From Doon With Death

Chapter 12

The house looked forbidding at night. In Wexford’s headlights the rough grey granite glittered and the leaves of the flowerless wistaria which clung to it showed up a livid yellowish green.

Someone was dining with the Quadrants. Wexford pulled up beside the black Daimler and went up the steps to the front door. He rang the bell several times; then the door was opened, smoothly, almost offensively slowly, by Quadrant himself.

For dining with Helen Missal he had worn a lounge suit. At home, with his wife and guests, he ascended to evening dress. But there was nothing vulgar about Quadrant, no fancy waistcoat, no flirtation with midnight blue. The dinner jacket was black and faultless, the shirt - Wexford liked to hit on an apt quotation himself when he could - ‘whiter than new snow on a raven’s back’.

He said nothing but seemed to stare right through Wexford at the shadowy garden beyond. There was an insolent majesty about him which the tapestries that framed his figure did nothing to dispel. Then Wexford told himself sharply that this man was, after all, only a provincial solicitor.

‘I’d like another word with your wife, Mr Quadrant.’

‘At this hour?’

Wexford looked at his watch and at the same time Quadrant lifted his own cuff - links of silver and onyx glinted in the muted lights - raised his eyebrow at the square platinum dial on his wrist and said:

‘It’s extremely inconvenient.’ He made no move to let Wexford enter. ‘My wife isn’t a particularly strong woman and we do happen to have my parents-in-law dining with us . . .’

Old man Rogers and his missus, Pomfret Hall, Wexford thought vulgarly. He stood stolidly, not smiling.

‘Oh, very well,’ Quadrant said, ‘but keep it brief, will you?’

There was a faint movement in the hall behind him. A brown dress, a wisp of coffee-coloured stuff, appeared for an instant against the embroidered trees on the hangings, then Mrs Quadrant’s nanny scuttled away.

‘You’d better go into the library.’ Quadrant showed him into a room furnished with blue leather chairs. ‘I won’t offer you a drink since you’re on duty.’ The words were a little offensive. Then Quadrant gave his quick cat-like smile. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘while I fetch my wife.’ He turned with the slow graceful movement of a dance measure, paused briefly and closed the door behind him, shutting Wexford in.

So he wasn’t going to let him bust in on any family party, Wexford thought. The man was nervous, hiding some nebulous fear in the manner of men of his kind, under a massive self-control.

As he waited he looked about him at the books. There were hundreds here, tier upon tier of them on every wall. Plenty of Victorian poetry and plenty of Victorian novels, but just as much verse from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Wexford shrugged. Kingsmarkham was surrounded by such houses as this one, a bastion of affluence, houses with libraries, libraries with books.

Fabia Quadrant came in almost soundlessly. Her long dress was black and he remembered that black was not a colour but just a total absorption of light. Her face was gay, a little hectic, and she greeted him cheerfully.

‘Hallo again, Chief Inspector.’

‘I won’t keep you long, Mrs Quadrant.’

‘Won’t you sit down?’

‘Thank you. Just for a moment.’ He watched her sit down and fold her hands in her lap. The diamond on her left hand burned in the dark nest between her knees. ‘I want you to tell me everything you can remember about Dudley Drury,’ he said.

‘Well, it was my last term at school,’ she said. ‘Margaret told me she’d got a boyfriend - her first, perhaps. I don’t know. It’s only twelve years ago, Chief Inspector, but we weren’t like the adolescents of today. It wasn’t remarkable to be without a boyfriend at eighteen. Do you understand?’ She spoke clearly and slowly, as if she were instructing a child. Something about her manner angered Wexford and he wondered if she had ever had to hurry in her life, ever had to snatch a meal standing up or run to catch a train. ‘It was a little unusual, perhaps, but not odd, not remarkable. Margaret didn’t introduce me to her friend but I remember his name because it was like Drury Lane and I had never heard it before as a surname.’

Wexford tried to crush his impatience.

‘What did she tell you about him, Mrs Quadrant?

‘Very little.’ She paused and looked at him as if she was anxious not to betray a man in danger. ‘There was only one thing. She said he was jealous, jealous to the point of fanaticism.’

‘I see.’

‘He didn’t care for her to have any other friends. I had the impression that he was very emotional and possessive.’

Traits you would hardly understand, Wexford thought, or would you? He remembered Quadrant’s inconstancies and wondered again. Her voice, uncharacteristically sharp and censorious, interrupted his reverie.

