From Doon With Death

Chapter 1

‘I think you’re getting things a bit out of proportion, Mr Parsons,’ Burden said. He was tired and he’d been going to take his wife to the pictures. Besides, the first things he’d noticed when Parsons brought him into the room were the books in the rack by the fireplace. The titles were enough to give the most level-headed man the jitters, quite enough to make a man anxious where no ground for anxiety existed: Palmer the Poisoner, The Trial of Madeleine Smith, Three Drowned Brides, Famous Trials, Notable British Trials.

‘Don’t you think your reading has ‘been preying on your mind?’

‘I’m interested in crime,’ Parsons said. ‘It’s a hobby of mine.’

‘I can see that.’ Burden wasn’t going to sit down if he could avoid it. ‘Look, you can’t say your wife’s actually missing. You’ve been home one and a half hours and she isn’t here. That’s all. She’s probably gone to the pictures. As a matter of fact I’m on my way there now with my wife. I expect we’ll meet her coming out.’

‘Margaret wouldn’t do that, Mr Burden. I know her and you don’t. We’ve been married nearly six years and in all that time I’ve never come home to an empty house.’

‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll drop in on my way back. But you can bet your bottom dollar she’ll be home by then.’ He started moving towards the door. ‘Look, get on to the station if you like. It won’t do any harm.’

‘No, I won’t do that. It was just with you living down the road and being an inspector . . .’

And being off duty, Burden thought. If I was a doctor instead of a policeman I’d be able to have private patients on the side. I bet he wouldn’t be so keen on my services if there was any question of a fee.

Sitting in the half-empty dark cinema he thought: Well, it is funny. Normal ordinary wives as conventional as Mrs Parsons, wives who always have a meal ready for their husbands on the dot of six, don’t suddenly go off without leaving a note.

‘I thought you said this was a good film,’ he whispered to his wife.

‘Well, the critics liked it.’

‘Oh, critics,’ he said.

Another man, that could be it. But Mrs Parsons? Or it could be an accident. He’d been a bit remiss not getting Parsons to phone the station straight away.

‘Look, love,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand this. You stay and see the end I’ve got to get back to Parsons.’

‘I wish I’d married that reporter who was so keen on me.’

‘You must be joking,’ Burden said. ‘He’d have stayed out all night putting the paper to bed. Or the editor’s secretary.’

He charged up Tabard Road, then made himself stroll when he got to the Victorian house where Parsons lived. It was all in darkness, the curtains in the big bay downstairs undrawn. The step was whitened, the brass kerb above it polished. Mrs Parsons must have been a house-proud woman. Must have been? Why not, still was?

Parsons opened the door before he had a chance to knock. He still looked tidy, neatly dressed in an oldish suit, his tie knotted tight. But his face was greenish grey. It reminded Burden of a drowned face he had once seen on a mortuary slab. They had put the glasses back on the spongy nose to help the girl who had come to identify him.

‘She hasn’t come back,’ he said. His voice sounded as if he had a cold coming. But it was probably only fear.

‘Let’s have a cup of tea,’ Burden said. ‘Have a cup of tea and talk about it.’

‘I keep thinking what could have happened to her. It’s so open round here. I suppose it would be, being country.’

‘It’s those books you read,’ Burden said. ‘It’s not healthy.’ He looked again at the shiny paper covers. On the spine of one was a jumble of guns and knives against a blood-red background. ‘Not for a layman,’ he said. ‘Can I use your phone?’

‘It’s in the front room.’

‘I’ll get on to the station. There might be something from the hospitals.’

The frontroom looked as if nobody ever sat in it. With some dismay he noted its polished shabbiness. So far he hadn’t seen a stick of furniture that looked less than fifty years old. Burden went into all kinds of houses and he knew antique furniture when he saw it. But this wasn’t antique and. nobody could have chosen it because it was beautiful or rare. It was just old. Old enough to be cheap, Burden thought, and at the same time young enough not to be expensive. The kettle whistled and he heard Parsons fumbling with china in the kitchen. A cup crashed on the floor. It sounded as if they had kept the old concrete floor. It was enough to give anyone the creeps, he thought again, sitting in these high-ceilinged rooms, hearing unexplained inexplicable creaks from the stairs and the cupboard, reading about poison and hangings and blood.

