9

Sometimes a troop of damsels glad . . .

Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott

Miss Fowler’s was an unacademic bookless flat. Burden, who was aware of his own failing of cataloguing people in types, had tried not to expect old-maidishness. But this was what he found. The room into which Miss Fowler showed him was full of hand-made things. The cushion covers had been carefully embroidered, the amateurish water-colours obviously executed with patience, the ceramics bold. It looked as if Miss Fowler could hardly bear to reject the gift of an old scholar, but the collection was neither restful nor pleasing.

‘Poor, poor Margaret,’ she said. Burden sat down and Miss Fowler perched herself in a rocking chair opposite him, her feet on a petit-point footstool. ‘What a very shocking thing all this is! That poor man too. I’ve got the list you wanted.’

Burden glanced at the neatly typed row of names.

‘Tell me about her,’ he said.

Miss Fowler laughed self-consciously, then bit her lip as if she thought this was no occasion for laughter.

‘Honestly, Inspector,’ she said. ‘I can’t remember. You see, there are so many girls . . . of course, we don’t forget them all, but naturally it’s the ones who achieve something, get Firsts, or find really spectacular posts, those are the ones we remember. Hers wasn’t a very distinguished year. There was plenty of promise, but none of it came to very much. I saw her, you know, after she came back.’

‘Here? In Kingsmarkham?’

‘It must have been about a month ago.’ She took a packet of Weights from the mantelpiece, offered one to Burden, and puffed bravely at her own as he held a match to it.

They never really grow up, he thought.

‘I was in the High Street,’ she went on. ‘It was just after school and she was coming out of a shop. She said, “Good afternoon, Miss Fowler.” Honestly, I hadn’t the faintest idea who she was. Then she said she was Margaret Godfrey. You see, they expect you to remember them, Inspector.’

‘Then how did you . . . ?’

‘How did I connect her with Mrs Parsons? When I saw the photograph. You know, I felt sorry we hadn’t talked, but I’m always seeing old girls, but I honestly couldn’t tell you who they are or their ages, come to that. They might be eighteen or thirty. You know how it is, you can’t tell the ages of people younger than yourself.’ She looked up at Burden and smiled. ‘But you are young,’ she said.

Again he returned to the list. The names were in alphabetical order. He read aloud slowly, waiting for Miss Fowler’s reactions:

‘Lyn Annesley, Joan Bertram, Clare Clarke, Wendy Dticham, Margaret Dolan, Margaret Godfrey, Mary Henshaw, Jillian Ingram, Anne Kely, Helen Laird, Marjorie Miller, Hilda Pensteman, Janet Probyn, Fabia Rogers, Deirdre Sachs, Diana Stevens, Winifred Thomas, Gwen William’s, Yvonne Young.’

Under the names Mrs Morpeth had written with an air of triumph: Miss Clare Clarke is a member of the High School teaching staff!!!

‘I’d like to talk to Miss Clarke,’ he said.

‘She lives at Nectarine Cottage, down the first lane on the left on the Stowerton Road,’ Miss Fowler said.

Burden said slowly, ‘Fabia is a very unusual name.’

Miss Fowler shrugged. She patted her stiffly waved grey hair. ‘Not a particularly unusual type,’ she said. ‘Just one of those very promising people I was telling you abut who never amounted to much. She lives here somewhere. She and her husband are quite well known in what I believe are called social circles. Helen Laird was another one. Very lovely, very self-confident. Always in trouble. Boys, you know. Honestly, so silly! I thought she’d go on the stage, but she didn’t, she just got married. And then Miss Clarke, of course . . .’

Burden had the impression she had been about to include Miss Clarke among the failures, but that loyalty to her staff prevented her. He didn’t pursue it. She had given him a more disturbing lead.

‘What did you say happened to Helen Laird?’

‘I really know nothing, Inspector. Mrs Morpeth said something about her having married a car salesman. Such a waste!’ She stubbed out her cigarette into an ashtray that was daubed with poster paint and obviously home-baked. When she went on her voice sounded faintly sad. ‘They leave, you know, and we forget them, and then about fifteen years later a little tot turns up in the first form and you think, I’ve seen that face before somewhere! Of course you have – her mother’s.’

Dymphna and Priscilla, Burden thought, nearly sure. Not long now, and Dymphna’s face, the same red hair perhaps, would revive in Miss Fowler’s memory some long-lost chord.

