Not in the Flesh

by Ruth Rendell

  I didn't say anything. I just sat there, holding her ringless hand.

  “I think about him all the time,” she said. “I wish I believed we'll meet again, but I don't, I really don't.”

  When I got home I read the inscription inside the wedding ring. It was a gold ring. Chased with leaves, and with Forever inside. Well, it did last forever, their forever. Mum died in the middle of January of the following year. I went home whenever I could, but Vivien was there with her all the time in her last months and saw her every day. “She knew what was wrong with her,” she said to me. “I know she did, though she never said. She'd found a lump in the left breast all of a year ago, but she didn't do anything about it. She only went to the doctor when the pain in her back got unbearable.”

  I asked her what Mum was afraid of.

  “Nothing,” she said. “She wasn't afraid of anything except of going on living. She did nothing about the lump because she wanted to die. She wouldn't kill herself but she knew this would kill her and that was what she wanted.”

  So we lived on alone there with Grandad, who had lost his wife and his only child. He too died a couple of years later, but at eighty-two, which isn't a tragic age to die at, not like forty-four and forty-nine, though the loss of him was just someone else for us to miss. Grandad left us everything he had, enough to pay off the mortgage and have quite a bit for each of us. I bought Vivien out because she wanted to live in a flat with her boyfriend, and now I live in the house alone. But I won't sell it. I'm not like Mum, I don't think Dad is dead. One day he'll come back and I'll be here waiting for him. With all I have that was once his: the wedding ring he gave Mum and a scrap of paper with his writing on it. All that I have left of him.

  Selina Hexham's memoir of her father, Gone Without Trace: The Lost Father, will be published in January 2007 by Lawrence Busoni Hill at £19.99.

  Barry put the sheets of newsprint, these and the ones from the previous Sunday, into an envelope and drove over to Kingsmarkham with them. He had put in a covering note in case Wexford wasn't in, saying the cuttings were from him and out of the Sunday Times but nothing more. Wexford would know. His daughter Sheila answered the door, a baby in her arms. She didn't know Barry, but he of course knew her the way everyone did. Her face was one of those familiar to all television viewers and newspaper readers. She said her father was out, she didn't know where, but wouldn't he come in? They were just having coffee.

  Barry said no, thanks, but it was very kind of her. Suppose this man Hexham was the body in the trench, he thought as he drove back to Stowerton, and he had found him? That would be something. He was angry too, in the way he thought Wexford might be. Someone, maybe one of those people he had talked to, maybe not, had killed this man and thrown his body into a trench, like they buried cattle dead of some disease. Barry thought of those girls and their mother and her parents. Not only had they a much-loved man to mourn for but privation to face, the hardship that comes when a death can't be presumed. One of those people had caused all this and probably for no other motive than gain or cowardice.

  If it was Hexham.

  15

  “Should I have my solicitor here?”

  He was surprised she knew of such a requirement. Then he remembered all the law and police programs on television that the housebound watch. He shook his head, thought of saying, “Not yet,” but said nothing. Was he eventually going to arrest her?

  This Sunday morning she was no less pathetic. She hadn't been alone when he left her the evening before. He had insisted on her having someone with her before he went, and she had phoned her cleaner, who agreed to come. It seemed to him dreadful that the only companion she could find was a woman not particularly sympathetic to her whom she would have to pay. She wouldn't, of course, have said why she wanted the cleaner but only that she wasn't feeling well and was nervous about being alone.

  She reclined on the bulbous buttoned sofa, her swollen legs up on a cushion. Her face was caked with white powder and in the heat from the radiators, unnecessary and unwanted, she fanned herself with a brochure out of some newspaper. He had angry helpless feelings that something should be done about people like her, something to help them, ameliorate their lot, but he didn't know what that something could be. She wasn't poor, she wasn't in want, she was like that woman in the poem: “O why do you walk through the fields in gloves… O fat white woman whom nobody loves.” No doubt, it was her own fault that no one loved her, but it was too late for that now.

  “Do you have any idea who this man was?” he asked her.

