by From Doon
The lovely bijou house was a Queen Anne affair, much done up with white paint, wrought iron and window-boxes. The front door was yellow, flanked with blue lilies in stone urns. Burden struck the ship’s bell with a copper clapper that hung on a length of cord. But, as he had expected, no one came. The garage, a converted coach-house, was empty and the doors stood open. He went down the steps again, crossed the road and walked up to the police station, wondering as he went how Bryant had got on with the Southern Water Board.
Wexford seemed pleased about the lipstick. They waited until Bryant had got back from Stowerton before going down to The Olive and Dove for dinner.
‘It looks as if this clears Parsons,’ Wexford said. ‘He left the Water Board at five-thirty or a little after. Certainly not before. He couldn’t have caught the five-thirty-two.’
‘No,’ Burden said reluctantly, ‘and there isn’t another till six-two.’
They went into the dining-room of The Olive and Dove and Wexford asked for a window table so that they could watch Mrs Missal’s house.
By the time they had finished the roast lamb and started on the gooseberry tart the garage doors were still open and no one had come into or gone out of the house. Burden remained at the table while Wexford went to pay the bill, and just as he was getting up to follow him to the door he saw a blonde girl in a cotton dress enter the High Street from the Sewingbury Road. She walked past the Methodist Church, past the row of cottages, ran up the steps of Mrs Missal’s house and let herself in at the front door.
‘Come on, Mike,’ Wexford said.
He banged at the bell with the clapper.
‘Look at that bloody thing,’ he said. ‘I hate things like that.’
They waited a few seconds. Then the door was opened by the blonde girl.
‘Mrs Missal?’
‘Mrs Missal, Mr Missal, the children, all are out,’ she said. She spoke with a strong foreign accent. ‘All are gone to the sea.’
‘We’re police officers,’ Wexford said. ‘When do you expect Mrs Missal back?’
‘Now is seven.’ She glanced behind her at a black grandfather clock. ‘Half past seven, eight. I don’t know. You come back again in a little while. Then she come.’
‘We’ll wait, if you don’t mind,’ Wexford said.
They stepped over the threshold on to the velvety blue carpet. It was a square hall, with a staircase running up from the centre at the back and branching at the tenth stair. Through an arch on the right-hand side of this staircase Burden saw a dining-room with a polished floor partly covered by Indian rugs in pale colours. At the far end of this room open french windows gave on to a wide and apparently endless garden. The hall was cool, smelling faintly of rare and subtle flowers.
‘Would you mind telling me your name, miss, and what you’re doing here?’ Wexford asked.
‘Inge Wolff. I am nanny for Dymphna and Priscilla.’
Dymphna! Burden thought, aghast. His own children were John and Pat.
‘All right, Miss Wolff. If you’ll just show us where we can sit down you can go and get on with your work.’
She opened a door on the left side of the hall and Wexford and Burden found themselves in a large drawing-room whose bow windows faced the street. The carpet was green, the chairs and a huge sofa covered in green linen patterned with pink and white rhododendrons. Real rhododendrons, saucer-sized heads of blossom on long stems, were massed in two white vases. Burden had the feeling that when rhododendrons went out of season Mrs Missal would fill the vases with delphiniums and change the covers accordingly.
‘No shortage of lolly,’ Wexford said laconically when the girl had gone. ‘This is the sort of set-up I had in mind when I said she might buy Arctic Sable for a gimmick.’
‘Cigarette, sir?’
‘Have you gone raving mad, Burden? Maybe you’d like to take your tie off. This is Sussex, not Mexico.’
Burden restored the packet and they sat in silence for ten minutes. Then he said, ‘I bet she’s got that lipstick in her handbag.’
‘Look, Mike, four were sold, all marked in violet ink. Right? Miss Clements has two, Mrs Darrell has one. I have the fourth.’
‘There could be a chemist in Stowerton or Pomfret or Sewingbury marking lipstick in violet ink.’
‘That’s right, Mike. And if Mrs Missal can show me hers you’re going straight over to Stowerton, first thing in the morning and start on the shops over there.’
But Burden wasn’t listening. His chair was facing the window and he craned his neck.
