Not In The Flesh (3 page)

   The walk was downhill in the morning and uphill in the evening. He often wished the reverse was true. He had even tried to find a new way of doing the journey so that, if not downhill, it was flat all the way, surely a possibility if one's route went around the side of a hill. It might be a possibility, but it wasn't discoverable in the terrain of Kingsmarkham. He turned the corner into his own street and approached the house where Mr. and Mrs. Dirir and their son lived. It was called Mogadishu, which Wexford knew he should have found touching, exiles reminding themselves daily of their native land. Only he didn't. He found it irritating, not, he told himself, because it was such a very un-English name for a house, but because it had a name at all. Most, if not all, of the other houses in the street had numbers only. But he wasn't quite sure that this was the real reason. The real reason would be racist, and this bothered him for he sincerely did his best, constantly examining his conscience and his motives, to avoid even a smidgen of race prejudice. If it underlay his feelings about the Dirirs, it could perhaps be attributed to the undoubted bias in the town and no less among the police, against immigrants from Somalia. There was a small colony of them in Kingsmarkham, mostly law-abiding, it seemed, though they seemed as a race to be secretive people, modest, quiet, religious—some Christian, most Moslem—industrious, and reserved. The bias rested on the fact or the suspicion or the unfounded prejudice that their sons went about armed with knives.

   When the Dirir's and their son came around for a drink—in their case Dora's latest health fad, pomegranate juice or, as they preferred, fizzy lemonade—they all got on well, even if conversation was a little stilted. They spoke good English, were considerably better educated, he had thought ruefully, than he was, and all of them anxious for the betterment of their community's fortunes. Mrs. Dirir constituted herself a kind of social worker among her fellow immigrants, keeping an eye on their health, their work opportunities, their financial state, and the welfare of their children. Her husband was a civil servant in the local benefit office, her son a student at the University of the South in Myringham.

   Wexford had noticed that while he and Dora called everyone else they knew in the neighborhood by their given names, the Somali couple were Mr. and Mrs. Dirir just as they were Mr. and Mrs. Wexford. If Hannah Goldsmith had been aware of this, she would have called it racism of the worst kind, the sort that decrees meting out an extravagant respect to people of a different color from oneself; a respect, she would say, that in the half-baked liberal masks contempt. Wexford was pretty sure he didn't feel contempt for the Dirirs, rather a puzzlement and a failure to find any common ground between them. He thought he might try calling Mr. Dirir Omar next time he met him, and Mrs. Dirir Iman, and as he was wondering how he might achieve this, Mrs. Dirir emerged from her front door for no reason that he could discern but to say, “Good evening, Mr. Wexford.”

   There was no time like the present. It still took a bit of nerve to say as he did, “Good evening, Iman. How are you?”

   She seemed somewhat taken aback, said in a preoccupied way, “Fine. I am fine, thank you,” and retreated into the house. He worried all the rest of the way home that he had been too precipitate and offended her.

   The next day Carina Laxton told him the body found on Grimble's land had once, between ten and twelve years before when it was still alive, been a man. Whoever had killed him had wrapped his body in some kind of purple cloth before burying him. What he had died of she couldn't tell and warned him with a frown that it was possible she might never be able to tell. It was policy now to have two pathologists conduct the autopsy, and Dr. Mavrikian had also been present. Scanning the report, Wexford saw that he also had little faith in ever finding the cause of death. The only clue to that cause was a crack in one of the dead man's ribs.

He had gathered his team together to give them a rundown on the thin facts as he knew them, but he left the demonstration on the much-magnified computer screen to DS Hannah Goldsmith. He was no good with computers and now never would be. The picture that had come up was a plan of the area, comprising Old Grimble's Field, the land and house on the western side of it, the house facing, and the two houses on its southern side. Hannah made the arrow move on to the spot where the body had been found and then, with mysterious skill in Wexford's eyes, to each dwelling in the vicinity and the two cottages on the Kingsmarkham Road.

