Not In The Flesh_ A Wexford Novel Part 16

Not quite, Hannah thought. "Before we go any further, Miss Cook, I'd better tell you Samuel Miller is dead. I'm sorry. I hope this won't upset you."

She was silent. Her strong masculine features remained rigid. She pa.s.sed one hand over her forehead and said, "He wrote poems, you know. He'd written a book too. Sam was no fool."

Hannah noted the diminutive. "I didn't know."

"No. People didn't. He wrote a poem for me, but Williams found it and tore it up. D'you want a coffee?"

"I'll get it," Hannah said.

Looking over her shoulder when she was at the counter, she saw the big woman put her head into her hands. A wedding ring was on the third finger of her left hand and Hannah wondered if the jealous lover was resentful of that too. She took the two cups of coffee back to their table.

"Why did he go to see the Tredowns when you were all in Flagford?"

"I don't know. Did he?"

"He'd worked for them three years before, the last time he came fruit-picking in Flagford. A man called Grimble turned the pickers off his field and Samuel Miller went to see the Tredowns and they gave him a job repairing their car and then driving it."

"D'you mean Tredown the book writer? The one that did that book called something about heaven? The one they're making a film of?"

"That's the one."

"He lived in Flagford?"

"Still does," said Hannah. "Samuel . . ." The name bothered her, it was inappropriate for what she had supposed Dusty was, not so odd for a writer and a poet. "Samuel-did he know it was that Tredown? I mean, if he was a writer, did he go to see Tredown because he was?"

"Don't ask me. I never knew Tredown lived there. Sam never said."

"I'm wondering if he brought something he'd written with him to show Tredown."

Bridget plainly wasn't interested. "If he did I never saw it. How did he die?"

Hannah longed to be able to say this was something Bridget Cook didn't need to know, but she couldn't do that. "I'm afraid he was killed. He was shot." She said quickly, "The man who shot him is dead." She let the words register, sink in, then said, "Miss Cook, do you know if Sam carried a knife?"

"It was for his own protection. The folks he hung out with-you needed a knife with that lot. He never used it, that I am sure of."

"The last time you saw him-can you remember that?"

"That's not something you forget," Bridget Riley said. "We'd fixed up to get married in three weeks. It wasn't just me, he really wanted it. I'm telling you that because people-well, they used to say things on account of Sam was so much younger than me. Anyway, that day, we'd finished picking for the day. We had a shower in the van but it got broke and Sam was going to mend it but he never did. He come in and said he'd found a place where he could have a bit of a wash. It was an empty house in a field where he'd camped three years earlier. When he got back, he said, we'd go down the pub and then he said, here you are, this is for you, and he give me this ring."

"The ring you're wearing?"

Bridget nodded. "I'd given him a present too. I'd bought him a T-s.h.i.+rt with his name on."

At last. Hannah felt the tension in her shoulders relax. She produced the photograph from her bag. "Was it this one?"

The ravaged face went white. Bridget Cook's reaction was more intense than it had been even to news of Miller's death. "Oh, my G.o.d." She touched the glossy surface of the photograph with a callused forefinger.

"I'm sorry if it's been a shock, Miss Cook."

"No, no. I'm okay. I saw it-the T-s.h.i.+rt with his name on it-in the Oxfam shop in Myringham. Me and Mich.e.l.le was having a day out. I said to her, 'Look at that, I've got to have that for Sam,' and she said, 'He won't want that thing on it, will he?' She meant the scorpion, but I said, 'He's got a scorpion tattoo on his shoulder. He'll like it.' I was right, he did. He put it on when he went off to have his wash. I never saw him again." Keeping herself from crying had made her voice hoa.r.s.e. She looked down at her left hand. "Funny he give me this when he was leaving me." Revelation came to her. "But he didn't, did he? He got himself killed." She shook her head. "Williams thinks it's my wedding ring or he'd have had it off me."

Hannah went home to Bal, wondering how long this woman would stay with a man who beat her up and destroyed the poem another man had written for her. Then, holding Bal in her arms, she caught sight of the two of them, young and good-looking, in the mirror and thought that circ.u.mstances alter cases.