‘I’ve reported your wife as missing,’ he said to Parsons. ‘There’s nothing from the hospitals.’

Parsons turned on the light in the back room and Burden followed him in. It must have a weak bulb under the parchment lampshade that hung from the centre of the ceiling. About sixty watts, he thought. The shade forced all the light down, leaving the ceiling, with its plaster decorations of bulbous fruit, dark and in the corners blotched with deeper shadow. Parsons put the cups down on the side board, a vast mahogany thing more like a fantastic wooden house than a piece of furniture, with its tiers and galleries and jutting beaded shelves. Burden sat down in a chair with wooden arms and seat of brown corduroy. The lino struck cold through the thick soles of his shoes.

‘Have you any idea at all where your wife could have gone?’

‘I’ve been trying to think. I’ve been racking my brains. I can’t think of anywhere.’

‘What about her friends? Her mother?’

‘Her mother’s dead. We haven’t got any friends here. We only came here six months ago.’

Burden stirred his tea. Outside it had been close, humid. Here in this thick-walled dark place, he supposed, it must always feel like winter.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t like to say this but somebody’s bound to ask you. It might as well be me. Could she have gone out with some man? I’m sorry, but I had to ask.’

‘Of course you had to ask. I know, it’s all in here.’ He tapped the bookcase. ‘Just routine enquiries, isn’t it? But you’re wrong. Not Margaret. It’s laughable.’ He paused, not laughing. ‘Margaret’s a good woman. She’s a lay preacher at the Wesleyan place down the road.’

No point in pursuing it, Burden thought. Others would ask him, probe into his private life whether he liked it or not; if she still hadn’t got home when the last train came in and the last bus had rolled into Kingsmarkham garage.

‘I suppose you’ve looked all over the house?’ he asked. He had driven down this road twice a day for a year but he couldn’t remember whether the house he was sitting in had two floors or three. His policeman’s brain tried to reassemble the retinal photograph on his policeman’s eye. A bay window at the bottom, two flat sash windows above it and - yes, two smaller ones above that under the slated eyelids of the roof. An ugly house, he thought, ugly and forbidding.

‘I looked in the bedrooms,’ Parsons said. He stopped pacing and hope coloured his cheeks. Fear whitened them again as he said: ‘You think she might be up in the attics? Fainted or something?’

She would hardly still be there if she’d only fainted, Burden thought. A brain haemorrhage, yes, or some sort of accident. ‘Obviously we ought to look,’ he said. ‘I took it for granted you’d looked.’

‘I called out. We hardly ever go up there. The rooms aren’t used.’

‘Come on,’ Burden said.

The light in the hall was even dimmer than the one in the dining-room. The little bulb shed a pallid glow on to a woven pinkish runner, on lino patterned to look like parquet in dark and lighter brown. Parsons went first and Burden followed him up the steep stairs. The house was biggish, but the materials which had been used to build it were poor and the workmanship unskilled. Four doors opened off the first landing and these were panelled but without beading and they looked flimsy. The flat rectangles of plywood in their frames reminded Burden of blind blocked-up windows on the sides of old houses.

‘I’ve looked in the bedrooms,’ Parsons said. ‘Good heavens, she may be lying helpless up there!’

He pointed up the narrow uncarpeted flight and Burden noticed how he had said ‘Good heavens!’ and not ‘God!’ or ‘My God!’ as some men might have done.’

‘I’ve just remembered, there aren’t any bulbs in the attic lights.’ Parsons went into the front bedroom and unscrewed the bulb from the central lamp fitting. ‘Mind how you go,’ he said.

It was pitchy dark on the staircase. Burden flung open the door that faced him. By now he was certain they were going to find her sprawled on the floor and he wanted to get the discovery over as soon as possible. All the way up the stairs he’d been anticipating the look on Wexford’s face when he told him she’d been there all along.

A dank coldness breathed out of the attic, a chill mingled with the smell of camphor. The room was partly furnished. Burden could just make out the shape of a bed. Parsons stumbled over to it and stood on the cotton counterpane to fit the bulb into the lamp socket. Like the ones downstairs it gave only an unsatisfactory light, which, streaming faintly through a shade punctured all over with tiny holes, patterned the ceiling and the distempered walls with yellowish dots. The window was uncurtained. A bright cold moon swam into the black square and disappeared again under the scalloped edge of a cloud.

