Not In The Flesh Read Free Page B

said, and left it open for a day or two and then those bastards at the planning turned me down so we filled the bugger in.”
       “I'd like you to think carefully, Mr. Grimble.” Wexford doubted if this was possible, but he tried. “Between the time you dug the trench and the time you filled it in, was it”—he paused—“in any way interfered with?”
       “What d'you mean, interfered with?” Grimble asked.
       “Had it been touched? Had anything been put in it? Had it been disturbed?”
       “How should I know? Bill Runge filled it in. I paid him to do it and he done it. To be honest with you, I was too upset to go near the place. I mean I'd banked on getting that permission, I'd as near as dammit been promised I'd get it. Can you wonder I was fed up to my back teeth? I was ill as a matter of fact. You ask the wife. I was laid up in bed, had to have the doctor, and he said no wonder you're in a bad way, Mr. Grimble, he said, your nerves are shot to pieces and all because of those planning people and I said—”
       Wexford almost had to shout to get a word in. “When was permission refused?”
       Again it was Kathleen who answered him. “I'll never forget the date, he was in such a state. He started the digging end of May and the second week of June they wrote to him and said he could build one house but not more.”
       Out in the little hallway, shaking her head, casting up her eyes, and with a glance at the open door behind them, she whispered, “He's still on the phone to his pal most days. After eleven years! That's all they talk about, those two, that blessed planning permission. It gets you down.”
       Wexford smiled noncommittally.
       Rather shyly, she peered up into his face. She was a little woman with thinning reddish hair, round wire-rimmed glasses sliding down her nose. “I don't know if I ought to ask, but how did you know there was a dead body in there? It wasn't that truffle man, was it? I thought he'd died.”
       Wexford only smiled.
       “If John thought that, he'd go mad. He hates that truffle man. He hates trespassers. But if he's dead, that's all right.”
       “I've a feeling,” Wexford said when they were back at the police station, “that we've got a mystery person—man or woman, we don't know yet—on our hands. Identification is going to be a problem. I shan't be surprised if we're still asking who this character is in three months' time. It's just a hunch but I do have these hunches and often they're right.”
       Burden shrugged. “And just as often they're wrong. His teeth, her teeth, will identify him or her. His or her dentition, I should say. It never, or rather, seldom, fails.”
       “I'm not telling the media anything till Carina gets back to me. It's not a good idea, confronting them with a cadaver we can't even say was a man or a woman. We can't say how he or she died or whether foul play, as they always put it, is suspected or not.”
       “What is it you always say?” said Burden. “A body illicitly interred is a body unlawfully killed.”
       “Pretty well true,” said Wexford, “but not invariably.”
       “By the way, the kid with the knife said his mother gave it to him. She's called Leeanne Fincher. She said it made her feel better when he was out of the house knowing he'd got a weapon. I think I'll go see her on my way home.”
       Wexford too went home. He walked. Dr. Akande had told him it was time he paid attention to that long-neglected piece of machinery, that once-efficient pump, his heart. Not in the half-hearted (halfhearted!) way he had in the past, dieting in a feeble fashion, forgetting the diet in favor of indulgence in meat and cheese and whiskey, exercising in ever-decreasing spurts, letting Donaldson drive him whenever it rained or the temperature fell below fifteen degrees, running out of statins and not renewing his prescription. Now it was a walk to work and a walk home every day, a double dose