From Doon With Death

Chapter 15

He would have let them arrest him, would have gone with them, Burden thought, like a lamb. Now, assured of his immunity, his aplomb had gone and panic, the last emotion Burden would have associated with Quadrant, showed in his eyes.

His wife pulled herself away from him and sat up. During Wexford’s long speeches she had been sobbing and her lips and eyelids were swollen. Her tears, perhaps because crying is a weakness of the young, made her look like a girl. She was wearing a yellow dress made of some expensive crease-less fabric that fell straight and smooth like a tunic. So far she had said nothing. Now she looked elated, breathless with unspoken words.

‘When I knew that Doon was a woman,’ Wexford said, ‘almost everything fell into place. It explained so much of Mrs Parsons’ secrecy, why she deceived her husband and yet could feel she wasn’t deceiving him; why Drury thought she was ashamed of Doon; why in self disgust she hid the books . . .’

And why Mrs Katz, knowing Doon’s sex but not her name, was so curious, Burden thought. It explained the letter that had puzzled them the day before. I don’t know why you should be scared. There was never anything in that . . . The cousin, the confidante, had known all along. For her it was secret but a fact of which she had so long been aware that she had thought it unnecessary to tell the Colorado police chief until he had probed. Then it had come out as an artless postscript to the interview.

‘Say, what is this?’ he had said to Wexford. ‘You figured it was a guy?’

Helen Missal had moved back into the shade. The trunk she sat on was against the wall and the sun made a brighter splash on her bright blue skirt, leaving her face in shadow. Her hands twitched in her lap and the window was reflected ten times in her mirror-like nails.

‘Your behaviour was peculiar, Mrs Missal,’ Wexford said. ‘Firstly you lied to me in saying you didn’t know Mrs Parsons. Perhaps you really didn’t recognize her from the photograph. But with people like you it’s so difficult to tell. You cry Wolf! so often that in the end we can only find out what actually happened from the conversation of others or by things you let slip accidentally.’

She gave him a savage glance.

‘For God’s sake give me one of those cigarettes, Douglas,’ she said.

‘I’d made up my mind that you were of no significance in this case,’ Wexford went on, ‘until something happened on Friday night. I came into your drawing-room and told your husband I wanted to speak to his wife. You were only annoyed but Mr Quadrant was terrified. He did something very awkward then and I could see that he was nervous. I assumed when you told me that you’d been out with him that he didn’t want us to find out about it. But not a bit of it. He was almost embarrassingly forthcoming.’

‘So I thought and I thought and at last I realized that I’d been looking at that little scene from upside down. I remembered the exact words I’d used and who I’d been looking at . . . but we’ll leave that now and pass on.’

‘Your old headmistress remembered you, Mrs Missal. Everyone thought you’d go on the stage, she said. And you said the same thing. “I wanted to act!” you said. You weren’t lying then. That was in 1951, the year Minna left Doon for Drury. I was working on the assumption that Doon was ambitious and her separation from Minna frustrated that ambition. If I was looking for a spoiled life I didn’t have to go any further.'

‘In late adolescence Doon had been changed from a clever, passionate, hopeful girl into someone bitter and disillusioned. You fitted into that pattern. Your gaiety was really very brittle. Oh, yes, you had your affairs, but wasn’t that consistent too? Wasn’t that a way of consoling yourself for something real and true you couldn’t have?’

She interrupted him then and shouted defiantly:

‘So what?’ She stood up and kicked one of the books so that it skimmed across the floor and struck the wall at Wexford’s feet. ‘You must be mad if you think I’m Doon. I wouldn’t have a disgusting . . . a revolting thing like that for another woman!’ Flinging back her shoulders, projecting her sex at them, she denied perversion as if it would show in some deformity of her body. ‘I hate that sort of thing. It makes me feel sick! I hated it at school. I saw it all along, all the time . . .’

Wexford picked up the book she had kicked and took another from his pocket. The bloom on the pale green suede looked like dust.

‘This was love,’ he said quietly. Helen Missal breathed deeply. ‘It wasn’t disgusting or revolting. To Doon it was beautiful. Minna had only to listen and be gentle, only to be kind.’ He looked out of the window as if engrossed by a flock of birds flying in leaf-shaped formation. ‘Minna was only asked to go out with Doon, have lunch with her, drive around the lanes where they’d walked when they were young, listen when Doon talked about the dreams which never came to anything. Listen,’ he said. ‘It was like this.’ His finger was in the book, in its centre. He let it fall open at the marked page and began to read:

‘If love were what the rose is; And I were like the leaf, Our lives would grow together, In sad or singing weather . . .’

Fabia Quadrant moved and spoke. Her voice seemed to come from far away, adding to the stanza out of old memory:

‘Blown fields or flowerful closes, Green pleasure or grey grief . . .

They were the first words she had uttered. Her husband seized her wrist, clamping his fingers to the thin bones. If he had only dared, Burden thought, he would have covered her mouth.

‘If love were what the rose is,’ she said, ‘And I were like the leaf.’

She stopped on a high note, a child waiting for the applause that should have come twelve years before and now would never come. Wexford had listened, fanning himself rhythmically with the book. He took the dream from her gently and said:

‘But Minna didn’t listen. She was bored.’ To the woman who had capped his verse he said earnestly, ‘She wasn’t Minna any more, you see. She was a housewife, an ex-teacher who would have liked to talk about cooking and knitting patterns with someone of her own kind.’

‘I’m sure you remember,’ he said conversationally, ‘how muggy it got on Tuesday afternoon. It must have been very warm in the car. Doon and Minna had had their lunch, a much bigger lunch than Minna would have had here. She was bored and she fell asleep.’ His voice rose but not in anger. ‘I don’t say she deserved to die then, but she asked for death!’

Fabia Quadrant shook off her husband’s hand and came towards Wexford. She moved with dignity to the only one who had ever understood. Her husband had protected her, Burden thought, her friends had recoiled, the one she loved had only been bored. Neither laughing nor flinching, a country policeman had understood.

‘She did deserve to die! She did!’ She took hold of the lapels of Wexford’s coat and stroked the stuff. ‘I loved her so. May I tell you about it because you understand? You see, I had only my letters.’ Her face was pensive now, her voice soft and unsteady. ‘No books to write.’ She shook her head slowly, a child rejecting a hard lesson. ‘No poems. But Douglas let me write my letters, didn’t you, Douglas? He was so frightened . . .’ Emotion came bubbling up, flooding across her face till her cheeks burned, and the heat from the window bathed her.

‘There was nothing to be frightened of!’ The words were notes in a crescendo, the last a scream. ‘If only they’d let me love her . . . love her, love her . . .’ She took her hands away and tore them through the crest of hair. ‘Love her, love her . . .’

‘Oh God!’ Quadrant said, crouching on the trunk. ‘Oh God!’

‘Love her, love her . . . green pleasure or grey grief . . .’ She fell against Wexford and gasped into his shoulder. He put his arm around her hard, forgetting the rules, and closed the window.

Still holding her, he said to Burden: ‘You can take Mrs Missal away now. See she gets home all right.’

Helen Missal drooped, a battered flower. She kept her eyes down and Burden edged her through the door, out onto the landing and down the hot dark stair. Now was not the time, but he knew Wexford must soon begin:

‘Fabia Quadrant, I must tell you that you are not obliged to say anything in answer to the charge but that anything you do say . . .’

The love story was ended and the last verse of the poem recited.