Not In The Flesh (17 page)

   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.”

   Burden ordered drinks for them without asking Wexford what he wanted. He knew. “That's how it was when Damon and I found it.”

   “Her husband died. I suppose the shock of knowing he'd killed a man caused his first stroke. She kept thinking she would go back into the bungalow and take a look, see if it could remain there, but she didn't. Not till two years ago. Mrs. Pickford asked her to tea. She says she went over there on the bus and got there a bit early. Grimble's key was still under the stone by the back door. She went in and down the stairs.”

   “The place must have stunk.”

   “I know. All she said was that there was a faint smell of decay in the cellar. Of ‘something gone bad’ was the way she put it. She pulled off some of the logs—God knows what she thought that would achieve—and when she saw what was underneath—well, you know what it must have been two years ago—she just fled. ‘It frightened me,’ she said. ‘I was so frightened.’ She ran out, lumbered out, I suppose, the poor old thing, slamming the door behind her.”

   “No doubt that's why I had a job getting it open.”

   “She staggered up the stairs, went home, and tried to forget about it, I suppose.” Wexford lifted his glass, savored the claret that filled it, and sighed a little. “I'm going back tomorrow.”

   “Tomorrow's Sunday.”

   “Can't be helped. The better the day, the better the deed, as my grandad said, or if he didn't he should have.”

   “Are we going to charge her at least with concealing a death?”

   “I don't know if I'd have the heart,” said Wexford, “but I must eventually. I showed her the photo of the T-shirt, but it was plain she didn't recognize it. All she'd seen of him through the window was the orange anorak.”

   “What became of the knife?” Burden asked.

   The lost father couldn't be the man they were looking for, could he? The time was right, eleven years ago, disappeared in June, a male, the right sort of age as far as Carina Laxton could tell the age. If the DNA, that ultimate certain proof, was right . . . Two people were alive to provide it, those two daughters. Barry Vine's first thought when he had read the piece in the “News Review” was that he must immediately tell Wexford but it was Saturday night and the next day part two of Selina Hexham's memoir would appear. There might be something in tomorrow's installment to make it impossible for Alan Hexham to be their man.

   He drove home and read it again. Nowhere did the writer say she positively knew her father was dead and knew how he died; nowhere did she say whether she and her sister had ever heard from him in the intervening years. She might say so in the next installment. Would he be justified in showing it to Wexford at this hour when he didn't know if the whole thing would turn out to make it impossible that Alan Hexham's was the body in Grimble's trench? Selina might write that her father had phoned home a year later without saying where he was or that they had had a postcard from Australia. His imagination working away, Barry forgot for a moment that whatever might appear tomorrow, Selina Hexham had already written it, perhaps a year ago, and wasn't feverishly penning her memories now for a newspaper due to publish them in a few hours' time. Then he remembered, told himself not to be ridiculous, to wait till tomorrow and settled down to his Linda di Chamounix CD.

The Sunday Times, News Review, 5 November 2006 Part Two of Gone Without Trace: The Lost Father

   My mother knew he was dead. She knew it from that first day, the day we all went to the police together. She didn't say that to the police or to us, of course she didn't, but years later she told me she had known it from the first. There was no other explanation for his staying away for twenty-four hours without getting in touch with her. She knew when she was loved and she knew herself to be a sensitive, perceptive woman who would quickly have been able to tell if her husband was seeing another woman. It was this self-knowledge which perhaps made it worse when the rumor spread round our neighborhood, at our school, even at the church where Mum sometimes went, that Dad had run off with Denise Cole. There were other theories for his disappearance, of course: he was heavily in debt (he who had never owed anyone a penny), he was depressed because he felt himself a failure as a teacher (he who was a brilliant teacher and immensely popular), he had met someone in Lewes (at a funeral!) who had offered him a wonderful job at twice his present salary if he would leave at once, but the favorite one was that of his elopement.

   Denise Cole isn't her real name. It would be unfair to give it. I'm sure she was quite innocent either of having designs on my father or of fostering the rumor. She was about twenty-five years old, rented a room in the next street to us, and was a checkout supervisor in a supermarket in Leyton High Road. She had left school at sixteen after getting half a dozen rather good O levels. Now she wanted to go to university and study for a psychology degree so that she could go into social work. Whether she ever got her degree and became a social worker I don't know, but I do know that she is married and living up in the north somewhere.

   Dad used to coach her. She mostly came to our house for her coaching in biology, but sometimes they went to her room where she always had a friend of hers present. There wasn't so much danger then for a teacher to be accused of molesting a student he was alone with, but I suppose Denise and my dad thought it best to be on the safe side. The friend was also sitting for A levels, so Dad had two students to teach. No one ever suggested he was involved with Megan Lloyd. It was always Denise because it so happened that she had gone missing two days before he did.

   I remember him going around to the house where she had a room and coming back rather cross to say that one of the other tenants had told him she'd done “a moonlight flit.” Megan hadn't been there either, but there was no question of her being missing. She just hadn't turned up because Denise had told her she owed £3,000 on her Visa card and meant to go off somewhere for a while “until it had all blown over,” whatever that meant.