‘He was very upset that she was moving back to London. She said he was in a terrible state, his life wouldn’t be worth living without her. You can imagine the sort of thing.’

‘But he’d only known her a few weeks.’

‘I’m simply telling you what she said, Chief Inspector.’ She smiled as if she was an immense distance from Drury and Margaret Godfrey, light years, an infinity of space. ‘She didn’t seem to care. Margaret wasn’t a sensitive person.’

Soft footsteps sounded in the hall and behind Wexford the door opened.

‘Oh, there you are,’ Fabia Quadrant said. ‘Chief Inspector Wexford and I have been talking about young love. It all seems to me rather like the expense of spirit in a waste of shame.’

But that wasn’t young love, Wexford thought, trying to place the quotation. It was much more like what he had seen on Helen Missal’s face that afternoon.

‘Just one small point, Mrs. Quadrant,’ he said. ‘Mrs Parsons seems to have been interested in Victorian poetry during the two years she lived in Flagford. I’ve wondered if there was any special significance behind that.’

‘Nothing sinister, if that’s what you mean,’ she said. ‘Nineteenth-century verse was part of the Advanced English syllabus for Higher School Certificate when we took it in 1951. I believe they call it “A” Levels now.’

Then Quadrant did a strange thing. Crossing the library between Wexford and his wife, he took a book out of the shelves. He put his hand on it without hesitation. Wexford had the impression be could have picked it out blindfold or in the dark.

‘Oh, Douglas,’ Mrs Quadrant said, ‘he doesn’t want to see that.’

‘Look,’

Wexford looked and read from an ornate label that had been pasted inside the cover:

Presented to Fabia Rogers for distinguished results in Higher School Certificate, 1951.

In his job it didn’t do to be at a loss for words, but now he could find no phrase to foster the pride on Quadrant’s dark face, or mitigate the embarrassment on his wife’s.

‘I’ll be going now,’ he said at last.

Quadrant put the book back abruptly and took his wife’s arm. She rested her fingers firmly on his jacket sleeve. Suddenly they seemed very close, but, for all that, it was a strangely sexless communion. Brother and sister, Wexford thought, a Ptolemy and a Cleopatra.

‘Good night, Mrs Quadrant. You’ve been most cooperative. I apologize for troubling you . . .’ He looked again at his watch. ‘At this hour,’ he said, savouring Quadrant’s enmity.

‘No trouble, Chief Inspector.’ She laughed deprecatingly, confidently, as if she was really a happy wife with a devoted husband.

Together they showed him out. Quadrant was urbane, once more courteous, but the hand beneath the sleeve where his wife’s fingers lay was clenched and the knuckles showed like white flints under the brown skin.

A bicycle was propped against the police-station wall, a bicycle with a basket, practical-looking lights and a bulging tool bag. Wexford walked into the foyer and almost collided with a fat fair woman wearing a leather windcheater over a dirndl skirt.

‘I beg your pardon.’

‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘No bones broken. I suppose you wouldn’t be him, this Chief Inspector bod?’

Behind the desk the sergeant grinned slightly, changed the grin to a cough, and covered his mouth with his hand.

‘I am Chief Inspector Wexford. Can I help you?’ She fished something out of her shoulder bag.

‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I’m supposed to be helping you. One of your blokes came to my cottage . . .’

‘Miss Clarke,’ Wexford said. ‘Won’t you come into my office?’

His hopes had suddenly risen unaccountably. It made a change for someone to come to him. Then they fell again when he saw what she had in her hand. It was only another photograph.

‘I found it,’ she said, ‘among a lot of other junk. If you’re sort of scouring the joint for people who knew Margaret it might help.’

The picture was an enlarged snapshot. It showed a dozen girls disposed in two rows and it was obviously not an official photograph.

‘Di took it,’ Miss Clarke said. ‘Di Stevens that was. Best part of the sixth form are there.’ She looked at him and made a face as if she was afraid that by bringing it she had done something silly. ‘You can keep it if it’s any use.’

Wexford put it in his pocket, intending to look at it later, although he doubted whether it would be needed now. As he was showing Miss Clarke out he met Sergeant Martin coming back from his interview with the manager of the supermarket. No records had been kept of the number of pink hoods sold during the week, only the total sale of hoods in all colours. The stock had come in on Monday and Saturday night twenty-six hoods had been sold. The manager thought that about twenty-five per cent of the stock had been pink and on a very rough estimate he guessed that about six pink ones had been sold.