Chapter Twenty-one.

The hospice that would be Owen Tredown's home until he came to his final resting place was in Pomfret, a purpose-built unit set among trees. In the area between it and Pomfret High Streetwas a fairly large man-made pond on which were mallards and a couple of moorhens. Bulrushes and hostas with succulent bluish leaves fringed its banks. Donaldson drove past it, turned, and parked outside the hospice gates for Wexford to spend five minutes admiring its generous windows, its carefully laid-out garden, and all the various kinds of access provided for disabled visitors.

He liked the theory or idea of a hospice. He had looked the word up in the dictionary before coming out and found the first definition given for it was "a house of rest and entertainment for pilgrims." Rest was right, but entertainment? Hardly, unless you counted the television sets that he'd heard were provided in every room. He approved, but still he asked himself what it must feel like to go into a place you knew you'd never come out of alive. You knew this was it, the last place in the world to lie down in, this was the antechamber to the crematorium. He told Donaldson to drive on.

The newspapers must already have Tredown's obituaries prepared. One or two of them would discard those prewritten epitaphs in favor of a tribute composed by a personal friend. There would be a photograph of Tredown, probably taken some twenty-five years before, when the author was young and handsome. The last line would be "he is survived by his wife Maeve."

The rain had gone and it was another fine day, cold as November must be, but bright and sunny as summer without summer's haze. Greg was in the front garden of Mrs. McNeil's house, sweeping leaves from the path. When he saw Wexford arrive he pulled off the jade-green latex gloves he was wearing and ran to open the car door. Like a doorman at a luxury hotel, Wexford thought. Greg's T-s.h.i.+rt was white enough for a was.h.i.+ng-powder advertis.e.m.e.nt, dazzling as fresh fallen snow, his jeans so tight as perhaps to ruin forever his chances of becoming a parent. He ushered the chief inspector into the house with some ceremony, called out, "Reeny, darling, your guest is here," and asked Wexford what he would like to drink.

She was a different woman. If he had met her outside her expected environment he wouldn't have recognized her. Though bound to await trial on various serious charges, she looked ten years younger and happier than he had ever seen her. She still had her feet up on a footstool but she had sheer stockings on her legs and those feet encased in court shoes. Her hair had just been done-did Greg's talents extend that far?-and she wore a silk blouse and neat black skirt. She gave Wexford one of the first smiles he had ever had from her and extended a hand with freshly painted nails.

"Mrs. McNeil, I want to talk to you again about the-er, intruder in Mr. Grimble's house," he said when Greg had brought tea for him and what might have been water with ice and lemon but was more likely gin and tonic for Irene McNeil. "We now believe his name was Samuel Miller. I want you to cast your mind back to September eight years ago and tell me something. In the days or weeks following the day you and your husband had removed his body from the bathroom to the cellar, did you talk about it? Did you discuss it? Did anyone else in the neighborhood mention him? Ask about him?"

She picked up a chocolate biscuit off the plate Greg had brought, laid it down again, and selected instead one with a crust of coconut icing. "I didn't talk about it. The less said about it the better, I thought. It was best forgotten."

He marveled, not so much at her as at the society she had moved in that bred such dismissive indifference to a man's death. "Did your husband talk to you about it?"

"Ronald wanted to bury the body. He said it wasn't safe leaving it there. John Grimble or whatever his name is, he might find it. All I said was he shouldn't try to do that on his own, move it and bury it, I mean. He didn't ask me to help again. It was too much to expect of me."

"Did he try to bury the body?"

"Of course he didn't," said Mrs. McNeil. "It was in the cellar, wasn't it, when you found it? Ronald wasn't strong enough. He was nearly eighty, he wasn't well. It hurt his back when we had to move the body down those stairs. I shall always say it was that which damaged his hip. I told you it was the day after that he had a stroke and he wasn't strong enough to have a hip replacement. He wouldn't have stood the anesthetic."

