FROM THE POMFRET ROAD A NARROW LANE winds its way up into the hills and to the verge of the forest. All down the hedges here grows the wayfarer’s tree with its flat creamy bracts of blossom, and beneath, edging the meadows like a fringe of lace, the whiter, finer, more delicate cow parsley. There are houses, Edwin Fitzgerald’s among them, approached by paths, cart tracks, or even smaller narrower lanes, but the lane gives the impression of leading directly to the obelisk on the hill.
It is like downland up here, the trees ceasing until the forest of conifers begins over there to the east, chalk showing in outcroppings and heather on the chalk. And all the way the obelisk looming larger, a needle of granite with its point a tetragon. The road never reaches it. A quarter of a mile this side it swerves, turns east, and divides, one fork making for Myfleet, the other for Pomfret, and soon there are meadows again and the heath is past. It was in one of these meadows, close to the overhang of the forest, traversed by a footpath leading from the road to Myfleet, that the discovery had been made. Over to the west the obelisk stabbed the blue sky, catching a shred of cloud on its point.
The grave was in a triangle formed by the wood, the lane, and the footpath, in a slightly more than right-angled corner of the field. It was near enough to the forest for the air to smell resinous. The soil was light and sandy with an admixture of pine needles.
“Easy enough to dig,” said Wexford to Burden. “Almost anyone not decrepit could dig a grave like that in half an hour. Digging it deep enough would have taken a little longer.”
They were viewing the terrain, the distance of the grave from the road and the footpath, while Sir Hilary Tremlett, the pathologist, stood by with the scene-of-crimes officer to supervise the careful unearthing. Sir Hilary had happened to be at Stowerton when Fitzgerald’s call came in. By a piece of luck he had just arrived at the infirmary to perform a postmortem. It was not yet ten o’clock, a morning of pearly sunshine, the blue sky dotted with innumerable puffs of tiny white cloud. But every man there, the short, portly, august pathologist included, had a raincoat on. It had rained daily for so many weeks that no one was going to take the risk of going without; no one anyway could yet believe his own eyes.
“The rain made the weeds grow like that,” said Wexford. “You can see what happened. It’s rather interesting. All the ground here had grass growing on it, then a patch was dug to receive that. It was covered up again with overturned earth, the weed seeds came and rain, seemingly endless rain, and what grew up on that fertile patch and that patch only were broad-leaved plants. If it had been a dry spring there would have been more grass and it would all have been much less green.”
“And the ground harder. If the ground hadn’t been soft and moist the dog might not have persisted with its digging.”
“The mistake was in not digging the grave deep enough. It makes you wonder why he or she or they didn’t. Laziness? Lack of time? Lack of light? The six-foot rule is a good one because things of this kind do tend to work to the surface.”
“If that’s so,” said Dr. Crocker, coming up to them, “why is it they always have to dig so far down to find ancient cities and temples and so forth?”
“Don’t ask me,” said Wexford. “Ask the dog. He’s the archaeologist. Mind you, we don’t have any lava in Sussex.”
They approached a little nearer to where Detectives Archbold and Bennett were carrying out their delicate spadework. It was apparent now that the corpse of the man that lay in the earth had been neither wrapped nor covered before it was buried. The earth didn’t besmear it as a heavier, clayey soil might have done. It was emerging relatively clean, soaking wet, darkly stained, giving off the awful reek that was familiar to every man there, the sweetish, fishy, breath-catching, gaseous stench of decomposing flesh. That was what the dog had smelt and liked and wanted more of.
“I often think,” said Wexford to the doctor, “that we haven’t much in common with dogs.”
“No, it’s at times like this you know what you’ve always suspected, that they’re not almost human at all.”
The face was pale, stained, bloated, the pale parts the color of a dead fish’s belly. Wexford, not squeamish at all, hardened by the years, decided not to look at the face again until he had to. The big domed forehead, bigger and more domed because the hair had fallen from it, looked like a great mottled stone or lump of fungus. It was that forehead which made him pretty sure this must be Rodney Williams. Of course, he wasn’t going to commit himself at this stage, but he’d have been surprised if it wasn’t Williams.
Sir Hilary, squatting down now, bent closer. Murdoch, the scene-of-crimes officer, was beginning to take measurements, make calculations. He called the photographer over, but Sir Hilary held up a delaying hand.