Wexford sent Martin over to Flagford in search of Janet Tipping. Then he rang Drury’s number. Burden answered. They hadn’t found anything in the house. Mrs Drury was staying with her sister in Hastings, but the sister had no telephone.

‘Martin’ll have to get down there,’ Wexford said. ‘I can’t spare you. What did Spellman say?’

‘They closed at five-thirty sharp on Tuesday. Drury collected his wife’s vegetable order on Wednesday.’

‘What’s he buying vegetables for, anyway? He grows them in the garden.’

‘The order was for tomatoes, a cucumber and a marrow, sir.’

‘That’s fruit, not vegetables. Talking of gardening, I’m going to get some lights over to you and they can start digging. I reckon that purse and that key could be interred with Drury’s potatoes.’

Dudley Drury was in a pitiful state when Wexford got back to Sparta Grove. He was pacing up and down but he looked weak at the knees.

‘He’s been sick, sir,’ Gates said.

‘Hard cheese,’ Wexford said. ‘What d’you think I am, a health visitor?’

The search of the house had been completed and the place looked a lot tidier than it had before they began. When the lighting equipment arrived Bryant and Gates started digging over the potato patch. White-faced, Drury watched from the dining-room windows as the clods of earth were lifted and turned. This man, Wexford thought, had once said life would be unlivable without Margaret Parsons. Had he really meant it would be unendurable, if another possessed her?

‘I’d like you to come down to the station now, Drury.’

‘Are you going to arrest me?’

‘I’d just like to ask you a few more questions,’ Wexford said. ‘Just a few more questions.’

Meanwhile Burden had driven over to Pomfret, awakened the ironmonger and checked his nephew’s alibi.

‘Dud always gets off early on Tuesdays,’ he grumbled ‘Gets earlier and earlier every week, it does. More like five than a quarter past.’

‘So you’d say he left around five last Tuesday?’

‘I wouldn’t like to say five. Ten past, a quarter past. I was busy in the shop. Dud came in and said, “I’m off now, Uncle.” I’d no call to go checking up on him, had I?’

‘It might have been ten past or a quarter past?’

‘It might have been twenty past for all I know.’

It was still raining softly. The main road was black and slickly gleaming. Whatever Miss Sweeting may have seen in the afternoon, the lane and the wood were deserted now. The top branches of the trees moved in the wind. Burden slowed down, thinking how strange it was that an uninteresting corner of the countryside should suddenly have become, because of the use to which someone had put it, a. sinister and dreadful hiding place, the focal point of curious eyes and the goal, perhaps for years to come, of half the visitors to the neighbourhood. From henceforth Flagford Castle would take second place to Prewett’s wood in the guide book of the ghoulish.

He met Martin on the forecourt of the police station. Janet Tipping couldn’t be found. As usual on Saturday night she had gone out with her boyfriend, and her mother had told Martin with a show of aggressive indifference that it was nothing for her to return as late as one or two o’clock. The cottage was dirty and the mother a slattern. She didn’t know where her daughter was and, on being asked to hazard a guess, said that Janet and her friend had probably gone for a spin to the coast on his motor-bike.

Burden knocked on Wexford’s door and the Chief Inspector shouted to him to come in.

Drury and Wexford sat facing each other.

‘Let’s go over Tuesday evening again,’ Wexford was saying. Burden moved silently into one of the steel and tweed chairs. The clock on the wall, between the filing cabinet where Doon’s books still lay and the map of Kingsmarkham, said that it wanted ten minutes to midnight.

‘I left the shop at a quarter past five and I drove straight to Flagford. When I got to Spellman’s they were closed so I went down the side and looked round the greenhouses. I called out a couple of times but they’d all gone. Look, I’ve told you all this.’

Wexford said quietly, ‘All right, Drury. Let’s say I’ve got a bad memory.’

Drury’s voice had become very high and strained. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead.

‘I had a look round to see if the order was anywhere about, but it wasn’t.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I was a bit fed-up on account of my wife wanting the vegetables for tea. I drove slowly through the village because I thought I might see Mr Spellman and get him to let me have the order, but I didn’t see him.’

‘Did you see anybody you know, anybody you used to know when you lived in Flagford?’

‘There were some kids,’ Drury said. ‘I don’t know who they were. Look, I’ve told you the rest. I went into The Swan and this girl served me . . .’