‘Still,’ she said, as if reading his thoughts, ‘there’s a limit to everything and I retire in two years’ time.’

He thanked her for the list and left. As soon as he got to the station Wexford showed him the Katz letter.

‘It all points to Doon being the killer, sir,’ Burden said, ‘whoever he is. What do we do now, wait to hear from Colorado?’

‘No, Mike, we’ll have to press on. Clearly Mrs Katz doesn’t know who Doon is and the best we can hope for is to get some of the background from her and the last letter Mrs P. sent her before she died. Doon is probably going to turn out to be a boy friend Mrs P. had when she was at school here. Let’s hope she didn’t have too many.’

‘I’ve been wondering about that,’ Burden said, ‘because honestly – as Miss Fowler would say – those messages in Minna’s books don’t look like the work of a boy at all, not unless he was a very mature boy. They’re too polished, too smooth. Doon could be an older man who got interested in her.’

‘I thought of that,’ Wexford said, ‘and I’ve been checking up on Prewett and his men. Prewett bought that farm in 1949 when he was twenty-eight. He’s an educated person and quite capable of writing those messages, but he was in London on Tuesday. There’s no doubt about it, unless he was involved in a conspiracy with two doctors, an eminent heart specialist, a sister, God knows how many nurses and his own wife.

‘Draycott’s only been in the district two years and he was in Australia from 1947 to 1953. Bysouth can scarcely write his own name, let alone dig up suitable bits of poetry to send to a lady love, and much the same goes for Traynor. Edwards was in the Army throughout 1950 and 1951 and Dorothy Sweeting can’t possibly know what was going on in Minna’s love life twelve years ago. She was only seven.’

‘Then it looks as if we’ll have to ferret out what we can from the list,’ Burden said. ‘I think you’ll be interested when you see some of the names, sir.’

Wexford took the list and when he came to Helen Laird and Fabia Rogers he swore fiercely. Burden had pencilled in Missal and Quadrant, following each surname with a question mark.

‘Somebody’s trying to be clever,’ Wexford said, ‘and that I won’t have. Rogers. Her people are old man Rogers and his missus at Pomfret Hall. They’re loaded. All made out of paint. There’s no reason why she should have told us she knew Mrs P. When we talked to Dougie this Doon angle didn’t seem that important. But Mrs Missal . . . Not know Mrs P. indeed, and they were in the same class!’

He had grown red with anger. Burden knew how he hated being taken for a ride.

‘I was going to forget all about that cinema ticket, Mike, but now I’m not so sure. I’m going to have it all out again with Mrs Missal now.’ He stabbed at the list. ‘While I’m gone you can start contacting these women.’

‘It would have to be a girls’ school,’ Burden grumbled. ‘Women change their names, men don’t.’

‘Can’t be helped,’ Wexford said snappily. ‘Mr Griswold’s been on twice already since the inquest, breathing down my neck.’

Griswold was the Chief Constable. Burden saw what Wexford meant.

‘You know him, Mike. The least hint of difficulty and he’s screaming for the Yard,’ Wexford said, and went out, leaving Burden with the list and the letter.

Before embarking on his womanhunt Burden read the letter again. It surprised him because it gave an insight into Mrs Parsons’ character, revealing a side he had not really previously suspected. She was turning out to be a lot less pure than anyone had thought.

. . . If meeting Doon means rides in the car and a few free meals I wouldn’t be too scrupulous, Mrs Katz had written. But at the same time she didn’t know who Doon was. Mrs Parsons had been strangely secretive, enigmatic, hiding the identity of a boy friend from a cousin who had also been an intimate friend.

A strange woman, Burden thought, and a strange boy friend. It was a funny sort of relationship she had with this Doon, he said to himself. Mrs Katz says, I can’t see why you should be scared, and later, on, there was never anything in that. What did she mean, anything in that? But Mrs P. was scared. What of, sexual advances? Mrs Katz says she had a suspicious mind. Fair enough, he reflected. Any virtuous woman would be scared and suspicious of a man who paid her a lot of attention. But at the same time there was never anything in it. Mrs. P. mustn’t be too scrupulous.

