wearing, didn't it?”
“I do have a carer comes in a lot, dear, and she's ever so kind. She reads bits of the local paper to me, but she never read that bit. What did you say he was wearing?”
“A T-shirt, Mrs. Lomax.” Hannah could tell she didn't know what this was. “A thing-a garment-something like a sweater, only cotton. It's white and it's got a scorpion printed on it.”
“A what, dear?”
Describing a scorpion is surprisingly difficult. “A black thing,” Hannah began. Was it a reptile? An insect? An arachnid? “A bit like a sort of spider with a long tail-”
Doris Lomax cut her short. “Oh, no dear. I knitted a sweater for him but it was plain blue. Maybe he had a thing like that, but I don't know.” An unwelcome possibility occurred to her. “You don't mean, oh, you can't mean you've found-”
“We're not sure yet, Mrs. Lomax. We really can't tell but it's possible.” She had to say that.
“Oh, poor Charlie, poor Charlie. He wasn't quite right in his head, you know, but such a nice boy. A good boy.” Another unhappy idea occurred to her. “You don't want me to come and look at him, do you? I can see a bit-well, sort of shapes, but I wouldn't-I couldn't…”
“No, of course not,” Hannah said. “Of course not.” She didn't add that there was nothing to see but the basic structure of a man, common to all men. “One more thing-can you tell me what color Charlie's hair was?”
“His mother had fair hair, dear, but all the Cummingses was dark. Charlie was quite dark.” She looked gravely at Hannah. “Not quite as dark as you, dear, but getting on that way.”
Hannah was finding she desperately didn't want the body in Grimble's cellar to be Charlie Cummings. It was very unlike her, she thought, but she didn't want this old woman to suffer further hurt. Inspiration came to her. “How tall was Charlie, Mrs. Lomax?”
“Not very tall for a man, dear. Maybe five feet five or six.”
Hannah's relieved expression wouldn't have been visible, but the little sigh she gave reached Mrs. Lomax. “Thank you, Mrs. Lomax. You've been very helpful. I think you can be sure this isn't Charlie Cummings.”
“Can I, dear? But he's still dead somewhere, isn't he?”
A Passage to India was darkish and cool. A ceiling fan, not too aggressive, blew the air about and faintly agitated the colored streamers, figured in red and blue and gold, which hung against the walls. It was hard to tell if these were Indian decor or early Christmas decorations. Wexford and Burden were shown to what Rao the proprietor was starting to call “their” table.
Burden wore his silk suit. It was very discreet, charcoal gray with knife-edge creases to the trousers and long lapels to the jacket. But still it was silk and Wexford thought it a bit much, though he kept this to himself. Burden's shirt was plain white and his tie light gray with a single slightly off-center vertical stripe in black, as if he was trying to play down the effect of the suit, which he too perhaps knew was over the top. Matea, the beautiful Somali girl, brought menus and asked them in her heavily accented soft voice what they would like to drink. Water, of course, it would have to be water. She seemed to sense their reluctance and she smiled. Wexford asked her if they could have the fan off and she said she'd tell Rao.
When she had disappeared behind the bead curtain, he said to Burden, “If I didn't know you for an uxorious man, I'd suspect all this sartorial elegance being designed to impress or better still attract Matea.”
“Utter nonsense.” Burden never blushed. His face retained its even biscuit color through all embarrassments. “When I got dressed this morning I didn't even know we'd come here. It was your idea, if you remember. Since we're in the long-words department, my attitude to Matea is paternal or maybe avuncular.”
“Really? I hope you don't go telling people that old one about her being your niece. With your coloring no one would ever believe you.”
Burden laughed. “You were wrong about the body in the cellar being Charlie Cummings. He was far too tall.”
“Yes.” Wexford hesitated. “God knows who it is. We know the remains are those of a man and he was between forty and fifty when he died. Carina's now saying he's been dead eight years. We've run out of possible people he might be.”
“Could we try the National DNA Database?”
“Try it with what, Mike? The man in the cellar's DNA won't be on it. He died too long ago.”
Matea came back with a large jug of iced water and took their order. The long black hair that had hung loose when Wexford saw her at the inaugural meeting of KAAM had been wound up onto the top of her head and secured there with long jewel-headed pins. It struck him that she didn't wear the hijab. It would have been a shame if she had, he thought, the scarf covering her crowning glory. Perhaps she was one of those modern progressive Moslems who had broken with the old traditions, or maybe she wasn't a Moslem at all. Some Somalis were Christians, he had heard, some animists. Her hairstyle gave Matea a regal look. With her head held high and her back plumb-line straight, she walked, as Burden remarked, like some African queen.
“Seen many, have you?” Wexford made a face. “All we really know is that the clothes in the kitchen belonged to the man in the cellar. We don't know why he took them off or why, wearing only a vest and pants, he went down into that filthy cellar. Or was he killed elsewhere? There were no keys, no identification. Did his killer take those things?”
Wexford broke off as sweet-scented spicy dishes were brought, a large bowl of fragrant rice, little stone pots of green and scarlet pickles, a basket of naan. Matea asked if everything was all right.
“Excellent, thank you,” said Burden. “Delicious.”
But it was Wexford who she glanced at, did more than glance, let her eyes rest on him for a few seconds, hesitating as if there was something she wanted to say. But she said nothing, half smiled a little shyly, the first sign of awkwardness they had seen her give, and walked quickly away.
“Those Tredown women,” Burden said, “that was all a bit odd. I said it was done to distract us. I think they made two attempts, the first one being when they thought we were still interested in Douglas Chadwick and they tried to make us believe he'd been having an affair with Louise Axall. Very clumsy, that. The woman wasn't even living there then.”
“And then they moved on to Irene McNeil. Again a vague insinuation. Mrs. McNeil went in and out of Grimble's house. When that didn't seem to impress us they said she stole things, removed things from the house. You could tell it was an afterthought. But why, Mike? Why all this?”
“As I said, to distract us from something they don't want looked into.”
“Yes, but what? There is one thing or rather one person they might want to deflect us from, the one person among all the people in that corner of Flagford we haven't questioned, we haven't even seen.”
“Tredown,” said Burden.
“Exactly. The great author. There he is, shut up in his ivory tower, writing for all he's worth to keep those two in comfort, his nose apparently kept to the grindstone by them but protected by them as well. Interesting, don't you think?”
Matea brought the bill, and Wexford gave her his credit card. Burden went off to the men's room and was still there when she came back. She said in her low sweet voice, “Mr. Wexford?”
How did she know his name? From the card, of course, or because she remembered it from the meeting. He smiled at her.
“I want to ask-”
The sentence was cut off by Rao the proprietor coming up to her and asking her to show two more customers to a table. Burden came back and asked what she had said to him. “She wanted to ask me something but didn't say what.”
“Perhaps some question of asylum or immigration or whatever.”
“Perhaps,” said Wexford.
It was Halloween, a celebration he disliked. Every window he passed on his way home, or every window behind which children lived, had a skeleton mobile dancing on strings or a pumpkin with a grinning mouth cut out. Guy Fawkes Night wasn't among his favorite festivals, but it was an improvement on this. Was it on its way out, soon to be superseded by this dumbed-down black magic? At the corner of his own road he passed a group of preteens dressed in black and gathered under a streetlamp, the chemical light showing up their painted cheeks and