‘What did you have to drink?’

‘A half of bitter.’ He blushed. At the lie, Burden wondered, or at the breach of faith? ‘The place was empty. I coughed and after a bit this girl came out from behind the back. I ordered the bitter and paid for it. She’s bound to remember.’

‘Don’t worry, we’ll ask her.’

‘She didn’t stay in the bar. I was all alone. When I’d finished my drink I went back to Spellman’s to see if there was anyone about. I didn’t see anyone and I went home.’

Drury jumped up and gripped the edge of the desk. Wexford’s papers quivered and the telephone receiver rattled in its’ rest.

‘Look,’ he shouted, ‘I’ve told you. I wouldn’t have laid a finger on Margaret.’

‘Sit down,’ Wexford said and Drury crouched back, his face twitching. ‘You were very jealous of her, weren’t you?’ His tone had become conversational, understanding. ‘You didn’t want her to have any friends but you.’

‘That’s not true.’ He tried to shout but his voice was out of control. ‘She was just a girlfriend. I don’t know what you mean, jealous. Of course I didn’t want her going about with other boys when she was with me.’

‘Were you her lover, Drury?’

‘No, I was not.’ He flushed again at the affront. ‘You’ve got no business to ask, me things like that. I was only eighteen.’

‘You gave her a lot of presents, didn’t you, a lot of books?’

‘Doon gave her those books, not me. She’d finished with Doon when she came out with me. I never gave her any thing. I couldn’t afford it.’

‘Where’s Foyle’s, Drury?’

‘It’s in London. It’s a bookshop.’

‘Did you ever buy any books there and give them to Margaret Godfrey?’

‘I tell you I never gave her any books.’

‘What about The Picture of Dorian Gray? You didn’t give her that one. Why did you keep it? Because you thought it would shock her?’

Drury said dully, ‘I’ve given you a specimen of my printing.’

‘Printing changes a lot in twelve years. Tell me about the book.’

‘I have told you. We were in her aunt’s cottage and the book came in a parcel. She opened it and when she saw who’d sent it she said I could have it.’

At last they left him to sit in silence with the sergeant. Together they went outside.

‘I’ve sent Drury’s printing over to that handwriting bloke in St Mary’s Road,’ Wexford said. ‘But printing, Mike, and twelve years ago! It looks as if whoever printed those inscriptions did so because his handwriting was poor or difficult to read. Drury’s writing is very round and clear. I got the feeling he doesn’t write much and his writing’s never matured.’

‘He’s the only person we’ve talked to who called Mrs Parsons Minna,’ Burden said, ‘and who knew about Doon. He had one of those hood things in his house and while it could be one of the other five it could be Mrs Parson’s. If he left his uncle’s at five-ten or five-fifteen even he could have been at Prewett’s by twenty past and by then Bysouth had had those cows in for nearly half an hour.’

The telephones had been silent for a long time now, an unusually long time for the busy police station. What had happened to the call they had been awaiting since lunchtime? Wexford seemed to read his thoughts almost uncannily.

‘We ought to hear from Colorado any minute,’ he said. ‘Calculating roughly that they’re about seven hours behind us in time, suppose Mrs Katz was out for the day, she’d be getting home just about now. It’s half past twelve here and that makes it between five, and six in the West of the United States. Mrs Katz has got little kids. I reckon she and her family have been out for the day and they haven’t been able to get hold of her. But she ought to be coming home about now and I hope they won’t be too long.’

Burden jumped as the bell pealed.’ He lifted the receiver and gave it to Wexford. As soon as he spoke Burden could tell it was just another bit of negative evidence.

‘Yes,’ Wexford said. ‘Yes, thank you very much. I see. Can’t be helped . . . Yes, good night.’

He turned back to Burden. ‘That was Egham, the hand writing fellow. He says Drury could have printed those inscriptions. There’s no question of the printing being disguised, but he says it was very mature for a boy of eighteen and if it’s Drury’s he would have expected a much greater development than Drury’s present specimen shows.’

‘Moreover, there’s another point in his favour. I took a sample from the treads of his tires and although they haven’t finished with it, the lab boys are pretty certain that car hadn’t been parked in a muddy lane since it was new. The stuff I got was mostly sand and dust. Let’s have some tea, Mike.’

Burden cocked his thumb at the door.

‘A cup for him, sir?’

‘My God, yes,’ Wexford said. ‘How many times do I have to tell you? This isn’t Mexico.’