“All these people are sort of old Kingsmarkham, the Grimbles and the Darracotts and the Pages and the Pargeters-Christine Darracott was a Pargeter before she married. They've lived around here for generations, all farm laborers once. Well, the Grimbles were blacksmiths. My grandfather had a horse, and I remember him taking it to a Grimble to be shod.”
“Was that the one with the truffle-digging pig? No, save it for later when we're having a nasty lunch in the canteen. Tell me what Nancy Jackson said. Imagine I can't read.”
They were having a cup of tea in Wexford's office, Burden perched, as was his wont, on a corner of the big rosewood desk. The morning had been warm and, when the sun came out, hot, but now a wind had got up, very blustery and chilling the air. The first raindrops of a shower dashed against the window. Burden finished his tea and put the cup back in its saucer.
“She says Darracott asked her to go away with him. This was in May '95. Apparently, he had an idea of going to Cardiff, where he had family-his mother was Welsh-and getting a job on the buses there. Nancy wasn't at all keen on this idea. She's a bit of a snob, is Nancy. It was okay having a fling with Darracott, but he wasn't husband material, she said. They used to go to her home where she lived with her mother-”
“No more relatives, please, Mike.” Wexford added water to the teapot and poured more for both of them. “She sounds a tough cookie.”
“Hard as nails. Mr. Jackson, by the way, owns a highly profitable garage and what he calls an on-the-spot repair shop in Sewingbury. Their house is worth a lot more than mine.”
“Good for Nancy. So what happened?”
“Rows, I gathered. Darracott trying to persuade Nancy and Nancy telling him to give up the idea, culminating in Darracott telling her he was going as soon as Christine had departed on this holiday to Tenerife.”
“Did she know anything about Grimble asking him to help with digging this trench?”
“Oh, yes. He couldn't make up his mind whether to do it or not, and when he did it was too late. Planning permission was refused, something Nancy said cheered Darracott up no end. Everybody seems to have been happy about that except poor old Grimble. Now sometime at the end of May was the last time Nancy saw Darracott. They couldn't go to her place because her mother had an old pal staying. So where d'you think they went? Over to Flagford to the late Mr. Grimble's bungalow. Sunnybank, it's called.”
“What, that derelict dump in Grimble's field? Not exactly a love nest, was it?”
“I suppose passion will always find a way. I don't know if it was locked up in those days, she didn't say-didn't know, I suppose. Remember Grimble meant to demolish it as soon as he got his permission. Anyway, they went there, she doesn't remember the date, but it was before Grimble started digging, and Darracott told her he'd decided to go to Cardiff and stop with his other sister-sorry, Reg-until he'd got a job and somewhere to live. He'd write to her. He still hoped she'd join him. Nancy says he gave her his sister's address and phone number. She never heard a word.”
“The sister'd be another potential DNA donor, only we don't need her,” said Wexford. “And that's it?”
“Well, no, not exactly. I'm not going to say this is just like a woman because you'd be down on me like a ton of bricks for being a sexist, but the fact is she didn't want the guy, she'd broken with him, and as it happens she'd met Jackson by then. For all that, she didn't like it that Darracott hadn't written. She couldn't have meant much to him if he forgot her as soon as she was out of his sight. So she phoned the sister, or tried to, but the number was un- obtainable. She wrote to him at that address and got no reply. And that was it.”
“Do we have the sister's name?”
“Dilys Hughes. Coleman's traced her to another address in Cardiff. The difficulty is she remembers very little about the summer of 1995. She had been in the hospital having a hysterectomy around that time. She does remember getting a letter from her brother some weeks earlier asking what were his chances of getting a job in Cardiff and accommodation. It was the first time she'd heard from him for years, she told Coleman. She answered his letter, putting him off, and she never heard from him again until some relative or other told her he'd gone missing.”“So did Darracott ever go to Wales? Or did he go, find his sister was in the hospital, and stay with someone else, stay in a bed-and-breakfast or something?”
“He may have been dead.”
“It's beginning to look like it,” Wexford said cautiously. “We must hope this DNA test won't take too long. But what motive did Grimble have, Mike? Darracott was a postman. He hadn't any money or if he had it wasn't going to come Grimble's way. Don't tell me Grimble had his eye on Nancy Jackson because I won't believe it. One of the extraordinary things about Grimble is that he appears to be happily married to his Kathleen. Oh, he's a bad- tempered bugger. I suppose he could have struck Darracott in a rage over there in that field, bashed him over the head with a spade because he wouldn't help him and Runge fill the trench in.”
“We don't believe that, do we?” said Burden.
“I don't think we do. I'll tell you what, it might be wise to have a look inside that bungalow of Grimble's.”
“He'll never let us. We'd have to get a warrant.”
“Then so be it,” said Wexford. “We'll get one. I've just got a feeling not taking a look inside might be something we'd regret.”
7
Wexford had picked up The Son of Nun and was leafing through it, reading bits of it and rereading them in consternation, when Sheila phoned.
“So you've got the lead in this Tredown epic?”
“Isn't it great? I'm to be Jossabi, the goddess of love and beauty. She was like a sort of Helen of Troy, you know. The wars in heaven all started because of her being stolen away. Of course you've read The First Heaven?”
“No, I haven't,” said Wexford. “I've dipped into it but I don't like fantasy. If I read fiction I want to recognize the characters as real people, the kind of people I might know, not immortal gods and dinosaurs.”
“But, Pop, the point with The First Heaven is that the people all seem real. It's a marvelous book, the kind you can't put it down.”
“I could. If it's anything like The Son of Nun I don't know why anyone wants to make a film of it. So what's all this about female genital mutilation?”
“You've such a big group of Somalis in Kingsmarkham I just thought I should target it in my campaign. Sylvia agrees. I've just been talking to her. The view our campaign takes is all the girls in this country between the ages of three months and twenty with origins in the Horn of Africa should be medically examined every year to check that they've not been mutilated. You could start that, get the GPs to agree to it, and when they find a recent case you could get a prosecution going.”
“Get an accusation of institutional racism in the police going more like,” said Wexford. “You can only do that sort of thing if you examine every girl, not just the African ones, and the NHS hasn't the resources. Oh, I hear what you say. I hate the practice as much as you do, but I've got a more realistic attitude to what can and can't be done.”
“I'll tell you something,” said Sheila, huffy now. “I bet you if these were little white girls there'd be a national outcry.”
He called Dora and left Sheila to her mother. By association, the role of a goddess of love and beauty reminded him of the girl in the restaurant called A Passage to India-Matea. Could she be Somali? And if she was…? The idea of some old woman using a sharpened stone and no anaesthetic to shear away her delicate flesh was so abhorrent that he made the effort to banish it from his mind and once more picked up The Son of Nun.
It was, he saw, a reissue. The novel had first been published in the mid-eighties and was one of a number Tredown had written on Old Testament themes. There were others based on the story of Samuel, the triumphs of David, and the iniquities of Ahab and Jezebel. The sad story of Jephtha's daughter Tredown had retold under the title of The First Living Thing He Saw, and he remembered how Jephtha had foolishly promised God that, in gratitude for victory in war, he would sacrifice the first creature he encountered when he returned and was in sight of home. The idiot might have calculated it would be his daughter, Wexford thought with contempt. Suggesting to Dora when she came off the phone that this hardly seemed to him likely to be a recipe for literary success, on the
