Not In The Flesh (6 page)

   In turning round, the black-haired woman caused something of a shock. From the back she might have been twenty-five. When she faced them, even in the shadow that fell across her face, she at once became close on sixty. She was extravagantly thin, with the thinness that is natural and unaffected by dieting or overeating, and her face was deeply lined. She came up to them, held out a long-fingered, rope-veined hand, smiled, and was immediately transformed into a ravaged beauty.

   “How do you do? I'm Claudia Ricardo. Well, I was Tredown when I was married to Owen, but I reverted when we were divorced. Ricardo was my maiden name, though I wasn't actually a maiden for very long.”

   Burden was less able to deal with this sort of thing than Wexford. He resorted to ignoring it and speaking in the stolid gloomy tone of a copper on the beat. They had, he said, some questions they would like to ask. Wexford would probably have enjoyed himself at Mrs. Tredown's expense and engaged in repartee with Claudia Ricardo, but Burden's technique may have been more effective. “We'd like to speak to Mr. Tredown as well.”

   “No can do,” said Maeve in a phrase Wexford hadn't heard for years.

   “Yes, I understand he's ill,” Wexford said. “We'll disturb him as little as possible.”

   “It's not that he's ill. He is, but that's not the point. He's working.”

   Claudia Ricardo gave another of her smiles, a less charming one this time. “My wife-in-law—that's what we call each other—likes to keep his nose to the grindstone. I mean, his books are our bread and butter. She cracks the whip, don't you, Em darling?”

   It was Maeve Tredown who smiled this time. She appeared not to be the least offended but fixed Claudia with a conspiratorial smile, accompanied by a companionable wrinkling of the nose, a kind of what-a-one-you-are expression.

   Wexford thought he preferred her when she was taciturn. “Very well. It's not necessary to see him today,” he said. “Perhaps you can answer a few questions. No doubt you know a body was discovered in Grimble's Field. We're having some difficulty of identification. Are you aware of anyone going missing in the area about eleven years ago?”

   “How would we?” This was Maeve who had seated herself on a slippery black leather sofa with Claudia beside her. “What has that dump to do with us?”

   “Probably nothing, but do you know of anyone being missing around here? It would be eleven years ago last May or June.”

   Few people are able to utter an unadorned no but Maeve Tredown managed it. “No.”

   Claudia aimed at being more helpful. “That would have been soon after I came to live here,” she said. “I married again after the divorce, but that didn't work out either. Maeve asked me if I'd like to come here and live with them. Nice of her, wasn't it? A bit odd, you might say—well, you would say, but very nice. We'd always got on, far better than I did with Owen, though that was a lot better when I wasn't married to him.”

   Why tell them all this? Wexford had no idea. Because it amused her? Because she had decided they were both dense plodders? “You must have seen Mr. Grimble and his friend digging a trench across the field.”

   “We saw that,” said Maeve, becoming more expansive. “I was delighted when they refused him planning permission.”

   “Me too.” Claudia bounced up and down on the leather seat, like a child offered an unexpected treat. “I had a little holiday in my heart. Don't you think that's a nice expression? I almost had an orgasm when I heard.”

   Maeve said suddenly, “There was that cousin or brother-in-law or some relative of Grimble's who went missing around then. I've just remembered,” as if someone had asked. “I can't tell you who it was, but everybody knew. I expect that's who it is.”

   “That's exactly right,” said Claudia with a merry laugh. “Yes, I expect Grimble killed him and put him in the trench. I'm so sorry you can't see Owen now. Could you come back another time? Actually it's lovely to have some male company, isn't it, Em?”

   “How did they know the body was in the trench?” said Burden on the way back.

   “We told them.”

   “Well, not exactly. You just said Grimble and his friend were digging a trench.”

   “Oh, come on, Mike. Whatever you think of them, they're not stupid. Anyone would pick that up. Besides, it said a body was in a trench on the local TV news. I'm more interested in this missing relative Grimble didn't mention.”

   “Maybe he's on Peach's list,” said Burden.

He was. He was one of the two men who had gone missing at the relevant time, Peter Darracott and Charlie Cummings. Hannah Goldsmith and Lyn Fancourt had spent the morning tracking down their families and discovered that Peter Darracott, who had disappeared from home in May 1995, was John Grimble's second cousin, his natural father's cousin's son.

