Not in the Flesh

by Ruth Rendell

  He nodded to Burden, his neighbor. In response to Wexford's “Good afternoon, Mr. Grimble,” he merely stared. His wife said she was pleased to meet them in the tones of an old woman waking from her after-lunch siesta. On the way there Burden had explained something of the obsession that contributed to Grimble's reputation, so Wexford wasn't surprised at his first words.

  “I mean to say,” Grimble began, “if I tell you something that may put you on the right road to catching a criminal, will you use your influence to get my permission?”

  “Oh, John,” said Kathleen Grimble.

  “Oh, John, oh, John, you're a parrot, you are. Now, Mr. Burden-it is Mr. Burden, isn't it? You hear what I say-will you?”

  “What permission would that be?” Wexford asked.

  “Didn't he tell you?” Grimble said in his surly, grudging voice. He cocked a thumb in Burden's direction. “It's not as if everybody don't know. It's common knowledge. All I want is to be told I can build houses on what's my own, my own land that my dear old dad left me in his last will and testament-well, my stepdad he was, but as good as a father to me. So what I'm saying is, if I scratch your back will you scratch mine?”

  “We have no influence at all with the planning authority, Mr. Grimble. None at all. But I must tell you that this is a murder case and you are obliged to tell us what you know. Withholding information is a criminal offense.”

  A tall thin man, one of a race who is classified as white and would be horrified if otherwise designated, Grimble had skin discolored to a dark brownish-gray, suffused about his nose and chin with crimson. A perpetual frown had creased up his forehead and dug deep furrows across his cheeks. He stuck out his lower lip like a mutinous child and said, “It's a funny thing how everybody's against me getting permission to build on my own land. Everybody. All my old dad's neighbors. All of them objected. Never mind how I know, I do know, that's all. Now it's the police. You wouldn't think the police would care, would you? If they're for law and order, like they're supposed to be, they ought to want four nice houses put up on that land, four houses with nice gardens and people as can afford them living there. Not asylum seekers, mind, not the so-called homeless, not Somalis, but decent people with a bit of money.”

  “Oh, John,” said Kathleen.

  Wexford got to his feet. He said sternly, “Mr. Grimble, either tell us what you have to tell us now or I shall ask you to accompany us to the police station and tell us there. In an interview room. Do you understand me?”

  No apology was forthcoming. Wexford thought Grimble could take a prize for surliness, but it seemed the man hadn't even begun. His features gathered themselves into a bunch composed of the deepest frown a human being could contrive, a wrinkling of his potatolike nose and a baring of the teeth, the result of curling back his top lip. His wife shook her head.

  “Your blood pressure will go sky high, John. You know what the doctor said.”

  Whatever the doctor had said, reminding Grimble of it caused a very slight reduction in frown and teeth-baring. He spoke suddenly and rapidly. “Me and my pal, we reckoned we'd put in the main drainage. Get started on it. Get rid of the old septic tank. Link the new houses up to the main drain in the road. You get me? We got down to digging a trench-”

  “Just a minute,” said Wexford, loath to remind him of his grievance but seeing no way to avoid it. “What new houses? You hadn't got planning permission for any new houses.”

  “D'you think I don't know that? I'm talking about eleven years ago. I didn't know then, did I? My pal knew a chap in the planning and he said I was bound to get permission, bound to. He said, you go ahead, do what you want. Your pal-meaning me-he may not get it for four houses but there's no way they'd say no to two, right?”

  “Exactly when was this? You said eleven years ago. When did your stepfather die?”

  Unexpectedly, Kathleen intervened. “Now, John, you just let me tell them.” Sulkily, Grimble nodded, contemplated the television on which the sound had been turned down fully but the picture remained. “John's dad-his name was Arthur-he died in the January. January '95, that is. He left this will, straightforward it was, no problems. I don't know the ins and outs of it but the up-shot was that it was John's in the May.”

  “That piece of land, Mrs. Grimble, and the house on it?”

  “That's right. He wanted to pull down the old place and get building, but his pal Bill Runge-that's the pal he's talking about-he said, you can't do that, John, you have to get permission, so John got me to write to the council and ask to put up four houses. You got all that?”

  “Yes, I think so, thank you.” Wexford turned back to John Grimble, who was leaning forward, his head on one side, in an attempt to hear the soundless television program. “So without getting the permission,” he said, “you and Mr. Runge started digging a trench for the main drainage? When would that have been?… Mr. Grimble, I'm speaking to you.”