‘Car’s coming in now,’ he said. ‘Olive-green Mercedes, 1962. Registration XPQ189Q.’
‘All right, Mike, I don’t want to buy it.’
As the wheels crunched on the drive and someone opened one of the nearside doors, Burden ducked his head.
‘Blimey,’ he said. ‘She is something of a dish.’
A woman in white slacks stepped out of the car and strolled to the foot of the steps. The kingfisher-blue and darker-blue patterned silk scarf that held back her red hair matched her shirt. Burden thought she was beautiful, although her face was hard, as if the tanned skin was stretched on a steel frame. He was paid not to admire but to observe. For him the most significant thing about her was that her mouth was painted not brownish pink but a clear golden-red. He turned away from the window and heard her say loudly:
‘I am sick to my stomach of bleeding kids! I bet you anything you like, Pete, that lousy little Inge isn’t back yet.’
A key was turned in the front-door lock and Burden heard Inge Wolff running along the hall to meet her employers. One of the children was crying.
‘Policemen? How many policemen? Oh, I don’t believe it, Inge. Where’s their car?’
‘I suppose they want me, Helen. You know I’m always leaving the Merc outside without lights.’
In the drawing-room Wexford grinned.
The door opened suddenly, bouncing back from one of the flower-vases as if it had been kicked by a petulant foot. The red-haired woman came in first. She was wearing sunglasses with rhinestone frames, and although the sun had gone and the room was dim, she didn’t bother to take them off. Her husband was tall and big, his face bloated and already marked with purple veins. His long shirt-tails hung over his belly like a gross maternity smock. Burden winced at its design of bottles and glasses and plates on a scarlet and white checkerboard.
He and Wexford got up.
‘Mrs Missal?’
‘Yes, I’m Helen Missal. What the hell do you want?’
‘We’re police officers, Mrs Missal, making enquiries in connection with the disappearance of Mrs Margaret Parsons.’
Missal stared. His fat lips were already wet, but still he licked them.
‘Won’t you sit down,’ he said. ‘I can’t imagine why you want to talk to my wife.’
‘Neither can I,’ Helen Missal said. ‘What is this, a police state?’
‘I hope not, Mrs Missal. I believe you bought a new lipstick on Tuesday morning?’
‘So what? Is it a crime?’
‘If you could just show me that lipstick, madam, I shall be quite satisfied and we won’t take up any more of your time. I’m sure you must be tired after a day at the seaside.’
‘You can say that again.’ She smiled. Burden thought she suddenly seemed at the same time more wary and more friendly. ‘Have you ever sat on a spearmint ice lolly?’ She giggled and pointed to a very faint bluish-green stain on the seat of her trousers. ‘Thank God for Inge! I don’t want to see those little bastards again tonight.’
‘Helen!’ Missal said.
‘The lipstick, Mrs Missal.’
‘Oh, yes, the lipstick. Actually I did buy one, a filthy colour called Arctic something. I lost it in the cinema last night.’
‘Are you quite sure you lost it in the cinema? Did you enquire about it? Ask the manager, for instance?’
‘What, for an eight-and-sixpenny lipstick? Do I look that poor? I went to the cinema –’
> ‘By yourself, madam?’
‘Of course I went by myself.’ Burden sensed a certain defensiveness, but the glasses masked her eyes. ‘I went to the cinema and when I got back the lipstick wasn’t in my bag.’
‘Is this it?’ Wexford held the lipstick out on his palm, and Mrs Missal extended long fingers with nails lacquered silver like armour-plating. ‘I’m afraid I shall have to ask you to come down to the station with me and have your fingerprints taken.’
‘Helen, what is this?’ Missal put his hand on his wife’s arm. She shook it off as if the fingers had left a dirty mark. ‘I don’t get it, Helen. Has someone pinched your lipstick, someone connected with this woman?’
She continued to look at the lipstick in her hand. Burden wondered if she realized she had already covered it with prints.
‘I suppose it is mine,’ she said slowly. ‘All right, I admit it must be mine. Where did you find it, in the cinema?’
‘No, Mrs Missal. It was found on the edge of a wood just off the Pomfret Road.’
