Not In The Flesh Read Online Free Page B

police. Alarm bells rang when the missing person was a child or a young girl. Every available officer was needed to hunt for lost children. Women in general, when they vanished, aroused concern and attention. Young men, indeed able-bodied men of any age but for the very old, were a different matter. This man, Carina Laxton had told him earlier, had probably been in his forties. When he disappeared his nearest and dearest must have missed him, if he had nearest and dearest, and perhaps searched for him, but even if his disappearance had been reported, the police would not have done so. It was generally assumed that when a man left home, even left home without saying good-bye or leaving a note, he had gone off to make himself a new life or join another woman.
       The postmortem had uncovered no clue as to how the man, now inevitably labeled X, had met his death. One of his ribs was cracked but apart from that, no marks had showed on his bones. He had been five feet eight inches tall. This measurement, Carina told him scathingly, was for Wexford's ears only. In her report she would give his height in centimeters. The skull was intact. Fortunately, enough “matter” remained, including marrow in the long bones, to extract DNA for help in identification. The wisdom teeth were missing but apart from that he had a full set, though with many fillings.
       Why did he assume identifying X would be such a difficult task? Some kind of intuition, perhaps, which people said he had but which he couldn't accept himself. Surely, one should always rely on the facts and the facts alone. It was far too early to have any idea of who those bones might once have been, still less who dug the grave and put them there. Some of this he said to Hannah Goldsmith before she left to question the occupants of the cottages.
       He liked Hannah, who was a good officer and, being interested in her welfare, he took her left hand in his and asked her if congratulations were in order.
       She didn't blush. Hannah had too much poise and what she would have called “cool” for that. But she nodded and smiled a rare and radiant smile. “Bal and I got engaged last night,” she said.
       After he had said, in accordance with a long-forgotten traditional etiquette, that he hoped she would be very happy, he thought how absurd it was (by those ancient standards) that two people who had been living together for the past year should betroth themselves to each other. But engagement, as someone had said, was the new marriage and for all he knew, she and Bal Bhattacharya might never marry but remain engaged as some people did through years together and the births of children till death or the intervention of someone else parted them.
       “How's Bal?”
       “He's fine. Said to say hallo.”
       Wexford was sorry to have lost this fiancé of hers, who had left to join the Met, the two of them occupying a flat near the Southern line, halfway between here and Croydon. Bal had been valuable, in spite of lapses into puritanical behavior and wild heroism.
       Bill Runge was as jovial and extroverted a man as Grimble had been recalcitrant. Sturdily plump and looking younger by a dozen years than his friend, he worked at Forby Garden Centre, where Wexford and Burden found him inside the main gate, arranging bags of daffodil and narcissus bulbs.
       “Poor devil,” he said. “I don't mind telling you, there's times when I feel like telling him to give it a rest. I did try, I did tell him once. Give over, John, I said, it's not worth it. Life's too short. Sell the place like it is. Take the money and run, I said, but he was so upset. In the end I had to apologize.”
       “Tell us about the trench you dug, Mr. Runge.”
       Bill Runge attached a price ticket to a packet of anemone corms, wiped his hands on the plastic apron he wore, and turned to them. “Yes, well, we'd dug this trench for the main drainage. Mind you, I said to him, John, I said,