Not in the Flesh

by Ruth Rendell

  There was no question of Vivien and me going to bed. We stayed up with Mum, waiting and hoping and sometimes doing that ridiculous thing of running to the front door and out to the gate to look up and down our street. Viv and I did it four or five times, and then Mum said to stop because it was raining so hard and we came in soaked. She kept saying, “I wish the rain would stop, I wish it would stop,” as if it made things worse, Dad being out in the rain.

  Eventually, we went to bed but we couldn't sleep, and we heard Mum go downstairs and walk about and come back up again and go down again. She came into our room in the morning and said we had to go to school, it would turn out that there was some simple explanation for Dad not coming home, but we could tell she didn't believe this, and after a while she said we need not go. It was better for us to be here with her, she needed us here. And then she gave an awful sort of sob as if her heart would break.

  She went to the police station at about nine and we went with her. It was true what she'd said, she didn't want to be anywhere without us. She filled in the missing-person form and the policeman who was looking after us said she wasn't to worry as he was sure to be back that day. In fact, he said, the police didn't search seriously if fit healthy men of his age-he was forty-four-went missing. It wasn't like children and young girls or old people. Most men of his age, “the vast majority” he said, came back within seventy-two hours. My mother thanked him and said he was very kind, but even then, at that early stage, she knew my dad hadn't done any of the things other people suggested, gone off with another woman, gone away to start a new life somewhere, been on a binge, wakened in a strange bed, and been afraid to go home. Even then, she was saying he must be dead.

  Next week: Selina tries to discover the secrets in the life of her father, Alan Hexham. These extracts are from Gone Without Trace: The Lost Father by Selina Hexham, to be published by Lawrence Busoni Hill in January 2007.

  13

  Damon Coleman had interviewed her and later so had Burden. Both had reported her as difficult, prickly, and old-fashioned. Wexford's experience of Mrs. Irene McNeil consisted of the letter she had written him, and that had led him to expect a deeply conservative woman, a snob, her ethos centered in another, long-past age. Still, he thought he would be talking to someone with more sense and more dignity than the Tredown women.

  What he didn't expect was that he would feel sorry for her. It wasn't her great lumbering girth and the fact that she had to use a stick-would soon need two sticks-which provoked his pity. It wasn't her apparent distress at coping with disability or the pain in her arthritic limbs but, rather, something in her eyes, a bewilderment at finding herself ending up alone here in a house that, though she had been there for nearly eight years, was still new and alien to her, without child or friend or companion. He told himself that whatever she told him, whatever he and Burden found out from her, he must be gentle and considerate.

  The house that she and her husband had bought because it was near the shops and on a bus route-the bus went just twice a day-and “easy to run” had evidently been designed for a young couple out at work all day. Its interior was stark, lined with built-in cupboards, ceiling eyelet lighting, hardwood laminate floors. There was something pathetic about Mrs. McNeil's padded, buttoned velvet furniture in this minimalist setting, her footstools and cushions and ornaments crowded together and seeming to jostle one another.

  Her husband had had his first stroke eight years before and had died six months after they moved in, when they were still at the stage, Mrs. McNeil said, of saying to each other that they would settle down, they would get used to it. She had had to get used to it alone. Wexford's recalling her mind to Flagford Hall, the house that she had left behind, let forth a flood of reminiscence. Mrs. McNeil spoke in a steady complaining whine, the voice of a woman who has left all life's pleasures in the past and to whom the present is all labor and sorrow.

  “Even with that dreadful man Grimble living opposite, we were comfortable and peaceful there.” Sweat trickled down her cheeks. “It was my husband's family home. You could call it his ancestral home. His family had lived there for generations. The house is perfect Queen Anne, you know, and the gardens are gorgeous-or they were, I don't suppose they are now. As for this place, you wouldn't believe the noise there is at night here, louts and young girls drunk and screaming in the street. Even on the day Mr. Grimble turned that young man out, when he put his furniture out into the front garden, there was nothing like I get here.”

  “Let me take you back to that time, Mrs. McNeil.”

  “I wish you could,” said Mrs. McNeil bitterly.

  “I believe you kept watch on the house that had belonged to Mr. Grimble after he was dead and it belonged to his son. Nothing wrong in that. In fact, very commendable-we might well call it neighborhood watch.” Wexford avoided Burden's satirical eye. “Did you see many people go in there, apart of course from Mr. John Grimble himself?”

  “He never went in there much. He wasn't interested. He told Mrs. Hunter and Mrs. Hunter told me it was a load of old junk-those were his very words. It was only fit to be burnt and that was what he intended to do once he got his planning permission. Have a bonfire of the lot, he said, and then demolish the place. An old white elephant, he called it. We're opposing his planning application, Mrs. Hunter said, and I said so were we.”

  Old and lonely, she was relishing pouring out her memories to a sympathetic ear. There could be, when he chose, something in Wexford's manner that invited confidences from those who had little opportunity to air their miseries and their grievances. During a quarrel over their respective lifestyles, his daughter Sylvia had said to him, “You ought to have been a bloody psychotherapist.”

