by From Doon
Well, I must close now. This is quite a big house really and not exactly filled with mod. cons.! Remember me to Wil and your offspring. Regards from Ron.
Love from Meg
A happy marriage? Could a marriage be happy, rocking uneasily on a sea of deceit and subterfuge? Burden put the letter down, then picked it up and read it again. Wexford told him of his conversation with the police chief and his face cleared a little.
‘We’ll never prove it,’ Burden said.
‘One thing, you can go and tell Drury Gates’ll take him home now. If he wants to sue us I daresay Dougie Q. will be nothing loth to lend a hand. Only don’t tell him that and don’t let me see him. He’s upsetting my liver.’
It was beginning to grow light. The sky was grey and misty and the streets were drying. Wexford, stiff and cramped with sitting, decided to leave his car and walk home.
He liked the dawn without usually being sufficiently strong-minded to seek it unless he must. It helped him to think. No one was about. The market place seemed much larger than it did by day and a shallow puddle lay in the gutter where the buses pulled in. On the bridge he met a dog, going purposefully abut its mysterious business, trotting quickly, head high, as if making for some definite goal. Wexford stopped for a second and looked down into the water. The big grey figure stared back at him until the wind disturbed the surface and broke up the reflection.
Past Mrs Missal’s house, past the cottages . . . he was nearly home. On the Methodist church notice-board he could just make out the red-painted letters in the increasing light: ‘God needs you for his friend.’ Wexford came closer and read the words on another notice pinned beneath it. ‘Mr R. Parsons invites all church members and friends to a service in memory of his wife, Margaret, who died so tragically this week, to be held here on Sunday at ten a.m.’
So today, for the first time since she had died, the house in Tabard Road would be empty . . . No, Wexford thought, Parsons was at the inquest. But, then . . . His thoughts returned to certain events of the afternoon, to laughter shut off in full spate, to a book, a fierce transposition of emotion, to a woman dressed for an assignation.
‘We’ll never prove it,’ Burden had said.
But they could go to Tabard Road in the morning, and they could try.
My demands were modest, Minna. I wanted so little, but a few hours out of the scores of hours that make a week, infinitesimal eddies in the great ocean of eternity.
I wanted to talk, Minna, to spread at your feet the pains and sorrows, the anguish of a decade of despair. Time, I thought, time that planes out the rough edge of cruelty, that dulls the cutting blade of contempt, that trims the frayed fringe of criticism, time will have softened her eye and made tender her ear.
It was a quiet wood we went to, a lane where we had walked long ago, but you had forgotten the flowers we had gathered, the waxen diadem of the Traveller’s Joy.
I talked softly, thinking you were pondering. All the while I thought you listening and at last I paused, hungry for your gentle praise, your love at last. Yes, Minna, love. Is that so bad, so evil, if it treads in the pure garments of companionship?
I gazed, I touched your hair. Your eyes were closed for you found dull sleep more salutary than my words and I knew it was too late. Too late for love, too late for friendship, too late for anything but death . . .
14
Such closets to search, such alcoves to importune.
Robert Browning, Love in a Life
Parsons was dressed in a dark suit. His black tie, not new and worn perhaps on previous mourning occasions, showed the shiny marks of a too-hot, inexpertly handled iron. Sewn to his left sleeve was a diamond-shaped patch of black cotton.
‘We’d like to go over the house again,’ Burden said, ‘if you wouldn’t mind leaving me the key.’
‘I don’t care what you do,’ Parsons said. ‘The minister’s asked me to Sunday dinner. I shan’t be back till this afternoon.’ He began to clear his breakfast things from the table, putting the teapot, the marmalade jar away carefully in the places the dead woman had appointed for them. Burden watched him pick up the Sunday paper, unopened and unread, and tip his toast crusts on it before depositing it in a bucket beneath the sink. ‘I’m selling this place as soon as I can,’ he said.
‘My wife thought of going along to the service,’ Burden said.
Parsons kept his back turned to him. He poured water from a kettle over the single cup, the saucer, the plate.
