by Ruth Rendell
“Darracott's love nest,” Burden muttered, though it wouldn't have been as bad as this eleven years ago when the missing man had brought Nancy Jackson here.
He opened a wardrobe door to release a new smell, mothballs and ancient dried sweat, the stench of the old man's clothes still left hanging there, two suits that might have been new in the forties, a sports jacket, coats and trousers. Burden closed the door again and they made their way into the bathroom, where the floor was deep in gray dust, the bath brown from iron stains and the lavatory pan stuffed with newspaper. A sliver of soap, rock-hard and split into blackened cracks, lay above the basin, and on a sagging wooden shelf was an old man's shaving brush, the bristles worn down to stumps.
Damon began sneezing again. “Let's get out of here, sir.”
“Wait a minute. There's a cellar.”
A flight of steps led down into darkness. Burden went first, switching on his flashlight. He let the beam play on what lay below. There was a small square of floor space and beyond that a doorway. All the other doors in the house were open but that door was shut. Burden said, with some kind of prevision, with foreboding, “Better not touch that doorknob.”
For 364 days a year he never carried a handkerchief. This was the 365th and for no known reason he had picked up a clean one when he went to put his shirt on. He wrapped it around his right hand, took hold of the door handle, tugged at it, and finally wrenched it open. Inside was a small room perhaps measuring six feet by eight, where everything seemed coated in coal dust. A heap of coal lay in one corner, prompting Burden to ask himself when he had last seen coal-years and years ago. In front of it wood was stacked, pieces of timber and small logs, a pile of it, three feet high.
“Pull out one of those planks, Damon, could you? But go carefully.”
Damon went carefully, slowly tugging at the longest piece of timber until it came free, dislodging some of the logs and sending them tumbling. He pulled at another, smaller, board and heard the inspector's indrawn breath.
“There's something under there,” Burden said.
The flashlights set down on a shelf, their beams playing on the heap of timber, revealed what might have been a small piece of white rag. They carefully lifted logs one by one until hair came to light, black and coarse like the horsehair Burden had once seen stuffing an old sofa, then something that might have been a section of bone. When what was under the logs was half-exposed, Damon took a step backward, grasped his flashlight, and shone the beam directly downward. By its light, he and Burden were looking down at the remains of a man, bones mostly, vestiges of gray flesh clinging to them, still dressed with horrid incongruity in whitish under-shirt and underpants. The black hair, the first thing Burden had seen, longish and shaggy, covered the back of the skull. Whoever he was appeared to have been dumped face downward, the arms and legs spread in a starfish shape.
The smell in the house came from elsewhere. Here, only a kind of airlessness combined with a whiff of coal dust remained, for the body they were looking at had been there a long time.
“Is this the chap who didn't leave, sir?”
“Plainly, he didn't,” said Burden, “but who he was, God knows. One thing's for sure. Just as you don't bury yourself, you don't hide yourself in a woodpile after you're dead.”
8
His whole team was there, at the kind of meeting he usually held at nine in the morning. The time was seven in the evening and dark as midnight. They looked tired, even the very young ones. Burden was trim as ever in a stone linen jacket and jeans, his forehead pleated in a frown, his graying hair cut a fraction too short. Weariness makes some people look younger and Hannah was one of them, the color gone from her cheeks, her eyes heavy, while Lyn's and Karen's faces, made up as usual in the morning, were now shiny and pale as nature made them. Damon seemed the exception to the rule that black skins bleach to gray when exhaustion sets in and he still had that alert look, his eyes pitch black and bright, the whites almost blue, which Wexford so liked about him.
He noticed that he alone among the men wore a tie. Barry's shirt under a thin zipper jacket was open almost to the waist, revealing a fleshy roll which, in women, he'd heard called a “muffin top.” Like Hamlet he had been “too much in the sun” and, from bridge to tip, his nose was burnt red from the long protracted summer, as was his tieless throat. Ties had almost disappeared, at least they had out here in the country, and Wexford wondered what inhibition or diffidence in himself made him need to go on wearing this weathered, worn, and stain-spotted strip of synthetic fabric.
Wondered, but only for a moment, and then he began to address them. “This afternoon,” he began, “the body of a man was found in the derelict bungalow on Grimble's Field. Mike Burden and Damon Coleman went in there on a routine search and found the body in the cellar. We don't know who it is, but Carina has seen it and says she'd guess it's been there a shorter time than the unidentified corpse in the trench. Nor can we say yet if there's any connection between these two bodies. We shall know more tomorrow when she's done the postmortem.
“As for Peter Darracott, we are waiting for the result of the DNA test and we should get that tomorrow. Depending on that result, we may have to widen our search. If, for instance, the body in the trench isn't Peter Darracott. There appear to be no more missing or possibly missing males in the Kingsmarkham area who disappeared sometime in the spring of 1995. There is of course the possibility that the body in the cellar is Darracott's. I shall have John Grimble in here in the morning and question him about this second body found on his property. At the moment we have some reason to believe the death was the result of violence because the body was hidden in the cellar under a pile of logs. As yet we don't know what caused death or whether death occurred in the cellar. But the body had been hidden. Someone hid it and we know it's extremely rare to conceal a body that has met a natural death.
