Ruth Rendell - Not in the Flesh

“Would he have believed that?”

“We tend to believe what we want to believe, Barry, and Tredown passionately wanted to believe it.”

“So who did drive Hexham, guv?”

“No one,” Wexford said. “He was taken to their car all right. Or taken in the direction of the car, which was in the garage. Claudia is maintaining a useless silence down there. She might as well not bother. Maeve admitted everything to Inspector Burden, isn't that so, Mike?”

“Not everything,” said Burden, “but a lot.”

“Hexham was taken to the garage and his briefcase containing the second manuscript was taken from him and put into the boot of the car. There, as he bent down to get into the passenger seat, he was stabbed in the back with a knife, probably repeatedly stabbed.”

“You mean by Maeve or Claudia?” Barry asked.

“I mean by Samuel Miller. I mean by the lover of Claudia Ricardo and later on of Bridget Cook. Sam Miller, the so-called poet.”

“Miller may have stabbed him in a frenzy-God knows why-because one blow of the knife seemed to have cracked a rib. That broken rib is the only sign Carina could find that Hexham met his death by violence.”

“But we knew he must have,” Karen said, “because someone buried him.” Picking up Hannah's usage, she added, “Who was that, guv?”

Wexford sighed a little. “That was Miller. Grimble's trench had been dug and partially filled in by Bill Runge. Miller didn't really have to bury him. The grave had already been prepared. All he had to do was wrap the body in a sheet-Claudia's purple sheet, there was of course no bed linen burglary-carry the body to the trench after dark, take out a few spadefuls of earth, lay poor Hexham in there and cover him up again with, say, six inches of soil. Next day, June seventeenth, Runge finished filling in the trench. Someone must have helped Miller carry the body and I daresay that was Claudia. She'd be stronger than Maeve.”

“They must have paid Miller,” said Burden.

“Indeed they must. I doubt if sex with Claudia would have been sufficient inducement. But how much? Unless they tell us we'll never know and we'll never know even then because lying seems to come naturally to them. We do know that Miller took the ring off Hexham's finger and kept it. Maybe Claudia told him to. She wouldn't have dared keep it herself.

“He took it and three years later he gave it to Bridget Cook and went back to Athelstan House to blackmail those two women. For all I know at present, he may have been back several times in those three years to blackmail them. Over the plagiarism, of course, not the murder. He was too deeply involved in that himself. I don't suppose he threatened them with the police-it's more likely that he'd tell his story to a tabloid. They paid up and this time we do know the sum Miller extracted from them-a thousand pounds.”

“What happened to Miller after he'd buried Hexham?” Hannah asked.

“We must assume he went back to his fruit-picking poetry-writing career with possibly occasional forays into Sussex to demand money with menaces from the Tredown women. By this time of course The First Heaven was starting to be the success Tredown had predicted for it and, when Miller came back three years after Hexham's murder, they could pay up without too much pain. By this time too Miller had engaged himself to Bridget Cook. He may have genuinely meant to marry her. She had a caravan and a car. She wasn't a bad option for someone like him.

“With the thousand pounds in his jeans pocket he went into Grimble's bungalow. Who knows how often he'd been in there before when he was camped in Grimble's Field? Bridget's shower was broken and he stripped off his clothes in the kitchen, left them on the counter, and went into the bathroom to wash himself in the trickle of water that came out of the tap. He had no intention of putting those clothes on again-with the exception of the T-shirt, he'd have worn that again to please Bridget-though he didn't intend to leave them behind, either. The thousand pounds was in the pocket of his jeans and that too he intended to take with him. After he had washed, he meant to help himself to whatever he fancied from Arthur Grimble's wardrobe. In fact, he had already been into the bedroom and put the contents of his anorak pockets-keys and a watch and his wallet-into the pocket of a sports jacket. It was in the bathroom that Ronald McNeil encountered him.

“Now Irene McNeil says he menaced her husband with a knife, and the knife we took off Darrel Fincher may certainly have been his. But would a man who believed himself alone in a house, a man who was in his underwear, in a bathroom, carry a knife with him? I don't think so. I think what happened was that after McNeil had shot Miller, he found a knife among the clothes in the kitchen and put it in the bathroom to give credence to his story. The thousand pounds remained where it was, in Miller's jeans pocket. Pity it never found its way to Bridget Cook.”

“She had a lucky escape,” Hannah said.

“And maybe even she will think so,” said Wexford, “when all this gets to be public knowledge.”

In A Passage to India Wexford said to Burden, “We come in here because it's more or less next door-well, you come to feast your eyes on beauty and I must come because you do. I can't think of any other reason. I'm getting sick of Indian food.”

“There's a new restaurant opened on the corner of Queen Street. It's Uzbek. We could give it a go.”

The bead curtain was pushed aside and Matea came out, followed by Rao in a tight suit and a bow tie. Matea stopped when she saw them and whispered something to her employer. He seemed to be arguing with her, but after a moment or two, he spread his hands out, shrugged, and let her go back the way she had come. Two menus in his hand, he came over to Wexford and Burden, all smiles, bowing to them.

“What was that about?” Burden said when Rao had taken their order.

“God knows. Before we say any more, I have to tell you that Tredown is dead. Barry told me as we were coming out.”

Burden was silent. “I think this is a case where you could truly talk about a merciful release.”

“Yes. Poor wretch. Stealing Hexham's work didn't bring him much pleasure, did it? It brought him money. Money for those two hellcats. But when you come to think of it, they didn't know what to do with it when they had it, did they? Flagford is a pretty village, but they lived in the ugliest house in it. As far as I could gather, they never had a holiday. They hadn't got a decent piece of furniture. Their car was fifteen years old. When Tredown wanted to change his consciousness he didn't use an expensive opiate but a herb you could grow in your garden.”

Always interested in sartorial matters, Burden said, “And one of his wives dressed like a bag lady and the other one from Asda.”

Two more couples had come into the restaurant, followed by a man on his own. Matea emerged from the kitchen area, setting the bead curtain ringing. She moved so fast, her normal grace was lost. Her face seemed deliberately turned away from their table as she went to hand menus to the newcomers.

Without commenting on her behavior, Wexford said, “It's an image I shan't soon get out of my head, that poor devil sitting up there in a room-which, by the way, we never got to see-with someone else's manuscript in front of him, retyping the whole thing, making a little change here, a different word there, altering Hexham's no doubt superior style to something more like his own writing in those Bible epics. Maybe making those changes made him feel what he was doing wasn't all that wrong. He must have told himself that the finished work-think of it, Mike, over five hundred pages when it was a hardcover book, how many manuscript sheets must it have been?-but think of it, think of him laboring away, turning someone else's work into his own, so that he could tell himself in the long watches of the night that what he was doing wasn't so bad, wasn't real plagiarism, because its author had said he could have it-hadn't he?”