   His wife had gone away on holiday with her next-door neighbor to Tenerife, a ten-day package. If she wanted foreign holidays, Christine Darracott told Hannah, she'd always had to go with a friend. Her husband was afraid of flying.

   “I used to tell people he got airsick,” she said and her face became vindictive. “I used to, but if anyone asks me now I tell the truth. I'm done with shielding him from everything. He was scared shitless, if you want the truth.”

   “You came home and found him gone, Mrs. Darracott?” Home was a terraced house in Pestle Lane, parallel to Kingsmarkham High Street. “Hadn't he even left you a note?”

   “Nothing. Not a sausage. Mind you, he left me the bed he hadn't made and his dirty dishes and full ashtrays everywhere. But that was normal.”

   “He'd taken a lot of his clothes,” Hannah told Wexford, “and things they owned in common, a radio, a little portable TV—oh, and a hair dryer. What does a man want with a hair dryer?”

   “Much the same as what a woman does, I suppose. Maybe he'd had long hair. You mustn't be sexist, DS Goldsmith.”

   Hannah had the grace to laugh. “The truth is he took it out of spite. Why women get married I never will know.”

   “Well, you're going to,” said Burden, “unless that ring's purely for ornament.”

   “We shall see,” said Hannah, unfazed. “She told me Peter was Grimble's second cousin, whatever that means. Apparently, there's a huge family, spread out everywhere. She reported Peter as missing but doesn't appear to have taken steps herself to find him. She more or less said it was good riddance. ‘One thing, he wouldn't have left the country,’ she said. ‘Too scared to get on a plane.’ ”

   “Did they know each other?” Wexford asked. “I mean, Grimble and this Peter Darracott?” He turned to Burden. “Do you know your second cousins? Do you, Lyn?”

   “I wouldn't even know what makes someone your second cousin,” said Burden.

   Lyn smiled. “You'd know them if you were like me and hadn't got many relations. Apart from my mum and dad, my second cousin is the only relative I've got.”

   “According to Peach's list and comments,” said Wexford, “Christine Darracott never heard from him again. It's always hard to imagine how this can happen, someone disappearing and being gone for good, but it does, all the time. Of course it helps when their nearest and dearest would just as soon they never turned up. How about Charlie Cummings, Lyn?”

   He had gone missing from the house in which he lived with his mother in December 1994. Both lived on the benefit, Charlie having some kind of disability, what would now be called, Lyn said, “learning difficulties.” Apparently, both he and his mother were unable to read or write. The details Lyn had came from Mrs. Cummings's neighbor, Mrs. Cummings herself having died in 2000.

   “Doris Lomax, that's the woman next door, said she died of a broken heart. There was quite a hunt for Cummings. I mean, you can see there would have been, with him not being normal and never going out much except to the village shop. That's where he went on that day in December. It was in the morning. He went to the shop to get a loaf and a packet of tea bags and he was—well, he was never seen again. Mrs. Cummings went next door to Mrs. Lomax and I gather Mrs. Lomax sort of took charge. She phoned us and then practically the whole village turned out to hunt for him.”

   “I remember this case,” Wexford said. “I remember it well, and you must, too, Mike.”

   “I got involved in the search. We turned the place over, looking for him. It was like a search for a child.”

   “I suppose he was a child,” said Wexford sadly. I just hope, he didn't say aloud, that dreadful thing in Grimble's Field isn't him. I'd like to find he'd turned up, living in Brighton with a kindly woman as childlike as himself. “And now, if you and Hannah and maybe Damon will start tracking down previous owners of houses in Pump Lane and the Kingsmarkham Road, you and I, Mike, will have another session with Grimble.”

A phone call to Theodore Borodin at his London home disclosed that Ronald and Irene McNeil had sold him Flagford Hall seven years before. It was a large house, almost a stately home, too much for the aging couple to cope with.

   “They were getting on a bit,” Borodin said. “The time was coming when they wouldn't be able to drive. They needed somewhere to live near the shops. The only one in Flagford's hopeless. Old McNeil was eighty and she wasn't much younger, and now I come to think of it, someone told me he'd died.”

   “But they must have been there,” Damon Coleman said, “when this murder and the subsequent burial took place.”

