Ruth Rendell - Not in the Flesh

Burden was drinking his usual lager, Wexford claret. He was uncomfortably aware of his wife's eyes on him as he fetched a second glass. She had already told him that whereas one glass of red wine was good for his heart, four or five were not, and when he said, “Can one have too much of a good thing?” scolded that his health was not, as far as she was concerned, a suitable subject for jokes. She herself was drinking what looked like red wine but was in fact cranberry juice. She and Jenny had pushed their chairs back from the table and were talking about KAAM, the newly formed group.

Wexford had been interrupted and now he repeated what he had said about Myringham University and Douglas Chadwick. “Her name's Sarah Finlay and she's a lecturer there. But in psychology, not mechanical engineering. I don't know whether it's a coincidence, Mike. There are an enormous lot of students at Myringham and she says she didn't know him. I talked to her on the phone.”

“What became of the T-shirt?”

“She gave it to her brother, who didn't want it either. She broke up with Ben Mabledon soon after and she took it to the Oxfam secondhand shop.”

“Which Oxfam shop?”

“The one in Myringham. This was in '98. It's a long time ago and naturally there are different people in the Oxfam shop and no one would remember that far back, anyway. It's not as if they'd keep meticulous records of the old clothes they sold.”

“You don't think it's Douglas Chadwick, do you?”

“No, I don't,” said Wexford. “Why would old Grimble have killed his tenant? Come to that, why would young Grimble have killed him? The old man wanted to be rid of him and he wanted his money, which is exactly what he couldn't accomplish by killing him. As for the money, he had the piano to sell. Presumably that was the arrangement. I'll go, the lodger would have said, you keep as much of my stuff as you want to cover the debt, put the rest out in the front, and my pal will come and pick it up in his van. And that's exactly what old Grimble did. I don't think Chadwick comes into it. I think Chadwick's out there somewhere, in Wales or the north of Scotland or the Scilly Isles, playing the piano in a hotel lounge or working in a garage or taking another mechanical engineering course in a university in Northern Ireland.”

“Did you say Douglas Chadwick?”

Wexford turned slowly to smile at Jenny Burden. “I did,” he said. “Do say you know him, Jenny. Give us some much-needed revelation.”

“Well, if it's the same one, I used to know a Douglas Chadwick whose sister was a teacher in the first school I ever taught at. He was a jazz pianist-amateur, I mean-in a club.”

“It sounds like the same one. When was this?”

“Let's see. My first job was at a school in Lewes. That was before I came to Kingsmarkham, so it'll be fifteen years ago. Helen Chadwick and I used to go to this club and hear Douglas play, and we all had a meal together once, and I think we met in a pub. And then I got my job at Kingsmarkham Comprehensive.”

“Where is he now?” her husband asked.

“Don't know. I know where she is. And so do you. She got married like me and she's Helen Carver now.”

“You mean that woman who came on a visit and called to see us and brought those appalling kids who chopped the heads off all my dahlias?”

“That's who I mean, yes.”

Wexford laughed. “I'm a feminist,” he said. “I don't hold with women changing their names when they marry. It causes needless confusion. What happened to the brother, Jenny?”

“She didn't mention him that time her kids decapitated Mike's dahlias. I could ask her. I could phone her-well, now.”

“Don't issue any invitations,” said Burden.

It was eight-thirty in the evening. Jenny took her mobile out of her handbag and went out into the damp darkness of the Olive's garden. In the snug Wexford, Burden, and Dora began speculating as to the present whereabouts of Douglas Chadwick, and Wexford, because one of his problems would be solved, half hoped Helen Carver would say she hadn't seen her brother since April 1996. He had disappeared from the face of the earth.

Jenny came back, looking very different from the smiling, rather excited woman who had gone optimistically off into the garden. “I spoke to her. I said I'd heard Douglas was playing at some fringe theater at a festival next month and I thought we might go. God, I wish I hadn't. She was nearly in tears. She said he'd died in a road accident two years ago.”

If Helen Carver had wept for the loss of her brother, Dilys Hughes seemed indifferent to the negative result of the DNA comparison. She had been reading the Sunday Times when Barry Vine arrived and from the way it lay open on the seat of an armchair, had cast it aside reluctantly when he rang her doorbell. “I've not seen him for fifteen years,” she said, “and when I've heard from him it's always been him wanting something.” She didn't ask Barry to sit down. “To be honest with you, it wouldn't have broken my heart if it had been him in that ditch.”

“You've no idea where he might be now?”

“I told you. Last time I heard was when he wanted to come here and that was eleven years ago. He thought he could bring some woman with him, the cheek of him. He might as well be dead as far as I'm concerned.”

Barry rather regretted coming to Cardiff, especially on a Sunday. A phone call would have done just as well, but he had thought the woman would need the sensitive approach. Wexford was very keen on understanding and empathy, though Barry suspected this was a directive from above rather than his own opinion. But now there seemed nothing more to be said. Peter Darracott's present whereabouts were of no importance if he wasn't the mystery man who had been buried eleven years before.

“Ah, well, that's all then, Mrs. Hughes,” he said. It had taken all of three minutes after a two-and-a-half-hour journey.

She had picked up the Sunday Times and had just enough courtesy to remain standing while she read it. “Bye-bye. Take care.”

Of all meaningless tags that was the most banal, Barry thought as he let himself out. Were you more likely to look to right and left before you crossed a street or drive your car within the speed limit because someone told you to take care? There was a shopping center on the way to the station. He went in, found a music store with, as usual, a pitifully small classical section. Bellini was his favorite composer, though he sometimes made incursions into Donizetti. The kind of people who confused the two he despised. By a piece of luck the shop happened to have La Sonnambula in stock. He knew it well but was quite happy to have it to listen to on the long journey back to Paddington, interrupted though it would be by other passengers rustling crisp bags while their mobiles played pop music. Outside a newsagent's he saw the Sunday Times. On its front page it advertised, in the News Review section, the story Dilys Hughes had been so absorbed in: “Gone Without Trace: The Lost Father” by Selina Hexham. Barry felt tempted to see it for himself and he bought a copy of the paper, realizing as soon as he did so how heavy it was, all those sections, and he would have to carry them home.

Once in the train he riffled through the main section, just to keep himself up to date with the news, discarded all the rest but the News Review, which he kept, folded small in the pocket of the raincoat he had brought with him. He'd read it at home in the evening. The rest of the journey he spent in blissful enjoyment of Bellini.

“We now know that the remains in Grimble's bungalow aren't Douglas Chadwick,” said Wexford, “but whoever he was the scorpion T-shirt was his. It certainly did belong to the man in the cellar. His hairs were on it, traces of his DNA were on it. It was his all right. The same goes for the anorak, the jeans, and the sneakers. Did he buy it from the Myringham Oxfam shop, or did someone buy it for him? And why has no one else come forward to say they've recognized that T-shirt at a later date? Did he take his clothes off before going into the cellar, or did someone else take them off after he was dead? And why take them off?”