Authors: Ruth Rendell
“I expect that pleased you.”
“It certainly did. The last thing I wanted was four houses built opposite me. All the same they would have been, all red brick with those picture windows, so-called. Of course that was before we knew we'd move on account of the disgusting behavior going on at the Tredowns.”
“You saw the trench they'd dug filled in again?”
“Oh, yes. I saw the man fill it in. He had his wireless on all the time, full on. I could hear it from Flagford Hall with all my windows shut. Those kind of people can't do anything without that pop music. Ronald used to say it makes them feel uneasy not having background noise.”
“Did you see anything odd at that time, Mrs. McNeil? Anything, never mind how small, you thought at the time was—well, strange.”
“Not apart from that man's wireless set. But that's not odd these days, that's normal.” She hesitated. “Well, there was one thing, though I don't really know that you could call it odd.”
“Try me,” said Damon.
“It was just the day after that man had finished filling in the trench. The first Mrs. Tredown—she calls herself Claudia Ricardo, but a person like that would call herself anything—she came across Grimble's Field with her dog. She had a little dog in those days, brought it with her. It's dead now and no one shed any tears about that. Well, she walked it across the field and when she came to where the trench was—there was a sort of line of bare earth if you see what I mean—she didn't walk over it, she walked around it, all the way down to the bungalow and up the other side as if she was avoiding that line of earth. I went over after she'd gone and I couldn't see any reason why a person would walk around it.”
“While you were living at Flagford Hall did you hear of anyone going missing? Disappearing?”
“Only that retarded man. What was he called? Cummings? He was simple, you know. Almost the village idiot.”
This phrase gave Damon a worse shock than would a stream of obscenities issuing from Mrs. McNeil's mouth. He even made an involuntary sound, a kind of “ouch” of protest. She spoke more gently than she had throughout the interview. “Are you feeling unwell?”
“No, no, I'm fine.” He tried a smile. “Thank you, Mrs. McNeil, you've been very helpful.”
Walking him to the front door, her legs barely performing their prime function, she turned, peered at him, and said, “You speak very good English. What part of the world do you come from?”
This was a question Damon was quite used to being asked. It still happened all the time. “Bermondsey,” he said.
Number 5 Oswald Road, home of John and Kathleen Grimble, was one of those houses—or its living room was—which are furnished with most of the necessities of life, things to sit on and sit at, things to look at and listen to, to supply warmth or keep out the cold, insulate the walls and cover the floors, but with nothing to refresh the spirit or gladden the heart, compel the eye or turn the soul's eye toward the light. The predominant color was beige. There was a calendar (Industry in Twenty-first Century UK) but no pictures on the walls, no books, not even a magazine, a small pale blue cactus in a beige pot but no flowers or other plants, no cushions on the bleak wooden-armed chairs and settee, a beige carpet but no rugs. The only clock was the digital kind with large, very bright green, quivering figures.
John Grimble was sitting in front of the screen when Wexford and Hannah were brought in by his wife. The film that was showing had reached a torrid love scene, enacted in silence as the sound was off. Kathleen Grimble took her place in the other orthopedic chair as if these positions and this contemplation of the picture had been ordained by some higher power. This time, though, she picked up the knitting that she had left lying on the seat of the chair, and, gazing in total impassivity at the writhing couple, began her mechanical and speedy work with needles and scarlet wool. Madame Defarge, Wexford thought. He could imagine her sitting on the steps of the guillotine, muttering “Oh, John, don't” each time a head rolled.
“I'd appreciate your attention, Mr. Grimble,” he said. “We've something very serious to ask you.”
Grimble turned an irritable face to him. “Give it five minutes, can't you, and I'll be with you.”
“Turn it off, please,” said Wexford, “or I'll do it myself.”
But at that moment the actor on the screen picked up a knife from the bedside table and thrust it into the outstretched neck of his companion, causing Mrs. Grimble to assert herself. “Right, that's enough,” she said calmly. “I'm not watching that sort of thing.” Grabbing the remote, she turned off the set.
