10
We were young, we were merry, we were very very wise,
And the door stood open at our feast. . . .
Mary Coleridge, Unwelcome
Nectarine Cottage lay in a damp hollow, a bramble-filled basin behind the Stowerton Road. The approach down a winding path was hazardous and Miss Clarke was taking no chances. Notices pencilled on lined paper greeted Burden at intervals as he descended. The first on the gate had commanded Lift and push hard; the second, some ten feet down the path, Mind barbed wire. Presently the brambles gave place to faint traces of cultivation. This was of a strictly utilitarian kind, rows of sad cabbages among the weeds, a splendid marrow plant protected from the thistles by a home-made cloche. Someone had pinned a sheet of paper to its roof, Do not remove glass. Evidently Miss Clarke had clumsy friends or was the victim of trespassers. This Burden could understand, for there was nothing to indicate habitation but the vegetables and the notices, and the cottage only came into view when he was almost upon it at the end of the path.
The door stood wide open and from within came rich gurgling giggles. For a moment he thought that, although there were no other houses in the lane, he had come to the wrong place. He rapped on the door, the giggles rose to a gale and someone called out:
‘Is that you, Dodo? We’d almost given you up.’
Dodo might be a man or a woman, probably a woman. Burden gave a very masculine cough.
‘Oh, gosh, it isn’t,’ said a voice. ‘I tell you what, Di. It must be old Fanny Fowler’s cop, a coughing cop.’
Burden felt uncommonly foolish. The voice seemed to come from behind a closed door at the end of the passage.
He called loudly, ‘Inspector Burden, madam!’
The door was immediately flung open and a woman came out dressed like a Tyrolean peasant. Her fair hair was drawn tightly back and twisted round her head in plaits.
‘Oh, gosh,’ she said again. ‘I didn’t realize the front door was still open. I was only kidding about you being Miss Fowler’s cop. She rang up and said you might come.’
‘Miss Clarke?’
‘Who else?’ Burden thought she looked very odd, a grown woman dressed up as Humperdinck’s Gretel. ‘Come and pig it along with Di and me in the dungeon,’ she said.
Burden followed her into the kitchen. Mind the steps, said another notice pinned to the door and he saw it just in time to stop himself crashing down the three steep steps to the slate-flagged floor. The kitchen was even nastier than Mrs Parsons’ and much less clean. But outside the window the sun was shining and a red rose pressed against the diamond panes.
There was nothing odd about the woman Miss Clarke had called Di. It might have been Mrs Parsons’ double sitting at the table eating toast, only this woman’s hair was black and she wore glasses.
‘Di Plunkett, Inspector Burden,’ Clare Clarke said. ‘Sit down, Inspector – not that stool. It’s got fat on it – and have a cup of tea.’
Burden refused the tea and sat on a wooden chair that looked fairly clean
‘I’ve no objection if you talk while I eat,’ said Miss Clarke, bursting once more into giggles. She peered at a tin of jam and said crossly to her companion: ‘Confound it! South African. I know I shan’t fancy it now.’ She pouted and said dramatically, ‘Ashes on my tongue!’ But Burden noticed that she helped herself generously and spread the jam on to a doorstep of bread. With her mouth full she said to him: ‘Fire away. I’m all ears.’
‘All I really want to know is if you can tell me the names of any of Mrs Parsons’ boy friends when she was Margaret Godfrey, when you knew her.’
Miss Clarke smacked her lips.
‘You’ve come to the right shop,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a memory like an elephant.’
‘You can say that again,’ said Di Plunkett, ‘and it’s not only your memory.’ The both laughed, Miss Clarke with great good humour.
