Not In The Flesh Read Online Free PDF

you wouldn't notice, is it?”
       Returning to the car, Wexford said to Burden, “What did he mean by ‘one of the Mrs. Tredowns,’ do you know?”
       “Search me.”
       Wexford asked his question again when they were back at the station. The fifth person he asked knew the answer. Barry Vine laughed, then said, “He lives with his two wives. It's not like bigamy, him and the first one got divorced all right and I don't suppose there's any ‘how's your father,’ if you get my meaning. Not with the first one anyway. And Tredown's not a well man.”
       “You mean his ex-wife came back to live with him and his second wife?”
       “Something like that, guv. I don't know the ins and outs of it. They're a weird lot, but I think they all get on. Tredown's ill now. Heart, I think, or it may be cancer. We'll have to talk to them, won't we?”

    The Olive and Dove, not many years ago a quiet and conservative country inn with one bathroom to five bedrooms, a public bar as well as a saloon, prawn cocktail, roast lamb, and apple pie served for lunch, and music unheard within its precincts, had gradually become a smart and fashionable hotel, awarded four stars in the Good Hotel Guide. Once it had stood at the entrance to Kingsmarkham, overlooking the bridge that crossed the Kingsbrook (a sizable river notwithstanding its name), and it was still where it had always been, though the bridge had been widened and the shopping area extended to where once there had only been great beech trees, water meadows, and a cottage or two. The beech trees were still there, though now they grew out of the pavement, and the water meadows had retreated a quarter of a mile or so. As for the cottages, they were now weekenders' residences, newly thatched and double-glazed.
       Among its new bathrooms, its sauna, spa, Crystal Bar and Moonraker's Bar, its workout room, its room called, for some unknown reason to non-francophones, Chez l'Ordinateur, its winter garden, and its “quiet room,” the old snug remained. Rumor was that the Olive had retained it solely—or at any rate, partly—at the request of Chief Inspector Wexford, backed up by its best barman who had said if it went it would be over his dead body. “We don't want any more dead bodies round here,” was Wexford's rejoinder, but now they had one and it was eleven years dead.
       “So we can pinpoint death to eleven years ago last June,” Burden was saying as he carried to their table Wexford's requisite red wine and his own lager. “What do we think happened? Sometime at the end of May, Grimble and Bill Runge started to dig the trench but on the twelfth Grimble's application was refused. I checked with the planners. Four days later, on the sixteenth, Runge filled in half the trench. After dark, X's killer or an accomplice lifted out some of the earth, laid the body wrapped in a purple sheet inside, and replaced the earth. There'd be nothing to show the trench had been tampered with. Next day Runge finished filling it in.”
       “Something like that. Was it a sheet?”
       “That's what the lab says. It's in rags, but once it had been a purple sheet.”
       “Who has or had purple sheets? I wonder. The whole job would have been easy enough. The toughest part would have been carrying the body. He's not likely to have been killed out there.” Wexford took a small draft of his claret. “It's funny, I know it can't be like that, but I fancy I can see this stuff flowing into my arteries and magically melting all that nasty gunge that clings to their walls. Of course it's not at all like that.”
       “No, it's not,” said Burden. “My brother-in-law had a thing called a colonoscopy and he watched what they were doing on a screen. He said his intestines looked like they were lined with pink satin.”
       “Modern medicine is wonderful. I just wish we didn't have to hear about it day in and day out. In the Middle Ages they say people brought God into the