Burden groped vainly. The letter, like its recipient, was a puzzle. As he put it down and turned to the telephone he was certain of only two facts: Doon hadn’t been making advances; he wanted something else, something that frightened Mrs Parsons but which was so innocuous in the estimation of her cousin that it would be showing excessive suspicion to be scrupulous about it. He shook his head like a man who has been flummoxed by an intricate riddle, and began to dial.

He tried Bertram first because there was no Annesley in the book – and, incidentally, no Pensteman and no Sachs. But the Mr Bertram who answered said he was over eighty and a bachelor. Next he rang the number of the only Ditchams he could find, but although he listened to the steady ringing past all reason, there was no reply.

Mrs Dolan’s number was engaged. He waited five minutes and tried again. This time she answered. Yes, she was Margaret Dolan’s mother, but Margaret was now Mrs Heath and had gone to live in Edinburgh. In any case, Margaret had never brought anyone called Godfrey to the house. Her particular friends had been Janet Probyn and Deirdre Sachs, and Mrs Dolan remembered them as having been a little shut-in clique on their own.

Mary Henshaw’s mother was dead. Burden spoke to her father. His daughter was still in Kingsmarkham. Married? Burden asked. Mr Henshaw roared with laughter while Burden waited as patiently as he could. He recovered and said his daughter was indeed married. She was Mrs Hedley and she was in the county hospital.

‘I’d like to talk to her,’ Burden said.

‘You can’t do that,’ Henshaw said, hugely amused. ‘Not unless you put a white coat on. She’s having a baby, her fourth. I thought you were them, bringing me the glad news.’

Through Mrs Ingram he was put on to Jillian Ingram, now Mrs Bloomfield. But she knew nothing of Margaret Parsons except that at school she had been pretty and prim, fond of reading, rather shy.

‘Pretty, did you say?’

‘Yes, she was pretty, attractive in a sort of way. Oh, I know, I’ve seen the papers. Looks don’t necessarily last, you know.’

Burden knew, but still he was surprised.

Anne Kelly had gone to Australia, Marjorie Miller . . .

‘My daughter was killed in a car crash,’ said a harsh voice, full of awakened pain. ‘I should have thought the police of all people would know that.’

Burden sighed. Pensteman, Proby, Rogers, Sachs . . . all were accounted for. In the local directory alone he found twenty-six Stevenses, forty Thomases, fifty-two Williamses, twelve Youngs.

To track them all down would take the best part of the afternoon and evening. Clare Clarke might be able to help him. He closed the directory and set off for Nectarine Cottage.

The french windows were open when Inge Wolff let Wexford into the hall and he heard the screams of quarrelling children. He followed her across the lawn and at first saw nobody but the two little girls: the elder a sharp miniature fascimile of her mother, bright-eyed, red-headed; the younger fat and fair with a freckle-blotched face. They were fighting for possession of a swing-boat, a red and yellow fairground thing with a rabbit for a figurehead.

Inge rushed over to them, shouting.

‘Are you little girls that play so, or rough boys? Here is one policeman come to lock you up!’

But the children only clung more tightly to the ropes, and Dymphna, who was standing up, began to kick her sister in the back.

‘If he’s a policeman,’ she asked, ‘where’s his uniform?’

Someone laughed and Wexford turned sharply. Helen Missal was in a hammock slung between the mulberry tree and the wall of a summerhouse and she was drinking milkless tea from a glass. At first he could see only her face and a honey-coloured arm dangling over the edge of the canvas. Then, as he came closer, he saw that she was dressed for sunbathing. She wore only a bikini, an ice-white figure of eight and a triangle against her golden skin. Wexford was embarrassed and his embarrassment fanned his anger into rage.

‘Not again!’ she said. ‘Now I know how the fox feels. He doesn’t enjoy it.’

Missal was nowhere about, but from behind a dark green barrier of macrocarpa Wexford could hear the hum of a motor mower.

‘Can we go indoors, Mrs Missal?’

She hesitated for a moment. Wexford thought she was listening, perhaps to the sounds from the other side of the hedge. The noise of the mower ceased, then, as she seemed to hold her breath, started again. She swung her legs over the hammock and he saw that her left ankle was encircled by a thin gold chain.

‘I suppose so,’ she said. ‘I don’t have any choice, do I?’

She went before him through the open doors, across the cool dining-room where Quadrant had looked on the wine, and into the rhododendron room. She sat down and said:

‘Well, what is it now?’