Grimble began a low muttered complaining that Hannah interrupted. “Mr. Grimble, you didn't tell us a relative of yours went missing in May 1995. A bit before the time you applied for planning permission to build on your field. I'm talking about Mr. Peter Darracott of Pestle Lane, Kingsmarkham.”
“Is it all right for her to ask me questions?” Grimble said to Wexford. “I mean, has she got the proper qualifications?”
Wexford saw the blood rush to Hannah's cheeks, a sure sign of rage developing. He gave her a very small shake of the head. “Very proper, Mr. Grimble. Better than mine, in fact,” he said, thinking of Hannah's psychology degree.
“I suppose I have to take your word for it. What do you want to know for?” He was still addressing Wexford, but it was Hannah who replied, the color receding from her face.
“We already do know, Mr. Grimble. When we last spoke to you, you didn't mention Mr. Darracott.”
“Because I didn't know him, that's why.”
“But you knew he was your cousin.”
“My second cousin, if you don't mind. Oh, I can see what you're getting at. There was a body found in my field that's been dead eleven years. My second cousin went missing eleven years ago, so they've got to be one and the same. Now I'll tell you something. Everybody knows Peter Darracott had been carrying on with the woman as worked in the chemist on the corner of Pestle Lane, and that's who he went off with. And I for one don't blame him—married to that Christine what had a tongue on her like a razor. Nagged him from morn till night she did till he went spare.”
“Oh, John, don't,” said Kathleen.
“How well did you know him?” Wexford asked in a deceptively mild tone.
“About as well as most folks know their second cousins. Maybe we'd see each other at family funerals and that was about it. As matter of fact the last time I saw him was at my mum's funeral two years before he went missing.”
“It was good of him to come, John,” said Kathleen.
“Yes, well, my dad was his godfather and he thought he might be in the will, didn't he? He was unlucky there.”
“Some itinerant farmworkers camped on that land eleven years ago. Was that with your permission?”
Grimble flared again. The very word “permission” seemed enough to inflame him. “Are you joking? They counted on me living over here what was five miles away. Some busybody must have told them. But I was too many for them. Me and Bill Runge come over to see where we'd dig that trench and there they was, their vans and their muck and litter all over my field. I got them off there pretty damn quick, I can tell you. Me and Bill went in there and got them off. If folks tell you we had guns it's a lie. Sticks we had, and they put up no resistance. They was scared of us and no wonder.”
He must have got that bit about resistance off the TV, Wexford thought. “Can you remember exactly when that was, Mr. Grimble?”
“To the day, I can. It was May thirty-first and the next day me and Bill started digging. Them bloody planners refused me permission on June twelfth, and on the sixteenth Bill started filling up our trench. Nearly broke my heart it did. If you're thinking one of them might be them bones, you can think again. They was gone back to where they come from days before me and Bill ever stuck a spade in the sod.”
Sheila was just leaving when Wexford got home. He put his arms around her and kissed her, an embrace that also included the baby Anoushka in a sling on her mother's chest. “Grandad kiss,” said Amy as Wexford picked her up.
“You don't have to go the moment I get in, do you?”
“I do. I've got a car picking me up here in two minutes. You're late, anyway, Pop.”
“I always am. Unpunctuality is the impoliteness of policemen. Not a very good epigram, I'm afraid, but I'm too weary to do better. When are you coming down again?”
“Next week. I've got a project on. Ma will tell you.”
The car came, sleek and black. The white-haired driver had the face of the old Italian actor Rossano Brazzi. Wexford waved to his daughter and the children and they waved at him out of a rear window, and he went on watching until they were all out of sight. He turned away, noting that his front garden was still a mass of flowers, awaiting the frost that never came. Fuchsias in tubs, the last of the dahlias and Michaelmas daisies in the borders. Nothing to do with him, he seldom if ever pulled out a weed or planted a seed, but all Dora's work. If he sometimes neglected his wife, and he feared he did, he appreciated her when her work came into flower. There was a graceful yellow thing in a tub called a thunbergia that he'd forced himself to learn the name of, though he'd forget it again by the spring, and another yellow thing that was a shrub with flowers that smelled of oranges, but that was long over now.
