by From Doon
‘She preferred me!’ Burden remembered Drury’s exultant cry in the middle of his interrogation.
Wexford continued:
‘When Minna withdrew her love, or willingness to be loved, if you like, Doon’s life was broken. To other people it had seemed just an adolescent crush, but it was real all right. At that moment, July 1951, a neurosis was set up which, though quiescent for years, flared again when she returned. With it came hope. They were no longer teenagers but mature. At last Minna might listen and befriend. But she didn’t and so she had to die.’
Wexford stepped forward, coming closer to the seated man.
‘So we come to you, Mr Quadrant.’
‘If it wasn’t for the fact that you’re upsetting my wife,’ Quadrant said, ‘I should say that this is a splendid way of livening up a dull Sunday morning.’ His voice was light and supercilious, but he flung his cigarette from him across the room and out of the open window past Burden’s ear. ‘Please go on.’
‘When we discovered that Minna was missing – you knew we had. Your office is by the bridge and you must have seen us dragging the brook – you realized that the mud from that lane could be found in your car tyres. In order to cover yourself, for in your “peculiar position” (I quote) you knew our methods, you had to take your car back to the lane on some legitimate pretext. It would hardly have been safe to go there during the day, but that evening you were meeting Mrs Missal –’
Helen Missal jumped up and cried, ‘No, it isn’t true!’
‘Sit down,’ Wexford said. ‘Do you imagine she doesn’t know about it? D’you think she didn’t know about you and all the others?’ He turned back to Quadrant. ‘You’re an arrogant man, Mr Quadrant,’ he said, ‘and you didn’t in the least mind our knowing abut your affair with Mrs Missal. If we ever connected you with the crime at all and examined your car, you could bluster a little but your reason for going to the lane was so obviously clandestine that any lies or evasions would be put down to that.
‘But when you came to the wood you had to look and see, you had to make sure. I don’t know what excuse you made for going into the wood . . .’
‘He said he saw a Peeping Tom,’ Helen Missal said bitterly.
‘ . . . but you did go in and because it was dark by then you struck a match to look more closely at the body. You were fascinated as well you might be and you held the match until it burnt down and Mrs Missal called out to you.
‘Then you drove home. You had done what you came to do and with any luck nobody would ever connect you with Mrs Parsons. But later when I mentioned the name Doon to you – it was yesterday afternoon, wasn’t it? – you remembered the books. Perhaps there were letters too – it was all so long ago. As soon as you knew Parsons would be out of the house you used the dead woman’s missing key to get in, and so we found you searching for what Doon might have left behind.’
‘It’s all very plausible,’ Quadrant said. He smoothed his wife’s dishevelled hair and drew his arm more tightly around her. ‘Of course, there isn’t the remotest chance of your getting a conviction on that evidence, but we’ll try it if you like.’ He spoke as if they were about to embark on some small stratagem, the means of getting home when the car has broken down or a way of getting tactfuly out of a party invitation.
‘No, Mr Quadrant,’ Wexford said, ‘we won’t waste our time on it. You can go if you wish, but I’d prefer you to stay. You see, Doon loved Minna, and although there might have been hatred too, there would never have been contempt. Yesterday afternoon when I asked you if you had ever known her you laughed. That laughter was one of the few sincere responses I got out of you and I knew then that although Doon might have killed Minna, passion would never have turned into ridicule.
‘Moreover, at four o’clock this morning I learnt something else. I read a letter and I knew then that you couldn’t be Doon and Drury couldn’t be Doon. I learnt exactly what was the nature of Doon’s disadvantage.’
Burden knew what was coming but still he held his breath.
‘Doon is a woman,’ Wexford said.
15
Love not, love not! The thing you love may change:
The rosy lip may cease to smile on you,
The kindly beaming eye grow cold and strange,
The heart still warmly heat, yet not be true.
Caroline Norton, Love Not
He would have let them arrest him, would have gone with them, Burden thought, like a lamb. Now, assured of his immunity, his aplomb had gone and panic, the last emotion Burden would have associated with Quadrant, showed in his eyes.