Wexford wondered how he could stand that stink right up against his face. He seemed rather to enjoy it, the whole thing, the corpse, the atmosphere, the horror, the squalor. Pathologists did, and just as well really. It wouldn’t do if they shied away from it.
The body was subjected to a long and careful scrutiny. Sir Hilary looked at it closely from all angles. He came very close to touching but he did not quite touch. His fingers were plump, clean, the color of a slice of roast pork. He stood up, nodded to Murdoch and the photographer, smiled at Wexford.
“I could have a poke-about at that after lunch,” he said. He always spoke of his autopsies as “having a poke-about.” “Not much doing today. Any idea who it might be?”
“I think I have, Sir Hilary.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Saves a lot of hassle. We’ll smarten him up a bit before his nearest and dearest come for a private view.”
Joy Williams, Wexford thought. No, she shouldn’t be subjected to that. He felt the warmth of the mounting sun kind and soft on his face. He turned his back and looked across the sweep of meadows to the Pomfret road, green hay gold-brushed, dark green hedgerows stitched in like tapestry, sheep on a hillside. All he could see was that face and a wife looking at it. This horrid image doth unfix my hair and make my seated heart knock at my ribs …
It occurred to him that the nearest point on the main road to this place was the bus stop where Colin Budd had been attacked. Did that mean anything? The lane that passed within yards of the burial place met the road almost opposite the bus stop. But Budd had been stabbed weeks after this man’s death. The brother-in-law might do the identification instead. John Something, the chemist. John Harmer.
HE SEEMED A SENSIBLE MAN. YOUNGER THAN Williams by five or six years, he was one of those tailored people, a neat, well-made, smallish man with regular features and short, crisply wavy hair. He had closed up his dispensary and left the shop in the care of his wife.
Having taken a deep breath, he looked at the body. He looked at the face, his symmetrical features controlled in blankness. He wasn’t going to show anything, not he, no shock, disgust, pity. You could almost hear his mother’s voice saying to a small curly-headed boy: Be a man, John. Don’t cry. Be a man.
Harmer remembered and was a man. But he might have said with Macduff that he must also feel it like a man, for his face gradually paled until it became as sickly greenish white as the corpse’s. His stomach, not his will, had betrayed him. Or threatened to. He came out into the air, into the sunshine, away from charnel-house corpse rot, and smelt the summer noonday, and the bile receded. He nodded to Wexford; he nodded rather more and longer than was necessary.
“Is that your brother-in-law, Rodney Williams?”
“Yes.”
“You are quite certain of that?”
“I’m certain.”
Wexford had thought of asking him to be the bearer of the news to Joy but he had quickly seen Harmer wouldn’t be a suitable, let alone a sympathetic, messenger. He went himself, walking to Alverbury Road, thinking as he walked. There wasn’t much he personally could do until the pathologist’s report came and the lab had been over Williams’s clothes. With distaste he recalled the bloodied mass of cloth that had wrapped the wounds. He felt glad now he had had the lab go over that car so carefully, and at a time when it looked as if Williams might have been guilty of some misdemeanor and have done a moonlight flit.
Those crumbs of plaster in the boot could be vital evidence. At first he had supposed they derived from some routine of Williams’s work. But Gardner had told him there was never a question of Williams having handled the stuff he sold. More likely the truth was that those plaster crumbs had been caught up in the folds of that bloodstained cloth and the body itself had been in the boot of the car …
In the front garden of 31 Alverbury Road someone had mown the bit of lawn and cut the privet hedge. It looked as if both these tasks had been performed with the same pair of blunt shears. Rodney Williams had been in one respect domestically adequate—he had kept his garden trim.
Sara opened the front door to him. He hadn’t expected her to be there and he was a little taken aback. He would have preferred breaking the news to her mother alone. The school term wasn’t yet over but A-levels were, and with those examinations behind her there was perhaps nothing for her to go to school for.
She had on a white tee-shirt, pure unrelieved white, short-sleeved and showing felt-tipped pen drawings on her arms and hands, the snake again in green, a butterfly with a baby face, a raven woman with aggressive breasts and erect wings, somehow obscene on those smooth golden arms, childish and rounded.
“Is your mother in, Sara?”
She nodded. Had the tone of his voice told her? She looked sideways at him, fearfully, as they went down the short passage to the kitchen door.