“The clothes he seems to have worn were in the kitchen. Two unusual features of this case are that the body was clothed only in a vest and underpants and that a thousand pounds in ten- and twenty-pound notes were in the pocket of a pair of jeans. The jeans were probably his, but that still has to be established. Are there any questions?”
There always were. Hannah was the first to ask. “Why did DI Burden and Damon go in there, guv?”
“A Mrs. McNeil, the woman who used to live in Borodin's house, wrote to me with what looked like an absurd story about old Grimble-Grimble senior, that is-evicting his lodger but no one seeing him actually leave. Then John Grimble wouldn't let us go in there, which seemed a bit dodgy, so we got a warrant.”
She nodded, sighed, and pushed back her long black hair behind her ears. Barry Vine asked if the media had yet been told and Wexford said he'd tell them in the morning after his meeting with the chief constable. Then he'd hold a press conference when the postmortem results-and with luck the DNA test result-came through.
Lyn had something to say but not a question. Theodore Borodin had come down for the weekend and she had been to call on him, an interview that yielded nothing of interest beyond his professing a total lack of curiosity about any of his neighbors, none of whom he seemed to know by name.
“When I was coming away and getting into my car one of Tredown's wives came out.” This gave rise to laughter, enough to make Lyn modify what she had said. “I mean one of the Mrs. Tredowns. She came up to me and said was it true they'd found a cadaver-that was her word, ‘cadaver’-in that house. She could see something had happened, what with all the crime tape around the place and police vehicles coming and going. I asked her what made her think it was a-well, a body, and she said something like, ‘I knew it. They don't put that blue and white ribbon round a place because some lout's broken a window.’ And she was very happy at the idea, I must say. ‘Man or woman?’ she said. Of course I didn't tell her. I just said if there was anything any of the people living there needed to know we'd keep them informed and then I drove off.”
Wexford laughed. “Well done,” h
e said. “Right, that's that for now. We can't do anymore tonight, so I suggest you all go home and get a good night's rest. We'll start again in the morning.” But as Burden lingered when all the rest had gone, he said, “Come and have a drink, Mike. The snug in the Olive, I think.”
Rain had fallen for most of the day, but now the clouds had moved away eastward and it was becoming a fine night, mild enough for lights to be on in the Olive's garden. A few drinkers, mostly young, sat at the tables under sunshades that would double as umbrellas if the rain began again.
“I don't like sitting outdoors,” said Wexford, squashing any alfresco ideas Burden might have had. “I never have. Nothing depresses me so much on a holiday as the prospect of a picnic. All those flies and wasps. I remember a picnic Dora and I had when the girls were little. The food was all laid out on a red-checked tablecloth-funny how you remember these details-and this puppy, basset hound or beagle or something, came running up, grabbed a Swiss roll in its mouth, and made off with it. The girls were entranced. Sheila thought we'd actually fixed it.” He laughed at the memory. “She thought we'd arranged for the bloody thing to come and do that to entertain them. I almost wished we had.”
“That,” said Burden, ordering their drinks, “is sort of like Christmas in reverse. I mean the way we have fixed Father Christmas. It's probably Dad dressed up, but kids think it really is some old guy from Lapland. Or they do for a while.”
Mike could still surprise him with his occasional insights. He smiled. “That must have been quite a shock, finding those-er, remains in Grimble's cellar. I imagine your first thought was that here was the old man's lodger.”
“And my second and third thoughts.”
“It's a bit much, though, isn't it? This old man-how old was he, by the way? Eighty?-he murders his tenant and stuffs the corpse in the cellar. Or, because he's not strong enough to do that, lures him down into the cellar and there kills him. In six months' time the old man is dead and within weeks of his death the son is murdering another man and burying him in a trench some ten yards from where the other body is lying.”
“More than ten yards, Reg. More like twenty.”
“Ten or twenty, it doesn't make much difference. Does homicide run in the family? And if it does we have to suppose Grimble senior didn't wait until he was eighty and practically at death's door before he killed. So how many other unsolved killings are there along the way? And what are the motives in all this? Cui bono? ”
“We don't know who benefits, do we?” said Burden. “We don't yet know who either of these men are. We're not even near to finding out. The old man may have been dead before either of them died. We don't know what connection there was between them, if any.
“Isn't it rather odd that Mrs. McNeil should have written to you about this lodger? She didn't mention him before when Damon first interviewed her. And when you come to think of it, her story is pretty thin. I can understand she was bored and had nothing better to do than watch her neighbors' houses from morning till night, but why seize on that? Why jump to the conclusion that a man's disappeared-a man she didn't know but thinks was called Chapman, no first name-just because she hasn't actually seen him depart?”
“You think she knows more than she's telling?”
“Well, don't you? Another funny thing is the thousand pounds. The clothes were shabby, those jeans were on their last legs.” Burden realized what he had said and laughed. “Yet a thousand pounds was in the pocket?”
“And those notes had been in there for a decade.” Wexford shrugged. “I can't say I look forward to another session with John Grimble in the morning, and there'll be no wife there to ‘Oh, John’ him.”
