The Olive and Dove, not many years ago a quiet and conservative country inn with one bathroom to five bedrooms, a public bar as well as a saloon, prawn cocktail, roast lamb, and apple pie served for lunch, and music unheard within its precincts, had gradually become a smart and fashionable hotel, awarded four stars in the Good Hotel Guide. Once it had stood at the entrance to Kingsmarkham, overlooking the bridge that crossed the Kingsbrook (a sizable river notwithstanding its name), and it was still where it had always been, though the bridge had been widened and the shopping area extended to where once there had only been great beech trees, water meadows, and a cottage or two. The beech trees were still there, though now they grew out of the pavement, and the water meadows had retreated a quarter of a mile or so. As for the cottages, they were now weekenders' residences, newly thatched and double-glazed.
Among its new bathrooms, its sauna, spa, Crystal Bar and Moonraker's Bar, its workout room, its room called, for some unknown reason to non-francophones, Chez l'Ordinateur, its winter garden, and its “quiet room,” the old snug remained. Rumor was that the Olive had retained it solely-or at any rate, partly-at the request of Chief Inspector Wexford, backed up by its best barman who had said if it went it would be over his dead body. “We don't want any more dead bodies round here,” was Wexford's rejoinder, but now they had one and it was eleven years dead.
“So we can pinpoint death to eleven years ago last June,” Burden was saying as he carried to their table Wexford's requisite red wine and his own lager. “What do we think happened? Sometime at the end of May, Grimble and Bill Runge started to dig the trench but on the twelfth Grimble's application was refused. I checked with the planners. Four days later, on the sixteenth, Runge filled in half the trench. After dark, X's killer or an accomplice lifted out some of the earth, laid the body wrapped in a purple sheet inside, and replaced the earth. There'd be nothing to show the trench had been tampered with. Next day Runge finished filling it in.”
“Something like that. Was it a sheet?”
“That's what the lab says. It's in rags, but once it had been a purple sheet.”
“Who has or had purple sheets? I wonder. The whole job would have been easy enough. The toughest part would have been carrying the body. He's not likely to have been killed out there.” Wexford took a small draft of his claret. “It's funny, I know it can't be like that, but I fancy I can see this stuff flowing into my arteries and magically melting all that nasty gunge that clings to their walls. Of course it's not at all like that.”
“No, it's not,” said Burden. “My brother-in-law had a thing called a colonoscopy and he watched what they were doing on a screen. He said his intestines looked like they were lined with pink satin.”
“Modern medicine is wonderful. I just wish we didn't have to hear about it day in and day out. In the Middle Ages they say people brought God into the conversation all the time, and with the Victorians it was death. We talk about our insides. Ah, well. Now, we have a precise date for the burial, if not the death. Probably death occurred hours or, at most, days before. Whoever killed X must have known about the trench. It's not visible from Pump Lane or the Kingsmarkham Road.”
“It would be visible from windows.”
“Yes, we shall have to check that. I'd guess Athelstan House, Oak Lodge, and Marshmead, wouldn't you? Possibly Flagford Hall too. Was he a local man, Mike? Or was he here on a visit? Eleven years is a long time. We're going to get pretty tired of that phrase before we're done. Most of them, young or old, walked across that land regularly. However much Grimble dislikes it, all the houses that abut the field have got gaps in their fences or even gateways that give them access.”
“Have we taken into account the predecessors of those residents who weren't there eleven years ago?”
“Barry's working on it,” said Wexford, “with help from the Hunters. I'm hoping they're the sort of old people who know everything about who lived where since time immemorial. They haven't a clue about what happened yesterday or their own phone numbers, but when it comes to years back, they're recording angels.”
“Who's seen the Tredowns?”
“I'm reserving them for myself. They're my tomorrow morning treat. Want to come? I want Hannah to have a look at our sparse missing-persons list along with Lyn.”
Eight years before, although quite a large number of men remained missing in the greater mid-Sussex area, there were only two in Kingsmarkham and its environs, which included Flagford. Trevor Gaunt was listed as being sixty-five at the time, which made him an unlikely candidate.
“Unless Carina Laxton is way out with her calculations,” said DC Lyn Fancourt. “I never will understand how they can say someone's been eight or ten or, come to that, twenty years dead just by poking about with bones. Or how old they were.”
Hannah laughed. “They can, though. You just have to accept it. She could be a year or two out on the age but not twenty years. This old boy isn't our man. He probably dropped dead somewhere,” she said with the callousness of youth, “and they never found the body. Who's the other one?”
“A guy called Bertram Farrance. This list doesn't give much in the way of detail, does it? I mean, all it gives is his age, which was thirty-eight, his address, and that he was reported missing by his wife.”
“What do you expect? You see the telly. You know what they all say. ‘He went out to buy the evening paper at five and when he hadn't come back by six I was devastated, I didn't know what to do. He'd never done that before,’ et cetera, et cetera.”
“It can't always be like that,” said Lyn, laughing.
“You could get over there-where is it? Station Road?-see if the woman's still there.”
It went against the grain with Hannah to refer to any woman, even though she might have been married for forty years, was called Mrs., and had taken her husband's name, as a wife. She had an even stronger objection to “lady,” a word she had found out came from the Anglo-Saxon “lafdig,” meaning “she who makes the bread.” Lyn Fancourt thought she was quite right and admired her for the stand she made, but, just the same, wasn't it a bit silly?
“I love your ring,” she said.
“Between ourselves, I could have done without. I feel quite committed enough to Bal without wearing a shackle on my finger. But he wanted it, so what can you do? There's no need to get married, just because you wear a ring.”
Lyn walked down to Station Road. It wasn't far and walking was good for her. When she had weighed herself that morning she found she had gained sixty-two grams. It wasn't that much, but it troubled her and she tried to think what extra calories she had consumed in the past few days. Literally the past few days because she had weighed herself on Sunday and only by a tremendous effort of will restrained herself from stepping onto the scales on Monday and Tuesday as well. Karen Malahyde would tell her she was getting obsessed, but it was all right for Karen and for Hannah too. They were naturally thin. Such strength of character was needed to stop counting calories, keep off the scales, and, more than that, stop thinking about it all the time! Stop thinking about it, she said to herself, and she went up to the green door that opened directly onto the pavement and rang the bell.
Nothing could have been easier, except that the result got them no further. The woman who answered the door answered her question without inviting her in. “He's not missing. He's upstairs. You want to see for yourself?”
“Well, yes.”
A shriek from the woman, shrill enough to shatter glass, summoned him. “Bertie! Come down here, Bertie.”
“What happened?” Lyn asked. “Did he just come back?”
“After about a year he did. Said he'd lost his memory. I don't let him out alone now. He wants to go out, I say, okay Bertie, but I'm coming with you. And that's what I do. He's not been out alone once since he came back.”
The man who came downstairs looked as if he was of African or Afro-Caribbean origin. He was short and rather fat, wearing camouflage pants and a loose black T-shirt. He didn't speak but confirmed his identity when she asked him. She asked for photographic ID and, rather to Lyn's surprise, Mrs. Farrance, if that was who she was, produced a passport. The man was unmistakably Bertram Farrance. Lyn handed the passport back.
“Okay, is it?” said Mrs. Farrance, amiably enough. Her voice rising several decibels, she shouted at her husband, “Okay, back upstairs, Bertie. Off you go.”
Telling the story to Hannah, Lyn hoped to make her laugh, but the sergeant seemed admiring of Mrs. Farrance rather than amused. “Of course I'd prefer to see a couple be equal partners,” she said, “but if there had to be inequality-in the case of a very feckless or weak man, for instance-I'd rather see the setup these Farrance's have.
