Not in the Flesh

by Ruth Rendell

  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.”

  “By ‘we won’ she meant the neighbors' opposition to Mr. Grimble's plan had succeeded?”

  “That's about it.”

  Burden said, “I think you'd have told us if anything had been put into the trench overnight? Or if you'd seen anything untoward about the trench?”

  “I would have, yes. I know what you're getting at. I saw about it on telly. I mean, a skeleton wrapped in purple rags, that's not the kind of thing you wouldn't notice, is it?”

  Returning to the car, Wexford said to Burden, “What did he mean by ‘one of the Mrs. Tredowns,’ do you know?”

  “Search me.”

  Wexford asked his question again when they were back at the station. The fifth person he asked knew the answer. Barry Vine laughed, then said, “He lives with his two wives. It's not like bigamy, him and the first one got divorced all right and I don't suppose there's any ‘how's your father,’ if you get my meaning. Not with the first one anyway. And Tredown's not a well man.”

  “You mean his ex-wife came back to live with him and his second wife?”

  “Something like that, guv. I don't know the ins and outs of it. They're a weird lot, but I think they all get on. Tredown's ill now. Heart, I think, or it may be cancer. We'll have to talk to them, won't we?”

  The Olive and Dove, not many years ago a quiet and conservative country inn with one bathroom to five bedrooms, a public bar as well as a saloon, prawn cocktail, roast lamb, and apple pie served for lunch, and music unheard within its precincts, had gradually become a smart and fashionable hotel, awarded four stars in the Good Hotel Guide. Once it had stood at the entrance to Kingsmarkham, overlooking the bridge that crossed the Kingsbrook (a sizable river notwithstanding its name), and it was still where it had always been, though the bridge had been widened and the shopping area extended to where once there had only been great beech trees, water meadows, and a cottage or two. The beech trees were still there, though now they grew out of the pavement, and the water meadows had retreated a quarter of a mile or so. As for the cottages, they were now weekenders' residences, newly thatched and double-glazed.

  Among its new bathrooms, its sauna, spa, Crystal Bar and Moonraker's Bar, its worko
ut room, its room called, for some unknown reason to non-francophones, Chez l'Ordinateur, its winter garden, and its “quiet room,” the old snug remained. Rumor was that the Olive had retained it solely-or at any rate, partly-at the request of Chief Inspector Wexford, backed up by its best barman who had said if it went it would be over his dead body. “We don't want any more dead bodies round here,” was Wexford's rejoinder, but now they had one and it was eleven years dead.

  “So we can pinpoint death to eleven years ago last June,” Burden was saying as he carried to their table Wexford's requisite red wine and his own lager. “What do we think happened? Sometime at the end of May, Grimble and Bill Runge started to dig the trench but on the twelfth Grimble's application was refused. I checked with the planners. Four days later, on the sixteenth, Runge filled in half the trench. After dark, X's killer or an accomplice lifted out some of the earth, laid the body wrapped in a purple sheet inside, and replaced the earth. There'd be nothing to show the trench had been tampered with. Next day Runge finished filling it in.”

  “Something like that. Was it a sheet?”

  “That's what the lab says. It's in rags, but once it had been a purple sheet.”

  “Who has or had purple sheets? I wonder. The whole job would have been easy enough. The toughest part would have been carrying the body. He's not likely to have been killed out there.” Wexford took a small draft of his claret. “It's funny, I know it can't be like that, but I fancy I can see this stuff flowing into my arteries and magically melting all that nasty gunge that clings to their walls. Of course it's not at all like that.”

  “No, it's not,” said Burden. “My brother-in-law had a thing called a colonoscopy and he watched what they were doing on a screen. He said his intestines looked like they were lined with pink satin.”

  “Modern medicine is wonderful. I just wish we didn't have to hear about it day in and day out. In the Middle Ages they say people brought God into the conversation all the time, and with the Victorians it was death. We talk about our insides. Ah, well. Now, we have a precise date for the burial, if not the death. Probably death occurred hours or, at most, days before. Whoever killed X must have known about the trench. It's not visible from Pump Lane or the Kingsmarkham Road.”

  “It would be visible from windows.”

  “Yes, we shall have to check that. I'd guess Athelstan House, Oak Lodge, and Marshmead, wouldn't you? Possibly Flagford Hall too. Was he a local man, Mike? Or was he here on a visit? Eleven years is a long time. We're going to get pretty tired of that phrase before we're done. Most of them, young or old, walked across that land regularly. However much Grimble dislikes it, all the houses that abut the field have got gaps in their fences or even gateways that give them access.”

  “Have we taken into account the predecessors of those residents who weren't there eleven years ago?”

  “Barry's working on it,” said Wexford, “with help from the Hunters. I'm hoping they're the sort of old people who know everything about who lived where since time immemorial. They haven't a clue about what happened yesterday or their own phone numbers, but when it comes to years back, they're recording angels.”

  “Who's seen the Tredowns?”

  “I'm reserving them for myself. They're my tomorrow morning treat. Want to come? I want Hannah to have a look at our sparse missing-persons list along with Lyn.”

  Eight years before, although quite a large number of men remained missing in the greater mid-Sussex area, there were only two in Kingsmarkham and its environs, which included Flagford. Trevor Gaunt was listed as being sixty-five at the time, which made him an unlikely candidate.