It was a grotesque and nightmarish picture she had conjured up, these two aged and no doubt misshapen people, limping and short of breath, struggling and gasping as they humped a dead man down a narrow staircase into a subterranean chamber. "Why do you think Miller was in the house?" Wexford asked.

"Looking for something to steal," she said promptly. "And then he went to wash himself. That would be stealing too, wouldn't it, stealing Mr. Grimble's water?"

Wexford left her and returned to Flagford. The sun was low in the sky, creating a dazzling glare that the sun visor on the wind-screen did little to remedy. Grimble's Field had become a haven for rabbits, which scattered for the shelter of the trees when Wexford walked up the path. The bungalow had already been searched twice, but he still thought taking a third look might be worth a try. The first thing he did was turn on the cold taps in the bathroom, one over the bath and one on the washbasin. To his surprise-he had never fully believed in the theory that Miller had gone in there to wash himself or have a bath-water came from both. Not a gush or even a steady stream of water but a good deal more than a trickle. It would have been easy to fill the washbasin and not too unpleasant to wash in it in September. The sliver of soap was still there, cracked and blackened now. The shaving brush and the sc.r.a.p of gray toweling were still there. But the knife . . . ?

Since they must both have known there was a chance of the body being discovered in the cellar, it would have been very much in Ronald McNeil's interest to place the knife near the body. But was there ever a knife? Bridget Cook had told Hannah he carried one "for his own protection," an excuse Wexford had heard many times before. In spite of all the searching that had been done, could the knife still be in here? Wexford surveyed the bathroom, which must have been a squalid place even while in daily use by old Grimble. Watermarks and rust stains disfigured taps and plug-holes. All the pipework was exposed or wrapped in dirty rags and several tiles had come away from the side of the bath. The floor had been deep in dust but most of that had been swept up by the searchers. He knelt down on the cleanest spot and peered at the floorboards.

Moving his hands through the drifts of powdery yet gritty gray stuff that had acc.u.mulated behind the lavatory pan, he pushed his forefinger down a s.p.a.ce between the boards. There was nothing to be seen, but his finger encountered some kind of obstruction. What he needed was a knife (a knife!) to slide down into the crack. He went into the kitchen, opened a likely-looking drawer, and found a handful of ancient and rusty cutlery. The knives were far too blunt to stab anyone or be, as far as he could see, of any use at all except perhaps the use he had in mind for one of them. He returned to the bathroom, slid the rusty blade down into the crack, and pushed until it half-lifted the obstruction, something small and cylindrical. Easing it out, he blew the dust from it and saw that what he had found was a cartridge, probably, almost certainly, from a twelve-bore shotgun.

That, at any rate, proved Mrs. McNeil's story. How much now did it matter if the mystery of the knife was never solved? Whether McNeil had killed in self-defense or in malice hardly mattered, either. He was dead and the only offense with which his widow could be charged was that of concealing a death. If Grimble ever got his planning permission, would anyone want to live in a house (or two houses or three) built here, where two murders had happened, where two bodies had been hidden? Wexford was thinking about this, imagining himself as a potential buyer, when he heard a door close softly and a footstep in the kitchen.

He turned around, finding himself in the same position as Miller must have been when he was surprised by McNeil entering the house. This intruder, however, wasn't carrying a shotgun. Claudia Ricardo said, without polite preamble, "I saw your car outside with that driver of yours in it." Why was "that driver of yours" so much more offensive to Wexford than "your driver"? The words meant the same thing. "It seemed an opportunity to get some facts out of you."

He said nothing, waited.

"Is it true that was Dusty's body you found in here?"

"Yes, it's true."

"And he'd been dead for eight years? Murdered? How funny. And it was eight years in September?"

"It would seem so," said Wexford.

"If only we'd known," she said, as if to herself. "That's why he never came back. I thought he'd come back, I really did."

The thought came to him then that this woman, attractive in a bizarre way, had been s.e.xually involved with Miller. Not perhaps in 1998 but three years before that. In jeans and clinging red sweater, she looked younger than when she wore her long skirts and "hippyish" patchwork. She pushed her hands through her hair, the movement lifting her cheeks and giving youth to her face. Silent for a while, apparently speculating, she said, "What happened to the money?"