His wife pulled herself away from him and sat up. During Wexford’s long speeches she had been sobbing and her lips and eyelids were swollen. Her tears, perhaps because crying is a weakness of the young, made her look like a girl. She was wearing a yellow dress made of some expensive creaseless fabric that fell straight and smooth like a tunic. So far she had said nothing. Now she looked elated, breathless with unspoken words.
‘When I knew that Doon was a woman,’ Wexford said, ‘almost everything fell into place. It explained so much of Mrs Parsons’ secrecy, why she deceived her husband and yet could feel she wasn’t deceiving him; why Drury thought she was ashamed of Doon; why in self-disgust she hid the books . . .’
And why Mrs Katz, knowing Doon’s sex but not her name, was so curious, Burden thought. It explained the letter that had puzzled them the day before. I don’t know why you should be scared. There was never anything in that. . . . The cousin, the confidante, had known all along. For her it was no secret but a fact of which she had so long been aware that she had thought it unnecessary to tell the Colorado police chief until he had probed. Then it had come out as an artless postscript to the interview.
‘Say, what is this?’ he had said to Wexford. ‘You figured it was a guy?’
Helen Missal had moved back into the shade. The trunk she sat on was against the wall and the sun made a brighter splash on her bright blue skirt, leaving her face in shadow. Her hands twitched in her lap and the window was reflected ten times in her mirror-like nails.
‘Your behaviour was peculiar, Mrs Missal,’ Wexford said. ‘Firstly you really didn’t recognize her from the photograph. But with people like you it’s so difficult to tell. You cry Wolf! so often that in the end we can only find out what actually happened from the conversation of others or by things you let slip accidentally.’
She gave him a savage glance.
‘For God’s sake give me one of those cigarettes, Douglas,’ she said.
‘I’d made up my mind that you were of no significance in this case,’ Wexford went on, ‘until something happened on Friday night. I came into your drawing-room and told your husband I wanted to speak to his wife. You were only annoyed but Mr Quadrant was terrified. He did something very awkward then and I could see that he was nervous. I assumed when you told me that you’d been out with him that he didn’t want us to find out about it. But not a bit of it. He was almost embarrassingly forthcoming.
‘So I thought and I thought and at last I realized that I’d been looking at that little scene from upside down. I remembered the exact words I’d used and who I’d been looking at . . . but we’ll leave that now and pass on.
‘Your old headmistress remembered you, Mrs Missal. Everyone thought you’d go on the stage, she said. And you said the same thing. “I wanted to act!” you said. You weren’t lying then. That was in 1951, the year Minna left Doon for Drury. I was working on the assumption that Doon was ambitious and her separation from Minna frustrated that ambition. If I was looking for a spoiled life I didn’t have to go any further.
‘In late adolescence Doon had been changed from a clever, passionate, hopeful girl into someone bitter and disillusioned. You fitted into that pattern. Your gaiety was really very brittle. Oh, yes, you had your affairs, but wasn’t that consistent too? Wasn’t that a way of consoling yourself for something real and true you couldn’t have?’
She interrupted him then
and shouted defiantly:
‘So what?’ She stood up and kicked one of the books so that it skimmed across the floor and struck the wall at Wexford’s feet. ‘You must be mad if you think I’m Doon. I wouldn’t have a disgusting . . . a revolting thing like that for another woman!’ Flinging back her shoulders, projecting her sex at them, she denied perversion as if it would show in some deformity of her body. ‘I hate that sort of thing. It makes me feel sick! I hated it at school. I saw it all along, all the time . . .’
Wexford picked up the book she had kicked and took another from his pocket. The bloom on the pale green suède looked like dust.
‘This was love,’ he said quietly. Helen Missal breathed deeply. ‘It wasn’t disgusting or revolting. To Doon it was beautiful. Minna had only to listen and be gentle, only to be kind.’ He looked out of the window as if engrossed by a flock of birds flying in leaf-shaped formation. ‘Minna was only asked to go out with Doon, have lunch with her, drive around the lanes where they’d walked when they were young, listen when Doon talked about the dreams which never came to anything. Listen,’ he said. ‘It was like this.’ His finger was in the book, in its centre. He let it fall open at the marked page and began to read:
‘If love were what the rose is;
And I were like the leaf,
Our lives would grow together
In sad or singing weather . . .’
