Not in the Flesh

by Ruth Rendell

  That, obviously, he couldn't tell her. She was a woman who might easily have ideas put into her head. He looked patiently into the broad pale face, powdered and clumsily blotched with pink. She wasn't carrying excessive weight but seemed tightly corseted and was rather breathless. She laid one heavily ringed hand against her upper chest as if to quieten a threatened gasping. “There were the farmworkers. My husband called them itinerant workers. They come at fruit-picking time in trailers, you know, and one year they camped on Mr. Grimble's field and made an awful mess. Is that the kind of thing you mean?”

  “It might be,” he said cautiously. “Do you remember which year that was?”

  “Maybe ten years. Could have been eleven.”

  That was better. “What time of the year would it have been?”

  She looked at him helplessly. “Well, it was always June or September they came. June for the strawberries, and autumn for the apples and pears.”

  Barry persisted. “Which was it that year? Can you remember?”

  And she did, her already pink face flushing with the effort. “Old Mr. Grimble, Mr. Arthur Grimble, he was dead by then. He'd died in the winter. His son never did a thing to that garden, but all the roses were in bloom just the same. And when the fruit-pickers camped there in their trailers-they used to hang their washing on the trees, that wasn't very nice-where was I? Oh, yes, when they camped there Mr. Grimble, young Mr. Grimble that is, he came and drove them off with sticks. Well, they looked like guns to me, but my husband said they were sticks.”

  “That was before the trench was dug, was it?

  “Yes, it must have been. That's why Mr. Grimble and his friend came over, that's how they knew the workers were there. Mr. Grimble told my husband they meant to survey the land for where the main drains should go and what did they find but all those people camping. I don't mind telling you I never cared much for Mr. Grimble, but when it came to trespassing I was completely on his side.”

  “All that is very helpful, Mrs. Pickford. Perhaps you could tell me if you remember anyone-a man-disappearing around here about that time.” The word alarmed her, he could see, and he modified it. “Well, going away. Someone you know who went away and you didn't see them again.”

  “Oh, no. I'd have said. When you asked me if I remembered anything unusual happening I'd have said. That would be very un-usual, wouldn't it?”

  The Hunters next door looked old enough to be Brenda Pickford's parents, and she, as Barry said to himself, was no spring chicken. The front door was opened to him by a carer. He found the ancient pair sitting opposite each other before a fireplace, in which there was a vase of dried flowers instead of a fire. Barry thought there was something pathetic about their placing themselves in that particular spot, out of habit presumably, because all their lives until recently it had been normal practice to sit in front of an open fire. Pathetic perhaps but not tragic, for the room was insufferably hot by his standards, yet both of them, shrunken and wasted, were wrapped in layers of cardigans, scarves, and shawls, the old man as much as his wife. Audrey Hunter's eyes were shut and Barry would have thought her asleep but for the hand in her lap that moved and trembled, describing figures of eight on the blanket that covered her knees. Her husband's eyes were a watery sky blue, artless, innocent, and uncomprehending.

  “He's ninety-six and she's ninety-three,” said the woman. “You needn't look like that. They're deaf, they can't hear you.” She bellowed into Mr. Hunter's ear, “Here's a policeman come to ask you about Old Grimble's Field.”

  “What's that?” the old man muttered as Barry had known he would. Eventually, the question having been shouted twice more, he said, “Eleven years? I was only eighty-five then. I could get about then.”

  His wife continued doodling invisible shapes on her lap. She opened her eyes, put her free hand out to the carer, and whispered, “What's happening?”

  “Nothing, sweetheart,” said the carer. “Nothing for you to worry about.” To Barry she said in a more peremptory tone, “You won't get anything out of them, you know.”

  He persisted for a little longer but in vain.

  “What did I tell you?” The woman was triumphant as she showed him to the front door.

  He got into his car. The interview had rather shaken him. Wexford had been overoptimistic about the Hunters. Inevitably, Barry thought of modern medicine and healthier lifestyles keeping everyone alive much longer so that by the time he reached retirement age there wouldn't be thousands but tens, hundreds, of thousands of people like the Hunters. Alive but not living, ancient and disabled by time, deprived by the years of memory, hearing, sight, and most movement but still alive. He, too, maybe one day. The carer, when she told him he needn't look like that, must have referred to his expression of pity mixed with horror.

  Hannah and Lyn went to the canteen for lunch, Lyn forcing herself to choose the spring salad and trying to keep her eyes from Hannah's ham and cheese pancakes with sautéed potatoes. On the other side of the room, alone at a table, Hannah had spotted PS Peach of the uniformed branch. Peach had taken what he called “a shine to” Hannah. He meant he had fallen in love with her, as he truly had, but to say so aloud would sound too serious and emotional for him even to dream of. Once, a few months back, he had declared himself in a way few men do these days, by telling her he liked her and wanted to take her out with him with engagement in view. Hannah thought he must be the only officer in Kingsmarkham police station who didn't know about her and Bal Bhattacharya. She told him and he was visibly upset. Since then, if he hadn't avoided her, he had kept his distance. Just the same, “I don't want to catch his eye,” Hannah said to Lyn.