There was something outrageous and at the same time spiteful about the way she spread her nakedness against the pink and green chintz. Wexford turned away his eyes. She was in her own home and he could hardly tell her to go and put some clothes on. Instead he took the photograph from his pocket and held it out to her.

‘Why did you tell me you didn’t know this woman?’

Fear left her eyes and they flared in surprise.

‘I didn’t know her.’

‘You were at school with her, Mrs Missal.’

‘I was not.’ Her hair fell over her shoulders, bright copper like a new penny. ‘At least, I don’t think I was. I mean, she was years older than me by the look of this. She may have been in the sixth when I was in the first form. I just wouldn’t know.’

Wexford said severely: ‘Mrs Parsons was thirty, the same age as yourself. Her maiden name was Godfrey.’

‘I adore “maiden name”. It’s such a charitable way of putting it, isn’t it? All right, Chief Inspector, I do remember now. But she’s aged, she’s different . . .’ Suddenly she smiled, a smile of pure delighted triumph, and Wexford marvelled that this woman was the same age as the pathetic dead thing they had found in the wood.

‘It’s very unfortunate you couldn’t remember on Thursday evening, Mrs Missal. You’ve put yourself in a most unpleasant light, firstly by deliberately lying to Inspector Burden and myself and secondly by concealment of important facts. Mr Quadrant will tell you that I’m quite within my rights if I charge you with being an accessary –’

Helen Missal interrupted sulkily. ‘Why pick on me? Fabia knew her too, and . . . Oh, there must be lots and lots of other people.’

‘I’m asking you,’ he said. ‘Tell me about her.’

‘If I do,’ she said, ‘will you promise to go away and not come back?’

‘Just tell me the truth, madam, and I will gladly go away. I’m a very busy man.’

She crossed her legs and smoothed her knees. Helen Missal’s knees were like a little girl’s, a little girl who has never climbed a tree or missed a bath.

‘I didn’t like school,’ she said confidingly. ‘It was so restricting, if you know what I mean. I just begged and begged Daddy to take me away at the end of my first term in the sixth –’

‘Margaret Godfrey, Mrs Missal.’

‘Oh, yes, Margaret Godfrey. Well, she was a sort of cipher – isn’t that a lovely word? I got it out of a book. A sort of cipher. She was one of the fringe people, not very clever or nice-looking or anything.’ She glanced once more at the picture. ‘Margaret Godfrey. D’you know, I can hardly believe it. I should have said she was the last girl to get herself murdered.’

‘And who would be the first, Mrs Missal?’

‘Well, someone like me,’ she said, and giggled.

‘Who were her friends, the people she went around with?’

‘Let me think. There was Anne Kelly and a feeble spotty bitch called Bertram and Diana Something . . .’

‘That would be Diana Stevens.’

‘My God, you know it all, don’t you?’

‘I meant boy friends.’

‘I wouldn’t know. I was rather busy in that direction myself.’ She looked at him, pouting provocatively, and Wexford wondered, with the first flicker of pity he had felt for her, if the coyness would increase as her beauty declined until in age she became grotesque.

‘Anne Kelly,’ he said, ‘Diana Stevens, a girl called Bertram. What about Clare Clarke, what about Mrs Quadrant? Would they remember?’

She had said that she hated school, but as she began to speak her voice was softer than he had ever known it and her expression gentler. For a moment he forgot his anger, her lies, the provocative costume she wore, and listened.

‘It’s funny,’ she said, ‘but thinking of those names has sort of brought it back to me. We used to sit in a kind of garden, a wild old place. Fabia and me and a girl called Clarke – I see her around sometimes – and Jill Ingram and that Kelly girl and – and Margaret Godfrey. We were supposed to be working but we didn’t much. We used to talk about . . . Oh, I don’t know . . .’

‘About your boy friends, Mrs Missal?’ As soon as the words were out Wexford knew he had been obtuse.

‘Oh, no,’ she said sharply. ‘You’ve got it wrong. Not then, not in the garden. It was a wilderness, an old pond, bushes, a seat. We used to talk about . . . well, about our dreams, what we wanted to do, what we were going to make of our lives.’ She stopped and Wexford could see in a sudden flash of vision a wild green place, the girls with their books and hear with his mind’s ear the laughter, the gasp of dizzy ambition. Then he almost jumped at the change in her voice. She whispered savagely, as if she had forgotten he was there: ‘I wanted to act! They wouldn’t let me, my father and my mother. They made me stay at home and it all went. It sort of dissolved into nothing.’ She shook back her hair and smoothed with the tips of two fingers the crease that had appeared between her eyebrows. ‘I met Pete,’ she said, ‘and we got married.’ Her nose wrinkled. ‘The story of my life.’