‘I remember Margaret Godfrey perfectly,’ she said. ‘Second-class brain, anaemic looks, personality both prim and dim. Still, de mortuis and all that jazz, you know. (Prang that fly, Di. There’s a squeegy-weegy sprayer thing on the shelf behind your great bonce.) Not a very social type, Margaret, no community spirit. Went around with a female called Bertram, vanished now into the mists of obscurity. (Got him, Di!) Chummed up with one Fabia Rogers for a while – Fabia, forsooth! not to mention Diana Stevens of sinister memory –’
Miss or Mrs Plunkett broke in with a scream of laughter and waving the fly-killer made as if to fire a stream of liquid at Miss Clarke’s head. Burden shifted his chair out of range.
Ducking and giggling, Clare Clarke went on: ‘ . . . Now notorious in the Stowerton rural district as Mrs William Plunkett, one of this one-eyed burg’s most illustrious sons!’
‘You are a scream, Clare,’ Mrs Plunkett gasped. ‘Really, I envy those lucky members of the upper fourth. When I think of what we had to put up with –’
‘What about boy friends, Miss Clarke?’
‘Cherchez l’homme, eh? I said you’d come to the right shop. D’you remember, Di, when she went out with him the first time and we sat behind them in the pictures? Oh, gosh, I’ll never forget that to my dying day.’
‘Talk about sloppy,’ said Mrs Plunkett. ‘“Do you mind if I hold your hand, Margaret?” I thought you were going to burst a blood-vessel, Clare.’
‘What was his name?’ Burden was bored and at the same time angry. He thought the years had toughened him, but now the picture of the green and white bundle in the wood swam before his eyes; that and Parsons’ face. He realized that of the people they had interviewed he hadn’t liked a single one. Was there no pity in any of them, no common mercy?
‘What was his name?’ he said again wearily.
‘Dudley Drury. On my sacred oath, Dudley Drury.’
‘What a name to go to bed with,’ Mrs Plunkertt said.
Clare Clarke whispered in her ear, but loud enought for Burden to hear: ‘She never did! Not on your sweet life.’
Mrs Plunkett saw his face and looked a little ashamed. She said defensively in a belated effort to help:
‘He’s still around if you want to trace him. He lives down by Stowerton Station. Surely you don’t think he killed Meg Godfrey?’
Clare Clarke said suddenly: ‘She was quite pretty. He was very keen on her. She didn’t look like that then, you know, not like that ghastly mockery in the paper. I think I’ve got a snap somewhere. All girls together.’
Burden had got what he wanted. Now he wanted to go. It was a bit late in the day for snaps. If they could have seen one on Thursday it might have helped but that was all.
‘Thank you, Miss Clarke,’ he said, ‘Mrs Plunkett. Good afternoon.’
‘Well, cheeri-bye. It’s been nice meeting you.’ She giggled. ‘It’s not often we see a man in here, is it, Di?’
Half-way down the overgrown path he stopped in his tracks. A woman in jodhpurs and open-necked shirt was coming up towards the cottage, whistling. It was Dorothy Sweeting.
Dodo, he thought. They’d mistaken him for someone called Dodo and Dodo was Dorothy Sweeting. From long experience Burden knew that whatever may happen in detective fiction, coincidence is more common than conspiracy in real life.
‘Good afternoon, Miss Sweeting.’
She grinned at him with cheerful innocence.
‘Oh, hallo,’ she said, ‘fancy seeing you. I’ve just come from the farm. There’s a blinking great crowd like a Cup Final in that wood. You ought to see them.’
Still not inured to man’s inhuman curiosity, Burden sighed.
‘You know that bush where they found her?’ Dorothy Sweeting went on excitedly. ‘Well, Jimmy Traynor’s flogging twigs off it at a bob a time. I told Mr Prewett he ought of charge half a crown admittance.’
‘I hope he’s not thinking of taking your advice, miss,’ Burden said in a repressive voice.
‘There’s nothing wrong in it. I knew a fellow who had a plane crash on his land and he turned a whole field into a car park he had so may sightseers.’
Burden flattened himself against the hedge to let her pass.
‘Your tea will be getting cold, Miss Sweeting,’ he said.
