Free Not In The Flesh by Ruth Rendell Page A

glossy and black, and her eyes . . .
       “I don't think I could describe them,” said Burden, contemplating a dish of yellow chutney.
       “Oh, I could. How about ebony pools of fathomless depths or sloe-black windows of the soul? Come on, Mike, eat your lunch. What is she anyway? Middle Eastern? They don't make them like that in the outskirts of Stowerton.”
       Burden didn't know or said he didn't. His wife's political correctness, though less intense than Hannah Goldsmith's, had affected him with an unease about ever categorizing anyone according to their race.
       The shop on the corner of Pestle Lane and Queen Street still had the name Robinson's Chemists engraved on its window, reminder of ancient days, Burden said gloomily, before “pharmacy” became the in word. Its proprietor was now a tall thin Asian man called Sharma and his shop a model emporium of cleanliness, order, and efficiency. Gone were the tall stoppered vessels filled with dubious cobalt blue and malachite green liquids that used to stand in the window and gone too the trusses and mysteriously labeled “rubber goods” that used to puzzle him as a child. As he remarked to DC Lyn Fancourt, he hadn't been inside the place for thirty-five years. A blond female assistant in a short pink smock over jeans was stacking shelves while another was in the dispensary at the back of the counter.
       Palab Sharma had taken over the shop eleven years before and had taken over Nancy Jackson with it. “She got married and left,” he said to Burden. “It would have been two years after I came here.”
       “Do you know who she married and where she is now?”
       “My wife will know.”
       Summoned by phone from the flat above, Parvati Sharma appeared, neither in a sari nor salwar kameez and veil but smartly dressed in a white shirt, short skirt, and high heels. Though very pretty, she failed to match up to Burden's new standard of female beauty.
       “I went to the wedding,” she said. “I hadn't long been married myself. It was the first English wedding I ever went to and it was very nice.”
       Burden asked her if the couple lived in Kingsmarkham.
       “Sewingbury,” she said. “I'm so sorry, I don't know where. She's Mrs. Jackson now. I saw her in Marks & Spencer. She had her two little boys with her and I had mine. It was very nice. We said we'd have to meet and have a coffee or something, but we never have—well, not yet.”
       Burden thanked her and hustled Lyn away from where she was studying a display of slimming aids. “Do you think those tablets really do suppress appetite, sir?”
       “I doubt it,” said Burden and added, he who had seldom missed a meal in his entire life, “You just have to eat less. Easy-peasy.”

    Nancy Jackson, as Burden put it afterward to Wexford, had done well for herself. If there was no comparison in his eyes with Matea, she was a good-looking young woman, blond, sharp-featured, dressed in the young woman's uniform of skin-tight jeans and short tank top which left a three-inch gap of bare tanned flesh. If not quite the best part of Sewingbury, the home she shared with her husband and two small sons was in a quiet tree-lined road where every house had a double garage attached to it. She was welcoming, frank, and cheerful. For a change, she was a woman who appeared to have nothing to hide and no chips on her shoulder.
       She made Burden and Lyn a pot of tea and sat down with them at the teak table in her handsome kitchen, passing a plate of carrot cake slices and chocolate-chip cookies. Burden took a piece of cake; Lyn miserably succumbed to a cookie but refused milk in her tea.
       “My twins are at school now,” she said. “They're just five and I've got to go and fetch them at half-three, but I can give you half an hour.”
       “I believe you had a relationship with Peter Darracott, Mrs. Jackson,” Burden said.
       He must have spoken in a deliberately discreet way