‘You can’t have everything,’ Wexford said.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I wasn’t the only one . . .’

She hesitated and Wexford held his breath. He had an intuitive conviction that he was about to hear something of enormous significance, something that would iron out the whole case, wrap it up and tie it ready to hand to Mr Griswold. The green eyes widened and lit up; then suddenly the incandescence died and they became almost opaque. Outside in the hall a floorboard squeaked and Wexford heard the squashy sound of a rubber sole on thick carpet. Helen Missal’s face became quite white.

‘Oh God!’ she said. ‘Please, please don’t ask about the cinema ticket. Please don’t’!’

Wexford cursed inwardly as the door opened and Missal came in. He was sweating and there were damp patches on the underarms of his singlet. He stared at his wife and in his eyes was a strange mixture of disgust and concupiscence.

‘Put something on,’ he shouted. ‘Go on, put some clothes on.’

She got up awkwardly and Wexford had the illusion that her husband’s words were scrawled across her body like the obscene scribble on a pinup picture.

‘I was sunbathing,’ she said.

Missal wheeled round on Wexford.

‘Come to see the peep-show have you?’ His face was crimson with exertion and with jealousy. ‘What the copper saw.’

Wexford wanted to be angry, to match the other man’s rage with his own colder kind, but he could feel only pity.

All he said was, ‘Your wife has been able to help me.’

‘I’ll bet she has.’ Missal held the door open and almost pushed her through. ‘Been kind, has she? That’s a speciality of hers, being kind to every Tom, Dick and Harry.’ He fingered his wet shirt as if his body disgusted him. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘start on me now. What were you doing in Kingsmarkham on Tuesday afternoon, Mr Missal?’ The name of the client, Mr Missal. Your car was seen in the Kingsbrook Road, Mr Missal. Well, go on. Don’t you want to know?’

Wexford got up and walked a few paces towards the door. The heavy blossoms, pink, puce and white, brushed against his legs. Missal stood staring at him like an overfed, under-exercised dog longing to let out an uninhibited howl.

‘Don’t you want to know? Nobody saw me. I could have been strangling that woman. Don’t you want to know what I was doing? Don’t you?’

Wexford didn’t look at him. He had seen too many men’s souls stripped to relish an unnecessary spiritual skinning.

‘I know what you were doing,’ he said, skipping the name, the ‘sir’. ‘You told me yourself, just now in this room.’ He opened the door. ‘If not in so many words.’

Douglas Quadrant’s house was much larger and far less pleasing to the eye than the Missals’. It stood on an eminence amid shrubby grounds some fifty feet back from the road. A huge cedar softened to some extent its austere aspect, but when he was half-way up the path Wexford recalled similar houses he had seen in the north of Scotland, granite-built, vaguely gothic and set at each end with steeple-roofed towers.

There was something odd about the garden, but it was a few minutes before he realized in what its strangeness consisted. The lawns were smooth, the shrubs conventionally chosen, but about it all was a sombre air. There were no flowers. Douglas Quadrant’s garden presented a Monet-like landscape of grey and brown and many-shaded green.

After Mrs Missal’s blue lilies, the rhododendrons real and artificial in her drawing-room, this stately drabness should have been restful. Instead it was hideously depressing. Undoubtedly no flowers could bloom because none had been planted, but the effect was rather that the soil was barren or the air inclement.

Wexford mounted the shallow flight of broad steps under the blank eyes of windows hung with olive and burgundy and pigeon grey, and pressed the bell. Presently the door was opened by a woman of about seventy dressed amazingly in a brown frock with a beige cap and apron. She was what was once known, Wexford thought, as ‘an elderly body’. Here, he was sure, there would be no frivolous Teutonic blondes.

She in her turn looked as if she would designate him as ‘a person’, a creature not far removed from a tradesman, who should have known better than to present himself at the front door. He asked for Mrs Quadrant and produced his card.