‘What?’ Missal jumped up. He stared at Wexford, then at his wife. ‘Take those damn’ things off!’ he shouted and twitched the sunglasses from her nose. Burden saw that her eyes were green, a very light bluish green flecked with gold. For a second he saw painc there; then she dropped her lids, the only shields that remained to her, and looked down into her lap.
‘You went to the pictures,’ Missal said. ‘You said you went to the pictures. I don’t get this about a wood and the Pomfret Road. What the hell’s going on?’
Helen Missal said very slowly, as if she was inventing: ‘Someone must have found my lipstick in the cinema. Then they must have dropped it. That’s it. It’s quite simple. I can’t understand what all the fuss is about.’
‘It so happens,’ Wexford said, ‘that Mrs Parsons was found strangled in that wood at half past one today.’
She shuddered and gripped the arms of her chair. Burden thought she was making a supreme effort not to carry out. At last she said:
‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? Your murderer, whoever he is, pinched my lipstick and then dropped it at the . . . the scene of the crime.’
‘Except,’ Wexford said, ‘that Mrs Parsons died on Tuesday. I won’t detain you any longer, madam. Not just at present. One more thing, though, have you a car of your own?’
‘Yes, yes, I have. A red Dauphine. I keep it in the other garage with the entrance in the Kingsbook Road. Why?’
‘Yes, why?’ Missal said. ‘Why all this? We didn’t even know this Mrs Parsons. You’re not suggesting my wife . . . ? My God, I wish someone would explain!’
Wexford looked from one to the other. Then he got up.
‘I’d just like to have a look at the tyres, sir,’ he said.
As he spoke light seemed suddenly to have dawned on Missal. He blushed an even darker brick red and his face crumpled like that of a baby about to cry. There was despair there, despair and the kind of pain Burden felt he should not look upon. Then Missal seemed to pull himself together. He said in a quiet reserved voice that seemed to cover a multitude of unspoken enquiries and accusations:
‘I’ve no objection to your looking at my wife’s car but I can’t imagine what connection she has with this woman.’
‘Neither can I, sir,’ Wexford said cheerfully. ‘That’s what we shall want to find out. I’m as much in the dark as you are.’
‘Oh, give him the garage key, Pete,’ she said. ‘I tell you I don’t know any more. It’s not my fault if my lipstick was stolen.’
‘I’d give a lot to be able to hide behind those rhododendrons and hear what he says to her,’ Wexford said as they walked up the Kingsbrook Road to Helen Missal’s garage.
‘And what she says to him,’ Burden said. ‘You think it’s all right leaving them for the night, sir? She’s bound to have a current passport.’
Wexford said innocently: ‘I though that might worry you, Mike, so I’m going to book a room at The Olive and Dove for the night. A little job for Martin. He’ll have to sit up all night. My heart bleeds for him.’
The Missals’ garden was large and roughly diamond-shaped. On the north side, the side where the angle of the diamond was oblique, the garden was bounded by the Kingsbrook, and on the other a hedge of tamarisk separated it from the Kingsbrook Road. Burden unlocked the cedarwood gates to the garage and made a note of the index number of Helen Missal’s car. Its rear window was almost entirely filled by a toy tiger cub.
‘I want a sample taken from those tyres, Mike,’ Wexford said. ‘We’ve got a sample from the lane by Prewett’s farm. It’s a bit of luck for us that the soil’s practically solid cow dung.’
‘Blimey,’ Burden said, wincing as he got to his feet. He relocked the doors. ‘This is millionaires’ row, all right.’ He put the dried mud into an envelope and pointed towards the houses on the other side of the road: a turreted mansion, a ranch-style bungalow with two double garages and a new house built like a chalet with balconies of dark carved wood.
‘Very nice if you can get it,’ Wexford said. ‘Come on. I’m going to get the car and have another word with Prewett, and, incidentally, the cinema manager. If you’ll just drop that key in to Inge, or whatever she calls herself, you can get off home. I shall have to have a word with young Inge tomorrow.’
‘When are you going to see Mrs Missal again, sir?’
‘Unless I’m very much mistaken,’ Wexford said, ‘she’ll come to me before I can get to her.’
5
If she answer thee with No,
Wilt thou bow and let her go?
