by From Doon
‘And Fabia had a key to Parsons’ house,’ Burden said. ‘The key Mrs P. left in the car before she was killed.’
‘Quadrant had to protect Fabia,’ Wexford said. ‘He couldn’t be a husband but he could be a guardian. He had to make sure no one found out what things were really like for him and her. She was mad, Mike, really crazy, and his whole livelihood would have gone up in smoke if it was known. Besides, she had the money. It’s only cat’s meat what he makes out of his practice compared with what she’s got.
‘But it’s no wonder he was always sneaking off in the evenings. Apart from the fact that he’s obviously highly sexed, anything was preferable to listening to interminable stories about Minna. It must have been almost intolerable.’
He stopped for a moment, recalling his two visits to the house. How long had they been married? Nine years, ten? First the hints and the apologies; then the storms of passion, the memories that refused to be crushed, the bitter resentment of a chance infatuation that had warped a life.
With terrible finesse, worse than any clumsiness, Quadrant must have tried to break the spell. Wexford wrenched his thoughts away from those attempts, feeling again the convulsions of the woman in the attic, her heart beating against his chest.
Burden, whose knowledge of the Quadrants was less personal, sensed his chief’s withdrawal. He said practically:
‘Then Minna came back as Mrs P. Fabia met her and they went driving together in Quadrant’s car. He didn’t have it on Tuesday, but she did. When she got home on Tuesday night Fabia told him she’d killed Mrs P. What he’d always been afraid of, that her mental state would lead to violence, had actually happened. His first thought must have been to keep her out of it. She told him where the body was and he thought of the car tyres.’
‘Exactly,’ Wexford said, caught up once more in circumstantial detail. ‘Everything I said to him in Parsons’ attic was true. He went to get fresh mud in the tyres and to look at the body. Not out of curiosity or sadism – although he must have felt sadistic towards Mrs P. and curious, by God! – but simply to satisfy himself that she was there. For all we know Fabia wasn’t always lucid. Then Mrs Missal dropped her lipstick. She’s what Quadrant calls a happy-golucky girl and that was just carelessness.
‘He hoped we wouldn’t get around to questioning Fabia, not for some time, at any rate. When I walked into Mrs Missal’s drawing-room on Friday night –’
‘You spoke to Missal,’ Burden interrupted, ‘but you were looking at Quadrant because we were both surprised to see him there. You said, “I’d like a word with your wife,” and Quadrant thought you were speaking to him.’
‘I was suspicious of him until yesterday afternoon,’ Wexford said. ‘Then when I asked him if he’d known Mrs P. and he laughed I knew he wasn’t Doon. I said his laughter made me go cold and no wonder. There was a lot in that laugh, Mike. He’d seen Mrs P. dead and he’d seen her photograph in the paper. He must have felt pretty bitter when he thought of what it was that had driven his wife out of her mind and wrecked his marriage.’
‘He said he’d never seen her alive,’ Burden said. ‘I wonder why not? I wonder why he didn’t try to see her.’
Wexford reflected. He folded the scarf and put it away with the purse and the key. In the drawer his fingers touched something smooth and shiny.
‘Perhaps he didn’t dare,’ he said. ‘Perhaps he was afraid of what he might do . . .’ He took the photograph out, but Burden was preoccupied, looking at another, the one Parsons had given them.
‘They say love is blind,’ Burden said. ‘What did Fabia ever see in her?’
‘She wasn’t always like that,’ Wexford said. ‘Can’t you imagine that a rich, clever, beautiful girl like Fabia was, might have found just the foil she was looking for in that . . .’ He changed the pictures over, subtracting twelve years. ‘Your pal, Miss Clarke, brought me this,’ he said. ‘It gave me a few ideas before we ever heard from Colorado.’
Margaret Godfrey was one of five girls on the stone seat and she sat in the middle of the row. Those who stood behind rested their hands on the shoulders of the seated. Burden counted twelve faces. The others were all smiling but her face was in repose. The white forehead was very high, the eyes wide and expressionless. Her lips were folded, the corners tilted very slightly upwards, and she was looking at the camera very much as the Gioconda had looked at Leonardo . . .