"The thousand-" he said deliberately, "I mean, the hundred-pound wedding present?"

She wasn't the kind of woman who blushed, but her eyes narrowed.

"I can't tell you that, Miss Ricardo," he said. "Now it's your turn to tell me something. When Miller came to you eleven years ago, worked for you as a handyman and drove your car, did he bring you the ma.n.u.script of a novel for Mr. Tredown to read?"

A strange expression had come into her face, calculating and sly. "Whatever makes you ask?"

"Perhaps you'd just answer the question."

"Only if we can go and sit down somewhere. Have a little tete-a-tete? This place is a hole and a dump, but it's not as foul as this in the bedroom."

The stench of old clothes and mothb.a.l.l.s was unpleasant. Mice had been eating the old flock mattress. It was strange, Wexford had sometimes thought, how rodents could eat unpalatable, nutrition-free substances and apparently thrive on them. "Now perhaps you'd answer the question," he said again.

She shrugged in a way that managed to be offhand and involved at the same time. He noticed how long her neck was, a desirable feature in a woman. "Yes, well, people were always sending him ma.n.u.scripts," she said, contempt in her voice. "It was him teaching in creative writing schools that did it. They'd go along and sign up or whatever they did, poor deluded creatures, and go to his cla.s.ses and most of them got crushes on him. He used to be quite good-looking-we were known as a handsome couple-would you believe it?" When she saw Wexford didn't intend to answer her, she shrugged and went on, "Of course he only did it for the money. He had to, since he didn't make much from his books. I've never worked-did you know that? Never. Maeve did. She was someone's secretary. But me, I never fancied working. You have to get up so early in the morning. The people Owen taught, they'd go home and write something, usually some derivative rubbish or so boring you wouldn't believe. They'd send it to him asking for his comments. We got divorced and he married Maeve. She had an income from somewhere, not much, but better than nothing. Those ma.n.u.scripts, Maeve and I used to read bits of them out loud and have a laugh, it was most amusing. Owen read them all, he was sorry for the people who wrote them, and he'd spend good money on the return postage."

"And Miller, did he bring a ma.n.u.script?"

"You asked me that before," she said. "He may have. How would I know? If he did Owen didn't say anything to me about it. He didn't like us laughing at them. He's got a soft heart, poor old thing, so maybe he kept it dark. He was well then, of course."

Wexford wondered which piece of information that he had given her or question he had asked was responsible for the huge improvement in her spirits since she first walked into the house. Then she had been tense, anxious, but now as they left, her step was lighter and she looked young. It was no longer too difficult to believe that eleven years ago she had been the lover of a man of thirty-two.

"I'm off to see Owen," she said conversationally. "With Maeve, of course. I mean, she'll have to drive me. I'm not prepared to go on the bus. You wouldn't give me a lift, I suppose?"

"I'm afraid not, Miss Ricardo," he said.

His destination led him in the opposite direction to hers, back into Kingsmarkham. This suburban estate-many like it had sprung up around the town-lay quietly under a mother-of-pearl sky, November's sunset colors. One of the residents daringly mowed his lawn, another was cutting the last roses of the year, the bruised and misshapen flowers of late autumn. Irene McNeil's house had the indefinable look homes have in the daytime when their occupants are asleep. A shuttered silent look, a stillness.

If he hadn't known someone must be at home, Wexford would have given up after the second ring. But he pressed the bell a third time, there was a patter of soft footsteps, and Greg opened the door. Five minutes before, Wexford was sure, he had been asleep, had combed his hair on the way to let him in. His face was like the face of an infant who has been wakened too soon. But he wasn't one to lose his cool, as he might have said himself.

"Hi, Mr. Wexford, how're you?"

When this vacuous greeting started to become commonplace, Wexford resolved not to answer it in any circ.u.mstances. "I'd like to see Mrs. McNeil."

"Oh, dear, she's fast asleep."

"You'll do," Wexford said. "In fact, you may do even better."