  “All right. I hear you. Them busybody neighbors, it was them as put a spoke in my wheel, that fellow Tredown and those Pickfords. Them McNeils what used to live at Flagford Hall. I know what I know. That's why I never pulled down my dad's old house. Leave it there, I thought to myself, leave it there to be an eyesore to that lot. They won't like that and they don't. Leave the weeds there and the bloody nettles. Let the damn trees take over.”

  Wexford sighed silently. “I'm right, aren't I, in thinking that you and your friend started digging a trench between where you expected the houses would be sited and the road itself?” A surly nod from Grimble. “But your application for planning permission was refused. You could build one house but no more. So you filled in the trench. And all this was eleven years ago.”

  “If you know,” said Grimble, “I don't know why you bother to ask, wasting my time.”

  “Oh, John, don't,” said Kathleen Grimble, slightly varying her admonition.

  “We dug a trench like I said, and left it open for a day or two and then those bastards at the planning turned me down so we filled the bugger in.”

  “I'd like you to think carefully, Mr. Grimble.” Wexford doubted if this was possible, but he tried. “Between the time you dug the trench and the time you filled it in, was it”-he paused-“in any way interfered with?”

  “What d'you mean, interfered with?” Grimble asked.

  “Had it been touched? Had anything been put in it? Had it been disturbed?”

  “How should I know? Bill Runge filled it in. I paid him to do it and he done it. To be honest with you, I was too upset to go near the place. I mean I'd banked on getting that permission, I'd as near as dammit been promised I'd get it. Can you wonder I was fed up to my back teeth? I was ill as a matter of fact. You ask the wife. I was laid up in bed, had to have the doctor, and he said no wonder you're in a bad way, Mr. Grimble, he said, your nerves are shot to pieces and all because of those planning people and I said-”

  Wexford almost had to shout to get a word in. “When was permission refused?”

  Again it was Kathleen who answered him. “I'll never forget the date, he was in such a state. He started the digging end of May and the second week of June they wrote to him and said he could build one house but not more.”

  Out in the little hallway, shaking her head, casting up her eyes, and with a glance at the open door behind them, she whispered, “He's still on the phone to his pal most days. After eleven years! That's all they talk about, those two, that blessed planning permission. It gets you down.”

  Wexford smiled noncommittally.

  Rather shyly, she peered up into his face. She was a little woman with thinning reddish hair, round wire-rimmed glasses sliding down her nose. “I don't know if I ought to ask, but how did you know there was a dead body in there? It wasn't that truffle man, was it? I thought he'd died.”

  Wexford only smiled.

  “If John thought that, he'd go mad. He hates that truffle man. He hates trespassers. But if he's dead, that's all right.”

  “I've a feeling,” Wexford said when
they were back at the police station, “that we've got a mystery person-man or woman, we don't know yet-on our hands. Identification is going to be a problem. I shan't be surprised if we're still asking who this character is in three months' time. It's just a hunch but I do have these hunches and often they're right.”

  Burden shrugged. “And just as often they're wrong. His teeth, her teeth, will identify him or her. His or her dentition, I should say. It never, or rather, seldom, fails.”

  “I'm not telling the media anything till Carina gets back to me. It's not a good idea, confronting them with a cadaver we can't even say was a man or a woman. We can't say how he or she died or whether foul play, as they always put it, is suspected or not.”

  “What is it you always say?” said Burden. “A body illicitly interred is a body unlawfully killed.”

  “Pretty well true,” said Wexford, “but not invariably.”

  “By the way, the kid with the knife said his mother gave it to him. She's called Leeanne Fincher. She said it made her feel better when he was out of the house knowing he'd got a weapon. I think I'll go see her on my way home.”

  Wexford too went home. He walked. Dr. Akande had told him it was time he paid attention to that long-neglected piece of machinery, that once-efficient pump, his heart. Not in the half-hearted (halfhearted!) way he had in the past, dieting in a feeble fashion, forgetting the diet in favor of indulgence in meat and cheese and whiskey, exercising in ever-decreasing spurts, letting Donaldson drive him whenever it rained or the temperature fell below fifteen degrees, running out of statins and not renewing his prescription. Now it was a walk to work and a walk home every day, a double dose of Lipitor, a single glass of red wine every evening, and cultivating a liking for salads. Why did all women love salads and all men hate them? You could almost say that real men don't eat green stuff. He had refused adamantly and rudely to join a gym. Burden went to one, of course, bouncing up and down on cross-trainers and walkways-or was it crossways and walk-trainers?-and pumping metal bars that weighed more than he did.

  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.

  3

  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 live
d 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.