“Don't be too sure,” said Burden. “What's the betting he brings her along? Do you want another couple of units of that red plonk?”
Wexford sat in his office at the rosewood desk (which was his own and not the property of the Mid-Sussex Police Force) contemplating the T-shirt that had been found in the kitchen of Grimble's bungalow. It had already been examined in the lab and put to rigorous testing.
On a white background was printed in black a scorpion, measuring twelve inches from head to curled-up forked tail. The lab gave its length in centimeters but Wexford refused to cope with that. Under the scorpion's tail was the name sam in block letters. The letters had been printed in red but had now faded to a dull pink. The only label inside the T-shirt was a tiny square of cotton bearing the letter “M” for medium.
He left it lying there when Grimble was announced. Burden would have won his bet if Wexford had done more than smile in response to the challenge, for Grimble had indeed brought his wife. She was without her knitting, and the devil finding no work for idle hands, hers wandered aimlessly about her lap, rubbed the surface of Wexford's desk, and occasionally scratched portions of her anatomy.
Grimble listened with apparent surprise and growing distaste to the story of the discovery, related by Burden, in his late father's house. His wife's mouth fell open and one of those fidgety hands came up to cover it as if the solecism of relating such a story had been hers, not Wexford's.
“What's that thing?” He pointed an accusing finger at the T-shirt. “What's that doing there?”
In a level voice, Wexford said, “It was in your late father's house. In the kitchen. Is it yours?”
“Of course it isn't bloody mine.” Wexford had never seen Grimble so angry. “Would I wear a thing like that?” He cocked his thumb in his wife's direction. “And it isn't hers. I told you time and again I never set foot in that place after they never gave me my permission.”
“Now, John,” said his wife, “you keep calm.”
Grimble took a deep breath, closed his eyes briefly, and sighed. Unlikely as it seemed, it was apparent someone-probably Kathleen Grimble-had taught him a technique for dealing with rage. His face gradually lost the dark red color that had suffused it. He began shaking his head slowly.
“I don't get it,” he said. “What was that door doing shut?”
“Which door is that, Mr. Grimble?”
“Door to the cellar. He said he found it shut. That door was never shut. My old dad kept that open all the years he lived there. I was a boy there, I grew up there, didn't I, Kath, and I never saw that door shut, didn't know it could shut.”
Perhaps believing some response was required, Kathleen Grimble said, “There wasn't no need to shut that door.”
Grimble nodded. “I reckon whoever it was went down there snooping about”-his eyes wandered malevolently to Burden-“they got it wrong. That door was never shut.”
Unwilling to enter into an undignified argument, Burden nevertheless saw himself heading that way. “The door was shut,” he said as shortly and crisply as he could. “That you have to accept. I found it shut and opened it myself. I had some trouble in getting it to open.”
“It never was shut before, that's all I can say.” As with many people who make this remark, it was far from all he could say, but as he launched into a week-by-week, month-by-month account of the number of times he had been down the cellar steps and found the door open, Wexford briskly cut him short.
“All right. Thank you. Tell me about your father's tenant-a Mr. Chapman, was it?”
Grimble's face distorted into a moue of disgust that anyone could mistake this man's real name for Chapman. “Chadwick, Chadwick. Who told you he was called Chapman? They want their head tested. Chadwick, he was called.”
“Of course he was.” Kathleen was rubbing her fingertips together like someone crumbling bread. “Never Chapman. Where did you get that from?”
Instead of answering her, Wexford said, “Was his first name Sam?”
Uttering this innocuous three-letter word caused a similar explosion to that brought about by their mistake in Chadwick's surname. “Sam? You lot haven't done your homework, have you? Douglas was his name. My poor old dad called him Doug.”
“That's right,” said Kathleen with an approving smile for her husband. “He did. Friendly
to everyone, John's dad was. Kindness itself.”
“But he evicted this Chadwick?”
“No, he never. He wanted his rent. Kept him waiting weeks for it, Chadwick did.”
“Don't forget the piano, John.”
“I won't. You can be sure of that. Chadwick played that piano at all hours. Midnight, six in the morning, it was all one to him. And that was only half of it. He left wet towels on the bathroom floor like he had a servant to pick them up for him. It was hard on my poor old dad, he was a sick man then, got the Big C, though he didn't know it, poor old devil. He wasn't going to evict him, was he? Not with all that rent owing. Chadwick did a moonlight flit, left his stuff behind. Dad was an honest man, he wasn't keeping nothing what wasn't his due, so he put all that junk outside the house and held on to the piano. It was his right, wasn't it? Chadwick's pal came back with a van and knocked at the door and asked for the piano and Dad said-”
Damon Coleman had come into the room and, speaking softly to Wexford, said, “Miss Laxton's sent a note over to you, sir. I've got it here. I think it's the DNA test result.”
“Okay. Thanks, Damon.” Wexford unfolded the sheet of paper and read the result. He looked up, said to Grimble, “No doubt, you'll be glad to hear the body in your trench isn't that of your second cousin Peter Darracott.”