‘She’s not in here,’ Parsons said. His shoes had made dusty footprints on the white stuff that covered the bedstead like a shroud.

Burden lifted a corner of it and looked under the bed, the only piece of furniture in the room.

‘Try the other room,’ he said.

Once more Parsons went through the tedious, maddeningly slow motions of removing the light bulb. Now only the chill radiance from the window lit their way into the second attic. This was smaller and more crowded. Burden opened a cupboard and raised the lids from two trunks. He could see Parsons staring at him, thinking perhaps about what he called his hobby said about the things trunks could contain. But these were full of books, old books of the kind you sometimes see in stands outside second-hand shops.

The cupboard was empty and inside it the paper was peeling from the wall, but there were no spiders. Mrs Parsons was a house-proud woman.

‘It’s half past ten,’ Burden said, squinting at his watch. ‘The last train doesn’t get in till one. She could be on that.’

Parsons said obstinately, ‘She wouldn’t go anywhere by train.’

They went downstairs again, pausing to restore the light bulb to the front bedroom. There was something sinister and creepy about the stair-well that could have been so easily dispelled, Burden thought, by white paint and stronger lights. As they descended he reflected momentarily on this woman and the life she lived here, going fussily about her chores, trying to bring a little smartness to the mud-coloured woodwork, the ugly ridged linoleum.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ Parsons said.

Burden didn’t want to go back into the little dining-room with the big furniture, the cold tea-dregs in their two cups. By now Jean would be back from the cinema.

‘You could try phoning round her friends at the church,’ he said, edging towards the front door. If Parsons only knew how many reports they got in of missing women and how few, how tiny a percentage, turned up dead in fields or chopped in trunks . . .

‘At this time of night?’

Parsons looked almost shocked, as if the habits of a lifetime, the rule that you never called on anyone after nine o’clock, mustn’t be broken even in a crisis.

‘Take a couple of aspirins and try to get some sleep,’ Burden said. ‘If anything comes up you can give me a ring. We’ve told the station. We can’t do anything more. They’ll let you know as soon as they hear.’

‘What about tomorrow morning?

If he’d been a woman, Burden thought he’d beg me to stay. He’d cling to me and say, Don’t leave me!

‘I’ll look in, on my way to the station,’ he said.

Parsons didn’t shut the door until he was half-way up the street. He looked back once and saw the white bewildered face, the faint glow from the hall falling on to the brass step. Then, feeling helpless because he had brought the man no comfort, he raised his hand in a half-wave.

The streets were empty, still with the almost tangible silence of the countryside at night. Perhaps she was at the station now, scuttling guiltily across the platform, down the wooden stairs, gathering together in her mind the threads of the alibi she had concocted. It would have to be good, Burden thought, remembering the man who waited on the knife edge that spanned hope and panic.

It was out of his way, but he went to the corner of Tabard Road and looked up the High Street. From here he could see right up to the beginning of the Stowerton Road where the last cars were leaving the forecourt of The Olive and Dove. The market place was empty, the only people to be seen a pair of lovers standing on the Kingsbrook Bridge. As he watched the Stowerton bus appeared between the Scotch pines on the horizon., It vanished again in the dip beyond he bridge. Hand in hand, the lovers ran to the stop in the centre of the market place as the bus pulled in close against the dismantled cattle stands. Nobody got off. Burden sighed and went home.

‘She hasn’t turned up,’ he said to his wife.

‘It is funny, you know, Mike. I should have said she was the last person to go off with some man.’

‘Not much to look at?’

‘I wouldn’t say that exactly,’ Jean said. ‘She looked so - well, respectable. Flat-heeled shoes, no make-up, tidy sort of perm with hair-grips in it. You know what I mean. You must have seen her.’

‘I may have done,’ Burden said. ‘It didn’t register.’

‘But I wouldn’t call her plain. She’s got a funny old-fashioned kind of face, the sort of face you see in family albums. You might not admire it, Mike, but you wouldn’t forget her face.’

‘Well, I’ve forgotten it,’ Burden said. He dismissed Mrs Parsons to the back of his mind and they talked about the film.