   “Certainly they must have.” Borodin went on to describe in unnecessary detail what a state Flagford Hall had been in, what enormous sums of money he had been forced to spend on it, how costly was its upkeep, considering he only used it at the weekends, until Damon politely cut him short and thanked him for his help.

   The house, largish, detached, perhaps no more than eight years old, wasn't far from Wexford's own home. Damon passed it on his way there. The front door was opened by Irene McNeil herself, a heavy sluggish woman who looked every minute of her eighty-four years. Time had dragged down her features until chin blended in with neck and neck sagged over the collar of an unflattering gray blouse.

   While Damon tried not to look at her loglike swollen legs, she stared searchingly at him and remarked in a throaty tone, “I expected them to send someone more senior.”

   Damon was certainly not paranoid, not even particularly sensitive, about being a black man in still predominantly white rural England. Still, interpreting as otherwise than racist Mrs. McNeil's gaze, which traveled from his feet to the crown of his head and rested incredulously on the face that several women had found exceptionally handsome, would have been impossible.

   Having told him he had “better come in,” she led him through the ground floor, lumbering heavily. The interior was the reverse of what Damon expected, hi-tech and minimalist, built-in cupboards, ice-white walls, black tiles, and pale wood floors. In the living room, Mrs. McNeil's antiques and fifties armchairs sat un-easily against this stark background. Lowering herself onto a floral chintz sofa, she proceeded to list the reasons she and her husband had moved from Flagford Hall, a catalog from which Borodin's explanation was absent. Her voice was the most plummy and upper class Damon had ever heard.

   The neighbors were impossible, she said, particularly the Hunters and the Pickfords. She knew for a fact Mr. Pickford senior had poisoned her cat, and his saying (very rudely) that he hadn't laid a finger on it, adding that even a twenty-year-old bird-slaughtering fiend belonging to her couldn't be expected to live forever, was a tissue of lies. She had seen Mr. Hunter watching her house through binoculars and taking photographs of herself and her late husband having tea in their garden. But the worst of all were those Tredowns. She was sure there must be a law against a man living with two wives, or if there wasn't, there ought to be. It was the first Mrs. Tredown coming back to live with him and the second Mrs. Tredown that was the beginning of the end. That was when she and Mr. McNeil started seriously thinking of moving, wrench though it was to leave a house they had occupied since their return from their honeymoon. She told, rather than asked, Damon to pass her the framed photograph from an occasional table with a piecrust edge.

   “That was Ronald.”

   “Your husband?”

   “Yes, of course,” said Mrs. McNeil. “Who else would it be?”

   Damon looked at the photograph of an elderly but still handsome man with a mustache, “dressed up,” as he put it to himself, in the requisite gear for going hunting, a kind of cap on his head and a red jacket he thought vaguely he ought to call pink.

   “Very nice,” he said

   It was evidently an inadequate response. Mrs. McNeil snatched the photograph from him and said, “Ronald was a wonderful man.”

   Damon said he was sure of it, though there was something brutal in the pictured face and the hands clenched into fists. “Did you know Mr. Grimble?”

   “The old one?” said Mrs. McNeil. “He wasn't the class of person one expected to be living in Pump Lane, but, my goodness, he was an improvement on his son. Stepson, I should say. That one's real name, I mean his true father's name, was Darracott, and we all know what the Darracotts are.” Damon, who didn't, listened patiently to the ensuing stream of invective on the subject of Mr. John Grimble (“I call him Darracott”) culminating in the monstrous behavior of a son digging up his stepfather's garden when that parent was scarcely cold in his grave.

   “Tell me about that,” said Damon.

   “There's nothing to tell,” said Mrs. McNeil, uttering the sentence most likely to cause exasperation if not despair in a policeman's heart. Fortunately, some people, and Mrs. McNeil was one of them, quickly find they have plenty to tell after all. “He and this friend of his started digging a great—well, a sort of ditch or trench. It was high summer, you know, and they dug in an absolutely wanton fashion, right up through poor old Mr. Grimble's garden, ruining a beautiful Rosa hugonis and a bed of calla lilies—I don't suppose you know what those are but no matter—and the friend finished the job, if he finished it. He only worked in the evenings, if you can call it work. And then, of course, or so young Mr. Pickford told my husband, he failed to get his planning permission and they had to fill it all in again.”