Not In The Flesh (31 page)

Hannah had slipped the ring on, but it was too big for the third finger of her slender hand, fitting rather more tightly on the middle finger. It seemed an omen. She might wear the diamond Bal had given her for her engagement; no wedding band should ever replace it. If they wanted children she could have them without benefit of matrimony. She was too young to worry about inheritance tax, and the law would be changed by then, anyway. No, she'd never marry, she thought, as Damon came down the police station steps and got into the driving seat.

   “She's on a week's holiday and she's staying with her mother,” Hannah said. “Godalming somewhere. Salterton Street. God knows where that is, you'll have to use the satnav.”

   Fascinated by modern technology, Damon was delighted to get the chance. The satellite navigation voice, not unlike Hannah's own, directed him the opposite way to where he would have gone if left to himself. He sighed happily. “This woman, isn't there some nutcase boyfriend who's paranoid about her knowing other guys?”

   “You're quite safe,” said Hannah, laughing. “It's only one particular guy. She's left him behind in my neck of the woods.”

   The little house in a Godalming backstreet was found with ease but no more quickly, Damon insisted, than he could have done on his own. He was mildly disillusioned. Letting them into the house was a very old woman, small, shriveled, stick thin, in a short-sleeved sweater and leggings that would have fitted an undersized twelve-year-old. It was hard to believe she and tall brawny Bridget Cook could be mother and daughter.

   “You're not wanting to take my ring off me?” were almost the first words Bridget said.

   “We'd just like to compare it with this one, Miss Cook,” Hannah said. She held out the ring Selina Hexham had lent Wexford on the palm of her hand.

   “I don't know if it'll come off.”

   Bridget struggled with the ring, twisting and pulling it, failing to move it over the swollen joint.

   “Come on, love,” said Mrs. Cook in her birdlike twitter, “let me have a go. I've got just the thing. Wait a minute.”

   A jar of Vaseline was produced, the finger anointed, and at last the ring began to slide. Mrs. Cook gave it a final pull over her daughter's knuckle and the two rings lay side by side. Each had a chased design of leaves, as if a laurel wreath encircled them. Hannah looked closely, lifted each one in turn up to the light while the always obliging Mrs. Cook produced a magnifying glass. “Forever” was inside Bridget's, and “Forever” inside Selina Hexham's, identical promises engraved at the same time, in the same italics.

   “Let me see.” Lily Cook brandished her magnifying glass. “I can't see that even with my glasses. Oh, look, fancy that. Who's that other one belong to, Bridge?”

   “I don't know,” Bridget said sadly. It was as if some assumption she had made had been destroyed at a blow.

   “May I borrow it, Miss Cook?”

   “I knew you'd ask.” The sadness in Bridget's tone had deepened. “I have to say yes, don't I? Tell me one thing. Did he nick it?”

   In a manner of speaking, Hannah thought. “I can't tell you that,” she said, but she was touched suddenly by unusual emotion, by fellow feeling for a sister-woman. “The important thing is he gave it to you. He wanted you to wear it.”

It is surprisingly difficult to crawl on two legs and an arm, easier (but more painful) when you bend the damaged limb at the elbow and swing it back and forth. He was afraid that if he stood he might find he'd broken more than his wrist, but he tried and made it to the wall of the building, where he hung on with his left hand to a drainpipe. Not an ache but an intense burning soreness shivered through his body. In the morning he'd be a mass of bruises, but he was alive and not, he thought, much harmed. They would ask him, he knew very well, if he had lost consciousness. He wasn't sure. Had he? How was it that he didn't know? There seemed to be some missing minutes in his recall of the past ten, a black curtain coming down like a brief dropping off to sleep. Well, he'd tell them that. His phone was all right. As he began to key in the numbers a car turned in from the road and he recognized it as Raymond Akande's. It stopped before it reached him. Dr. Akande jumped out.

   “Someone tried to run me over in a car,” Wexford said.

   “Tried to?”

   “Failed, as you see. It was more a case of me running over them. I got tossed onto the top of the car and think I've broken my wrist. Look, I've got to make a phone call.”

   “No, you haven't. I'll take you to the infirmary myself.”