Burden picked out Helen Missal, her hair in outmoded sausage curls; Clare Clarke with plaits. All except Fabia Quadrant were staring at the camera. She stood behind the girl she had loved, looking down at a palm turned uppermost, at a hand dropping, pulled away from her own. She too was smiling but her brows had drawn together and the hand that had held and caressed hung barren against her friend’s sleeve. Burden gazed, aware that chance had furnished them with a record of the first cloud on the face of love.
‘Just one more thing,’ he said. ‘When you saw Mrs Quadrant yesterday you said she was reading. I wondered if . . . I wondered what the book was.’
Wexford grinned, breaking the mood. ‘Science fiction,’ he said. ‘People are inconsistent.’
Then they pulled their chairs closer to the desk, spread the letters before them and began to read.
Read on for the first chapter of the next
Wexford Case novel
All the chapter heading quotations are extracts
from The Book of Common Prayer
1
The laws of the Realm may punish Christian men
with death for heinous and grievous offences.
The Thirty-nine Articles
It was five in the morning. Inspector Burden had seen more dawns than most men, but he had never quite become jaundiced by them, especially summer dawns. He liked the stillness, the sight of the little country town in a depopulated state, the hard blue light that was of the same shade and intensity as the light at dusk but without dusk’s melancholy.
The two men they had been questioning about last night’s fight in one of Kingsmarkham’s cafés had confessed separately and almost simultaneously just a quarter of an hour before. Now they were locked into two stark white cells on the ground floor of this incongruously modern police station. Burden stood by the window in Wexford’s office, looking at the sky which had the peculiar greenish tint of aquamarine. A flock of birds flying in dense formation crossed it. They reminded Burden of his childhood when, as at dawn, everything had seemed bigger, clearer and of more significance than it did today. Tired and a little sickened, he opened the window to get rid of cigarette smoke and the sweaty smell of youths who wore leather jackets in the height of summer.
Outside in the corridor he could hear Wexford saying good night – or good morning – to Colonel Griswold, the Chief Constable. Burden wondered if Griswold had guessed when he arrived just before ten with a long spiel about stamping out hooliganism that he was in for an all-night session. That, he thought unfairly, was where meddling got you.
The heavy front door clanged and Griswold’s car started. Burden watched it move off the forecourt, past the great stone urns filled with pink geraniums and into Kingsmarkham High Street. The Chief Constable was driving himself. Burden saw with approval and grudging amusement that Griswold drove at just about twenty-eight miles per hour until he reached the black and white derestriction sign. Then the car gathered speed and flashed away out of sight along the empty country road that led to Pomfret.
He turned round when he heard Wexford come in. The Chief Inspector’s heavy grey face was a little greyer than usual, but he showed no other sign of tiredness and his eyes, dark and hard as basalt, showed a gleam of triumph. He was a big man with big features and a big intimidating voice. His grey suit – one of a series of low fastening, double-breasted affairs – appeared more shabby and wrinkled than ever today. But it suited Wexford, being not unlike an extension of his furrowed pachydermatous skin.
‘Another job jobbed,’ he said, ‘as the old woman said when she jobbed the old man’s
eye out.’
Burden bore with such vulgarisms stoically. He knew that they were meant to horrify him; they always succeeded. He made his thin lips crease into a tight smile. Wexford handed him a blue envelope and he was glad of the diversion to hide his slight embarrassment.
‘Griswold’s just given me this,’ Wexford said. ‘At five in the morning. No sense of timing.’
Burden glanced at the Essex postmark.
‘Is that the man he was on about earlier, sir?’
‘Well, I don’t have fanmail from beautiful olde worlde Thringford as a general rule, do I, Mike? This is the Rev. Mr Archery all right, taking advantage of the Old Pals’ Act.’ He lowered himself into one of the rather flimsy chairs and it gave the usual protesting creak. Wexford had what his junior called a love-hate relationship with those chairs and indeed with all the aggressively modern furnishings of his office. The glossy block floor, the square of nylon carpet, the chairs with their sleek chrome legs, the primrose venetian blinds – all these in Wexford’s estimation were not ‘serviceable’, they were dust-traps and they were ‘chi-chi’. At the same time he took in them an enormous half-secret pride. They had their effect. They served to impress visiting strangers such as the writer of this letter Wexford was now taking from its envelope.