  “Of course I don't,” she answered rather too quickly. “I don't know those sorts of people. I know I'd never seen him before.”

  “There were some clothes in the house, Mrs. McNeil,” he began, “in the kitchen. They were his.”

  “I said I saw him through the window and that orange thing he was wearing. I never saw him again till he was dead.”

  Till after your husband had shot him. Wexford made the correction silently. The man went across the road carrying a shotgun in broad daylight. But why not? Who would remark on that? Who would be perturbed if they heard the shots? Rabbits and pigeons were shot around here at any time. There was no closed season.

  “And a cupboardful in the bedroom,” she said. “All old Mr. Grimble's clothes. The son never removed them, left them all hanging there. People have no respect these days. I'm glad I had no children.”

  He forbore to say that if she had, they would now be approaching sixty. “Did you see the clothes on the kitchen counter?”

  “They were his, the man who came at Ronald with a knife. He took them off when he went to the bathroom.”

  “Now, Mrs. McNeil, I want you to think carefully before you answer. Did you and your husband take anything from the clothes in the kitchen after the man was-was dead?”

  Instead of thinking carefully, she answered at once.

  “What sort of thing?”

  The things he must have had, Wexford thought, the things everyone has, no matter how poor. “Small change, a driving license, keys?”A look that was part scorn, part impatience crossed her face. It was one that Wexford knew well, expressing as it did dismissal of the kind of people Mrs. McNeil's parents would have said kept the coal in the bath, and she herself that the only reason they no longer did so was because the council supplied them with central heating.

  “A person like that doesn't have that sort of thing,” she said.

  “A person like what, Mrs. McNeil?”

  “A working-class person. Not that they work much.”

  Wexford had to hold on hard to the pity he felt for her before it slipped away. “Not even a key?”

  She hesitated. She looked about her, to the right and to the left, as if for a way of escape. “My husband looked through the clothes.” Her lips compressed, she paused, then said very carefully, “There was some money.”

  A new expression had come into her eyes, one Wexford hadn't seen there before. Self-righteousness? Murder, or at any rate man-slaughter, concealing a death, trespass, none of those had been able to evoke it, but property, possession, money, were different. Being deprived of those or depriving another of those was the ultimate crime.

  “Where was it?”

  “In the pocket of those trousers they all wear. Blue things.”

  “How much money, Mrs. McNeil?”

  “A great deal. I don't know. I didn't count it.” Indignation spread across her face. “Are you suggesting we stole it? How dare you! Stealing is wrong.”

  “I know very well you didn't, Mrs. McNeil.”

  “Then what more do you want? I told you the man was dead. My husband shot him in self-defense.”

  At a range of-what? Ten feet? Twelve?

  The cleaner arrived, offered to prepare lunch for Irene McNeil, and to sit with her throughout the afternoon. If she had ever had friends they must all be dead by now. She had no one-but Wexford's sympathy was all gone. According to Maeve Tredown and, more reliably, the cleaner, I
rene McNeil was eighty-four. Was he going to take it upon himself to charge a woman of her age with anything? Maybe he would have to. He asked her again about the shooting and the knife.

  “I wasn't there.” She was on the verge of whimpering. “I didn't see it. Ronald said he came at him with a knife and Ronald would never tell a lie.”

  “Did you see the knife?”

  “I don't know. I think I did, I don't remember. It was a shock when Ronald came back and said he'd killed a man. Even though it was self-defense, I was upset. I didn't ask him a lot of questions.”

  “Mrs. McNeil, are you saying that when this man went into the bathroom, wearing nothing but his underwear, leaving his clothes behind in the kitchen, he took a knife with him?”

  “I don't know,” she said. “My husband said he did. Ronald never lied.”

  “The knife would still be there, wouldn't it? This man would have dropped it and it would still be there in the bathroom.”

  “I don't know. I don't remember. I'm so tired.” She began to cry. “I don't know what to do.”

  The cleaner was a fierce-looking woman with a stare. She said, “You've upset her properly. I hope you're satisfied.”