‘Whatever next?’ Wexford said. ‘If we don’t look sharp they’ll have every stick in that wood uprooted and taken home for souvenirs.’
‘Shall I have a couple of the lads go over there, sir?’ Burden asked.
‘You do that, and go and get the street directory. We’ll go and see this Drury character together.’
‘You aren’t going to wait to hear from Colorado, then?’
‘Drury’s a big possibility, Mike. He could well be Doon. I can’t help feeling that whatever Parsons says about his wife’s chastity, when she came back here she met up with Doon again and succumbed to his charms. As to why he should have killed her – well, all I can say is, men do strangle women they’re having affairs with, and Mrs P. may have accepted the car rides and the meals without being willing to pay for services rendered.
‘The way I see it, Mike, Doon had been seeing Mrs P. and asked her out on Tuesday afternoon with a view to persuading her to become his mistress. They couldn’t meet at her home because of the risks and Doon was going to pick her up on the Pomfret Road. She took the rain-hood with her because the weather had been wet and she didn’t bank on being in the car all the time. Even if she didn’t want Doon for her lover she wouldn’t want him to see her with wet hair.’
The time factor was bothering Burden and he said so.
‘If she was killed early in the afternoon, sir, why did Doon strike a match to look at her? And if she was killed later, why didn’t she pay for her papers before she went out with him and why didn’t she explain to Parsons that she was going to be late?’
Wexford shrugged. ‘Search me,’ he said. ‘Dougie Q. uses matches, carries them in his pocket. So do most men. He’s behaving in a very funny way, Mike. Sometimes he’s co-operative, sometimes he’s actively hostile. We haven’t finished with him yet. Mrs Missal knows more than she’s saying –’
‘Then there’s Missal himself,’ Burden interrupted.
Wexford looked thoughtful. He rubbed his chin and said: ‘I don’t think there’s any mystery about what he was doing on Tuesday. He’s as jealous as hell of that wife of his and not without reason as we know. I’m willing to take a bet that he keeps tabs on her when he can. He probably suspects Quadrant and when she told him she was gong out on Tuesday afternoon he nipped back to Kingsmarkham on the off-chance, watched her go out, satisfied himself that she didn’t go to Quadrant’s office and went back to Stowerton. He’d know she’d dress herself up to the nines if she was meeting Dougie. When he saw her go off in the car along the Kingsbrook Road in the same clothes she was wearing that morning he’d bank on her going shopping in Pomfret – they don’t close on Tuesdays – and he’d be able to set his mind at rest. I’m certain that’s what happened.’
‘It sounds like him,’ Burden agreed. ‘It fits. Was Quadrant here twelve years ago, sir?’
‘Oh, yes, lived here all his life, apart from three years at Cambridge and, anyway, he came down in 1949. Still, Mrs P. was hardly his style. I asked him if he knew her and he just laughed, but it was the way he laughed. I’m not kidding, Mike, it made my blood run cold.’
Burden looked at his chief with respect. It must have been quite a display, he thought, to chill Wexford.
‘I suppose the others could have been just – well, playthings as it were, and Mrs P. a life-long love.’
‘Christ!’ Wexford roared. ‘I should never have let you read that book. Playthings, life-long love! You make me puke. For pity’s sake find out where Drury lives and we’ll get over there.’
According to the directory, Drury, Dudley J. and Drury, Kathleen lived at 14 Sparta Grove, Stowerton. Burden knew it as a street of tiny pre-war semidetached houses, not far from where Peter Missal had his garage. It was not the kind of background he had visualized for Doon. He and Wexford had a couple of rounds of sandwiches from the Carousel and got to Stowerton by seven.
Drury’s house had a yellow front door with a lot of neatly tied climbing roses on the trellis round the porch. In the middle of the lawn was a small pond made from a plastic bath and on its rim stood a plaster gnome with a fishing rod. Someone had evidently been polishing the Ford Popular on the garage drive. As a vehicle for clandestine touring Mrs Katz would probably have despised it, but it was certainly shiny enough to have dazzled Margaret Parsons.
