Ruth Rendell - Not in the Flesh

On a dining table, the top of which was scarred with white rings made by hot cups and black channels made by cigarettes left to burn themselves out, stood a glass vase, its inside scummed with a brown deposit that supported the dried-up strawlike stems of flowers that fell into dust when Damon touched them. The smell was stronger here, mostly coming, it seemed, from the mold on the walls where rising damp had erupted in crusts like brown scabs. It was a very strong smell and one almost impossible to ignore. Damon began sneezing.

“Bless you,” said Burden automatically.

“What are we looking for, anyway, sir?” Damon asked when the spasm had passed.

“Anything,” said Burden. “I don't know. Signs of Arthur Grimble's lodger? He had a lodger, the lodger left or didn't leave. It's all a bit vague. When I asked Grimble if we could come in here he said nothing about this lodger. He just refused permission. I'm inclined to think he said it out of cussedness. He couldn't get his permission, so he wasn't going to give us any.”

The window in this room was intact but for a diagonal crack across one corner. Damon peered out of it into the greenish gloom and beyond at the grave and the police crime tape surrounding it. He tried a light switch but the power had long been cut off. It was only four in the afternoon, but a kind of premature dusk had come and inside here they needed their flashlights. The light they gave showed the way to the kitchen. At the sight of it Burden made no attempt to suppress his shudder. It was more like a cavern than a place where food had once been prepared-dark, smelly, every surface beaded with condensation as if the furniture had sweated.

Damon's flashlight played on the single counter where lay, in a heap, blue jeans, an orange-colored anorak, a well-worn T-shirt printed with some kind of animal or insect, wool socks, and a pair of black and gray sneakers.

“It looks as if our visit hasn't been in vain,” Burden said.

“Could this lot have belonged to X, sir?”

“Who knows? Not to either of the Grimbles, I'd have thought.”

Burden felt a tension that was almost a shiver run through him, and he couldn't attribute it to the dampness or the smells. It was something else, something primitive, perhaps a discharge of adrenaline preparing him for fight or flight. He and Coleman went back into the passage and from there into the bedrooms, both of which were full of cheap, shabby, worn-out furniture, a single bed in one, a double bed in the other, old-fashioned washstands, one of bamboo, with basins and jugs from another distant age, parchment-shaded hanging lamps, the whole covered in gray shrouds of dust. On the double bed two pillows without pillow-cases still lay, ocher-colored and marked with the stains of saliva, sweat, and other human effluvia Burden didn't want to think about. A gray bedspread had been visited by moths and mice, which had left behind them the usual evidence of their occupation.

“Darracott's love nest,” Burden muttered, though it wouldn't have been as bad as this eleven years ago when the missing man had brought Nancy Jackson here.

He opened a wardrobe door to release a new smell, mothballs and ancient dried sweat, the stench of the old man's clothes still left hanging there, two suits that might have been new in the forties, a sports jacket, coats and trousers. Burden closed the door again and they made their way into the bathroom, where the floor was deep in gray dust, the bath brown from iron stains and the lavatory pan stuffed with newspaper. A sliver of soap, rock-hard and split into blackened cracks, lay above the basin, and on a sagging wooden shelf was an old man's shaving brush, the bristles worn down to stumps.

Damon began sneezing again. “Let's get out of here, sir.”

“Wait a minute. There's a cellar.”

A flight of steps led down into darkness. Burden went first, switching on his flashlight. He let the beam play on what lay below. There was a small square of floor space and beyond that a doorway. All the other doors in the house were open but that door was shut. Burden said, with some kind of prevision, with foreboding, “Better not touch that doorknob.”

For 364 days a year he never carried a handkerchief. This was the 365th and for no known reason he had picked up a clean one when he went to put his shirt on. He wrapped it around his right hand, took hold of the door handle, tugged at it, and finally wrenched it open. Inside was a small room perhaps measuring six feet by eight, where everything seemed coated in coal dust. A heap of coal lay in one corner, prompting Burden to ask himself when he had last seen coal-years and years ago. In front of it wood was stacked, pieces of timber and small logs, a pile of it, three feet high.

“Pull out one of those planks, Damon, could you? But go carefully.”

Damon went carefully, slowly tugging at the longest piece of timber until it came free, dislodging some of the logs and sending them tumbling. He pulled at another, smaller, board and heard the inspector's indrawn breath.

“There's something under there,” Burden said.

The flashlights set down on a shelf, their beams playing on the heap of timber, revealed what might have been a small piece of white rag. They carefully lifted logs one by one until hair came to light, black and coarse like the horsehair Burden had once seen stuffing an old sofa, then something that might have been a section of bone. When what was under the logs was half-exposed, Damon took a step backward, grasped his flashlight, and shone the beam directly downward. By its light, he and Burden were looking down at the remains of a man, bones mostly, vestiges of gray flesh clinging to them, still dressed with horrid incongruity in whitish under-shirt and underpants. The black hair, the first thing Burden had seen, longish and shaggy, covered the back of the skull. Whoever he was appeared to have been dumped face downward, the arms and legs spread in a starfish shape.

The smell in the house came from elsewhere. Here, only a kind of airlessness combined with a whiff of coal dust remained, for the body they were looking at had been there a long time.

“Is this the chap who didn't leave, sir?”

“Plainly, he didn't,” said Burden, “but who he was, God knows. One thing's for sure. Just as you don't bury yourself, you don't hide yourself in a woodpile after you're dead.”

His whole team was there, at the kind of meeting he usually held at nine in the morning. The time was seven in the evening and dark as midnight. They looked tired, even the very young ones. Burden was trim as ever in a stone linen jacket and jeans, his forehead pleated in a frown, his graying hair cut a fraction too short. Weariness makes some people look younger and Hannah was one of them, the color gone from her cheeks, her eyes heavy, while Lyn's and Karen's faces, made up as usual in the morning, were now shiny and pale as nature made them. Damon seemed the exception to the rule that black skins bleach to gray when exhaustion sets in and he still had that alert look, his eyes pitch black and bright, the whites almost blue, which Wexford so liked about him.

He noticed that he alone among the men wore a tie. Barry's shirt under a thin zipper jacket was open almost to the waist, revealing a fleshy roll which, in women, he'd heard called a “muffin top.” Like Hamlet he had been “too much in the sun” and, from bridge to tip, his nose was burnt red from the long protracted summer, as was his tieless throat. Ties had almost disappeared, at least they had out here in the country, and Wexford wondered what inhibition or diffidence in himself made him need to go on wearing this weathered, worn, and stain-spotted strip of synthetic fabric.

Wondered, but only for a moment, and then he began to address them. “This afternoon,” he began, “the body of a man was found in the derelict bungalow on Grimble's Field. Mike Burden and Damon Coleman went in there on a routine search and found the body in the cellar. We don't know who it is, but Carina has seen it and says she'd guess it's been there a shorter time than the unidentified corpse in the trench. Nor can we say yet if there's any connection between these two bodies. We shall know more tomorrow when she's done the postmortem.