Dora said, when she had received his wife-appreciating kiss, “Did you see Sheila?”
“Just in time to watch them go. What's this project she was talking about?”
“Oh, that,” said Dora dismissively. “Her news was that she's got the lead in this film that's based on your friend Tredown's great work.”
“Not my friend,” said Wexford, fetching himself a glass of red wine and her a glass of white. “I haven't even set eyes on him yet. Do you mean The First Heaven ?”
“I suppose so. It's a wonderful thing for her. She's to be the goddess of love and beauty. Oh, Reg, you should have heard her. You should have heard what she said. ‘And I was the check-in chick in that Runway serial for years and years,’ she said. ‘Haven't I come up in the world?’ ”
“I wish she had stayed a bit longer. Shall we drink to her success?” They touched glasses, and Wexford, seeing tears in her eyes, said quickly, “So what is this project? I think of our other daughter as having projects, not Sheila.”
“It's something to do with female circumcision, only she calls it female genital mutilation. It sounds awful. She says it's going on here.”
Wexford was silent for a moment. Then he said, “It's against the law. There was a law passed a couple of years ago to stop people taking their daughters back to Africa to have it done. I hope there's none of it here. Did Sheila think there was?”
“She doesn't know. People are so secretive about it. There's quite a large Somali community in Kingsmarkham, as we know, and they supposedly practice it. You know how when everyone around here wants someone to blame for all the social ills, they always pick on the Somalis. I don't really know what female circumcision is. Do you?”
“Oh, yes,” said Wexford and, thinking he might need a second glass of wine, no matter what Dr. Akande said, he told her.
Of the names on Peach's list Charlie Cummings and Peter Darracott still remained unaccounted for, and unless more bodies were discovered it seemed likely they would simply remain as missing persons and possible candidates for what had been found in Grimble's Field.
“We have to consider,” said Wexford, “that the victim may not have lived here at all but have been here only on a visit, staying in the neighborhood.”
He and Burden were having lunch in the new Indian restaurant. Its name was A Passage to India and they had chosen it mainly because it was next door but one to the police station where a handicrafts shop had once been. No one any longer wanted to work tapestries or buy embroidery frames, and the shop, according to Barry Vine, had “gone bust.” Burden looked up from the menu, an elaborate affair done in scarlet and gold on mock parchment.
“The first time the itinerant farmworkers came to Flagford was eleven years ago in June, exactly as Grimble says. That was for the soft-fruit picking, and when he'd driven them off, Morella's fruit farm gave them a bit of land to camp on. That's where they were when they came back three years later in September. Whether it was the same lot I don't know. Probably some of the same lot and some new ones. Apparently the farmer—Morella's fruit farm, that is—was providing them with a proper campsite by that time. It's hard to keep tracks on these people. All we can say is that no missing person was reported to us.”
They gave their order to the waitress, who smiled politely. She had difficulty with English but managed a “Thank you very much.”
“We're checking on all the hotels,” Burden went on when she had gone. “The difficulty there is that of course they don't keep records that far back. Still, why would anyone who came, say, on holiday, get himself murdered and buried in Flagford? I suppose whoever he was could have come here to blackmail someone who lived here.”
“Sounds like the Sherlock Holmes story Conan Doyle forgot to write. Let's say he was in possession of compromising photos of old Mrs. McNeil and her lover old Mr. Pickford and wanted £10,000 to keep them dark. So they asked him around, poisoned him in the Tio Pepe, and at the same time Grimble was very conveniently digging a trench for them to bury the body in. I don't think so.”
“It was only an example,” said Burden in a huffy tone, and then, very surprisingly, “That girl who served us, she's called Matea, is probably the most beautiful woman I've ever seen.”
Wexford looked at him, his eyebrows raised. “I don't believe my ears. You never say things like that.”
“I'm not being—well, salacious or whatever you call it. I don't fancy her, as you'd say in your crude way. I just think she's beautiful. I'd say it even if my own wife was having lunch here with me.”
“Really? Women don't generally like it much if you say that sort of thing about other women, however innocent and pure, as in your case, the motivation may be.”