   “Thanks but this is something else.” Akande helped him into his car and there, when the sharp pains associated with movement had subsided, he spoke to Burden. “I want you to go to Athelstan House and arrest Maeve Tredown. What for? Attempted murder. That's right. Attempted murder of me. ”

   His notion that she had tried to poison him hadn't been so fantastic after all.

   “Of course you have to stay in overnight if they say so,” Dora said in the mildly scolding voice she used when he was recalcitrant. She sat by the bed he had rejected in favor of the armchair next to hers. “They've got to take X-rays and things. A scan, that doctor said. And they're going to put a plaster on your arm.”

   “When Jenny Burden broke her wrist they put a pin in. She didn't have a plaster. Why can't I have a pin?”

   “Don't be so childish, Reg. What were you doing at the hospice, anyway?”

   “Visiting Tredown. Or trying to.”

   “A corporal work of mercy, as the Catholics say?” She didn't wait for his answer. “I'm reading The First Heaven. Sheila kept on saying I have to, and I must say it's not a hardship. I'm loving it.” She hesitated, then said tentatively, “Would you think I was mad if I said the only thing is he didn't write it?”

   “My sentiments entirely,” said Wexford. “Here, give me your hand. Two minds with but a single thought we are. I wish they'd let me go home.”

   She shook her head. “Don't get run over again, will you?” To his dismay he saw a tear in her eye, but she said brightly, “Here's Mike. You'll want to talk to him.”

   “Don't go,” he said, but she was halfway across the ward. Burden kissed her cheek, came to the bedside, and stood over him. “What happened?” Wexford asked.

   “Court in the morning,” Burden said. “Of course she denies it, says you walked—well, ran—out in front of her. Are there any witnesses?”

   “Of course not. If there'd been anyone around she'd have postponed it till another day.”

   “Sure.”

   “Like I've had to postpone seeing Tredown. But she must be seriously afraid of me, don't you think? Did you have a look at the car?”

   “Both of us did. I took Barry with me. There are scratches on the bonnet and a couple of scrapes made by the heel of your shoe where I guess you tried to get a purchase and both sides are scraped to hell. There's a long dent all along the nearside. But so what, Reg? She doesn't deny hitting you, she just says it wasn't her fault. And she's got the nerve to say she's not a very good driver. I don't think we've a chance of making the charge stick, other than her leaving a scene of an accident.”

   “I don't think so either,” said Wexford, “but that doesn't matter all that much, seeing that we'll very shortly have her back in court on an even more serious charge, she and her henchwoman, Ricardo.”

   “And will we make that stick?”

   “God knows, Mike. We can only try.”

The two rings spilled out of the plastice zipper bag onto the lap of his blue-check dressing gown. One was tagged with the name “Cook,” the other “Hexham.” Hannah handed him a magnifying glass, apparently having no faith in his unaided eyesight.

   “Did you notice the chasing on the Cook ring is very slightly more worn than on the Hexham?”

   She hadn't. “Why d'you think that is, guv?”

   Dora had called him childish on the previous day and no doubt this was the word for his unreasonable hope that none of his fellow inmates of Frobisher Ward heard the title she gave him. Still, we all have our vanities and our touchiness, he told himself, we are only human. “Because one was on someone's finger more than the other. Three years went by when Miller had the ring before he gave it to Bridget Cook and in those years no one wore it.”

   The ward sister came up to them, told Hannah she would have to go as the doctors were doing their rounds. “And I expect he'll let you go home, Mr. Wexford.”

   “I thought they always called people by their first names these days, guv,” whispered Hannah.

   “I expect that like most of us,” said Wexford blandly, “they call them by the name they prefer.”

   At home he found a reception committee of daughters and grandchildren. “I haven't been at death's door,” he told his social-worker daughter.

   “They all want to write their names on your plaster,” Sylvia said. “What is it about the British that they always have to queue?”

   “They learn it at their mothers' knees,” said Wexford, holding out his cast for the two boys. “I don't believe you can write, you're too little,” he said to Amy.

   Shouting, “I can, I can,” she executed a bold squiggle in red felt-tip and he told her how clever she was.

   Anoushka, in her mother's arms, managed a scribble but Mary really was too little to do more than crow and laugh.

   “I've been calling on the Imrans,” Sylvia said when he and she were briefly alone.

   “You have?”

   “I'm a child care officer—remember?”

   “And what have you found?”