Fabia Quadrant moved and spoke. Her voice seemed to come from far away, adding to the stanza out of old memory:
‘Blown fields or flowerful closes,
Green pleasure or grey grief . . .’
They were the first words she had uttered. Her husband seized her wrist, clamping his fingers to the thin bones. If he had only dared, Burden thought, he would have covered her mouth.
‘If love were what the rose is,’ she said,
‘And I were like the leaf.’
She stopped on a high note, a child waiting for the applause that should have come twelve years before and now would never come. Wexford had listened, fanning himself rhythmically with the book. He took the dream from her gently and said:
‘But Minna didn’t listen. She was bored.’ To the woman who had capped his verse he said earnestly, ‘She wasn’t Minna any more, you see. She was a housewife, an ex-teacher who would have liked to talk about cooking and knitting patterns with someone of her own kind.
‘I’m sure you remember,’ he said conversationally, ‘how close it got on Tuesday afternoon. It must have been very warm in the car. Doon and Minna had had their lunch, a much bigger lunch than Minna would have had here . . . She was bored and she fell asleep.’ His voice rose but not in anger. ‘I don’t say she deserved to die then, but she asked for death!’
Fabia Quadrant shook off her husband’s hand and came towards Wexford. She moved with dignity to the only one who had ever understood. Her husband had protected her, Burden thought, her friends had recoiled, the one she loved had only been bored. Neither laughing nor flinching, a country policeman had understood.
‘She did deserve to die! She did!’ She took hold of the lapels of Wexford’s coat and stroked the stuff. ‘I loved her so. May I tell you about it because you understand? You see, I had only my letters.’ Her face was pensive now, her voice soft and unsteady. ‘No books to write.’ She shook her head slowly, a child rejecting a hard lesson. ‘No poems. But Douglas let me write my letters, didn’t you, Douglas? He was so frightened . . .’ Emotion came bubbling up, flooding across her face till her cheeks burned, and the heat from the window bathed her.
‘There was nothing to be frightened of!’ The words were notes in a crescendo, the last a scream. ‘If only they’d let me love her . . . love her, love her . . .’ She took her hands away and tore them through the crest of hair. ‘Love her, love her . . .’
‘Oh God!’ Quadrant said, crouching on the trunk. ‘Oh God!’
‘Love her, love her . . . green pleasure or grey grief . . .’ She fell against Wexford and gasped into his shoulder. He put his arm around her hard, forgetting the rules, and closed the window.
Still holding her, he said to Burden: ‘You can take Mrs Missal away now. See she gets home all right.’
Helen Missal drooped, a battered flower. She kept her eyes down and Burden edged her through the door, out on to the landing and down the hot dark stair. Now was not the time, but he knew Wexford must soon begin:
‘Fabia Quadrant, I must tell you that you are not obliged to say anything in answer to the charge but that anything you do say . . .’
The love story was ended and the last verse of the poem recited.
16
The truth is great and shall prevail.
Coventry Patmore, Magna est Veritas
Doon had written precisely a hundred and thirty-four letters to Minna. Not one had ever been sent or even left the Quadrants’ library where, in the drawer of a writing-desk, Wexford found them that Sunday afternoon. They were wrapped in a pink scarf and beside them was a brown purse with a gilt clip. He had stood on this very spot the night before, all unknowing, his hand within inches of the scarf, the purse and these wild letters.
Scanning them quickly, Burden understood now why Doon had printed the inscriptions in Minna’s books. The handwriting daunted him. It was spidery and difficult to decipher.
‘Better take them away, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Are we going to have to read them all, sir?’
Wexford had looked more closely, sifting the significant from the more obviously insane.
‘Only the first one and the last two, I fancy,’ he said. ‘Poor Quadrant. What a hell of a life! We’ll take all this lot down to the office, Mike. I’ve got an uneasy feeling Nanny’s listening outside the door.’
