Read Not In The Flesh for Free Online

in the past few days. Literally the past few days because she had weighed herself on Sunday and only by a tremendous effort of will restrained herself from stepping onto the scales on Monday and Tuesday as well. Karen Malahyde would tell her she was getting obsessed, but it was all right for Karen and for Hannah too. They were naturally thin. Such strength of character was needed to stop counting calories, keep off the scales, and, more than that, stop thinking about it all the time! Stop thinking about it, she said to herself, and she went up to the green door that opened directly onto the pavement and rang the bell.
       Nothing could have been easier, except that the result got them no further. The woman who answered the door answered her question without inviting her in. “He's not missing. He's upstairs. You want to see for yourself?”
       “Well, yes.”
       A shriek from the woman, shrill enough to shatter glass, summoned him. “Bertie! Come down here, Bertie.”
       “What happened?” Lyn asked. “Did he just come back?”
       “After about a year he did. Said he'd lost his memory. I don't let him out alone now. He wants to go out, I say, okay Bertie, but I'm coming with you. And that's what I do. He's not been out alone once since he came back.”
       The man who came downstairs looked as if he was of African or Afro-Caribbean origin. He was short and rather fat, wearing camouflage pants and a loose black T-shirt. He didn't speak but confirmed his identity when she asked him. She asked for photographic ID and, rather to Lyn's surprise, Mrs. Farrance, if that was who she was, produced a passport. The man was unmistakably Bertram Farrance. Lyn handed the passport back.
       “Okay, is it?” said Mrs. Farrance, amiably enough. Her voice rising several decibels, she shouted at her husband, “Okay, back upstairs, Bertie. Off you go.”
       Telling the story to Hannah, Lyn hoped to make her laugh, but the sergeant seemed admiring of Mrs. Farrance rather than amused. “Of course I'd prefer to see a couple be equal partners,” she said, “but if there had to be inequality—in the case of a very feckless or weak man, for instance—I'd rather see the setup these Farrance's have. That way things get done. I expect this woman is very efficient and managing.”

    It was DS Barry Vine who had talked to Jonathan Pickford's mother and was told her son and his girlfriend both worked in banking and commuted by train to London each day. He was twenty-nine and she was thirty. Both of them had been at university eleven years before and had only lived in this house since Brenda and her husband had converted it into two flats four years ago.
       “But you and your husband were here eleven years ago?”
       “We've been here since we were married.” She took him into the living room of their ground-floor flat and showed him from a window Grimble's Field next door and the boarded-up derelict bungalow. This morning, because it had rained most of the night, the land looked particularly green and lush, the bungalow half-hidden among the trees, the only incongruous note the crime tape, enclosing the area where the body had been found. “When old Mr. Grimble was alive,” she said, “he had such a lovely garden. And he went on working in it, keeping it immaculate until a week before he died. His lawn hadn't got a weed in it. Over by our fence he grew his vegetables and had his kitchen garden, and on the other side, near the Tredowns, he had his fruit trees. I remember how he used to give us Cox's apples and Bramleys. For cooking, you know.” She peered into Barry's face, in case perhaps he had never heard of an apple pie. “The trees are still there, of course, but John Grimble's never pruned them, never done a thing, so of course they don't bear. Isn't it a shame?”
       “If you can cast your mind back eleven years, Mrs. Pickford, precisely eleven years to June, can you remember anything unusual