Joy Williams anticipated nothing. On the table at which she was sitting were the remains of lunch for two. She looked up with a mildly disagreeable inquiring glance. They had been eating fish fingers with baked beans—an infelicitous mixture, Wexford thought. He could tell the constituents of their lunch by the quantity of it Sara had left on her plate. Joy had been reading a women’s magazine of the royalty-sycophantic—crocheted-tea-cozy kind which was propped against a bottle of soy sauce, pathetic import surely of Sara’s. What does a daughter do for her mother in a situation such as this? Go to her and put an arm round her shoulders? At least stand behind her chair? Sara went to the sink, stood with her back to them, looking out of the window above it at the grass and the fence and the meager little apple trees.
Wexford told Joy her husband had been found. Her husband’s body. More than that he couldn’t tell her, he knew no more. The girl’s shoulders twitched. Mrs. Williams leaned forward across the table and put her hand heavily over her mouth. She sat that way for a moment or two. The whistling kettle on the stove began to screech. Sara turned round, turned the gas off, looked at her mother with her mouth twisted up as if she had toothache.
“D’you want a coffee?” Joy said to Wexford.
He shook his head. Sara made the coffee, instant in two mugs, one with a big “S” on it and the other with the head of the Princess of Wales. Joy put sugar into hers, one spoonful, then after reflection, another.
“Shall I have to see him?”
“Your brother-in-law has already made the identification.”
“John?”
“Have you any other brothers-in-law, Mrs. Williams?”
“Rod’s got a brother in Bath. ‘Had,’ I should say. I mean he’s still alive as far as I know and Rod’s not, is he?”
“Oh, Mum,” said Sara. “For God’s sake.”
“You shut your mouth, you little cow!”
Joy Williams screamed it at her. She didn’t utter any more words but she went on screaming, drumming her fists on the table so that the mug bounced off and broke and coffee went all over the strip of coconut matting on the floor. Joy screamed until Sara slapped her face—the doctor already, the cool head in an emergency. Wexford knew better than to do it himself. Once he’d slapped a hysterical woman’s face and later been threatened with an action for assault.
“Who can we get hold of to be with her?” he asked. Mrs. Milvey? He thought of Dora and dismissed the thought.
“She hasn’t any friends. I expect my Auntie Hope will come.”
Mrs. Harmer that would be. Hope and Joy. My God, he thought. Although the girl was sitting beside her mother now, holding her hand, while Joy leaned back spent, her head hanging over the back of the kitchen chair, the tears silently rolling out of her eyes, he could see that it was all Sara could do to control her repugnance. She was almost shaking with it. The need to be parted, the one from the other, was mutual. Sara, no doubt, couldn’t wait for those exam results, the confirmation of St. Biddulph’s acceptance of her, for October and the start of term. It couldn’t come fast enough for her.
“I’ll stay with Mum,” she said, and there was stoicism in the way she said it. “I’ll give her a pill. She’s got Valium. I’ll give her a couple of Valium and find something nice for her on the TV.”
The ever-ready panacea.
It was too late for lunch now. He and Burden might have something in the office, get a sandwich sent down from the canteen. He had said he’d see the press at 2:30. Well, young Varney of the local paper, who was a stringer for the nationals …
There was a van on the police station forecourt marked “TV South” and a camera crew getting out of it.
“They’ve been up at the forest getting shots of the grave and Fitzgerald and the dog,” Burden said, “and they want you next.”
“Good. I’ll be able to put out an appeal for anyone who may have seen that car parked.” A less encouraging thought struck Wexford. “They won’t want to make me up, will they?” He had never been on television before.
Burden looked at him morosely, lifting his shoulders in a shrug of total indifference to any eventuality.
“It’s not the end of the world if they do, is it?”
There was no time like the present, even a present that would end in ten minutes with his first ever TV appearance.
“What’s happened to end your world, Mike?”
Burden immediately looked away. He mumbled something which Wexford couldn’t hear and had to ask him to repeat.
“I said that I supposed I should tell you what the trouble is.”
“Yes. I want to know.” Looking at Burden, Wexford noticed for the first time gray hairs among the fair ones. “There’s something wrong with the baby, isn’t there?”
“That’s right.” Burden’s voice sounded very dry. “In Jenny’s opinion, mind you. Not in mine.” He gave a bark of laughter. “It’s a girl.”
“What?”
Wexford’s phone went. He picked up the receiver. TV South, the Kingsmarkham Courier, and two other reporters were downstairs waiting for him. Burden had already gone, closing the door quietly behind him.