Not In The Flesh Read Online Free PDF Page A

leave it. Don't do it now. Leave it a couple of weeks. Be on the safe side. But he was so sure, poor devil. Then came the bombshell. No permission for four houses. Just the one he could build, on the site where his old dad's was. I thought he was going to have a nervous breakdown and maybe he did. Maybe that's what it was.”
       “You filled it in for him, I believe.”
       “I didn't want to. I could have done without that, I'm telling you, but he got in such a state. It'd break his heart to go near the place, he said. He said he'd pay me for doing it and—well, things weren't easy. My daughter was only twelve then. She wanted to go on a school trip to Spain and the education people don't pay for that. So I said yes to John and got started. It took me a couple of days. I could only do it in the evenings.”
       “Let me get this clear, you hadn't put the pipes in the trench?”
       “Oh, no, nothing like that. He'd got them on order but they hadn't come, thank God. Well, I filled in the trench, end of story.”
       “Not exactly, Mr. Runge. Tell me something. Think carefully. Did you shovel the earth back by putting in a layer the length of the trench and then going back to the beginning and putting in another layer and so on until it was filled up? Or did you fill the trench completely as you went along?”
       “Come again?”
       Wexford did his best to put his questions more clearly but, by the look on Runge's face, failed again. Burden came to his rescue by producing from his pocket a ballpoint and his notebook. “Let me draw it,” he said.
       A neat sketch was quickly achieved, three separate cross sections of the trench depicting how it would have appeared a quarter filled, half-filled, and completely full. Nodding, comprehending at last, Runge settled for the middle version. He had half-filled the trench, gone home when it got dark, returned to finish the job the next day.
       “You say you worked in the evenings,” said Wexford. “It was June and the evenings would have been light till late.”
       “June, it was. Didn't get dark till half-nine.”
       “Can you pinpoint the date, Mr. Runge?”
       “It was the sixteenth of June. I know that for sure. It was my boy's birthday, he was seven, and he was mad at me for staying out working late. I made it up to him, though.”
       It always brought Wexford pleasure to come upon a good parent, something that happened all too seldom. He smiled. “Did you see anyone while you were working? I mean, did anyone come into the field? Did anyone talk to you?”
       “Not that I recall.”
       “People do cross that field, walking their dogs.”
       “Maybe, but don't let poor old John know it.” Runge put up one finger, as if admonishing himself. “I tell a lie,” he said. “There was one person who came to talk to me. Mrs. Tredown. Like one of the Mrs. Tredowns, the young one, not that she's very young. Came across the field from her place. I said good evening to her. Very polite I was which is more than she was to me. I don't remember her exact words, I mean it was eleven years ago. ‘So he can't build his houses,’ she said, something like that. ‘I'm glad,’ she said, ‘I'm overjoyed. I'd like to dance on his effing trench,’ she said, only she didn't say ‘effing.’ I reckon that's why I've remembered, her language and her supposed to be a lady. ‘We won,’ she said, ‘God is not mocked.’ I reckon she isn't all there—two sandwiches short of a picnic, like they say.”
       “By ‘we won’ she meant the neighbors' opposition to Mr. Grimble's plan had succeeded?”
       “That's about it.”
       Burden said, “I think you'd have told us if anything had been put into the trench overnight? Or if you'd seen anything untoward about the trench?”
       “I would have, yes. I know what you're getting at. I saw about it on telly. I mean, a skeleton wrapped in purple rags, that's not the kind of thing