Ruth Rendell - Not in the Flesh

If it was Hexham.

“Should I have my solicitor here?”

He was surprised she knew of such a requirement. Then he remembered all the law and police programs on television that the housebound watch. He shook his head, thought of saying, “Not yet,” but said nothing. Was he eventually going to arrest her?

This Sunday morning she was no less pathetic. She hadn't been alone when he left her the evening before. He had insisted on her having someone with her before he went, and she had phoned her cleaner, who agreed to come. It seemed to him dreadful that the only companion she could find was a woman not particularly sympathetic to her whom she would have to pay. She wouldn't, of course, have said why she wanted the cleaner but only that she wasn't feeling well and was nervous about being alone.

She reclined on the bulbous buttoned sofa, her swollen legs up on a cushion. Her face was caked with white powder and in the heat from the radiators, unnecessary and unwanted, she fanned herself with a brochure out of some newspaper. He had angry helpless feelings that something should be done about people like her, something to help them, ameliorate their lot, but he didn't know what that something could be. She wasn't poor, she wasn't in want, she was like that woman in the poem: “O why do you walk through the fields in gloves… O fat white woman whom nobody loves.” No doubt, it was her own fault that no one loved her, but it was too late for that now.

“Do you have any idea who this man was?” he asked her.

“Of course I don't,” she answered rather too quickly. “I don't know those sorts of people. I know I'd never seen him before.”

“There were some clothes in the house, Mrs. McNeil,” he began, “in the kitchen. They were his.”

“I said I saw him through the window and that orange thing he was wearing. I never saw him again till he was dead.”

Till after your husband had shot him. Wexford made the correction silently. The man went across the road carrying a shotgun in broad daylight. But why not? Who would remark on that? Who would be perturbed if they heard the shots? Rabbits and pigeons were shot around here at any time. There was no closed season.

“And a cupboardful in the bedroom,” she said. “All old Mr. Grimble's clothes. The son never removed them, left them all hanging there. People have no respect these days. I'm glad I had no children.”

He forbore to say that if she had, they would now be approaching sixty. “Did you see the clothes on the kitchen counter?”

“They were his, the man who came at Ronald with a knife. He took them off when he went to the bathroom.”

“Now, Mrs. McNeil, I want you to think carefully before you answer. Did you and your husband take anything from the clothes in the kitchen after the man was-was dead?”

Instead of thinking carefully, she answered at once.

“What sort of thing?”

The things he must have had, Wexford thought, the things everyone has, no matter how poor. “Small change, a driving license, keys?”A look that was part scorn, part impatience crossed her face. It was one that Wexford knew well, expressing as it did dismissal of the kind of people Mrs. McNeil's parents would have said kept the coal in the bath, and she herself that the only reason they no longer did so was because the council supplied them with central heating.

“A person like that doesn't have that sort of thing,” she said.

“A person like what, Mrs. McNeil?”

“A working-class person. Not that they work much.”

Wexford had to hold on hard to the pity he felt for her before it slipped away. “Not even a key?”

She hesitated. She looked about her, to the right and to the left, as if for a way of escape. “My husband looked through the clothes.” Her lips compressed, she paused, then said very carefully, “There was some money.”

A new expression had come into her eyes, one Wexford hadn't seen there before. Self-righteousness? Murder, or at any rate man-slaughter, concealing a death, trespass, none of those had been able to evoke it, but property, possession, money, were different. Being deprived of those or depriving another of those was the ultimate crime.

“Where was it?”

“In the pocket of those trousers they all wear. Blue things.”

“How much money, Mrs. McNeil?”

“A great deal. I don't know. I didn't count it.” Indignation spread across her face. “Are you suggesting we stole it? How dare you! Stealing is wrong.”

“I know very well you didn't, Mrs. McNeil.”

“Then what more do you want? I told you the man was dead. My husband shot him in self-defense.”

At a range of-what? Ten feet? Twelve?

The cleaner arrived, offered to prepare lunch for Irene McNeil, and to sit with her throughout the afternoon. If she had ever had friends they must all be dead by now. She had no one-but Wexford's sympathy was all gone. According to Maeve Tredown and, more reliably, the cleaner, Irene McNeil was eighty-four. Was he going to take it upon himself to charge a woman of her age with anything? Maybe he would have to. He asked her again about the shooting and the knife.

“I wasn't there.” She was on the verge of whimpering. “I didn't see it. Ronald said he came at him with a knife and Ronald would never tell a lie.”

“Did you see the knife?”

“I don't know. I think I did, I don't remember. It was a shock when Ronald came back and said he'd killed a man. Even though it was self-defense, I was upset. I didn't ask him a lot of questions.”

“Mrs. McNeil, are you saying that when this man went into the bathroom, wearing nothing but his underwear, leaving his clothes behind in the kitchen, he took a knife with him?”

“I don't know,” she said. “My husband said he did. Ronald never lied.”

“The knife would still be there, wouldn't it? This man would have dropped it and it would still be there in the bathroom.”

“I don't know. I don't remember. I'm so tired.” She began to cry. “I don't know what to do.”

The cleaner was a fierce-looking woman with a stare. She said, “You've upset her properly. I hope you're satisfied.”

Dora and Sheila and the little girls had all had their lunch. Paul was coming for Sheila later in the afternoon. Wexford ate the food they had left for him, cold chicken and salad, not his favorite meal; with sparkling water and cranberry juice to choose from, he drank nothing but listened to his wife and daughter discussing Sheila's forthcoming wedding. Dora was so relieved Sheila was actually getting married at last, that she put up no objections to the plans for having the ceremony on one of the beaches of an island off the West Coast of Scotland. Only the proposal to have Amulet and Anoushka as bridesmaids aroused her to protest. Wexford thought he might quite enjoy it, especially as, unlike her first wedding at St. Peter's, Kingsmarkham, he wouldn't be expected to foot the bill.

An envelope addressed to him had been placed beside his plate. When he had finished the chicken and eaten enough of the salad to placate his wife, he opened it. In the list he kept in his head, Wexford's Seventh Law was that while women like cold food and loved raw food, men do not. He unfolded two newspaper cuttings, one dated today. He read them, moving into an armchair before starting on the second. Sheila came over and sat beside him, Anoushka on her knee.

“Are you tired, Pop? You look a bit tired.”

“I suppose I am.” He was having a lot of practice lately at reading expressions. “I see you want something. What is it?”

“While you were out Mrs. Dirir came around to see me. She knew I'd be here, Mum told her. She wanted to know if she could see you this evening. There's someone-a girl-she wants you to meet.”