Greg's smile grew wary as he invited Wexford in. "My pleasure," he murmured but looked rather startled when asked for his full name.

"Gregory Brewster-Clark," he said, and then, "May I ask why you want to know?"

"Well, yes, you may." For a moment Wexford considered telling him he might ask but not necessarily get an answer. He relented. "You may think it outdated of me," he said, "but I don't much care to call people I don't know by their given names."

It was plain that Greg didn't know what a given name was. But he had got his answer and cheered up, skipping into the kitchen and asking if he could get him anything. Wexford thought he was more like a hairdresser than a carer. He could imagine him with scissors in his hand, asking a client if he wanted a teeny fraction more off the back.

"I'd like to see inside the cupboards and drawers," he said.

Greg seemed to see nothing odd about this request. As far as he was concerned, any visitor male or female must have a burning desire to see his handiwork. Everything was clean and neat, sterile-looking and smelling of chlorine, as if an anesthetized patient might be brought in at any moment to await surgery. Happily, Greg opened one wall cupboard after another, displaying rows and stacks of matching china and gla.s.s. If there was food in this place it must all have been kept inside the fridge. A knife rack caught Wexford's attention but there was nothing of interest to be found in it.

Fortunately, it never seemed to occur to Greg to ask him what right he had to search Mrs. McNeil's kitchen. The word "warrant" would perhaps have been foreign to him. Wexford had expected an argument but, as he told Burden later, all he got was smiling acquiescence and a cup of excellent tea.

"First I had a look at the knife rack but the knives were all the same, with plain black handles. Then I asked to see inside the drawers. Greg showed not the least sign of suspicion. Maybe it's normal in the households where he works for visitors to scrutinize the culinary arrangements. Anyway, no knife. I asked him if there'd been a knife in any of the cupboards or drawers when he first arrived and did all this tidying up but he said no. I said I'd wait for Mrs. McNeil to wake up. I wanted to get back to this story of hers about the knife being stolen by the cleaner. For some reason I'd begun to believe it."

Up till now having looked increasingly bored, Burden brightened. He lifted his beer tankard to his lips as if celebrating.

"Greg gave me tea. He gave me biscuits. He talked to me about all the various jobs he'd had, the hotels he'd worked in, his training as a nurse, as an overnight carer, on and on. I thought she'd never wake up. In the end I got him to wake her and he did-gently yet effectively, I must say."

Burden nodded. "What happened?"

"I asked her. It always amazes me, Mike, the way our-er, customers lie and lie and when we finally tell them we know they've lied, we can prove they've lied, their lying is a fact, they're not ashamed, they don't say they're sorry or they feel guilty and what must we think of them, they just say, 'Okay,' or, 'Right, so what?' "

Burden was quickly dismissive. "Well, they're a bunch of villains, aren't they? Low life. And Irene McNeil may be an upper-cla.s.s sn.o.b, but she's as bad as any of them. What did she say?"

"When she went back to the house two years ago-on her way to have tea with the Pickfords, if you recall-she says she didn't look at the body, but she saw the knife lying on the floor of the cellar. She put it in her bag, where it presumably remained during the old ladies' tea party, then took it home with her. At this point she seems to have got confused because instead of seeing it as a useful piece of evidence in Ronald McNeil's defense, she decided it was a dangerous weapon, as indeed it is, and would somehow further implicate her husband and herself. I was angry by this time, Mike. I asked her if she knew wasting police time was an offense and she had recourse to 'women's weapons, waterdrops.' " Wexford shook his head ruefully. "Hannah would lose all respect for me if she heard me say that."

"You mean she cried?"

"That's it. Then she says she had a cleaner at the time-I had to listen to a long catalog of the woman's shortcomings-and this cleaner found the knife in a drawer somewhere and stole it."

"And you believed her?"

"Just wait. I got the woman's name out of her and who do you think it is?"

"How should I know, Reg?"

"You're exactly the one who would know. She's called Leeanne Fincher, mother of Darrel Fincher. Remember her? She's the woman who gave her son a knife 'for his own protection.' "

Burden laughed. "Amazing. We took the knife off him. We've still got it."