[Wexford 01] From Doon & Death

by Ruth Rendell

  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.

  ‘Do 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 and 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 about her. Mrs Missal, I mean. She was really gone on Quadrant, mad for him. When she realized who Mrs P. was and remembered what had 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. If s just by her house. She told Quadrant Parsons would be out...'

  '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. If s only caf 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 chiefs withdrawal. He said practically:

  Then Minna came back as Mrs P. Fabia met her and they went driving together in Quadranf 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-go-lucky 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.