assumed without thinking much about it that everyone on the list was white.
Miss Maniora called her “darling” in every sentence she spoke. She talked at great length about her brother, which was something Lyn could have done without. If the man in the cellar had been black, everyone in Flagford would have noticed and remembered him. She asked, really for something to say, if Fernanda Maniora had seen her brother lately, to be told that he had dropped in only last week, darling, and what a joy it was to see him.
Might he know something about the other men he had worked with at Morella's? She knew for a fact he had been there eight years before. “Where is he now, Miss Maniora?”
“He said he'd made a lot of money, darling. God bless him. He was going to Spain for a holiday. He'll be there now, you know.”
“Have you an address?”
But Frank Maniora's sister hadn't.
Still, talking to these women had given Lyn an idea. It was the women workers at Morella's she should be getting in touch with. For one thing, women noticed men and for another, women were simply more observant. Phone numbers for them were much easier to find. As she had thought, some had given mobile numbers. Eight years ago-would they still be the same? She could only try.
Exactly what he had expected had happened. Reading that book he had anticipated a chore, a bit of a bore, a slog, it was so long, more than five hundred pages. A slog it was and he put it down, never to take it up again, long before page 516 was reached.
The story he could have summarized if he had to. There was no need to read those last five chapters. The First Heaven was about the world before there were people in it. No people, no animals, and no birds, only sea creatures and insects, the whole ruled over by gods and goddesses, some with well-known names, some invented, but all with an Old Testament flavor. These deities behaved like human beings in that they loved and hated, committed crimes and performed heroic deeds, but were apparently immortal and therefore could watch the process of evolution, the gradual change of the tiny swimming things into land creatures and flying creatures. As the millennia passed, the gods foresaw the appearance on earth of man by a process of evolution but were powerless to stop it, though they knew it would mean an end to their immortality. It would mean a Gotterdammerung.
By this time he had forgotten that he had begun to read Owen Tredown's book to please Sheila. She didn't let him forget and was on the phone early the next morning.
“Great, isn't it, Pop?”
“Not in my opinion. I said I wouldn't like it and I didn't. I don't know how many times I've told you I don't care for fantasy.”
“I would never have said you were bigoted. You made up your mind you weren't going to like it, so you didn't. That's my last word on the subject.”
“That's a blessing anyway,” said Wexford, “though I doubt it's true. You know what they say. Good books make bad films and bad books make good films. I expect it will pull millions into the world's cinemas.”
Sheila began listing all the people she knew who had “adored” The First Heaven: Paul, of course, her sister Sylvia, the producer of the forthcoming film, its director. He covered his mouth to silence the sound of his yawn.
When she paused for breath, he said, “This producer, does he use advisers and researchers?”
“Well, of course, Pop.”
So Tredown surely must have. He didn't say this aloud. After she had rung off he fetched The Son of Nun - noting that it was overdue to the public library-and The Queen of Babylon and leafed through them, looking for points of resemblance, while believing he wouldn't find any. There he was wrong. The subject matter was quite different or so it seemed at first. But it was as he had thought. Tredown appeared very interested in strange gods and their worship, in rituals, in sacrifice, in Baal and Dagon and Ashtaroth, the deities he mentioned in The First Heaven. He recognized that, for those who liked this sort of thing, this book was more exciting and suspenseful than either of the biblical epics Wexford had read, but there was a kind of flavor or atmosphere about it that made it recognizable as Tredown's work. Perhaps it was in the sort of phrasing he used, the recurrence of certain favorite words, even the way he chose to describe his leading characters.
“The First Heavenwas published in the mid-nineties,” he said to Dora. “Have you read any of his later ones?”
She hadn't. “I can get one out of the library tomorrow, if you like.”
“I'd just like to know if he reverted to his old favorites or if The First Heaven marked a sort of turning point in his career. Are there any sequels, for instance?”
“I'll get you the lot,” Dora said, eyebrows raised.
Privately, Barry Vine believed putting a name to the body in Grimble's cellar was unimportant. He had been a traveler or gypsy or itinerant, whatever you liked to call him, had trespassed on someone else's property and been shot by some old lunatic. But it was crucial to police work, and Wexford thought it of the first importance, which was why Barry and Lyn were off to see a woman in Maidstone who might know a woman whose boyfriend had left her in September 1998 and just might…
“It's worth giving it a go, isn't it, Sarge?” said Lyn whose researches had found Lily Riley.
“It's my daughter who knew her,” Lily Riley said in the living room of her little house, bringing them cups of tea the color of mulligatawny soup. “Her and this Bridget used to go fruit picking together. Mostly it was up near Colchester, but one year they come down here so Michelle could stop with me. Not Bridget, though. She had her own van.”
Looking at her list, Lyn said, “That would be Bridget Cook and Michelle Riley?”
“That's right, love. Bridget brought her down in her van along with her boyfriend-I mean, Bridget's boyfriend. I only saw him the once. He'd been to Flagford before, Michelle said, three or four years before for the strawberries. This time it was plums they was picking, Victorias.”
“Do you remember his name, Mrs. Riley?”
“Dusty, they called him. Well, not Bridget. She had another name for him, but I disremember what it was. Them two, Dusty and Bridget, they stopped in the van. Michelle was in here with me.”
“You said you saw him, Mrs. Riley. What was he like?”
“Good-looking,” she said. “Well, I reckon you could call him good-looking. Mind you, he always looked dirty to me, but I dare-say I'm fussy. Bridget kept on telling him to wash himself. I'll tell you one thing, he was always knocking his head on the ceiling in that van, he was so tall, you see.”
Mrs. Riley insisted on a second round of tea and went to refill their cups.
“It's him, Sarge,” Lyn said excitedly. “Six feet four, the chap in the cellar was.”
“It looks like it,” said the more cautious Barry, “but let's not jump to conclusions yet.”
The tray once more set down on the table, Lily Riley began getting into her stride. “Him and Bridget was talking of getting married. What I do remember was Bridget saying to Michelle as he was too young for her, really, being only forty and her getting on for fifty. A funny thing was she said he wrote poems to her. It was romantic, she said. Anyway, they stopped a couple of days, and then they went off to this Flagford, all three of them.”
Lyn was suspicious. “How come you remember all this, Mrs. Riley?”
Lily Riley spoke huffily. There had been an imputation in Lyn's tone she hadn't liked. “I'll tell you how come. He left Bridget, this Dusty did. They was going to get married, the date was fixed and all. They said to me, you've got to come to our wedding, Lily, and I said okay, I would.
“Well, they'd been picking plums all day at Morella's, Michelle said, and they come home to the van and Dusty said he had to go out, he'd be gone an hour at the most, and off he went but never come back. That's how I remember it. Michelle was so upset. She's got a soft heart, my girl, and she was in tears. He broke poor Bridget's heart, that man.”
Barry came to the crucial question. “Do you know his other name, Mrs. Riley? Could it have been Sam?”
“Dusty, they called him. I don't know what else. I never heard it. I know he come from somewhere in London. Same with Bridget, somewhere in London.”
“That wasn't much help, Sarge,” Lyn said when they were outside.
“You've done a good job finding that Mrs. Riley, Lyn,” said Barry, “but that's where you're wrong. When they call a man Dusty it's usually because his surname's Miller. Like a man called Grey is Smoky and a man called White