‘I’m glad,’ he said. ‘I thought people might like to come, people who won’t be able to get along to the funeral tomorrow.’ The sink was stained with brown now; crumbs and tea-leaves clung along a greasy tide-mark. ‘I suppose you haven’t got a lead yet? On the killer, I mean.’ It was grotesque. Then Burden remembered what this man had read while his wife knitted.
‘Not yet.’
He dried the crockery, then his hand, on the tea towel.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said wearily. ‘It won’t bring her back.’
It was going to be a hot day, the first really hot day of the summer. In the High Street the heat was already making water mirages, lakes that sparkled and then vanished as Burden approached; in the road where actual water had lain the night before phantom water gleamed on the tar. Cars were beginning the nose-to-tail pilgrimage to the coast and at the junction Gates was directing the traffic, his arms flailing in blue shirt sleeves. Burden felt the weight of his own jacket.
Wexford was waiting for him in his office. In spite of the open windows the air was still.
‘The air conditioning works better when they’re shut,’ Burden suggested.
Wexford walked up and down, sniffing the sunlight.
‘It feels better this way,’ he said. ‘We’ll wait till eleven. Then we’ll go.’
They found the car Wexford had expected to see, parked discreetly in a lane off the Kingsbrook Road near where it joined the top end to Tabard Road.
‘Thank God,’ Wexford said almost piously. ‘So far so good.’
Parsons had given them the back-door key and they let themselves silently into the kitchen. Burden had thought this house would always be cold, but now, in the heat of the day, it felt stuffy and smelt of stale food and frowsty unwashed linen.
The silence was absolute. Wexford went into the hall, Burden following. They trod carefully lest the old boards should betray them. Parsons’ jacket and raincoat hung on the hallstand, and on the little square table among a pile of circulars, a dirty handkerchief and a heap of slit envelopes, something gleamed. Burden came closer and stared, knowing better than to touch it. He pushed the other things aside and together they looked at a key with a horseshoe charm on the end of a silver chain.
‘In here,’ Wexford whispered, mouthing the words and making no sound.
Mrs Parsons’ drawing-room was hot and dusty, but nothing was out of place. Wexford’s searchers had replaced everything as they had found it, even to the vase of plastic roses that screened the grate. The sun, streaming through closed windows, showed a myriad dance of dust particles in its shafts. Otherwise all was still.
Wexford and Burden stood behind the door, waiting. It seemed like an age before anything happened at all. Then, when it did, Burden could hardly believe his eyes.
The bay window revealed a segment of deserted street, bright grey in the strong light and sharply cut by the short shadows of trees in the gardens opposite. There was no colour apart from this grey and sunlit green. Then, from the right-hand side, as if into a film shot, a woman appeared walking quickly. She was as gaudy as a kingfisher, a technicolor queen in orange and jade. Her hair, a shade darker than the shirt, swung across her face like heavy drapery. She pushed open the gate, her nails ten garnets on the peeling wood, and scuttled out of sight towards the back door. Helen Missal had come at last to her schoolfellow’s house.
Wexford laid his finger unnecessarily to his lips. He gazed upwards at the ornate ceiling. From high above them came a faint footfall. S
omeone else had heard the high heels of their visitor.
Through the crack between the door and its frame, a quarter-inch-wide slit, Burden could see a knife-edge section of staircase. Up till now it had been empty, a vertical line of wallpaper above wooden banister. He felt the sweat start in his armpits. A stair squeaked and at the same moment a hinge gave a soft moan as the back door swung open.
Burden kept his eyes on the bright, sword-like line. He tensed, scarcely daring to breathe, as the wallpaper and the wood were for a second obscured by a flash of black hair, dark cheek, white shirt shadowed with blue. Then, no more. He was not even certain where the two met, but it was not far from where he stood, and he felt rather than heard their meeting, so heavy and so desperate had the silence become.
Four people alone in the heat. Burden found himself praying that he could keep as still and at the same time as alert as Wexford. At last the heels tapped again. They had moved into the dining-room.
It was the man who spoke first and Burden had to strain to hear what he said. His voice was low and held under taut control.