The door-knocker was a cast-iron lion’s head with a ring in its mouth. Wexford banged it hard, but no one came, so he pushed open the side gate and they entered the back garden. On the vegetable plot by the rear fence a man was digging potatoes.
Wexford coughed and the man turned round. He had a red glistening face, and although it was warm, the cuffs of his long-sleeved shirt were buttoned. His sandy hair and the whiteness of his wrists confirmed Wexford’s opinion that he was probably sensitive to sunburn. Not the sort of man, Burden thought, to be fond of poetry and send snippets of verse to the girl he loved, surely not the sort of man to buy expensive books and write delicate whimsical messages in their fly-leaves.
‘Mr Drury?’ Wexford asked quietly.
Drury looked startled, almost frightened, but this could simply be alarm at the invasion of his garden by two men much larger than himself. There was sweat on his upper lip, again probably only the result of manual toil.
‘Who are you?’
It was a thin highish voice that sounded as if its development towards a greater resonance had been arrested in puberty.
‘Chief Inspector Wexford, sir, and Inspector Burden. County Police.’
Drury had looked after his garden. Apart from a couple of square yards from which potatoes had been lifted, there were various freshly turned patches all over the flower-beds. He stuck the prongs of the fork into the ground and wiped his hands on his trousers.
‘Is this something to do with Margaret?’ he asked.
‘I think we’d better go into the house, Mr Drury.’
He took them in through a pair of french windows, considerably less elegant than Mrs Missal’s, and into a tiny room crowded with post-war utility furniture.
Someone had just eaten a solitary meal. The cloth was still on the table and the dirty plates had been half-heartedly stacked.
‘My wife’s away,’ Drury said. ‘She took the kids to the seaside this morning. What can I do for you?’
He sat down on a dining chair, offered another to Burden and, observant of protocol, left the only armchair to Wexford.
‘Why did you ask if it was something to do with Margaret, Mr Drury?’
‘I recognized her photograph in the paper. It gave me a bit of a turn. Then I went to a do at the chapel last night and they were all talking about it. It made me feel a bit queer, I can tell you, on account of me meeting Margaret through the chapel.’
That would have been Flagford Methodist Church, Burden reflected. He recalled a maroon-painted hut with a corrugated-iron roof on the north side of the village green.
Drury didn’t look scared any longer, only sad. Burden was struck by his resemblance to Ronald Parsons, not only a physical likeness but a similarity of phrase and manner. As well as the undistinguished features, the thin sandy hair, this man had the same defensiveness, the same humdrum turn of speech. A muscle twitched at the corner of his mouth. Anyone less like Douglas Quadrant would have been difficult to imagine.
‘Tell me about your relationship with Margaret Godfrey,’ Wexford said.
Drury looked startled.
‘It wasn’t a relationship,’ he said.
What did he think he was being accused of? Burden wondered.
‘She was one of my girl friends. She was just a kid at school. I met her at chapel and took her out . . . what, a dozen times.’
‘When did you first take her out, Mr Drury?’
‘It’s a long time ago. Twelve years, thirteen years . . . I can’t remember.’ He looked at his hands on which the crusts of earth were drying. ‘Will you excuse me if I go and have a bit of a wash?’
He went out of the room. Through the open serving hatch Burden saw him run the hot tap and swill his hands under it. Wexford moved out of Drury’s line of vision and towards the bookcase. Among the Penguins and the Reader’s Digests was a volume covered in navy-blue suède. Wexford took it out quickly, read the inscription and handed it to Burden.
It was the same printing, the same breathless loving style. Above the title – The Picture of Dorian Gray – Burden read:
Man cannot live on wine alone, Minna, but this is the very best bread and butter. Farewell, Doon, July, 1951.