Free Not In The Flesh by Ruth Rendell

none of it here. Did Sheila think there was?”
       “She doesn't know. People are so secretive about it. There's quite a large Somali community in Kingsmarkham, as we know, and they supposedly practice it. You know how when everyone around here wants someone to blame for all the social ills, they always pick on the Somalis. I don't really know what female circumcision is. Do you?”
       “Oh, yes,” said Wexford and, thinking he might need a second glass of wine, no matter what Dr. Akande said, he told her.

    Of the names on Peach's list Charlie Cummings and Peter Darracott still remained unaccounted for, and unless more bodies were discovered it seemed likely they would simply remain as missing persons and possible candidates for what had been found in Grimble's Field.
       “We have to consider,” said Wexford, “that the victim may not have lived here at all but have been here only on a visit, staying in the neighborhood.”
       He and Burden were having lunch in the new Indian restaurant. Its name was A Passage to India and they had chosen it mainly because it was next door but one to the police station where a handicrafts shop had once been. No one any longer wanted to work tapestries or buy embroidery frames, and the shop, according to Barry Vine, had “gone bust.” Burden looked up from the menu, an elaborate affair done in scarlet and gold on mock parchment.
       “The first time the itinerant farmworkers came to Flagford was eleven years ago in June, exactly as Grimble says. That was for the soft-fruit picking, and when he'd driven them off, Morella's fruit farm gave them a bit of land to camp on. That's where they were when they came back three years later in September. Whether it was the same lot I don't know. Probably some of the same lot and some new ones. Apparently the farmer—Morella's fruit farm, that is—was providing them with a proper campsite by that time. It's hard to keep tracks on these people. All we can say is that no missing person was reported to us.”
       They gave their order to the waitress, who smiled politely. She had difficulty with English but managed a “Thank you very much.”
       “We're checking on all the hotels,” Burden went on when she had gone. “The difficulty there is that of course they don't keep records that far back. Still, why would anyone who came, say, on holiday, get himself murdered and buried in Flagford? I suppose whoever he was could have come here to blackmail someone who lived here.”
       “Sounds like the Sherlock Holmes story Conan Doyle forgot to write. Let's say he was in possession of compromising photos of old Mrs. McNeil and her lover old Mr. Pickford and wanted £10,000 to keep them dark. So they asked him around, poisoned him in the Tio Pepe, and at the same time Grimble was very conveniently digging a trench for them to bury the body in. I don't think so.”
       “It was only an example,” said Burden in a huffy tone, and then, very surprisingly, “That girl who served us, she's called Matea, is probably the most beautiful woman I've ever seen.”
       Wexford looked at him, his eyebrows raised. “I don't believe my ears. You never say things like that.”
       “I'm not being—well, salacious or whatever you call it. I don't fancy her, as you'd say in your crude way. I just think she's beautiful. I'd say it even if my own wife was having lunch here with me.”
       “Really? Women don't generally like it much if you say that sort of thing about other women, however innocent and pure, as in your case, the motivation may be.”
       Matea came out through the red and gold bead curtain at this point, bringing their lamb biryani and chicken korma. She was about eighteen, very tall, very slender, and somehow her slenderness could be seen to be natural and not associated with starving herself. Her skin was the pastel gold of a tea rose, her features softly rounded and perfectly symmetrical, her hair waist-length,