‘You should never have come here,’ Douglas Quadrant said.
‘I had to see you.’ She spoke with loud urgency. ‘You said you’d meet me yesterday, but you never came. You could have come, Douglas.’
‘I couldn’t get away. I was going to, but Wexford came.’
His voice died away and the rest of the sentence went unheard.
‘Afterwards you could. I know, I met him.’
In the drawing-room Wexford made a small movement of satisfaction as another loose end was tied.
‘I thought . . .’ They heard her give a nervous laugh. ‘I thought I’d said too much. I almost did . . .’
‘You shouldn’t have said anything.’
‘I didn’t. I stopped myself. Douglas, you’re hurting me!’
His reply was something savage, something they couldn’t hear.
Helen Missal was taking no pains to keep her voice down and Burden wondered why one of them should show so much caution, the other hardly any.
‘Why have you come here? What are you looking for?’
‘You knew I would come. When you telephoned me last night and told me Parsons would be out, you knew it . . .’
They heard her moving about the room and Burden imagined the little straight nose curling in disgust, the fingers outstretched to the shabby cushions, drawing lines in the dust on the galleried sideboard. Her laughter, disdainful and quite humourless, was a surprise.
‘Have you ever seen such a horrible house? Fancy, she lived here, she actually lived here. Little Meg Godfrey . . .’
It was then that his control snapped and, caution forgotten, he shouted aloud.
‘I hated her! My God, Helen, how I hated her! I never saw her, not till this week, but it was she who made my life what it was.’ The ornaments on the tiered shelves rattled and Burden guessed that Quadrant was leaning against the sideboard, near enough for him to touch him but for the intervening wall. ‘I didn’t want her to die, but I’m glad she’s dead!’
‘Darling!’ They heard nothing, but Burden knew as if he could see her that she was clinging to Quadrant now, her arms around his neck. ‘Let’s go away now. Please. There’s nothing here for you.’
He had shaken her off violently. The little cry she gave told them that, and the slithering sound of a chair skidding across lino.
‘I’m going back upstairs,’ Quadrant said, ‘and you must go. Now, Helen. You’re as conspicuous in that get-up as . . .’ They heard him pause, picking a metaphor, ‘ . . . as a parrot in a dovecote.’
She seemed to stagger out, crippled both by her heels and his rejection. Burden, catching momentary sight of flame and blue through the door crack, made a tiny movement, but Wexford’s fingers closed on his arm. Above them in the silent house someone was impatient with waiting. The books crashing to the floor two storeys up sounded like thunder when the storm is directly overhead.
Douglas Quadrant heard it too. He leapt for the stairs, but Wexford reached them first, and they confronted each other in the hall. Helen Missal screamed and flung her arm across her mouth.
‘Oh God!’ she cried. ‘Why wouldn’t you come when I told you?’
‘No one is going anywhere, Mrs Missal,’ Wexford said, ‘except upstairs.’ He picked up the key in his handkerchief.
Quadrant was immobile now, arm raised, for all the world, Burden thought, like a fencer in his white shirt, a hunter hunted and snared. His face was blank. He stared at Wexford for a moment and closed his eyes.
At last he said, ‘Shall we go, then?’
They ascended slowly, Wexford leading, Burden at the rear. It was a ridiculous procession, Burden thought. Taking their time, hands to the banister, they were like a troop of house hunters with an order to view or relatives bidden upstairs to visit the bedridded.
At the first turn Wexford said:
‘I think we will all go into the room where Minna kept her books, the books that Doon gave her. The case began here in this house and perhaps there will be some kind of poetic justice in ending it here. But the poetry books have gone, Mr Quadrant. As Mrs Missal said, there is nothing here for you.’
He said no more, but the sounds from above had grown louder. Then, as Wexford put his hand to the door of the little room where he and Burden had read the poetry aloud, a faint sigh came from the other side.
The attic floor was littered with books, some open and slammed face-downwards, others on their spines, their pages spread in fans and their covers ripped. One had come to rest against a wall as if it had been flung there and had fallen open at an illustration of a pigtailed girl with a hockey stick. Quadrant’s wife knelt among the chaos, clutching a fistful of crumpled coloured paper.
