From Doon With Death

‘We’d like to go over the house again,’ Burden said, ‘if you wouldn’t mind leaving me the key.’

‘I don’t care what you do,’ Parsons said. ‘The minister’s asked me to Sunday dinner. I shan’t be back till this afternoon.’ He began to clear his breakfast things from the table, putting the teapot, the marmalade jar away carefully in the places the dead woman had appointed for them. Burden watched him pick up the Sunday paper, unopened and unread, and tip his toast crusts on it before depositing it in a bucket beneath the sink. ‘I’m selling this place as soon as I can,’ he said.

‘My wife thought of going along to the service,’ Burden said.

Parsons kept his back turned to him. He poured water from a kettle over the single cup, the saucer, the plate.

‘I’m glad,’ he said. ‘I thought people might like to come, people who won’t be able to get along to the funeral tomorrow.’ The sink was stained with brown now; crumbs and tea-leaves clung along a greasy tide-mark. ‘I suppose you haven’t got a lead yet? On the killer, I mean.’ It was grotesque. Then Burden remembered what this man had read while his wife knitted.

‘Not yet.’

He dried the crockery, then his hand, on the tea towel.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said wearily. ‘It won’t bring her back.’

It was going to be a hot day, the first really hot day of the summer. In the High Street the heat was already making water mirages, lakes that sparkled and then vanished as Burden approached; in the road where actual water had lain the night before phantom water gleamed on the tar. Cars were beginning the nose-to-tail pilgrimage to the coast and at the junction Gates was directing the traffic, his arms flailing in blue shirt sleeves. Burden felt the weight of his own jacket.

Wexford was waiting for him in his office. In spite of the open windows the air was still.

‘The air conditioning works better when they’re shut,’ Burden suggested.

Wexford walked up and down, sniffing the sunlight.

‘It feels better this way,’ he said. ‘We’ll wait till eleven. Then we’ll go.’

‘Thank God,’ Wexford said almost piously. ‘So far so good.’

Parsons had given them the back-door key and they let themselves silently into the kitchen. Burden had thought this house would always be cold, but now, in the heat of the day, it felt stuffy and smelt of stale food and frowsty unwashed linen.

The silence was absolute. Wexford went into the hall, Burden following. They trod carefully lest the old boards should betray them. Parsons’ jacket and raincoat hung on the hallstand, and on the little square table among a pile of circulars, a dirty handkerchief and a heap of slit envelopes, something gleamed. Burden came closer and stared, knowing better than to touch it. He pushed the other things aside and together they looked at a key with a horseshoe charm on the end of a silver chain.

‘In here,’ Wexford whispered, mouthing the words and making no sound.

Mrs Parsons’ drawing-room was hot and dusty, but nothing was out of place. Wexford’s searchers had replaced everything as they had found it, even to the vase of plastic roses that screened the grate. The sun, streaming through closed windows, showed a myriad dance of dust particles in its shafts. Otherwise all was still.

Wexford and Burden stood behind the door, waiting. It seemed like an age before anything happened at all. Then, when it did, Burden could hardly believe his eyes.

The bay window revealed a segment of deserted street, bright grey in the strong light and sharply cut by the short shadows of trees in the gardens opposite. There was no colour apart from this grey and sunlit green. Then, from the right-hand side, as if into a film shot, a woman appeared walking quickly. She was as gaudy as a kingfisher, a technicolor queen in orange and jade. Her hair, a shade darker than the shirt, swung across her face like heavy drapery. She pushed open the gate, her nails ten garnets on the peeling wood, and scuttled out of sight towards the back door. Helen Missal had come at last to her schoolfellow’s house.

Wexford laid his finger unnecessarily to his lips. He gazed upwards at the ornate ceiling. From high above them came a faint footfall. Someone else had heard the high heels of their visitor.

Through the crack between the door and its frame, a quarter-inch-wide slit, Burden could see a knife-edge section of staircase. Up till now it had been empty, a vertical line of wallpaper above wooden banister. He felt the sweat start in his armpits. A stair squeaked and at the same moment a hinge gave a soft moan as the back door swung open.

