Not In The Flesh by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page A

something called the Fredrik Gartensen Fantasy Prize. Which biblical genocide or monstrous injustice did that chronicle, he wondered, as he shut up the book and went to bed.
       Now he was on his way to see its author. There was very little traffic about. Donaldson had chosen to take the back lanes instead of the Kingsmarkham Road. They drove through lush green byways where the leaves were beginning to turn to pale gold and the fuzzy tangle of old man's beard covered the hedgerows. The cattle in the meadows browsed calmly in the mild sunshine, but in a broad paddock a glossy bay horse and a gray raced each other around its perimeter, manes flying.
       “It would be nice to walk across there with a dog,” said Wexford, “down into the valley and up the other side on to the Downs.”
       Burden looked at him. “You don't like dogs.”
       “Not much, but you have to have an excuse for that kind of thing.”
       “He's seriously ill, you know.”
       “Who is?”
       “Tredown. Jenny told me. Liver cancer. I think it is.”
       Wexford said nothing. He thought about cancer, the way so many people he and Dora knew had it or had had it but got better. Yet all the other people who hadn't got it still went about talking of cancer as if it was a death sentence, the end of the world, a fate worse than death itself. One day they wouldn't anymore, he supposed. He was aware that Donaldson was getting out of the car to open a pair of gates. They had arrived.
       A driveway went up between trees with overhanging branches. Between their trunks, on the left-hand side, Grimble's Field could be seen, very green this morning and, as always, providing exercise for a man and a dog. The decaying bungalow lay among the encroaching trees as if it were dead itself, waiting only to be picked up and removed to a grave of its own.
       The Athelstan House drive widened into a broad graveled space. Seen up close, the home was unprepossessing, large, ill-proportioned, mainly of purplish-red brick, roofed in bright blue-gray slates and with Gothic ogee-topped windows of buff-colored stone. The front door might have been a church doorway, dark brown, black-iron-studded, and with a purely ornamental curved handle. Wexford had the curious impression that it was a house of too many colors. And they were colors that clashed, all the ill-suited brown and purple and blue and cream jumbled and jangling together. Its being set against a rich backcloth of dark greens and autumn golds didn't help matters. He thought how much he would have disliked living in it, and then he rang the bell.
       A phone call had warned Maeve Tredown of their coming. She still looked surprised as if she had expected very different-looking men, Sherlock Holmes and Watson perhaps, or two uniformed comedy cops.
       “You'd better come in,” she said. “Please wipe your feet.” She seemed to realize that outside it was a fine, warm, and above all dry autumn day, and added, “No, I see. It isn't raining, is it?”
       The inside confirmed Wexford's opinion that Victorian builders (architects?) had gone out of their way to make their interiors hideous. This must have been what Lewis Carroll had in mind when he used the word “uglification.” The hallway was a passage, not particularly narrow but made to look narrower by the height of its ceiling and the vertical-striped green and yellow wallpaper. A kind of mosaic of black and ocher tiles covered the floor. As if an attempt was being made to conceal as much of the decor as possible, enough coats and capes and raincoats and mackintoshes and cagoules and anoraks and duffels and cardigans hung on ranges of hooks to protect twenty people from the weather, while appropriate footwear—boots and shoes and sneakers and even something Wexford hadn't seen for years, galoshes—stood in pairs on the yellow and black tiles. What room remained against the walls was occupied by suitcases and shopping bags.
       “In