‘Madam is having her tea,’ she said, unimpressed by Wexford’s bulk, his air of justice incarnate. ‘I’ll see if she can speak to you.’

‘Just tell her Chief Inspector Wexford would like a word with her.’ Affected by the atmosphere, he added, ‘If you please.’

He stepped over the threshold and into the hall. It was as big as a large room and, surprisingly enough, the tapestries of hunting scenes stretched on frames and attached to the walls did nothing to diminish its size. Again there was the same absence of colour, but not quite a total absence. Worked into the coats of the huntsmen, the saddle cloths of their mounts, Wexford caught the gleam of dull gold, ox-blood red and a hint of heraldic murrey.

The old woman looked defiantly at him as if she was prepared to argue it out, but as Wexford closed the front door firmly behind him someone called out:

‘Who is it, Nanny?’

He recognized Mrs Quadrant’s voice and remembered how the night before she had smiled at Missal’s crude joke.

Nanny just got to the double doors before him. She opened them in a way he had only seen done in films and, incongruously, grotesquely, there rose before his eyes a shot, ridiculous and immensely funny, from a Marx Brothers picture. The vision fled and he entered the room.

Douglas and Fabia Quadrant were sitting alone at either end of a low table covered by a lace cloth. Tea had apparently only just been brought in because the book Mrs Quadrant had been reading was lying open and face-upwards on the arm of her chair. The soft old silver of the teapot, the cream jug and the sugar bowl was so brightly polished that it reflected her long hands against the sombre colours of the room. It was forty years since Wexford had seen a brass kettle like this one boiling gently over a spirit flame.

Quadrant was eating bread and butter, just plain bread and butter but crustless and cut thin as a wafer.

‘This is an unexpected pleasure,’ he said, rising to his feet. This time there were no clumsy incidents with cigarettes. He restored his cup almost gracefully to the table and waved Wexford into an armchair.

‘Of course, you know my wife?’ He was like a cat, Wexford thought, a slim detached tom-cat who purred by day and went out on the tiles at night. And this room, the silver, the china, the long winecoloured curtains like blood transmuted into velvet! And amidst it all Mrs Quadrant, dark-haired, elegant in black, was feeding cream to her cat. But when the lamps were lit he stole away to take his feline pleasures under the bushes in the creeping dark.

‘Tea, Chief Inspector?’ She poured a driblet of water into the pot.

‘Not for me, thank you.’ She had come a long way. Wexford thought, since those days in the wilderness garden, or perhaps, even then, her gym tunic had been of a more expensive make, her hair more expertly cut than the other girls’. She’s beautiful, he thought, but she looks old, much older than Helen Missal. No children, plenty of money, nothing to do all day but feed cream to a ranging cat. Did she mind his infidelity, did she even know about it? Wexford wondered curiously if the jealousy that had reddened Missal had blanched and aged Quadrant’s wife.

‘And what can I do for you?’ Quadrant asked. ‘I half expected a visit this morning. I gather from the newspapers that you aren’t making a great deal of headway.’ Lining himself up on the side of the law, he added, ‘An elusive killer this time, am I right?’

‘Things are sorting themselves out,’ Wexford said heavily. ‘As a matter of fact it was your wife I wanted to speak to.’

‘To me?’ Fabia Quadrant touched one of her platinum earrings and Wexford noticed that her wrists were thin and her arms already corded like a much older woman’s. ‘Oh, I see. Because I knew Margaret, you mean. We were never very close, Chief Inspector. There must be dozens of people who could tell you more about her than I can.’

Possibly, Wexford thought, if I only knew where to find them.

‘I didn’t see her at all after her family moved away from Flagford until just a few weeks ago. We met in the High Street and had coffee. We discovered we’d gone our separate ways and – well!’

And that, Wexford said to himself, contrasting Tabard Road with the house he was in, must be the understatement of the case. For a second, building his impressions as he always did in a series of pictures, he glimpsed that meeting: Mrs Quadrant with her rings, her elaborately straight hair, and Margaret Parsons awkward in the cardigan and sandals that had seemed so comfortable until she came upon her old companion. What had they in common, what had they talked about?

‘What did she talk about, Mrs Quadrant?’

‘Oh, the changes in the place, people we’d known at school, that sort of thing.’ The governess and the lady of the manor. Wexford sighed within himself.

‘Did you ever meet anyone called Anne Ives?’