Burden kept his eyes on the bright, sword-like line. He tensed, scarcely daring to breathe, as the wallpaper and the wood were for a second obscured by a flash of black hair, dark cheek, white shirt shadowed with blue. Then, no more. He was not even certain where the two met, but it was not far from where he stood, and he felt rather than heard their meeting, so heavy and so desperate had the silence become.

Four people alone in the heat. Burden found himself praying that he could keep as still and at the same time as alert as Wexford. At last the heels tapped again. They had moved into the dining-room.

It was the man who spoke first and Burden had to strain to hear what he said. His voice was low and held under taut control.

‘You should never have come here,’ Douglas Quadrant said.

‘I had to see you.’ She spoke with loud urgency. ‘You said you’d meet me yesterday, but you never came. You could have come, Douglas.’

‘I couldn’t get away. I was going to, but Wexford came.’

His voice died away and the rest of the sentence went unheard.

‘Afterwards you could. I know, I met him.’

In the drawing-room Wexford made a small movement of satisfaction as another loose end was tied.

‘I thought . . .’ They heard her give a nervous laugh. ‘I thought I’d said too much. I almost did . . .’

‘You shouldn’t have said anything.’

‘I didn’t. I stopped myself. Douglas, you’re hurting me!’

His reply was something savage, something they couldn’t hear.

Helen Missal was taking no pains to keep her voice down and Burden wondered why one of them should show so much caution, the other hardly any.

‘Why have you come here? What are you looking for?’

‘You knew I would come. When you telephoned me last night and told me Parsons would be out, you knew it . . .’

They heard her moving about the room and Burden imagined the little straight nose curling in disgust, the fingers outstretched to the shabby cushions, drawing lines in the dust on the galleried sideboard. Her laughter, disdainful and quite humourless, was a surprise.

‘Have you ever seen such a horrible house? Fancy, she lived here, she actually lived here. Little Meg Godfrey . . .’

It was then that his control snapped and, caution forgotten, he shouted aloud.

‘I hated her! My God, Helen, how I hated her! I never saw her, not till this week, but it was she who made my life what it was.’ The ornaments on the tiered shelves rattled and Burden guessed that Quadrant was leaning against the sideboard, near enough for him to touch him but for the intervening wall. ‘I didn’t want her to die, but I’m glad she’s dead!’

‘Darling!’ They heard nothing, but Burden knew as if he could see her that she was clinging to Quadrant now, her arms around his neck. ‘Let’s go away now. Please. There’s nothing here for you.’

He had shaken her off violently. The little cry she gave told them that, and the slithering sound of a chair skidding across lino.

‘I’m going back upstairs,’ Quadrant said, ‘and you must go. Now, Helen. You’re as conspicuous in that get-up as . . .’ They heard him pause, picking a metaphor, ‘ . . . as a parrot in a dovecote.’

She seemed to stagger out, crippled both by her heels and his rejection. Burden, catching momentary sight of flame and blue through the door crack, made a tiny movement, but Wexford’s fingers closed on his arm. Above them in the silent house someone was impatient with waiting. The books crashing to the floor two storeys up sounded like thunder when the storm is directly overhead.

Douglas Quadrant heard it too. He leapt for the stairs, but Wexford reached them first, and they confronted each other in the hall. Helen Missal screamed and flung her arm across her mouth.

‘Oh God!’ she cried. ‘Why wouldn’t you come when I told you?’

‘No one is going anywhere, Mrs Missal,’ Wexford said, ‘except upstairs.’ He picked up the key in his handkerchief.

Quadrant was immobile now, arm raised, for all the world, Burden thought, like a fencer in his white shirt, a hunter hunted and snared. His face was blank. He stared at Wexford for a moment and closed his eyes.

At last he said, ‘Shall we go, then?’

They ascended slowly, Wexford leading, Burden at the rear. It was a ridiculous procession, Burden thought. Taking their time, hands to the banister, they were like a troop of house hunters with an order to view or relatives bidden upstairs to visit the bedridded.

At the first turn Wexford said:

‘I think we will all go into the room where Minna kept her books, the books that Doon gave her. The case began here in this house and perhaps there will be some kind of poetic justice in ending it here. But the poetry books have gone, Mr Quadrant. As Mrs Missal said, there is nothing here for you.’