   “The people who live at Oak Lodge are a married couple called Hunter and next door to them at Marshmead, James Pickford and his wife, Brenda, on the ground floor and in the upper flat, their son Jonathan and his girlfriend, Louise Axall. The older couple, Oliver and Audrey Hunter, have been there since the house was built about forty years ago. They are very old, keep themselves to themselves, and have a resident carer. As you may know, Flagford is locally known as ‘the geriatric ward.' The place opposite, Flagford Hall, belongs to a man called Borodin, like the composer.”

   Blank looks and silence met this disclosure, most of them being aficionados of Coldplay or Mariah Carey. Only DS Vine, the Bellini and Donizetti fan, nodded knowingly. Hannah shifted the cursor to a point across the Kingsmarkham Road, the diamond on her hand no one had seen before blazing as it caught the light. “He's a weekender, lives in London, and in any case, hasn't owned Flagford Hall for more than eight years.” The arrow moved again, flitting from plot to plot. “Two of the cottages are also occupied only at weekends, the other one by an old lady of ninety. With the exception of the house next door to Grimble's.”

   As the arrow moved to the large Victorian villa and the diamond flashed once more, the voice of DC Coleman, deep and resonant, sounded, “You know who lives there, guv? That author—what's he called?”

   “Thank you, Damon,” Wexford said in a tone that implied anything but gratitude. “Oddly enough, I do know. I've read his books—or one of them. Owen Tredown is what he's called. The other members of the household are his wife, Maeve, and a woman called Claudia Ricardo. Tredown's lived there for twenty years at least. Those are the neighbors and all of them need to be visited today. You, Damon, can concentrate your efforts on our records of missing persons.”

   “They go back only eight years,” Burden said.

   Wexford had forgotten. Vaguely he remembered that before they became fully computerized—went on broadband, was that the expression?—they hadn't the space for storing the reams of paper records. It was different now.

   “Well, check eight years back,” he said, his voice sounding lame.

   There was nothing, in fact, to be ashamed of in keeping a list of local disappearances for so short a period. It was standard practice before the National Missing Persons Bureau was established. Though it covered a relatively short space of time, it would be a long list, Wexford knew. People went missing at an alarming rate, nationwide something like five hundred every day, locally one a day—or was it one every hour? And not all of them by any means were sought by the police. Alarm bells rang when the missing person was a child or a young girl. Every available officer was needed to hunt for lost children. Women in general, when they vanished, aroused concern and attention. Young men, indeed able-bodied men of any age but for the very old, were a different matter. This man, Carina Laxton had told him earlier, had probably been in his forties. When he disappeared his nearest and dearest must have missed him, if he had nearest and dearest, and perhaps searched for him, but even if his disappearance had been reported, the police would not have done so. It was generally assumed that when a man left home, even left home without saying good-bye or leaving a note, he had gone off to make himself a new life or join another woman.

   The postmortem had uncovered no clue as to how the man, now inevitably labeled X, had met his death. One of his ribs was cracked but apart from that, no marks had showed on his bones. He had been five feet eight inches tall. This measurement, Carina told him scathingly, was for Wexford's ears only. In her report she would give his height in centimeters. The skull was intact. Fortunately, enough “matter” remained, including marrow in the long bones, to extract DNA for help in identification. The wisdom teeth were missing but apart from that he had a full set, though with many fillings.

   Why did he assume identifying X would be such a difficult task? Some kind of intuition, perhaps, which people said he had but which he couldn't accept himself. Surely, one should always rely on the facts and the facts alone. It was far too early to have any idea of who those bones might once have been, still less who dug the grave and put them there. Some of this he said to Hannah Goldsmith before she left to question the occupants of the cottages.

   He liked Hannah, who was a good officer and, being interested in her welfare, he took her left hand in his and asked her if congratulations were in order.

   She didn't blush. Hannah had too much poise and what she would have called “cool” for that. But she nodded and smiled a rare and radiant smile. “Bal and I got engaged last night,” she said.

   After he had said, in accordance with a long-forgotten traditional etiquette, that he hoped she would be very happy, he thought how absurd it was (by those ancient standards) that two people who had been living together for the past year should betroth themselves to each other. But engagement, as someone had said, was the new marriage and for all he knew, she and Bal Bhattacharya might never marry but remain engaged as some people did through years together and the births of children till death or the intervention of someone else parted them.

