Ruth Rendell - Not in the Flesh

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.”

Matea came out through the red and gold bead curtain at this point, bringing their lamb biryani and chicken korma. She was about eighteen, very tall, very slender, and somehow her slenderness could be seen to be natural and not associated with starving herself. Her skin was the pastel gold of a tea rose, her features softly rounded and perfectly symmetrical, her hair waist-length, glossy and black, and her eyes…

“I don't think I could describe them,” said Burden, contemplating a dish of yellow chutney.

“Oh, I could. How about ebony pools of fathomless depths or sloe-black windows of the soul? Come on, Mike, eat your lunch. What is she anyway? Middle Eastern? They don't make them like that in the outskirts of Stowerton.”

Burden didn't know or said he didn't. His wife's political correctness, though less intense than Hannah Goldsmith's, had affected him with an unease about ever categorizing anyone according to their race.

The shop on the corner of Pestle Lane and Queen Street still had the name Robinson's Chemists engraved on its window, reminder of ancient days, Burden said gloomily, before “pharmacy” became the in word. Its proprietor was now a tall thin Asian man called Sharma and his shop a model emporium of cleanliness, order, and efficiency. Gone were the tall stoppered vessels filled with dubious cobalt blue and malachite green liquids that used to stand in the window and gone too the trusses and mysteriously labeled “rubber goods” that used to puzzle him as a child. As he remarked to DC Lyn Fancourt, he hadn't been inside the place for thirty-five years. A blond female assistant in a short pink smock over jeans was stacking shelves while another was in the dispensary at the back of the counter.

Palab Sharma had taken over the shop eleven years before and had taken over Nancy Jackson with it. “She got married and left,” he said to Burden. “It would have been two years after I came here.”

“Do you know who she married and where she is now?”

“My wife will know.”

Summoned by phone from the flat above, Parvati Sharma appeared, neither in a sari nor salwar kameez and veil but smartly dressed in a white shirt, short skirt, and high heels. Though very pretty, she failed to match up to Burden's new standard of female beauty.

“I went to the wedding,” she said. “I hadn't long been married myself. It was the first English wedding I ever went to and it was very nice.”

Burden asked her if the couple lived in Kingsmarkham.

“Sewingbury,” she said. “I'm so sorry, I don't know where. She's Mrs. Jackson now. I saw her in Marks & Spencer. She had her two little boys with her and I had mine. It was very nice. We said we'd have to meet and have a coffee or something, but we never have-well, not yet.”

Burden thanked her and hustled Lyn away from where she was studying a display of slimming aids. “Do you think those tablets really do suppress appetite, sir?”