must remember it may not be him. Please don't go away from here in the belief that your father has been found.”
Vivien got up. “Shall I wait here for my sister?”
“We can give you somewhere more comfortable to wait. At a later date I may need to borrow the ring. Would that be all right?”
“Of course.”
He would have many more questions if the identification was positive.
17
That night he began to read Gone Without Trace. Selina had been correct when she summarized its contents, telling him of interviews she and Vivien had conducted with fellow teachers of Alan Hexham's and with students in his A-levels group, their careful search of everything in his study, their speculations as to the post-graduate degree he might have been studying for. Also in her book were some factual details from the transcript of her recorded interview with Denise Cole, and her investigation into the suggestion that her father had been in debt. As he read on, tired now but far from dropping off to sleep, he began to see that their detective work had been exhaustive. Professionals could hardly have done better, yet what it all amounted to was that they had found nothing.
He finished the book at ten minutes to one but had been too stimulated by it to fall asleep for some time. When he did it was to dream, not that a middle-aged man but a little Somali girl had disappeared, while her family and friends denied she had ever existed. In the morning he found that Alan Hexham and his daughters had receded from the forefront of his mind and Irene McNeil stepped or tottered in to take their place. While he slept he had come to a decision. Old and incapacitated as she was, he was going to have to arrest Irene McNeil, question her at the police station, and charge her with what? Concealing a death, certainly. He reflected that Ronald McNeil, trigger- happy Lord of the Manor, had neatly slipped out of any responsibility by dying.
Kingsmarkham police station had once had a single prison cell in its basement. Now there were two. But serious as the offenses were, expecting Mrs. McNeil to occupy it, for even one night, was unthinkable. She must be arrested and charged and allowed to return home. She came meekly enough to the police station with Wexford in his car, driven by Donaldson. When he interviewed her, her solicitor and Burden also being present, she gave much the same answers as she had in her own home. Apparently, she had expected to see the senior partner in the old- established Kingsmarkham law firm who had represented her and her husband for forty years, but he had retired some time before and the solicitor who arrived was a young woman. Mrs. McNeil refused to take any advice Helen Parker gave her and chose to ignore her when she said her client wasn't obliged to answer this or that.
Wexford asked her insistently about the knife she said the intruder had produced to threaten her husband. “But you weren't there, Mrs. McNeil, were you?” he said, only to be told that Ronald never lied. He asked again and again, which caused Helen Parker to say that her client had already told him she was not. This inflamed Mrs. McNeil, not with anger against Wexford, but against “this presumptuous girl” who had no business, she said, to be there at all. When Wexford questioned her as to how she could account for a man carrying a knife while in his underwear, and Helen Parker told her client not to answer, Mrs. McNeil shouted at her to keep out of it. Helen Parker gathered up her jacket and briefcase and walked out.
In the end Mrs. McNeil collapsed in tears. It was impossible to continue that day, and while Adam Thayer drove her home, Wexford came to a decision. He wouldn't charge her yet. Once he had done so he wouldn't be allowed to go on questioning her. There was talk of the law being changed, but it hadn't been changed yet.
His mind made up, he contemplated the list of missing persons that went back just eight years and Peach's list of the missing that extended much further than that. Ronald McNeil had shot the man in Grimble's house in September 1998, but, according to both lists, although an eighteen-year-old girl had disappeared in that month (and been found two weeks later), no man had gone missing between June 1998 and the following January. There was one group they hadn't yet checked on-the itinerant farmworkers.
They had camped on Grimble's Field in June 1995 but, three years later in September, were on a field set aside for them by the farmer on the other side of Flagford. Such people had once been called “Gypsies” whether they were Romany or not. They possibly had settled homes in the winter months, but in the warmer weather they moved from county to county, camping where they could, offering themselves as unskilled farmworkers where fruit or vegetables were to be harvested. These days things had changed and they had been replaced by asylum seekers or simply by visitors from Eastern Europe who came to work and raise money to take home after the season ended.
When Burden came in he asked him what he made of his theory that the man Ronald McNeil had shot was one of them.
“A thousand pounds is a big sum of money for someone like that to be carrying about with him,” Burden said.
“Yes, he wouldn't accumulate that picking apples at the rates these fruit farmers pay. But when we talked of this before, you said one of the itinerants might have come back for the purposes of blackmail. How about that?”
“You mean he'd been here three years earlier, found out something a Flagford citizen wouldn't want made public, and, when he came back, extracted money from them for his silence? Okay, I can see that. Why take the money into Grimble's house? Why go there at all? Presumably he came in a caravan or mobile home. Why not go back to it?”
“Suppose he no longer intended to pick fruit, now he'd got the money? He went into Grimble's house, where very likely he had been before-it was easy enough to get in. The entire population of Flagford seems to have been in and out. I don't know why he couldn't have washed himself in his mobile home or, come to that, in a shower provided on the site. But the only evidence we have that he was ever in that bathroom comes from Mrs. McNeil. He may have been, he may have thought there would have been plenty of water on tap and he wanted to wash himself properly. The clothes he took off had almost reached the rags stage. I think he planned on taking clothes out of old Grimble's wardrobe.”
Burden seemed taken with this theory. “What, a suit maybe, or more likely trousers and that sports jacket we saw in there?”
“Probably. But before he could do that, before he's even had his wash, in comes Colonel Blimp, aka Ronald McNeil, with a gun.”
“And no one on that campsite missed him?”
“It all depends on what he intended to do. He may have told his fellow workers that he didn't mean to stay there any longer. He'd got some money-he needn't have said how or where from-he'd found a way of acquiring some decent clothes and once he'd got them he'd be off.”
“Wouldn't they notice he'd left his mobile home or maybe his car behind?”
Wexford shook his head. “Not necessarily. These people don't each have a car and some sort of trailer. Sometimes there'll be three or four in each car. They might have noticed he'd left, say, a backpack behind with some probably valueless stuff inside. They wouldn't report someone as missing because most of them don't have any fixed abode. I think it was one of those fruit-pickers, Mike, and we can proceed on that assumption.”
On his way home he called in on Iman Dirir. He knew she was at home because he saw her dimly through the front window. For a moment he had thought she was her own daughter, for the woman he had glimpsed had long black hair hanging over her shoulders to the middle of her back. She took so long answering the door that he was on the point of ringing the bell again when it opened. She was in the uniform that could be Western or Eastern dress, black trousers and a long shirt. They went into her living room, which was exactly as it might have been if she and her husband had been middle-aged professionals born in Tunbridge Wells, even to the white walls, chintz furniture, and well-stocked bookcase. The plasma television would have been the envy of John Grimble.
“Can I offer you anything? A glass of wine? We don't drink, but we have wine for friends.”
He smiled. “Thank you, but I can't stay. I came to tell you that my Child Protection Officer, a woman who's very good at her job, has been to see Matea's parents and cautioned them about taking their five-year-old girl home. She was tactful. She simply told them that to take a child abroad and have her circumcised was an offense punishable