When the door opened and she saw Wexford she seemed to make an immense effort to behave as if this were her home, as if she was hunting in her own attic and the four who entered were unexpected guests. For a second Burden had the fantastic notion that she would attempt to shake hands. But no words came and her hands seemed paralysed. She began to back away from them and towards the window, gradually raising her arms and pressing her be-ringed fingers against her cheeks. As she moved her heels caught one of the scattered books, a girls’ annual, and she stumbled, half falling across the larger of the two trunks. A star-shaped mark showed on her cheek-bone where a ring had dug into the flesh.
She lay where she had fallen until Quadrant stepped forward and lifted her against him. Then she moaned softly and turned her face, hiding it in his shoulder.
In the doorway Helen Missal stamped and said, ‘I want to go home!’
‘Will you close the door, Inspector Burden?’ Wexford went to the tiny window and unlatched it as calmly as if he was in his own office. ‘I think we’ll have some air,’ he said.
It was a tiny shoe-box of a room and khakicoloured like the interior of a shoe-box. There was no breeze but the casement swung open to let in a more wholesome heat.
‘I’m afraid there isn’t much room,’ Wexford said like an apologetic host. ‘Inspector Burden and I will stand and you, Mrs Missal, can sit on the other trunk.’
To Burden’s astonishment she obeyed him. He saw that she was keeping her eyes on the Chief Inspector’s face like a subject under hypnosis. She had grown very white and suddenly looked much more than her actual age. The red hair might have been a wig bedizening a middle-aged woman.
Quadrant had been silent, nursing his wife as if she were a fractious child. Now he said with something of his former scorn:
‘Sûreté methods, Chief Inspector? How very melodramatic.’
Wexford ignored him. He stood by the window, his face outlined against clear blue.
‘I’m going to tell you a love story,’ he said, ‘the story of Doon and Minna.’ Nobody moved but Quadrant. He reached for his jacket on the trunk where Helen Missal sat, took a gold case from the pocket and lit a cigarette with a match. ‘When Margaret Godfrey first came here,’ W
exford began, ‘she was sixteen. She’d been brought up by old-fashioned people and as a result she appeared prim and shockable. Far from being the London girl come to startle the provinces, she was a suburban orphan thrown on the sophisticated country. Isn’t that so, Mrs Missal?’
‘You can put it that way if you like.’
‘In order to hide her gaucheness she put on a curious manner, a manner compounded of secretiveness, remoteness, primness. To a lover these can make up a fascinating mixture. They fascinated Doon.
‘Doon was rich and clevcer and good-looking. I don’t doubt that for a time Minna – that’s the name Doon gave her and I shall refer to her by it – Minna was bowled over. Doon could give her things she could never have afforded to buy and so for a time Doon could buy her love or rather her companionship; for this was a love of the mind and nothing physical entered into it.’
Quadrant smoked frercely. He inhaled deeply and the cigarette end glowed.
‘I have said Doon was clever,’ Wexford went on. ‘Perhaps I should add that brilliance of intellect doesn’t always go with self-sufficiency. So it was with Doon. Success, the flowering of ambition, actual achievement depended in this case on close contact with the chosen one – Minna. But Minna was only waiting, biding her time. Because, you see . . .’ He looked at the three people slowly and severally. ‘ . . . You know that Doon, in spite of the wealth, the intellect, the good looks, had one insurmountable disadvantage, a disadvantage greater than any deformity, particularly to a woman of Minna’s background, that no amount of time or changed circumstances could alter.’
Helen Missal nodded sharply, her eyes alight with memory. Leaning against her husband, Fabia Quadrant was crying softly.
‘So when Dudley Drury came along she dropped Doon without a backward glance. All the expensive books Doon had given her she hid in a trunk and she never looked at them again. Drury was dull and ordinary – callow is the word, isn’t it, Mrs Quadrant? Not passionate or possessive. Those are the adjectives I would apply to Doon. But Drury was without Doon’s disadvantage, so Drury won.’