W. J. Linton, Faint Heart
Sergeant Camb was talking to someone on the telephone when Wexford got to the station in the morning. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and said to the Chief Inspector:
‘A Mrs Missal for you, sir. This is the third time she’s been on.’
‘What does she want?’
‘She says she must see you. It’s very urgent.’ Camb looked embarrassed. ‘She wants to know if you can go to her house.’
‘She does, does she? Tell her if she wants me she’ll have to come here.’ He opened the door of his office. ‘Oh, and, Sergeant Camb, you can tell her I won’t be here after nine-thirty.’
When he had opened the windows and made his desk untidy – the way he liked it – he stuck his head out of the door again and called for tea.
‘Where’s Martin’?’
‘Still at The Olive and Dove, sir.’
‘God Almighty! Does he think he’s on his holidays? Get on to him and tell him he can get off home.’
It was a fine morning, June coming in like a lamb, and from his desk Wexford could see the gardens of Bury Street and the window-boxes of the Midland Bank full of blown Kaiserskroon tulips. The spring flowers were passing, the summer ones not yet in bud – except for rhododendrons. Just as the first peals of the High School bell began to toll faintly in the distance Sergeant Camb brought in the tea – and Mrs Missal.
‘We’ll have another cup, please.’
She had done her hair up this morning and left off her glasses. The organdie blouse and the pleated skirt made her look surprisingly demure, and Wexford wondered if she had abandoned her hostile manner with the raffish shirt and trousers.
‘I’m afraid I’ve been rather a silly girl, Chief Inspector,’ she said in a confiding voice.
Wexford took a clean piece of paper out of his drawer and began writing on it busily. He couldn’t think of anything cogent to put down and as she couldn’t see the paper from where she was sitting he just scribbled: Missal, Parsons: Parsons, Missal.
‘You see I didn’t tell you the entire truth.’
‘No?’ Wexford said.
‘I don’t mean I actually told lies. I mean I left bits out.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Well, the thing is, I didn’t actually go to the pictures by myself. I went with a friend, a man friend.’ She smiled as one sophisticate to another. ‘There wasn’t anything in i
t, but you know how stuffy husbands are.’
‘I should,’ Wexford said. ‘I am one.’
‘Yes, well, when I got home I couldn’t find my new lipstick and I think I must have dropped it in my friend’s car. Oh, tea for me. How terribly sweet!’
There was a knock at the door and Burden came in.
‘Mrs Missal was just telling me about her visit to the cinema on Wednesday night,’ Wexford said. He went on writing. By now he had filled half the sheet.
‘It was a good picture, wasn’t it, Mrs Missal? Unfortunately I had to leave half-way through.’ Burden looked for a third tea-cup. ‘What happened to that secret-agent character? Did he marry the blonde or the other one?’
‘Oh, the other one,’ Helen Missal said easily. ‘The one who played the violin. She put the message into a sort of musical code and when they got back to London she played it over to M.I.5.’
‘It’s wonderful what they think of,’ Burden said.
‘Well, I won’t keep you any longer, Mrs Missal. . . .’
‘No, I must fly. I’ve got a hair appointment.’
‘If you’ll just let me have the name of your friend, the one you went to the cinema with. . . .’
Helen Missal looked from Wexford to Burden and back from Burden to Wexford. Wexford screwed up the piece of paper and threw it into the wastepaper basket.
‘Oh, I couldn’t do that. I mean, I couldn’t get him involved.’
‘I should think it over, madam. Think it over while you’re having your hair done.’
Burden held the door open for the and she walked out quickly without looking back.
‘I’ve been talking to a neighbour of mine,’ he said to Wexford, ‘a Mrs Jones who lives at nine, Tabard Road. You know, she told us about the cars being parked in Tabard Road on Tuesday afternoons. Well, I asked her if she could remember any of the makes of the colours and she said she could remember one car, a bright red one with a tiger in the back. She didn’t see the number. She was looking at them from sideways on, you see, and they were parked nose to tail.’
‘How long was it there?’
‘Mrs Jones didn’t know. But she says she first saw it about three and it was there when the kids got home from school. Of course, she doesn’t know if it was there all that time.’