Ruth Rendell - Not in the Flesh

“You cannot possibly remember that far back. You know your memory's gone to pieces. It's laughable.” Claudia Ricardo cast on him a look of glacial scorn.

“Perhaps I can't,” he said. “I don't know. I'm so damned tired.” He closed his eyes and to Damon he looked already dead, his face waxen like a dead face. “They tell me I shall have to go into the hospice at Pomfret to die there,” he said without opening his eyes.

The two women stood silent, apparently unmoved.

Wexford chose his words carefully. “I was going to say, ‘Prepare yourself.’ But I'm not sure there's any preparation for this. The dead man I told you about was your father.” His eyes met hers. “I'm very sorry. I can't tell you much more, only that his body was buried in a field in a village called Flagford, a pleasant quiet place, if that is any comfort to you.”

Selina Hexham gave a little cry, the sound someone might make when stung. They were sitting in the living room of her house in Barnes, the house that had been her childhood home and the home of her parents. He guessed or intuited that it was exactly as it had been when her mother died, furnished with an eye to comfort and the solace of the mind-books, a music player, small, surely original paintings-rather than style.

“How did he die?”

“We don't know. It may be we never shall know.”

“Could it be-is it possible-I mean, is it absolutely certain it was a-a violent death? Could it have been a heart attack? Could he have just fallen down dead in that field?”

Wexford sighed. “You don't know how much I would like to let you believe that, Selina, but I can't. His body had been buried. Why would it have been buried if he had died a natural death?”

“No, I see.”

“I know you're upset. You would be a very unnatural daughter if you weren't. If you like I can say that will do for now and I can leave you alone to tell your sister, and I can come back tomorrow or the next day. But I have some questions I need to ask you now that we have identified your father's body. The sooner I ask them the sooner we shall find whoever-how your father came to die.”

“Of course you must ask me. Vivien won't be here till five. We'll have the evening together.”

“Then first, if I may,” said Wexford, “I should like to see the room that was his study.”

They went upstairs. He had been in many houses like this one in the course of his work-semidetached, the two ground-floor rooms usually made into one, two sizable bedrooms and a “box room.” They had sprung up all over England before and just after World War II, comfortable, once affordable, modest houses designed for a couple and two children. The box room here was tinier than usual. It was still as it must have been when Diana Hexham occupied it. Her single bed was there, a long mirror on the wall, a narrow wardrobe barely a foot deep. That was all there was room for apart from a row of books on the windowsill, held in place by wooden bookends, a complete set of Jane Austen in paperback, To Kill a Mockingbird, Madame Bovary in translation, the poems of Wilfred Owen.

“Your father had a desk in here and an electric typewriter?” he asked.

“And the chair he sat in and a lot of books.”

“Yes. What happened to them?”

“His books? We kept them all together when Mum moved in here. They're downstairs.”

He had another look around the tiny room but nothing was to be learned there. Back in the living room where they had sat, she led him to the bookshelves that had been built into the corner on the left of the French windows and that extended along most of the adjacent wall.

“The ones that are in that section are the ones that were in his study,” Selina said. “Oh, except for the Oxford Dictionary and Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. They're with the other dictionaries over there.”

He read the titles. Darwin's Origin of Species, Roget's Thesaurus, Ovid's Metamorphoses, The Greek Myths by Robert Graves, a collection of Icelandic sagas, half a dozen books by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins. It seemed a wild idea now that he might find some link between them to help him find what work Alan Hexham had been doing in that minuscule room.

“Do they help?” Selina asked.

“I don't think so.”

He looked along the other shelves, saw novels by various authors who had been well known a dozen years before and were still well known. Among them were Owen Tredown's The Son of Nun and The Queen of Babylon.

“The half-sheet of A4 paper you mention in your book,” he said, “with a list on it in your father's handwriting, may I see it?”

“Of course,” she said, but as she opened a drawer under the bookshelves and handed him an envelope, he saw there were tears in her eyes.

Hexham had been one of those rare people, growing rarer, whose handwriting was beautiful, a fine calligraphy but plain and without flourishes. He had listed seven authors of science fiction and two of historical novels, several of them, Wexford believed, no longer well known. Alongside the names he had written, in two cases, what were probably phone numbers, and underneath these: “Fact-finding? Proofreading? Editing?”

“Mr. Wexford,” Selina said as they returned to the seats they had had earlier, “I don't really care if you find the-the person who did whatever he did to my father. It doesn't matter now, does it?”

He shook his head. “You're wrong there. It matters. We haven't put it into words yet, but I will now. Someone killed your father and it would be wrong for that person to get away with it, to have profited from his crime. I have to believe that if I am to be in this business I'm in. For one thing, he might do it again, and for another, killing is the worst thing anyone can do and society needs to punish the perpetrator of such a crime for its own-its own well-being.”

“I suppose you're right. What did you want to ask me?”

“First of all, can you think why your father would have gone to Flagford? Did he know anyone there?”

“The only place he ever went to in Sussex-apart from when we all went to Worthing once on holiday-was Lewes. That was because of Maurice Davidson. They'd been friends at university, though Mr. Davidson was a mature student, he was much older than Dad. They didn't see a great deal of each other. I think they met mainly when Mr. Davidson came up to London. We all went there once for lunch. It was summer and I think it was for a picnic. I don't remember much about it. I was only about four.”

“Lewes is quite a long way from Flagford,” Wexford said. “I'm going to say some names to you and ask you to tell me if your father ever mentioned them. If you think you can remember.”

“I'd remember.”

“All right.” He enunciated the names slowly, pausing between each one and watching her face. “McNeil. Hunter. Pickford. Grimble. Tredown.”

“Tredown,” she said. “That's the name of the writer who wrote The First Heaven. ”

“One and the same,” Wexford said. “His name's not on this list. Your father never spoke of him?”

“I don't think The First Heaven had been published by then.”

“I noticed two of his earlier books on your shelves. Were they your father's?”

“I suppose so. Or my mother's.”

“And no bells are rung by McNeil, Grimble, Pickford, or Hunter? Louise Axall? Theodore Borodin?”

“I don't think so. I just can't imagine why my dad would have gone to a village in the middle of Sussex. Is there a train station?”

“Not at Flagford. There's one a few miles away at Kingsmarkham. Anyone heading for Flagford would have to take a taxi unless he was very keen on walking. Was he?”

“It was pouring with rain, Mr. Wexford. I don't think he'd have tried walking.”