  Dora and Sheila and the little girls had all had their lunch. Paul was coming for Sheila later in the afternoon. Wexford ate the food they had left for him, cold chicken and salad, not his favorite meal; with sparkling water and cranberry juice to choose from, he drank nothing but listened to his wife and daughter discussing Sheila's forthcoming wedding. Dora was so relieved Sheila was actually getting married at last, that she put up no objections to the plans for having the ceremony on one of the beaches of an island off the West Coast of Scotland. Only the proposal to have Amulet and Anoushka as bridesmaids aroused her to protest. Wexford thought he might quite enjoy it, especially as, unlike her first wedding at St. Peter's, Kingsmarkham, he wouldn't be expected to foot the bill.

  An envelope addressed to him had been placed beside his plate. When he had finished the chicken and eaten enough of the salad to placate his wife, he opened it. In the list he kept in his head, Wexford's Seventh Law was that while women like cold food and loved raw food, men do not. He unfolded two newspaper cuttings, one dated today. He read them, moving into an armchair before starting on the second. Sheila came over and sat beside him, Anoushka on her knee.

  “Are you tired, Pop? You look a bit tired.”

  “I suppose I am.” He was having a lot of practice lately at reading expressions. “I see you want something. What is it?”

  “While you were out Mrs. Dirir came around to see me. She knew I'd be here, Mum told her. She wanted to know if she could see you this evening. There's someone-a girl-she wants you to meet.”

  He gave a little groan. It sounded absurdly plaintive in his own ears. “It's Sunday, Sheila.” Why did he bother? That wasn't an excuse that carried any weight with her generation and those younger. Sunday was no longer a day of rest, no longer a day when shops were closed and entertainments shut, no longer a time when people stayed at home in peace and quiet.

  “I think it's important, Pop. It's something to do with genital mutilation.”

  “When is she coming?”

  She smiled. She knew he had given in.

  “About seven, she said.”

  When Paul had come and taken her and his small daughters away, Wexford reread the extracts Barry Vine had sent him. It was possible, he thought. Perhaps more than that. The dates were right, Thursday, June 15, 1995, the day Hexham disappeared, two days before the trench in Grimble's Field was finally filled in. The man's age was right. Between forty and fifty, Carina Laxton had said, and Alan Hexham's age had been forty-four. Throughout the investigation into this murder, it had been suggested that this first unidentified man must have been a visitor to the place. If nothing in this account indicated that Hexham had ever gone near Kingsmarkham or visited Flagford, there was nothing to disprove it or even make it unlikely. He had been in Lewes until two o'clock and after that he seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth. He might have taken the train to Kingsmarkham just as he might have gone to Brighton or returned to London and taken another train or a bus elsewhere.

  Of course it would have to be investigated. This young woman, Selina Hexham, must be interviewed and he would have to do it himself. One thing was certain, it couldn't just be put on the back burner. Thinking this way made him wonder about back burners-was the heat generated by them, whether its source was gas or electricity, necessarily less than that on the front ones? He thought not. In a moment he would go and check in his own kitchen, but as he pondered the question he fell asleep.

  The girl who came with Iman Dirir was Matea. So this was why she had wanted to speak to him the last time he and Burden had been to A Passage to India. This was why she had come to his front door on Halloween.

  She wore the kind of clothes that are equally Western and Eastern, loose cotton trousers and a long-sleeved tunic, embroidered and sequinned, as fashionable in London as in Amman or Mogadishu. Wexford thought she looked like a girl out of Omar Khayyám that any man would choose to sit with in the wilderness alongside a loaf of bread and a cup of wine. Her long black hair was a river flowing down her back. They sat in front of a log fire Dora had just lit, believing immigrants from warm places must be perpetually cold in their adopted country.