  “Unless Carina Laxton is way out with her calculations,” said DC Lyn Fancourt. “I never will understand how they can say someone's been eight or ten or, come to that, twenty years dead just by poking about with bones. Or how old they were.”

  Hannah laughed. “They can, though. You just have to accept it. She could be a year or two out on the age but not twenty years. This old boy isn't our man. He probably dropped dead somewhere,” she said with the callousness of youth, “and they never found the body. Who's the other one?”

  “A guy called Bertram Farrance. This list doesn't give much in the way of detail, does it? I mean, all it gives is his age, which was thirty-eight, his address, and that he was reported missing by his wife.”

  “What do you expect? You see the telly. You know what they all say. ‘He went out to buy the evening paper at five and when he hadn't come back by six I was devastated, I didn't know what to do. He'd never done that before,’ et cetera, et cetera.”

  “It can't always be like that,” said Lyn, laughing.

  “You could get over there-where is it? Station Road?-see if the woman's still there.”

  It went against the grain with Hannah to refer to any woman, even though she might have been married for forty years, was called Mrs., and had taken her husband's name, as a wife. She had an even stronger objection to “lady,” a word she had found out came from the Anglo-Saxon “lafdig,” meaning “she who makes the bread.” Lyn Fancourt thought she was quite right and admired her for the stand she made, but, just the same, wasn't it a bit silly?

  “I love your ring,” she said.

  “Between ourselves, I could have done without. I feel quite committed enough to Bal without wearing a shackle on my finger. But he wanted it, so what can you do? There's no need to get married, just because you wear a ring.”

  Lyn walked down to Station Road. It wasn't far and walking was good for her. When she had weighed herself that morning she found she had gained sixty-two grams. It wasn't that much, but it troubled her and she tried to think what extra calories she had consumed in the past few days. Literally the past few days because she had weighed herself on Sunday and only by a tremendous effort of will restrained herself from stepping onto the scales on Monday and Tuesday as well. Karen Malahyde would tell her she was getting obsessed, but it was all right for Karen and for Hannah too. They were naturally thin. Such strength of character was needed to stop counting calories, keep off the scales, and, more than that, stop thinking about it all the time! Stop thinking about it, she said to herself, and she went up to the green door that opened directly onto the pavement and rang the bell.

  Nothing could have been easier, except that the result got them no further. The woman who answered the door answered her question without inviting her in. “He's not missing. He's upstairs. You want to see for yourself?”

  “Well, yes.”

  A shriek from the woman, shrill enough to shatter glass, summoned him. “Bertie! Come down here, Bertie.”

  “What happened?” Lyn asked. “Did he just come back?”

  “After about a year he did. Said he'd lost his memory. I don't let him out alone now. He wants to go out, I say, okay Bertie, but I'm coming with you. And that's what I do. He's not been out alone once since he came back.”

  The man who came downstairs looked as if he was of African or Afro-Caribbean origin. He was short and rather fat, wearing camouflage pants and a loose black T-shirt. He didn't speak but confirmed his identity when she asked him. She asked for photographic ID and, rather to Lyn's surprise, Mrs. Farrance, if that was who she was, produced a passport. The man was unmistakably Bertram Farrance. Lyn handed the passport back.

  “Okay, is it?” said Mrs. Farrance, amiably enough. Her voice rising several decibels, she shouted at her husband, “Okay, back upstairs, Bertie. Off you go.”

  Telling the story to Hannah, Lyn hoped to make her laugh, but the sergeant seemed admiring of Mrs. Farrance rather than amused. “Of course I'd prefer to see a couple be equal partners,” she said, “but if there had to be inequality-in the case of a very feckless or weak man, for instance-I'd rather see the setup these Farrance's have. That way things get done. I expect this woman is very efficient and managing.”

  It was DS Barry Vine who had talked to Jonathan Pickford's mother and was told her son and his girlfriend both worked in banking and commut
ed by train to London each day. He was twenty-nine and she was thirty. Both of them had been at university eleven years before and had only lived in this house since Brenda and her husband had converted it into two flats four years ago.

  “But you and your husband were here eleven years ago?”

  “We've been here since we were married.” She took him into the living room of their ground-floor flat and showed him from a window Grimble's Field next door and the boarded-up derelict bungalow. This morning, because it had rained most of the night, the land looked particularly green and lush, the bungalow half-hidden among the trees, the only incongruous note the crime tape, enclosing the area where the body had been found. “When old Mr. Grimble was alive,” she said, “he had such a lovely garden. And he went on working in it, keeping it immaculate until a week before he died. His lawn hadn't got a weed in it. Over by our fence he grew his vegetables and had his kitchen garden, and on the other side, near the Tredowns, he had his fruit trees. I remember how he used to give us Cox's apples and Bramleys. For cooking, you know.” She peered into Barry's face, in case perhaps he had never heard of an apple pie. “The trees are still there, of course, but John Grimble's never pruned them, never done a thing, so of course they don't bear. Isn't it a shame?”

  “If you can cast your mind back eleven years, Mrs. Pickford, precisely eleven years to June, can you remember anything unusual happening on that land? Anything at all, it doesn't matter how small.”

  She seemed rather a timid woman. Suspicious too. It was as if she feared he was trying to catch her out in some misdemeanor. “Ought I to remember? What kind of thing do you mean?”