   “Not much,” she said. “Shamis starts school next month. She's excited about it. I don't tell them why I'm visiting and they haven't asked. Maybe they think it's all part of the service, something that we do for every family with a preschool child. If only we had the resources!”

   “Do you tell them when you're coming?”

   “Not to the time, Dad. I tell them I'll be along Monday or Tuesday, say. I can't tell them to stop at home for me. I've no grounds for that. There's just one thing to tell you and it's nothing really. They've got someone staying with them, a woman of about fifty. Mrs. Imran calls her ‘auntie,’ so I assume she's a relative.”

   “She came back with them from Somalia?”

   “I think so.”

   “Can't you ask her?”

   “She doesn't speak a word of English,” said Sylvia.

   “And you don't trust the Imrans to interpret?”

   “What do you think?”

   Karen Malahyde was also paying friendly visits to the Imrans and not always notifying them of the precise time she was coming. Possibly they thought this too was all part of the service.

   Two days later than he had intended, he walked into the reception area at Pomfret Hospice and asked for Owen Tredown. As he had predicted, he was a mass of bruises and his whole body ached. Though supported by a sling, the cast on his right arm felt heavy and cumbersome. He was all right sitting down, provided he was padded with a cushion, but walking made him wince at almost every step. Returning to the hospice gave him a strange feeling, and he told Donaldson to drop him outside the front doors. The sight of the fairly narrow defile—its walls scarred with dark red paint like a bloodstain—in which Maeve Tredown's car had trapped him and tossed him onto its bonnet, showed him how easily, if she had been going a fraction more slowly, she might have run over instead of under him. Had her action been aimed at preventing him being alone with Tredown? Or was it designed to expel him from the inquiry altogether?

   The advantage to the driver of a car as lethal weapon was that the intended victim doesn't believe until the very last minute that any fellow human being deliberately means to run him over. He, who ought to have known better, hadn't believed it. He'd simply set her down as the bad driver she boasted she was.

   The receptionist directed him to the lift and told him he would find Tredown in Room Four on the second floor. It was only when he was past the first floor that it occurred to him Claudia Ricardo might be there. Tredown's request that he come, his urging a nurse to phone him (“He insists you come yourself,” the woman had said. “He won't take no for an answer. And could you be alone please.”) would have no effect on her. He hoped too that the other inmates of the ward might be far enough away for no conversation to be overheard or that curtains could be drawn around Tredown's bed. At least, this time, he wasn't an inmate himself but a visitor, free to come and go.

   Tredown was in a private room off the corridor that led to the main ward. The door was shut. He knocked and, getting no answer, opened it. Inside it was light and airy, but excessively warm. A blue glass vase held white dahlias, another branches of red rowan berries. Room Four had only one occupant and he, as Wexford himself had been when in the infirmary, was sitting in a chair by the bedside with a blanket across his knees. There the resemblance ended. Tredown was asleep, his head turned to one side; and ill as the man had been last time he had seen him, now the advanced stage of his disease made him almost unrecognizable. All his flesh seemed to have been pared from him and the skin that was stretched over sharp but frail bones was a reptilian green. Tredown slept with his mouth closed, his face peaceful in repose and, in spite of wasting disease, protracted suffering, and discolored emaciation, remained handsome. So might be the sculpted face of some medieval ascetic carved from olivine stone.

   Pulling himself out of these fanciful flights, Wexford sat down in the other chair. In the absence of a cushion, he took a spare pillow from a pile and stuffed it behind his back. That was better. He reminded himself that this time it was Tredown who had asked for him and not he for Tredown—though he would have asked the next day—but still he hesitated to wake him. Perhaps a nurse would come and do it for him, but as yet there was no sign of one. The place was silent except for the occasional soft, steady footfall along the corridor outside.

   Ten minutes went by. Outside, he heard a car arrive. In the corridor someone whispered to someone else. A petal dropped off one of the dahlias and fluttered to the ground. Tredown slept, his breathing light but uneven and once or twice he made a little sound that Wexford interpreted as distress without quite knowing why he did so. Next time he heard the footsteps he opened the door and asked a man in a white boiler suit if it would be all right to wake Mr. Tredown. The man looked at his watch, said it was time he woke anyway, and entering the room, spoke gently and in a very low voice into Tredown's ear.