  Outside, fallen leaves covered everything so that not a square inch of green grass showed in the light that fell on the lawn from the French windows. The only thing that moved was a squirrel nosing methodically through the yellow carpet. The wind had dropped. Matea sat as still as the air, her hands folded in her lap. Mrs. Dirir, who was so like Matea that she might have been her mother, said quietly to Wexford, “This is something we are brought up not to talk about in our community. It would be better if we talked about it, but no one does. The nearest we ever get is if one girl asks another, ‘Are you cut?’ ”

  Wexford saw the girl tremble. It was a very slight movement, less than a shiver. The other woman went on, “They say you only become a woman after it is done. It is a-a sign of-what is the word I want?-of status.”

  Dora said quickly, “Yes, I see.” She got up and drew the curtains as if to shut out ugly menacing things.

  “You know that my husband and I brought our daughters here to save them from that,” Iman Dirir said to Wexford. She put out a hand to the girl in a graceful gesture. “Matea hasn't been saved. It has already happened to her. She was cut when she was very young.”

  The girl blushed a painful red. “I was three years old.”

  “It's hard for her to speak about it, Mr. Wexford. She has never before spoken about it except to me and to one or two others who are-are against it.”

  “I know,” he said. “Or rather I can imagine.” He heard Dora beside him make a little sound of distress.

  “She has told me it was not so bad for her as for some,” said Mrs. Dirir. Matea nodded vigorously. “She has not many problems. Not like many others who have cysts and fistulas and cannot-all right, Matea, I won't go on.”

  “How about the men?” Dora asked. “What do they feel about it? The husbands and fathers, I mean.”

  “They say it is woman's business. Not for them to interfere but there are some who say it is good because it keeps women-I think I am trying to say ‘pure.’ Would that be the right word?”

  “Pure, chaste, something like that,” Wexford said.

  “A woman who has been cut, they say, will not be unfaithful.” A dark red flush mounted in Iman Dirir's face. “I find this hard to say. I will try. Women who have been circumcised don't like what men and women do-can you understand what I mean?”

  “Of course,” Wexford said. “Of course we can.”

  Iman Dirir paused and her face gradually returned to its dark cream color. “It's not for herself that Matea has come to you. For her it's too late. It's for her sister's sake she has come.”

  Matea's English had improved. She spoke with a strong accent but
improved fluency. “It is for my sister Shamis. She is five years old but not yet in school. My mother and father go home to Somalia for vacation soon. They take with them my brother Adel and my sister.”

  Wexford decided to help her. “You're afraid your parents intend to have your sister circumcised while they are in Somalia?”

  “I know it,” Matea said.

  “It's against the law,” he said, knowing this to be a useless remark. Taking a female out of the country for the purpose of having her genitally mutilated had been a crime punishable by up to fourteen years' imprisonment for four years now, but there had been no prosecutions. The reason for this Mrs. Dirir had already out-lined. A blanket of silence was maintained among these people on the subject. No one would “betray” a lawbreaker to the authorities, no one would go to the police or the medical profession. “You should tell your parents of the penalty-I mean, that they could go to prison for a long time.”

  She shook her head. “Mrs. Dirir has done that. They say-they say on and on-we go only for vacation.”

  “I will have someone speak to them,” he said, thinking of Karen Malahyde, the Child Protection Officer. “I'll do my best.”

  “Thank you,” Matea said and he could see a leap of hope in her eyes.

  He slept badly that night. In sleeping dreams and the waking kind, he kept seeing a five-year-old held down on the ground amid a ring of watching women, held by her spread legs and her struggling arms, while another cut into her flesh with a sharpened stone. He would do his best. Would it be enough to prevent an outrage being perpetrated on a helpless child, not yet at primary school?

  16

  Selina Hexham might have made the whole thing up. “Gone Without Trace” sounded factual, but perhaps it was a work of fiction. Thinking this way after his disturbed night, Wexford had Hannah check the weather on June 15, 1995, with the Weather Centre, formerly the Meteorological Office, and the trains on that day between London and Lewes and Lewes and Kingsmarkham. She found that, as Selina Hexham had said, it rained all that day. A train from London to Lewes had left Victoria at 9:25 a.m. and reached Lewes at 10:12, while in the afternoon the 2:20 from Lewes had arrived in Kingsmarkham at 2:42.