Ruth Rendell - Not in the Flesh

“Certainly not. You must do that. Don't you want the credit?”

Eighty names were on Peach's list, fifty-seven of them women and girls. To Wexford's pleasure-he had warmly congratulated Peach on his achievement-he had not only included dates, ages, and addresses but descriptions and, to a certain extent, idiosyncrasies.

“It reminds me of the days when you used to have to put ‘distinguishing marks’ in your passport,” Wexford said, a printout in his hand. “There's a chap disappeared he says has a wart on the lobe of his left ear and another one got six toes on one foot.”

“Sounds nauseating.” Burden was in a gloomy mood this morning. “I suppose Peach did all this in what one might call the firm's time.”

“Oh, come on, Mike. It was the firm's business.”

“Maybe, but no one instructed him to do it. For all we know it may not be accurate. And we haven't finished local enquiries yet. Peach's stuff may not be needed.”

Wexford made no reply. They were on their way to Flagford, their destination Athelstan House, home of the Tredowns.

On the previous evening Wexford had reached home to find his wife reading a novel called The Son of Nun.

“Is that one of Tredown's?”

Dora looked up. “It's an early one, published twenty years ago. You said you were going to see him tomorrow, so I got it out when I was in the library.”

“Sounds like unseemly goings-on in a convent. Who was the son of Nun, anyway?”

“Joshua, apparently, though I haven't got to him yet.”

“It's characters like that Joshua who turned me against religion when I was young,” said Wexford. “All he did was fight battles in the name of the Lord and when the Lord told him to slaughter all the inhabitants of a city, he did slaughter them along with their children and babies and their oxen and their asses. If he was around today we'd call him a war criminal.”

“Things were different then,” said Dora vaguely. “Does Tredown always write about biblical subjects?”

“Don't ask me. I only read one. That was about Esther and that despot she married. The only character I liked was his first wife, who he divorced because she defied him. Talking of wives and defiance, is there anything to eat?”

“When have you ever come home, Reg, and found nothing to eat?”

“I only asked,” said Wexford. “D'you want a drink first? I must have my requisite red wine.”

Later on, after she had gone to bed, taking The Son of Nun with her, he looked through his bookcases and found the only book of Tredown's they possessed, The Queen of Babylon. He hoped this case wasn't going to take a turn that would necessitate his reading any more of them. Opposite the title page were listed Tredown's works. The Son of Nun, The People of the Book, The Widow and Her Daughter, The First Heaven. This last, he remembered reading somewhere, was hailed as Tredown's masterpiece for which he had won something called the Fredrik Gartensen Fantasy Prize. Which biblical genocide or monstrous injustice did that chronicle, he wondered, as he shut up the book and went to bed.

Now he was on his way to see its author. There was very little traffic about. Donaldson had chosen to take the back lanes instead of the Kingsmarkham Road. They drove through lush green byways where the leaves were beginning to turn to pale gold and the fuzzy tangle of old man's beard covered the hedgerows. The cattle in the meadows browsed calmly in the mild sunshine, but in a broad paddock a glossy bay horse and a gray raced each other around its perimeter, manes flying.

“It would be nice to walk across there with a dog,” said Wexford, “down into the valley and up the other side on to the Downs.”

Burden looked at him. “You don't like dogs.”

“Not much, but you have to have an excuse for that kind of thing.”

“He's seriously ill, you know.”

“Who is?”

“Tredown. Jenny told me. Liver cancer. I think it is.”

Wexford said nothing. He thought about cancer, the way so many people he and Dora knew had it or had had it but got better. Yet all the other people who hadn't got it still went about talking of cancer as if it was a death sentence, the end of the world, a fate worse than death itself. One day they wouldn't anymore, he supposed. He was aware that Donaldson was getting out of the car to open a pair of gates. They had arrived.

A driveway went up between trees with overhanging branches. Between their trunks, on the left-hand side, Grimble's Field could be seen, very green this morning and, as always, providing exercise for a man and a dog. The decaying bungalow lay among the encroaching trees as if it were dead itself, waiting only to be picked up and removed to a grave of its own.

The Athelstan House drive widened into a broad graveled space. Seen up close, the home was unprepossessing, large, ill-proportioned, mainly of purplish-red brick, roofed in bright blue-gray slates and with Gothic ogee-topped windows of buff-colored stone. The front door might have been a church doorway, dark brown, black-iron-studded, and with a purely ornamental curved handle. Wexford had the curious impression that it was a house of too many colors. And they were colors that clashed, all the ill-suited brown and purple and blue and cream jumbled and jangling together. Its being set against a rich backcloth of dark greens and autumn golds didn't help matters. He thought how much he would have disliked living in it, and then he rang the bell.

A phone call had warned Maeve Tredown of their coming. She still looked surprised as if she had expected very different-looking men, Sherlock Holmes and Watson perhaps, or two uniformed comedy cops.

“You'd better come in,” she said. “Please wipe your feet.” She seemed to realize that outside it was a fine, warm, and above all dry autumn day, and added, “No, I see. It isn't raining, is it?”

The inside confirmed Wexford's opinion that Victorian builders (architects?) had gone out of their way to make their interiors hideous. This must have been what Lewis Carroll had in mind when he used the word “uglification.” The hallway was a passage, not particularly narrow but made to look narrower by the height of its ceiling and the vertical-striped green and yellow wallpaper. A kind of mosaic of black and ocher tiles covered the floor. As if an attempt was being made to conceal as much of the decor as possible, enough coats and capes and raincoats and mackintoshes and cagoules and anoraks and duffels and cardigans hung on ranges of hooks to protect twenty people from the weather, while appropriate footwear-boots and shoes and sneakers and even something Wexford hadn't seen for years, galoshes-stood in pairs on the yellow and black tiles. What room remained against the walls was occupied by suitcases and shopping bags.

“In here,” said Maeve Tredown, opening a door.

It was a large room and, in spite of the warmth outside, very cold. Its window faced north and overlooked a lawn surrounded by trees, predominantly evergreens. The furniture was unnoticeable, nondescript chairs and sofas and tables. The carpet, patterned in reds and browns, reminded him of nothing so much as a dinner plate off which someone had just eaten a meal of fish and chips with tomato ketchup and a good sprinkling of vinegar. What dominated the place were books, hundreds of them, possibly thousands, in unglazed bookshelves that covered three walls from floor to ceiling. The fourth side of the room was mostly a window and one in dire need of cleaning. Looking out, her back to the room, stood a tall thin woman with long black hair.

“You'd better sit down.”

Maeve Tredown spoke as if she begrudged every word she uttered. She was small and round with a face like a pretty piglet's and dyed blond hair, a surely harmless and inoffensive woman. Just the same, Wexford felt that if he had been shown a photograph of her and told she was the matron of a notoriously cruel old people's home or the director of a brutal boot camp, he wouldn't have been surprised. It was all to do with her economical and clipped speech, the iciness in her light blue eyes, and the severe gray flannel suit she wore.