have a bit of a wash. It was an empty house in a field where he'd camped three years earlier. When he got back, he said, we'd go down the pub and then he said, here you are, this is for you, and he give me this ring.”
“The ring you're wearing?”
Bridget nodded. “I'd given him a present too. I'd bought him a T-shirt with his name on.”
At last. Hannah felt the tension in her shoulders relax. She produced the photograph from her bag. “Was it this one?”
The ravaged face went white. Bridget Cook's reaction was more intense than it had been even to news of Miller's death. “Oh, my God.” She touched the glossy surface of the photograph with a callused forefinger.
“I'm sorry if it's been a shock, Miss Cook.”
“No, no. I'm okay. I saw it-the T-shirt with his name on it-in the Oxfam shop in Myringham. Me and Michelle was having a day out. I said to her, ‘Look at that, I've got to have that for Sam,’ and she said, ‘He won't want that thing on it, will he?’ She meant the scorpion, but I said, ‘He's got a scorpion tattoo on his shoulder. He'll like it.’ I was right, he did. He put it on when he went off to have his wash. I never saw him again.” Keeping herself from crying had made her voice hoarse. She looked down at her left hand. “Funny he give me this when he was leaving me.” Revelation came to her. “But he didn't, did he? He got himself killed.” She shook her head. “Williams thinks it's my wedding ring or he'd have had it off me.”
Hannah went home to Bal, wondering how long this woman would stay with a man who beat her up and destroyed the poem another man had written for her. Then, holding Bal in her arms, she caught sight of the two of them, young and good-looking, in the mirror and thought that circumstances alter cases.
21
The hospice that would be Owen Tredown's home until he came to his final resting place was in Pomfret, a purpose-built unit set among trees. In the area between it and Pomfret High Streetwas a fairly large man-made pond on which were mallards and a couple of moorhens. Bulrushes and hostas with succulent bluish leaves fringed its banks. Donaldson drove past it, turned, and parked outside the hospice gates for Wexford to spend five minutes admiring its generous windows, its carefully laid-out garden, and all the various kinds of access provided for disabled visitors.
He liked the theory or idea of a hospice. He had looked the word up in the dictionary before coming out and found the first definition given for it was “a house of rest and entertainment for pilgrims.” Rest was right, but entertainment? Hardly, unless you counted the television sets that he'd heard were provided in every room. He approved, but still he asked himself what it must feel like to go into a place you knew you'd never come out of alive. You knew this was it, the last place in the world to lie down in, this was the antechamber to the crematorium. He told Donaldson to drive on.
The newspapers must already have Tredown's obituaries prepared. One or two of them would discard those prewritten epitaphs in favor of a tribute composed by a personal friend. There would be a photograph of Tredown, probably taken some twenty-five years before, when the author was young and handsome. The last line would be “he is survived by his wife Maeve.”
The rain had gone and it was another fine day, cold as November must be, but bright and sunny as summer without summer's haze. Greg was in the front garden of Mrs. McNeil's house, sweeping leaves from the path. When he saw Wexford arrive he pulled off the jade-green latex gloves he was wearing and ran to open the car door. Like a doorman at a luxury hotel, Wexford thought. Greg's T-shirt was white enough for a washing-powder advertisement, dazzling as fresh fallen snow, his jeans so tight as perhaps to ruin forever his chances of becoming a parent. He ushered the chief inspector into the house with some ceremony, called out, “Reeny, darling, your guest is here,” and asked Wexford what he would like to drink.
She was a different woman. If he had met her outside her expected environment he wouldn't have recognized her. Though bound to await trial on various serious charges, she looked ten years younger and happier than he had ever seen her. She still had her feet up on a footstool but she had sheer stockings on her legs and those feet encased in court shoes. Her hair had just been done-did Greg's talents extend that far?-and she wore a silk blouse and neat black skirt. She gave Wexford one of the first smiles he had ever had from her and extended a hand with freshly painted nails.
