Not In The Flesh by Ruth Rendell Page B

him for years, she told Coleman. She answered his letter, putting him off, and she never heard from him again until some relative or other told her he'd gone missing.”“So did Darracott ever go to Wales? Or did he go, find his sister was in the hospital, and stay with someone else, stay in a bed-and-breakfast or something?”
       “He may have been dead.”
       “It's beginning to look like it,” Wexford said cautiously. “We must hope this DNA test won't take too long. But what motive did Grimble have, Mike? Darracott was a postman. He hadn't any money or if he had it wasn't going to come Grimble's way. Don't tell me Grimble had his eye on Nancy Jackson because I won't believe it. One of the extraordinary things about Grimble is that he appears to be happily married to his Kathleen. Oh, he's a bad-tempered bugger. I suppose he could have struck Darracott in a rage over there in that field, bashed him over the head with a spade because he wouldn't help him and Runge fill the trench in.”
       “We don't believe that, do we?” said Burden.
       “I don't think we do. I'll tell you what, it might be wise to have a look inside that bungalow of Grimble's.”
       “He'll never let us. We'd have to get a warrant.”
       “Then so be it,” said Wexford. “We'll get one. I've just got a feeling not taking a look inside might be something we'd regret.”

7
    Wexford had picked up The Son of Nun and was leafing through it, reading bits of it and rereading them in consternation, when Sheila phoned.
       “So you've got the lead in this Tredown epic?”
       “Isn't it great? I'm to be Jossabi, the goddess of love and beauty. She was like a sort of Helen of Troy, you know. The wars in heaven all started because of her being stolen away. Of course you've read The First Heaven ?”
       “No, I haven't,” said Wexford. “I've dipped into it but I don't like fantasy. If I read fiction I want to recognize the characters as real people, the kind of people I might know, not immortal gods and dinosaurs.”
       “But, Pop, the point with The First Heaven is that the people all seem real. It's a marvelous book, the kind you can't put it down.”
       “I could. If it's anything like The Son of Nun I don't know why anyone wants to make a film of it. So what's all this about female genital mutilation?”
       “You've such a big group of Somalis in Kingsmarkham I just thought I should target it in my campaign. Sylvia agrees. I've just been talking to her. The view our campaign takes is all the girls in this country between the ages of three months and twenty with origins in the Horn of Africa should be medically examined every year to check that they've not been mutilated. You could start that, get the GPs to agree to it, and when they find a recent case you could get a prosecution going.”
       “Get an accusation of institutional racism in the police going more like,” said Wexford. “You can only do that sort of thing if you examine every girl, not just the African ones, and the NHS hasn't the resources. Oh, I hear what you say. I hate the practice as much as you do, but I've got a more realistic attitude to what can and can't be done.”
       “I'll tell you something,” said Sheila, huffy now. “I bet you if these were little white girls there'd be a national outcry.”
       He called Dora and left Sheila to her mother. By association, the role of a goddess of love and beauty reminded him of the girl in the restaurant called A Passage to India—Matea. Could she be Somali? And if she was . . . ? The idea of some old woman using a sharpened stone and no anaesthetic to shear away her delicate flesh was so abhorrent that he made the effort to banish it from his mind and once more picked up The Son of Nun.
       It was, he saw, a reissue. The novel had first been published in the mid-eighties and was one of a number Tredown had written on Old Testament themes. There were others based on the story of