  “Well, it looks as if you were successful as permission was refused,” he said. “Did anyone else go in there? I don't just mean immediately after Mr. Grimble senior was dead but in the months and even years to come. I'm sure you didn't relax your surveillance.”

  “Oh, no. I kept up my neighborhood watch, as you called it.” She seemed well contented to see herself in the role of local special constable. “As to your question, several people went in there. One evening I saw a woman who used to work in the chemist's shop go in there with a man I'd never seen before. You could guess what they were up to.” When Wexford made no comment, she went on, “My husband saw Mrs. Tredown go in there one day. I mean the second Mrs. Tredown, the one with the yellow hair. Of course none of these people went in by the front door. Mr. Grimble had boarded up the front door. All of them sneaked around the back.”

  “Mrs. McNeil, you're being very helpful.” Wexford knew she was lying. He could tell by her tone rather than her body language. Of that she had none, for she remained in the only position possible to her, a heavy slumping among cushions and shawls. She was one of those rare people who allow their hands to rest quite still while they talk. “Can you tell me how these people got into the house? They can't all have had a key, can they?”

  Falsehood promptly became truth. “Oh, he always kept his back-door key under a lump of stone outside the back door.”

  “And people knew that? All these people?” This was Burden. Wexford wished he hadn't intervened. His voice was abrupt and incredulous and Mrs. McNeil plainly resented it.

  “I don't like your tone, whoever you are.” She seemed to have forgotten she had seen him before. “I was talking to this gentleman.” She turned back to Wexford. “They must have known, mustn't they?” she said like the little girl she had been so long ago. “I expect they told each other. Yes, that would be it.”

  She had become pathetic again, desperate to bolster up her lies. Wexford of course knew what it all meant, that she had discovered the hiding place of the key herself and had divulged it to no one except perhaps her husband. He had to ask, but would the result of his questioning be to make her clam up, take refuge in offended silence?

  “Mrs. McNeil,” he said in a pleasant and interested tone, the kind a scholar might use when enqui
ring of an expert in his field, “knowing where the key was, were you never tempted just to have a look around in there yourself? I mean, as part of your surveillance system? I imagine you may well have wanted to check that no damage had been done to Mr. John Grimble's property.”

  She smiled. It was the first time. “Well, of course, you're perfectly right. That was exactly how I did feel. I did go in and my husband did. I didn't say so before because people always put the worst possible construction on that sort of thing. My husband and I-we even considered removing the key into our own safekeeping, but on careful consideration we decided that would be taking good neighborliness too far.”

  He had to ask her about the cellar. But more flattery first. There are some people who can take any amount of flattery, and politicians are said to be among them; rural gentry too, particularly those who have lost the position in the county their forebears enjoyed, have no position at all except the dubious one of clinging to the rim of an upper middle class. He thought he could flatter Irene McNeil a little more without arousing her suspicions, and he ignored Burden's stare. “It's unusual to meet with this sort of rectitude in these unregenerate days, Mrs. McNeil. Did you ever find anything in that house which made you feel your-er, investigations were justified?”

  This was a thrust, albeit a very gentle one, which had gone home. He saw he was approaching the crux. Irene McNeil said, “Would you mind fetching me a glass of water?”

  They both left her and went out into the snow-and-ice-colored operating theater of a kitchen. Once in there, you could believe Irene McNeil never ate anything cooked. A gas hob still looked the way it must have done in the showroom. Burden ran the tap, filled a glass.

  “Leave us, would you, Mike?” Wexford said. “No reflection on you but I may get somewhere if it's just me with her.”

  “It'll be a pleasure. Shall I stay in the house?”

  “You may as well.”

  Wexford took the glass back and handed it to her. He noticed that the big arthritic hand shook as she took it. “Mrs. McNeil, did you happen to go down to the cellar?” He noted how that “happen” softened the question, making it a casual inquiry.

  She was prickly with guilt. “Is there any reason why I shouldn't have?”

  Only that you shouldn't have been in the house at all. “I simply wondered why you shut the door to the cellar.”

  “Because I was…” She realized she had admitted it, clapped one hand over her mouth, and after staring at him aghast for a moment, broke into wild weeping. Her body heaved with sobs. At last she moved her hands, holding them up like someone pleading for mercy.

  He held the water to her lips, but she pushed it away violently, the way an angry child might, soaking his jacket and shirt. With an effort at control, he gave no sign of the shock the icy water had been. “Mrs. McNeil,” he said, “there is no need for this. There's nothing for you to distress yourself about.” But perhaps there was. How could he tell if this was hysteria or a heartbroken confession? He could find no tissues in that kitchen, brought her instead a drying-up cloth her cleaner must have laundered. She buried her face in it. No more than a minute later she sat up, was more erect than she had been for the whole of the interview, her face patted dry, reminding him that she, after all, belonged to what her kind called “the old school.” Still she didn't speak.

  He prompted her. “Because you were what, Mrs. McNeil?” Inspired, he guessed. “Because you were frightened?”

  “Yes!”

  “What frightened you? Mrs. McNeil, nothing will happen to you”-could he be sure of that?-“if you tell me the truth.”