“Mrs. McNeil, I want to talk to you again about the-er, intruder in Mr. Grimble's house,” he said when Greg had brought tea for him and what might have been water with ice and lemon but was more likely gin and tonic for Irene McNeil. “We now believe his name was Samuel Miller. I want you to cast your mind back to September eight years ago and tell me something. In the days or weeks following the day you and your husband had removed his body from the bathroom to the cellar, did you talk about it? Did you discuss it? Did anyone else in the neighborhood mention him? Ask about him?”
She picked up a chocolate biscuit off the plate Greg had brought, laid it down again, and selected instead one with a crust of coconut icing. “I didn't talk about it. The less said about it the better, I thought. It was best forgotten.”
He marveled, not so much at her as at the society she had moved in that bred such dismissive indifference to a man's death. “Did your husband talk to you about it?”
“Ronald wanted to bury the body. He said it wasn't safe leaving it there. John Grimble or whatever his name is, he might find it. All I said was he shouldn't try to do that on his own, move it and bury it, I mean. He didn't ask me to help again. It was too much to expect of me.”
“Did he try to bury the body?”
“Of course he didn't,” said Mrs. McNeil. “It was in the cellar, wasn't it, when you found it? Ronald wasn't strong enough. He was nearly eighty, he wasn't well. It hurt his back when we had to move the body down those stairs. I shall always say it was that which damaged his hip. I told you it was the day after that he had a stroke and he wasn't strong enough to have a hip replacement. He wouldn't have stood the anesthetic.”
It was a grotesque and nightmarish picture she had conjured up, these two aged and no doubt misshapen people, limping and short of breath, struggling and gasping as they humped a dead man down a narrow staircase into a subterranean chamber. “Why do you think Miller was in the house?” Wexford asked.
“Looking for something to steal,” she said promptly. “And then he went to wash himself. That would be stealing too, wouldn't it, stealing Mr. Grimble's water?”
Wexford left her and returned to Flagford. The sun was low in the sky, creating a dazzling glare that the sun visor on the wind-screen did little to remedy. Grimble's Field had become a haven for rabbits, which scattered for the shelter of the trees when Wexford walked up the path. The bungalow had already been searched twice, but he still thought taking a third look might be worth a try. The first thing he did was turn on the cold taps in the bathroom, one over the bath and one on the washbasin. To his surprise-he had never fully believed in the theory that Miller had gone in there to wash himself or have a bath-water came from both. Not a gush or even a steady stream of water but a good deal more than a trickle. It would have been easy to fill the washbasin and not too unpleasant to wash in it in September. The sliver of soap was still there, cracked and blackened now. The shaving brush and the scrap of gray toweling were still there. But the knife…?
Since they must both have known there was a chance of the body being discovered in the cellar, it would have been very much in Ronald McNeil's interest to place the knife near the body. But was there ever a knife? Bridget Cook had told Hannah he carried one “for his own protection,” an excuse Wexford had heard many times before. In spite of all the searching that had been done, could the knife still be in here? Wexford surveyed the bathroom, which must have been a squalid place even while in daily use by old Grimble. Watermarks and rust stains disfigured taps and plug-holes. All the pipework was exposed or wrapped in dirty rags and several tiles had come away from the side of the bath. The floor had been deep in dust but most of that had been swept up by the searchers. He knelt down on the cleanest spot and peered at the floorboards.
Moving his hands through the drifts of powdery yet gritty gray stuff that had accumulated behind the lavatory pan, he pushed his forefinger down a space between the boards. There was nothing to be seen, but his finger encountered some kind of obstruction. What he needed was a knife (a knife!) to slide down into the crack. He went into the kitchen, opened a likely-looking drawer, and found a handful of ancient and rusty cutlery. The knives were far too blunt to stab anyone or be, as far as he could see, of any use at all except perhaps the use he had in mind