He said no more, but the sounds from above had grown louder. Then, as Wexford put his hand to the door of the little room where he and Burden had read the poetry aloud, a faint sigh came from the other side.

When the door opened and she saw Wexford she seemed to make an immense effort to behave as if this were her home, as if she was hunting in her own attic and the four who entered were unexpected guests. For a second Burden had the fantastic notion that she would attempt to shake hands. But no words came and her hands seemed paralysed. She began to back away from them and towards the window, gradually raising her arms and pressing her be-ringed fingers against her cheeks. As she moved her heels caught one of the scattered books, a girls’ annual, and she stumbled, half falling across the larger of the two trunks. A star-shaped mark showed on her cheek-bone where a ring had dug into the flesh.

She lay where she had fallen until Quadrant stepped forward and lifted her against him. Then she moaned softly and turned her face, hiding it in his shoulder.

In the doorway Helen Missal stamped and said, ‘I want to go home!’

‘Will you close the door, Inspector Burden?’ Wexford went to the tiny window and unlatched it as calmly as if he was in his own office. ‘I think we’ll have some air,’ he said.

It was a tiny shoe-box of a room and khakicoloured like the interior of a shoe-box. There was no breeze but the casement swung open to let in a more wholesome heat.

‘I’m afraid there isn’t much room,’ Wexford said like an apologetic host. ‘Inspector Burden and I will stand and you, Mrs Missal, can sit on the other trunk.’

To Burden’s astonishment she obeyed him. He saw that she was keeping her eyes on the Chief Inspector’s face like a subject under hypnosis. She had grown very white and suddenly looked much more than her actual age. The red hair might have been a wig bedizening a middle-aged woman.

Quadrant had been silent, nursing his wife as if she were a fractious child. Now he said with something of his former scorn:

‘Sûreté methods, Chief Inspector? How very melodramatic.’

Wexford ignored him. He stood by the window, his face outlined against clear blue.

‘I’m going to tell you a love story,’ he said, ‘the story of Doon and Minna.’ Nobody moved but Quadrant. He reached for his jacket on the trunk where Helen Missal sat, took a gold case from the pocket and lit a cigarette with a match. ‘When Margaret Godfrey first came here,’ Wexford began, ‘she was sixteen. She’d been brought up by old-fashioned people and as a result she appeared prim and shockable. Far from being the London girl come to startle the provinces, she was a suburban orphan thrown on the sophisticated country. Isn’t that so, Mrs Missal?’

‘You can put it that way if you like.’

‘In order to hide her gaucheness she put on a curious manner, a manner compounded of secretiveness, remoteness, primness. To a lover these can make up a fascinating mixture. They fascinated Doon.

‘Doon was rich and clevcer and good-looking. I don’t doubt that for a time Minna – that’s the name Doon gave her and I shall refer to her by it – Minna was bowled over. Doon could give her things she could never have afforded to buy and so for a time Doon could buy her love or rather her companionship; for this was a love of the mind and nothing physical entered into it.’

Quadrant smoked frercely. He inhaled deeply and the cigarette end glowed.

‘I have said Doon was clever,’ Wexford went on. ‘Perhaps I should add that brilliance of intellect doesn’t always go with self-sufficiency. So it was with Doon. Success, the flowering of ambition, actual achievement depended in this case on close contact with the chosen one – Minna. But Minna was only waiting, biding her time. Because, you see . . .’ He looked at the three people slowly and severally. ‘ . . . You know that Doon, in spite of the wealth, the intellect, the good looks, had one insurmountable disadvantage, a disadvantage greater than any deformity, particularly to a woman of Minna’s background, that no amount of time or changed circumstances could alter.’

Helen Missal nodded sharply, her eyes alight with memory. Leaning against her husband, Fabia Quadrant was crying softly.

‘So when Dudley Drury came along she dropped Doon without a backward glance. All the expensive books Doon had given her she hid in a trunk and she never looked at them again. Drury was dull and ordinary – callow is the word, isn’t it, Mrs Quadrant? Not passionate or possessive. Those are the adjectives I would apply to Doon. But Drury was without Doon’s disadvantage, so Drury won.’

‘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.