  She came out with the whole story. Once she had begun it seemed there was no stopping her. The floodgates had opened and words cascaded. Even so, Burden dared not take notes. He had come back into the room but sat a little way away from Wexford and her. He could see that whatever she might think of him, she had made of Wexford a sympathetic friend.

  “The man, I don't know what he died of,” she began. “Perhaps it was his heart. Ronald, my husband, went into the house-oh, it was eight years ago, in September-he went in because he could see something moving about, I mean see it through the front window. That window was never boarded up, I don't know why not. We'd both seen it, a figure moving about. I remember it like it was yesterday. It was a man wearing a red coat-well, orange-and he was tall. He had to bend his head to get through a doorway. Ronald said he was going to see what was going on. Children, he thought, we sometimes saw children go in there, but this man was much too tall to be a child. Ronald wouldn't let me go with him.

  “He was gone a long time. It was late afternoon-well, evening, but still quite light. It was evening by the time he came back.” The flood waters trickled now, then stopped. There was a sob in her voice when she spoke again and though the tears had ceased, sweat now broke out on her face and neck. “He came into the house and he was so white I thought he was ill. Well, he was ill, he was. I cried out to him, ‘What's the matter, what's wrong?’ and he said, he said it in a voice I didn't recognize, ‘Reeny, there's a man in there and he's dead. Can you come, please?’

  “I went across the road with him. It was light enough to see by. There was no electricity on in the house. We went in the back door.” She looked up into Wexford's face. “I wasn't so heavy as I am now. I could move faster and I was quite strong. I had to be.” She reached for the water but most of it she had spilled over Wexford. Burden refilled the glass and she drank from it. “We went into the bathroom. He was in there, the man. He was lying on the floor and there was-blood.”

  At this point Wexford had to interrupt her, trying to keep the sternness out of his voice, “Mrs. McNeil, think what you are saying. You told us you thought this man might have died of a heart attack.”

  “No, he didn't. I shouldn't have said that. Ronald-oh, it was so terrible, he had a gun. He had a license for it, it was all above-board. He took his shotgun with him when he went into the house.”

  Wexford stopped her. His voice had become very grave.

  “Are you saying your husband shot this man? That's a very serious accusation, Mrs. McNeil.”

  “I said to him, ‘Did you shoot him?’ and Ronald said, ‘He came at me with a knife. I backed away and he came after me, I had to defend myself.’ ”

  “All right. What happened then?”

  “My husband said that we must move him, we couldn't leave him there. You see, Ronald had shot him. No one would have believed it was in self-defense.”

  You might have put it to the test, Wexford thought. You might just have decided late in the day that honesty was the best policy. What a catalog of folly all this was-yet he believed it. These two self-appointed vigilantes had somehow convinced themselves that it was their job to police that house. Or had it all been a simple but voracious curiosity? A need in their dull lives to trespass and transgress in ways more suited to the pranks of children?

  “You moved him?” he said.

  “Ronald couldn't have done it alone. He needed me to help.” She seemed pathetically proud of it. “We dared not leave him there, not with all those other people coming in.”

  “So you took him down to the cellar?” said Burden.

  “He wasn't wearing any clothes-well, just his underclothes. That's why he went into the bathroom, Ronald said. He thought perhaps he could have a bath or just wash himself.”

  Ghoulishly, she began to giggle, a sound not unlike her sobs, quite different from the Tredown women's cackling. “We wrapped him up in newspaper to take him downstairs. There was newspaper in the cellar. I went down and fetched the paper and we wrapped him in that. We put him in the cellar and my husband piled logs on top of him and boards and boxes and we left him. Ronald said that would have to do until he could think of some way to get rid of him. Burn him perhaps or bury him but he didn't know where.”

  “But you never did?”

  “No, we never did.” She lifted to them a woebegone face. “Ronald had his first stroke the next day.
He couldn't have burnt or buried anyone after that.”

  “Mrs. McNeil, did you shut the cellar door when you left?”

  She shook her head. “Not then. I did when I went back.”

  The heart of Kingsmarkham was no place to be on a Saturday evening, especially if you were over forty. It had once been a quiet country town, sleepy and peaceful, but now you might as well have been in Piccadilly Circus. The binge drinkers were out in force, spilling out of the pubs and clubs on to the pavement because this was an exceptionally warm November. Wexford told Donaldson to drive them to the little pub on the Kingsbrook called the Gooseberry Bush and not to wait for them, they would walk home from there. The place wasn't crowded but it wasn't exactly deserted either. Young people without cars disliked the half-hour walk from the town along footpaths bordering water meadows. The car park was full of the transport used by the middle-aged. If you turned your back to it, as Wexford said, if you pretended it wasn't there, you could look instead from your table at a clear starry sky and a moon shedding its pale light on to meadows bisected by dark hedges, willows fringing the Kingsbrook.

  “That was awful,” he said flatly. “I should have been tougher but I felt so sorry for her.”

  “Did she say any more after I'd gone?” Burden had left the house and gone outside to sit in the car.

  “Only that they'd never moved the body. I mean they'd never done what she says they intended, that is burn it or bury it. Well, we know they didn't. They moved house, leaving the body in there, covered by all the logs.”