It too was written on rather thick blue paper. In a painfully authentic upper-class accent, the Chief Inspector said affectedly, ‘May as well get on to the Chief Constable of Mid-Sussex, my dear. We were up at Oxford together, don’t you know?’ He squeezed his face into a kind of snarling grin. ‘All among the bloody dreaming spires,’ he said. ‘I hate that sort of thing.’
‘Were they?’
‘Were they what?’
‘At Oxford together?’
‘I don’t know. Something like that. It may have been the playing fields of Eton. All Griswold said was, “Now we’ve got those villains wrapped up, I’d like you to have a look at a letter from a very good friend of mine called Archery. Excellent fellow, one of the best. This enclosure’s for you, I’d like you to give him all the help you can. I’ve a notion it’s got something to do with that scoundrel Painter.”’
‘Who’s Painter?’
‘Villain who got the chop about fifteen or sixteen years ago,’ said Wexford laconically. ‘Let’s see what the parson has to say, shall we?’
Burden looked over his shoulder. The letter was headed St Columba’s Vicarage, Thringford, Essex. The Greek e’s awakened in him a small hostility. Wexford read it aloud.
‘“Dear sir, I hope you will forgive me for taking up your valuable time . . .” Don’t have much choice, do I? “ . . . but I regard this matter as being of some urgency. Col. Griswold, the Chief Constable of blah blah and so on, has very kindly told me you are the gentleman who may be able to assist me in this problem so I am taking the liberty, having first consulted him, of writing to you.”’ He cleared his throat and loosened his crumpled grey tie. ‘Takes a hell of a time coming to the point, I must say. Ah, here we go. “You will remember the case of Herbert Arthur Painter . . .” I will. “I understand you were in charge of it. I therefore supposed I should come to you before pursuing certain enquiries which, much against my will, I am compelled to make.”’
‘Compelled?’
‘That’s what the man says. Doesn’t say why. The rest’s a load of compliments and can he come and see me tomorrow – no, today. He’s going to phone this morning, but he “anticipates my willingness to meet him.”’ He glanced at the window to where the sun was coming up over York Street and with one of his distorted quotations, said, ‘I suppose he’s sleeping in Elysium at this moment, crammed with distressful cold mutton or whatever parsons go to bed on.’
‘What’s it all about?’
‘O God, Mike, it’s obvious, isn’t it? You don’t want to take any notice of this “being compelled” and “against his will” stuff. I don’t suppose his stipend amounts to much. He probably writes true crime stories in between early Communication and the Mothers’ Meeting. He must be getting desperate if he reckons on titillating the mass appetite by resurrecting Painter.’
Burden said thoughtfully, ‘I seem to remember the case. I’d just left school . . .’
‘And it inspired your choice of a career, did it?’ Wexford mocked. ‘“What are you going to be, son?” “I’m going to be a detective, Dad.”’
In his five years as Wexford’s right-hand man, Burden had grown immune to his teasing. He knew he was a kind of safety valve, the stooge perhaps on whom Wexford could vent his violent and sometimes shocking sense of humour. The people of this little town, indiscriminately referred to by Wexford as ‘our customers’ had, unless suspected of felony, to be spared. Burden was there to take the overflow of his chief’s rage, ridicule and satire. Now he was cast as the sponge to soak up the scorn that was rightly the due of Griswold and Griswold’s friend.
He looked shrewdly at Wexford. After a trying, frustrating day and night, this letter was the last straw. Wexford was suddenly tense with irritation, his skin more deeply wrinkled than usual, his whole body flexed with the anger that would not suffer fools gladly. That tension must find release.
‘This Painter thing,’ Burden said slyly, slipping into his role of therapist, ‘a bit run of the mill, wasn’t it? I followed it in the papers because it was the big local sensation. I don’t remember it was remarkable in any other way.’