   “How's Bal?”

   “He's fine. Said to say hallo.”

   Wexford was sorry to have lost this fiancé of hers, who had left to join the Met, the two of them occupying a flat near the Southern line, halfway between here and Croydon. Bal had been valuable, in spite of lapses into puritanical behavior and wild heroism.

   Bill Runge was as jovial and extroverted a man as Grimble had been recalcitrant. Sturdily plump and looking younger by a dozen years than his friend, he worked at Forby Garden Centre, where Wexford and Burden found him inside the main gate, arranging bags of daffodil and narcissus bulbs.

   “Poor devil,” he said. “I don't mind telling you, there's times when I feel like telling him to give it a rest. I did try, I did tell him once. Give over, John, I said, it's not worth it. Life's too short. Sell the place like it is. Take the money and run, I said, but he was so upset. In the end I had to apologize.”

   “Tell us about the trench you dug, Mr. Runge.”

   Bill Runge attached a price ticket to a packet of anemone corms, wiped his hands on the plastic apron he wore, and turned to them. “Yes, well, we'd dug this trench for the main drainage. Mind you, I said to him, John, I said, leave it. Don't do it now. Leave it a couple of weeks. Be on the safe side. But he was so sure, poor devil. Then came the bombshell. No permission for four houses. Just the one he could build, on the site where his old dad's was. I thought he was going to have a nervous breakdown and maybe he did. Maybe that's what it was.”

   “You filled it in for him, I believe.”

   “I didn't want to. I could have done without that, I'm telling you, but he got in such a state. It'd break his heart to go near the place, he said. He said he'd pay me for doing it and—well, things weren't easy. My daughter was only twelve then. She wanted to go on a school trip to Spain and the education people don't pay for that. So I said yes to John and got started. It took me a couple of days. I could only do it in the evenings.”

   “Let me get this clear, you hadn't put the pipes in the trench?”

   “Oh, no, nothing like that. He'd got them on order but they hadn't come, thank God. Well, I filled in the trench, end of story.”

   “Not exactly, Mr. Runge. Tell me something. Think carefully. Did you shovel the earth back by putting in a layer the length of the trench and then going back to the beginning and putting in another layer and so on until it was filled up? Or did you fill the trench completely as you went along?”

   “Come again?”

   Wexford did his best to put his questions more clearly but, by the look on Runge's face, failed again. Burden came to his rescue by producing from his pocket a ballpoint and his notebook. “Let me draw it,” he said.

   A neat sketch was quickly achieved, three separate cross sections of the trench depicting how it would have appeared a quarter filled, half-filled, and completely full. Nodding, comprehending at last, Runge settled for the middle version. He had half-filled the trench, gone home when it got dark, returned to finish the job the next day.

   “You say you worked in the evenings,” said Wexford. “It was June and the evenings would have been light till late.”

   “June, it was. Didn't get dark till half-nine.”

   “Can you pinpoint the date, Mr. Runge?”

   “It was the sixteenth of June. I know that for sure. It was my boy's birthday, he was seven, and he was mad at me for staying out working late. I made it up to him, though.”

   It always brought Wexford pleasure to come upon a good parent, something that happened all too seldom. He smiled. “Did you see anyone while you were working? I mean, did anyone come into the field? Did anyone talk to you?”

   “Not that I recall.”

   “People do cross that field, walking their dogs.”

   “Maybe, but don't let poor old John know it.” Runge put up one finger, as if admonishing himself. “I tell a lie,” he said. “There was one person who came to talk to me. Mrs. Tredown. Like one of the Mrs. Tredowns, the young one, not that she's very young. Came across the field from her place. I said good evening to her. Very polite I was which is more than she was to me. I don't remember her exact words, I mean it was eleven years ago. ‘So he can't build his houses,’ she said, something like that. ‘I'm glad,’ she said, ‘I'm overjoyed. I'd like to dance on his effing trench,’ she said, only she didn't say ‘effing.’ I reckon that's why I've remembered, her language and her supposed to be a lady. ‘We won,’ she said, ‘God is not mocked.’ I reckon she isn't all there—two sandwiches short of a picnic, like they say.”