  So it was much to the surprise of both girls when they saw him on his feet and heading their way, plate in one hand and glass of Coke in the other. A blush suffused his face as he approached, but he asked coolly enough if he might join them. Only the very rude and brutish ever say no to this request. Hannah said, “Of course,” and Lyn said, “You're welcome, Peachy. Sit down.”

  Peach must have had at least one given name but no one knew what it was. He was always called Peachy, even by Wexford, and the name wasn't inappropriate, bestowed as it was on a man with plump pink cheeks and fair hair.

  “I don't want to intrude,” he said, pausing to allow both women to demur, “but I've not come over just because I was-well, wanting company or anything like that.” He looked at Hannah and quickly looked away. “I've got something to tell you about this case. I mean, the body in Grimble's Field. Well, not tell you about it, tell you what I've done.”

  “What you've done, Peachy?” said Hannah.

  “What I've made, rather. It's this missing persons thing. We've got records going back only eight years, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, I've got them going back thirteen.”

  “You have?” Lyn was afraid she had sounded rude and she quickly said, “What d'you mean? You've found an earlier record?”

  “No, I've made one. It was like this. I'll explain.” Peach had abandoned his spaghetti bolognese and pushed away the plate. “That was when I first came here, in 1993. We'd just got computerized. I mean the station had and-well, I was-I am-pretty good on computers, if I do say so myself. Nothing out of the way, I'd done a course. I didn't have much use for it in here, not on the beat like I was, but I had access to a computer, of course I did, and I noticed we only kept records of missing persons going back eight years-it was like that then too-only going back to 1985.” He paused and looked into Lyn's face to avoid having to look into Hannah's. “So I thought, I know what I'll do, I'll keep records myself. I'll do it here and transfer it to my own laptop at home just to be on the safe side.”

  “And you did?”

  “Well, yes I did.”

  “From '93 till now?”

  “That's right. And it's quite a list. More women than men, though.”

  Hannah said, “You're a marvel, Peachy. The guv will be over the moon.”

  “Will you te
ll him?” At praise from Hannah, Peach had blushed to the color of a Mediterranean example of the fruit from which his name came, a rich rose shading to crimson.

  “Certainly not. You must do that. Don't you want the credit?”

  4

  Eighty names were on Peach's list, fifty-seven of them women and girls. To Wexford's pleasure-he had warmly congratulated Peach on his achievement-he had not only included dates, ages, and addresses but descriptions and, to a certain extent, idiosyncrasies.

  “It reminds me of the days when you used to have to put ‘distinguishing marks’ in your passport,” Wexford said, a printout in his hand. “There's a chap disappeared he says has a wart on the lobe of his left ear and another one got six toes on one foot.”

  “Sounds nauseating.” Burden was in a gloomy mood this morning. “I suppose Peach did all this in what one might call the firm's time.”

  “Oh, come on, Mike. It was the firm's business.”

  “Maybe, but no one instructed him to do it. For all we know it may not be accurate. And we haven't finished local enquiries yet. Peach's stuff may not be needed.”

  Wexford made no reply. They were on their way to Flagford, their destination Athelstan House, home of the Tredowns.

  On the previous evening Wexford had reached home to find his wife reading a novel called The Son of Nun.

  “Is that one of Tredown's?”

  Dora looked up. “It's an early one, published twenty years ago. You said you were going to see him tomorrow, so I got it out when I was in the library.”

  “Sounds like unseemly goings-on in a convent. Who was the son of Nun, anyway?”

  “Joshua, apparently, though I haven't got to him yet.”

  “It's characters like that Joshua who turned me against religion when I was young,” said Wexford. “All he did was fight battles in the name of the Lord and when the Lord told him to slaughter all the inhabitants of a city, he did slaughter them along with their children and babies and their oxen and their asses. If he was around today we'd call him a war criminal.”

  “Things were different then,” said Dora vaguely. “Does Tredown always write about biblical subjects?”

  “Don't ask me. I only read one. That was about Esther and that despot she married. The only character I liked was his first wife, who he divorced because she defied him. Talking of wives and defiance, is there anything to eat?”

  “When have you ever come home, Reg, and found nothing to eat?”

  “I only asked,” said Wexford. “D'you want a drink first? I must have my requisite red wine.”

  Later on, after she had gone to bed, taking The Son of Nun with her, he looked through his bookcases and found the only book of Tredown's they possessed, The Queen of Babylon. He hoped this case wasn't going to take a turn that would necessitate his reading any more of them. Opposite the title page were listed Tredown's works. The Son of Nun, The People of the Book, The Widow and Her Daughter, The First Heaven. This last, he remembered reading somewhere, was hailed as Tredown's masterpiece for which he had won something called the Fredrik Gartensen Fantasy Prize. Which biblical genocide or monstrous injustice did that chronicle, he wondered, as he shut up the book and went to bed.

