Not In The Flesh by Ruth Rendell

“You'd know all about that. You've plenty of practice wasting ours. Tell us what happened. You went to Mr. Darracott's house in May 1995 and then what?”
       “Go on, John,” said Kathleen, “do what the officer says. You've got nothing to hide, you know that.”
       “That's why I don't want to do what he says,” said Grimble sullenly.
       “If you won't, I will.”
       Grimble seemed to be pondering his wife's words, perhaps thinking that if he left things to her, she might say more than was expedient.
       “Come along, Mr. Grimble,” said Wexford. “If you don't want to go into it here we can always talk at the police station.”
       This promise or threat had its usual effect. After staring in a kind of despair at the space that his television set had occupied, Grimble turned abruptly away and said in a rush, “I went around to his place, and his wife was there, Christine, she's called, and I said to Pete, ‘D'you want to come over and give me a hand digging a trench on my property at Flagford what my dad left me?’ And Pete said, ‘Digging it what for?’ And I said, ‘For putting in the main drainage for the new properties I'm building.’ I never said I hadn't got no planning permission. It was no business of his.”
       “Just take it a bit more slowly, would you, Mr. Grimble?” said Hannah.
       At fractionally less fast a pace, Grimble went on, “She said, that Christine that is, ‘He'd want paying,’ and he told her to keep out of it and none too soon if you ask me. There wasn't no call for her to be there in the first place. Pete said, ‘I'd have to go over and see it. I'm not letting myself in for a job like that on spec,’ so I said, ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I'll run you over there tomorrow evening, right?’ ”
       As Wexford said later to Hannah, that was the only instance they had ever heard or were likely to hear of Grimble showing the faintest scrap of altruism, and even then it was more for his own benefit than Peter Darracott's. “And did you?”
       “It was a bloody waste of time. He said he would, but when the day come to start he never turned up, so I had to ask Bill Runge.”
       Hannah asked him if he had ever seen Peter Darracott again. “Not after he let me down, no, I didn't.”
       “Yes, you did, John,” said Kathleen Grimble. “You saw him when he come over to Dad's place and said he'd changed his mind, he'd help out on account of he needed the money, and you said, ‘Not on your nelly.’ It was when you'd finished the digging and the council said you couldn't build them houses. Must have been the sixteenth or seventeenth of June.”
       Wexford said later to Burden, “I got him to come down to the station and make a statement, and we went through the whole thing again. Of course I suggested he might like a solicitor, but he wouldn't. The problem is we don't even know if our corpse is Peter Darracott, and we won't till we've got the DNA comparison done.”
       “You mean Grimble actually gave a sample?”
       “I didn't ask him. I know when I'm talking to a brick wall. Darracott's got a nephew, his sister's son, and he was happy to oblige. Some people get a thrill out of that sort of thing, you know. I wish we could come up with a motive, Mike. Why would Grimble kill Peter Darracott and bury him in his dad's garden? If Darracott had been the chief planning officer I could understand it.”
       “I talked to Nancy Jackson today, she was called Nancy Saddler before she married—”
       “Not more family connections,” said Wexford. “Now those are what I call relationships.”
       “All these people are sort of old Kingsmarkham, the Grimbles and the Darracotts and the Pages and the Pargeters—Christine Darracott was a Pargeter before she married. They've lived around here for generations, all farm laborers once. Well, the Grimbles were blacksmiths. My grandfather had a horse, and I remember him taking it to a Grimble to be