‘You mean Margaret’s cousin? No, I never met her. She wasn’t at school with us. She was a typist or a clerk or something.’

Just another of the hoi-polloi, Wexford thought, the despised majority, the bottom seventy-five per cent.

Quadrant sat listening, swinging one elegant leg. His wife’s condescension seemed to amuse him. He finished his tea, crumpled his napkin and helped himself to a cigarette. Wexford watched him take a box of matches from his pocket and strike one. Matches! That was odd. Surely if he had behaved consistently Quadrant would have used a lighter, one of these table lighters that look like a Georgian teapot, Wexford thought, his imagination working. There had been a single matchstick beside Mrs Parsons’ body, a single matchstick half burnt away . . .

‘Now, Margaret Godfrey’s boy friends, Mrs Quadrant. Can you remember anyone at all?’

He leant forward, trying to impress her with the urgency of his question. A tiny flash of something that might have been malice or simply recollection darted into her eyes and was gone. Quadrant exhaled deeply.

‘There was a boy,’ she said.

‘Try to remember, Mrs Quadrant.’

‘I ought to remember,’ she said, and Wexford was sure she could, certain she was only stalling for effect. ‘It was like a theatre, a London theatre.’

‘Palladium, Globe, Haymarket?’ Quadrant was enjoying himself. ‘Prince of Wales?’

Fabia Quadrant giggled softly. It was an unkind titter, sympathetic towards her husband, faintly hostile to the Chief Inspector. For all his infidelity Quadrant and his wife shared something, something stronger, Wexford guessed, than ordinary marital trust.

‘I know, it was Drury. Dudley Drury. He used to live in Flagford.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Quadrant. It had just crossed my mind that your husband might have known her.’

‘I?’ As he spoke the monosyllable Quadrant’s voice was almost hysterically incredulous. Then he began to rock with laughter. It was a soundless cruel mirth that seemed to send an evil wind through the room. He made no noise, but Wexford felt scorn leap out of the laughing man like a springing animal, scorn and contempt and the wrath that is one of the deadly sins. ‘I, know her? In that sort of way? I assure you, dear Chief Inspector, that I most emphatically knew her not!’

Sickened, Wexford turned away. Mrs Quadrant was looking down into her lap. It was as if she had withdrawn into a sort of shame.

‘This Drury,’ Wexford said, ‘do you know if she ever called him Doon?’

Was it his imagination or was it simply coincidence that at that moment Quadrant’s laughter was switched off like a wrenched tap?

‘Doon?’ his wife said. ‘Oh, no, I never heard her call anyone Doon.’

She didn’t get up when Wexford rose to go, but gave him a dismissive nod and reached for the book she had been reading. Quadrant let him out briskly, closing the door before he reached the bottom of the steps, as if he had been selling brushes or reading the meter. Dougie Q.! If there was ever a fellow who could strangle one woman and then make love to another a dozen yards away . . . But why? Deep in thought, he walked down the Kingsbrook Road, crossed to the opposite side of the road and would have passed Helen Missal’s garage unseeing but for the voice that hailed him.

‘Did you see Douglas?’ Her tone was wistful but she had cheered up since he had last seen her. The bikini had been changed for a printed silk dress, high-heeled shoes and a big hat.

The question was beneath Wexford’s dignity.

‘Mrs Quadrant was able to fill in a few gaps,’ he said.

‘Fabia was? You amaze me. She’s very discreet. Just as well, Douglas being what he is.’ For a moment her pretty face was shollen with sensuality. ‘He’s magnificent, isn’t he? He’s splendid.’ Shaking herself, she drew her hand across her face and when she withdrew it Wexford saw that the lust had been wiped away. ‘My Christ,’ she said, once more cheerful and outrageous, ‘some people don’t know when they’re well off!’ She unlocked the garage doors, opened the boot of the red Dauphine and took out a pair of flatter shoes.

‘I had the impression,’ Wexford said, ‘that there was something else you wanted to tell me.’ He paused. ‘When your husband interrupted us.’

‘Perhaps there was and perhaps there wasn’t. I don’t think I will now.’ The shoes changed, she danced up to the car and swung the door open.

‘Off to the cinema?’ Wexford asked.

She banged the door and switched on the ignition.

‘Damn you!’ Wexford heard her shout above the roar of the engine.