  Now he was on his way to see its author. There was very little traffic about. Donaldson had chosen to take the back lanes instead of the Kingsmarkham Road. They drove through lush green byways where the leaves were beginning to turn to pale gold and the fuzzy tangle of old man's beard covered the hedgerows. The cattle in the meadows browsed calmly in the mild sunshine, but in a broad paddock a glossy bay horse and a gray raced each other around its perimeter, manes flying.

  “It would be nice to walk across there with a dog,” said Wexford, “down into the valley and up the other side on to the Downs.”

  Burden looked at him. “You don't like dogs.”

  “Not much, but you have to have an excuse for that kind of thing.”

  “He's seriously ill, you know.”

  “Who is?”

  “Tredown. Jenny told me. Liver cancer. I think it is.”

  Wexford said nothing. He thought about cancer, the way so many people he and Dora knew had it or had had it but got better. Yet all the other people who hadn't got it still went about talking of cancer as if it was a death sentence, the end of the world, a fate worse than death itself. One day they wouldn't anymore, he supposed. He was aware that Donaldson was getting out of the car to open a pair of gates. They had arrived.

  A driveway went up between trees with overhanging branches. Between their trunks, on the left-hand side, Grimble's Field could be seen, very green this morning and, as always, providing exercise for a man and a dog. The decaying bungalow lay among the encroaching trees as if it were dead itself, waiting only to be picked up and removed to a grave of its own.

  The Athelstan House drive widened into a broad graveled space. Seen up close, the home was unprepossessing, large, ill-proportioned, mainly of purplish-red brick, roofed in bright blue-gray slates and with Gothic ogee-topped windows of buff-colored stone. The front door might have been a church doorway, dark brown, black-iron-studded, and with a purely ornamental curved handle. Wexford had the curious impression that it was a house of too many colors. And they were colors that clashed, all the ill-suited brown and purple and blue and cream jumbled and jangling together. Its being set against a rich backcloth of dark greens and autumn golds didn't help matters. He thought how much he would have disliked living in it, and then he rang the bell.

  A phone call had warned Maeve Tredown of their coming. She still looked surprised as if she had expected very different-looking men, Sherlock Holmes and Watson perhaps, or two uniformed comedy cops.

  “You'd better come in,” she said. “Please wipe your feet.” She seemed to realize that outside it was a fine, warm, and above all dry autumn day, and added, “No, I see. It isn't raining, is it?”

  The inside confirmed Wexford's opinion that Victorian builders (architects?) had gone out of their way to make their interiors hideous. This must have been what Lewis Carroll had in mind when he used the word “uglification.” The hallway was a passage, not particularly narrow but made to look narrower by the height of its ceiling and the vertical-striped green and yellow wallpaper. A kind of mosaic of black and ocher tiles covered the floor. As if an attempt was being made to conceal as much of the decor as possible, enough coats and capes and raincoats and mackintoshes and cagoules and anoraks and duffels and cardigans hung on ranges of hooks to protect twenty people from the weather, while appropriate footwear-boots and shoes and sneakers and even something Wexford hadn't seen for years, galoshes-stood in pairs on the yellow and black tiles. What room remained against the walls was occupied by suitcases and shopping bags.

  “In here,” said Maeve Tredown, opening a door.

  It was a large room and, in spite of the warmth outside, very cold. Its window faced north and overlooked a lawn surrounded by trees, predominantly evergreens. The furniture was unnoticeable, nondescript chairs and sofas and tables. The carpet, patterned in reds and browns, reminded him of nothing so much as a dinner plate off which someone had just eaten a meal of fish and chips with tomato ketchup and a good sprinkling of vinegar. What dominated the place were books, hundreds of them, possibly thousands, in unglazed bookshelves that covered three walls from floor to ceiling. The fourth side of the room was mostly a window and one in dire need of cleaning. Looking out, her back to the room, stood a tall thin woman with long black hair.

  “You'd better sit down.”

  Maeve Tredown spoke as if she begrudged every word she uttered. She was small and round with a face like a pretty piglet's and dyed blond hair, a surely harmless and inoffensive woman. Just the same, Wexford felt that if he had been shown a photograph of her and told she was the matron of a notoriously cruel old people's home or the director of a brutal boot camp, he wouldn't have been surprised. It was all to do with her economical and clipped speech, the iciness in her light blue eyes, and the severe gray
flannel suit she wore.

  “I don't know what it is you want.” She glanced in the direction of the other woman, seemed to be considering whether there was any point in introducing her, and finally decided that there was no help for it. “Claudia,” she said, “I suppose these men are as likely to want to talk to you as to me.”

  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.