Outside, the heat and the bright light had robbed the house of character. It was like a steel engraving. Who would buy it, knowing what it had sheltered? It could become a school, Burden supposed, or an hotel or an old people’s home. The aged might not care, chatting, reminiscing, watching television in the room where Fabia Quadrant had written to the woman she killed.
They crossed the lawn to their car.
‘“Green pleasure and grey grief”,’ Wexford said. ‘That just about sums this place up.’
He got into the passenger seat and they drove away.
At the police station they were all talking about it, loitering in the foyer. It was an excitement that had come just at the right moment, just when they were growing tired of remarking on the heat-wave. A murderer and a woman at that . . . In Brighton it was one thing, Burden thought, but here! For Sergeant Camb it was making Sunday duty bearable; for green young Gates, who had almost decided to resign, it had tipped the scales in favour of his staying.
As Wexford came in, setting the doors swinging and creating a breeze out of the sultry air, they dispersed. It was as if each had suddenly been summoned to urgent business.
‘Feeling the heat?’ Wexford snapped. He banged into his office.
The windows had all been left open but not a paper on the desk had stirred.
‘Blinds, Mike. Pull down the blinds!’ Wexford threw his jacket on to a chair. ‘Who in hell left the windows open? It upsets the air conditioning.’
Burden shrugged and pulled down the yellow slats. He could see that the gossip he hated had shaken Wexford into impatient rage. Tomorrow the whole town would seethe with speculation, with wisdom after the event. Somehow in the morning they were going to have to get her into the special court . . . But it was his day off. He brightened as he thought that he would take Jean to the sea.
Wexford had sat down and put the letters, thick as the manuscript of a long novel or an autobiography, Doon’s autobiography, on the desk. It was shady in the office now, thin strips of light seeping through the blinds.
‘D’you think he knew about it when he married her?’ Burden asked. He began to sort through the letters, picking here and there on a legible phrase. He read in a kind of embarrassed wonder, ‘“Truly you have broken my heart a
nd dashed the wine cup against the wall . . .”’
Cooler now in temperature and temper, Wexford swivelled round in his purple chair.
‘God knows,’ he said. ‘I reckon he always thought he was God’s gift to women and marrying him would make her forget all about Minna.’ He stabbed at one of the letters with his forefinger. ‘I doubt whether the marriage was ever consummated.’ Burden looked a little sick, but Wexford went on. ‘“Even to that other dweller in my gates my flesh has been as an unlit candle . . .”’ He looked at Burden. ‘Et cetera, et cetera. All right, Mike, it is a bit repulsive.’ If it had been less hot he would have brought his fist down on the desk. Fiercely he added, ‘They’re going to gobble it up at the Assizes.’
‘It must have been terrible for Quadrant,’ Burden said. ‘Hence Mrs Missal and Co.’
‘I was wrong abut her. Mrs Missal, I mean. She was really gone on Quadrant, mad for him. When she realized who Mrs P. was and remembered what and happened at school, she thought Quadrant had killed her. Then, of course, she connected it with his behaviour in the wood. Can’t you see her, Mike . . . ?’ Wexford was intent yet far away. ‘Can’t you imagine her thinking fast when I told her who Mrs P. was? She’d have remembered how Quadrant insisted on going to that lane, how he left her in the car and when he was gone a long time she followed him, saw the match flame under the bushes, called to him perhaps. I bet he was as white as a sheet when he got back to her.
‘Then I talked to her yesterday and I caught her unawares. For a split second she was going to tell me about Fabia, about all her ambitions going to pot. She would have told me, too, only Missal came in. She telephoned Quadrant, then, in the five minutes it took me to get to his house and she went out to meet him. I asked her if she was going to the cinema! He didn’t turn up. Coping with Fabia, probably. She phoned him again in the evening and told him she knew Fabia was Doon, knew she had had a schoolgirl crush on Mrs P. Then he must have said he wanted to get into Parsons’ house and get hold of the books, just in case we’d overlooked them. Remember, he’d never seen them – he didn’t know what was in them. Mrs Missal had seen the church notice-board. It’s just by her house. She told Quadrant Parsons would be out . . .’