Wexford slipped the letter back into its envelope and put it in a drawer. His movements were precise and under a tight control. One wrong word, Burden thought, and he’d have torn it up, chucked the pieces on the floor and left them to the mercy of the cleaner. His words had apparently been as right as possible under the circumstances for Wexford said in a sharp cool voice, ‘It was remarkable to me.’
‘Because you handled it?’
‘Because it was the first murder case I ever handled on my own. It was remarkable to Painter because it hanged him and to his widow, I daresay. I suppose it shook her a bit as far as anything could shake that girl.’
Rather nervously Burden watched him observe the cigarette burn one of the men they had been interviewing had made in the lemon-coloured leather of a chair seat. He waited for the explosion. Instead Wexford said indifferently:
‘Haven’t you got a home to go to?’
‘Too late now,’ said Burden, stifling a yawn that threatened. ‘Besides, my wife’s away at the seaside.’
A strongly uxorious man, he found his bungalow like a morgue when Jean and the children were absent. This was a side of his character that afforded Wexford many opportunities for quips and snide remarks, this coupled with his comparative youth, his stolid stick-in-the-mud nature and a certain primness of outlook. But all Wexford said was, ‘I forgot.’
He was good at his job. The big ugly man respected him for that. Although he might deride, Wexford appreciated the advantage of having a deputy whose grave good looks were attractive to women. Seated opposite that ascetic face, warmed by a compassion Wexford called ‘softness’, they were more inclined to open their hearts than to a majestic fifty-fiveyear-old heavyweight. His personality, however, was not strong and his superior effaced him. Now, in order to channel off that sharp-edged vitality, he was going to have to risk a rebuke for stupidity.
He risked it. ‘If you’re going to have to argue the toss with this Archery, wouldn’t it be a good idea if we had a re-cap of the facts?’
‘We?’
‘Well, you then, sir. You must be a bit rusty yourself on the case after so long.’
The outburst came with an undercurrent of laughter. ‘God Almighty! D’you think I can’t see your brain working? When I want a psychiatrist I’ll hire a professional.’ He paused and the laughter became a wry grin. ‘OK it might help me . . .’ But Burden had made the mistake of relaxing too soon. ‘To get the facts straight for Mr Bloody Archery, I mean,’ Wexford snapped. ‘But there’s no mystery, you know, no cunning little red herrings. Painter did it all right.’ He pointed eastw
ards out of the window. The broad Sussex sky was becoming suffused with rose and gold, bands of soft creamy pink like strokes from a water-colour brush. ‘That’s as sure as the sun’s rising now,’ he said. ‘There never was any doubt. Herebert Arthur Painter killed his ninety-year-old employer by hitting her over the head with an axe and he did it for two hundred pounds. He was a brutal savage moron. I read in the paper the other day that the Russians call anti-social people ‘unpersons” and that just about describes him. Funny sort of character for a parson to champion.’
‘If he’s championing him.’
‘We shall see,’ said Wexford.
They stood in front of the map that was attached to the yellow ‘cracked-ice’ wallpaper.
‘She was killed in her own home, wasn’t she?’ Burden asked. ‘One of those big house off the Stowerton road?’
The map showed the whole of this rather sleepy country district. Kingsmarkham, a market town of some twelve thousand inhabitants, lay in the centre, its streets coloured in brown and white, its pastoral environs green with the blotches of dark veridian that denoted woodland. Roads ran from it as from the meshy heart of a spider’s web, one leading to Pomfret in the south, another to Sewingbury in the north-east. The scattered villages, Flagford, Clusterwell and Forby, were tiny flies on this web.
‘The house is called Victor’s Piece,’ said Wexford. ‘Funny sort of name. Some general built it for himself after the Ashanti Wars.’
‘And it’ s just about here.’ Burden put his finger on a vertical strand of the web that led from Kingsmarkham to Stowerton, lying due north. He pondered and light dawned. ‘I think I know it,’ he said. ‘Hideous dump with a lot of green woodwork all over it. It was an old people’s home up until last year. I suppose they’ll pull it down.’