From Doon With Death

Chapter 2

Burden slept quickly, used to crises. Even here, a market town be had expected to find dull after Brighton, the C.I.D. were seldom idle.

The telephone rang at seven.

‘Burden speaking.’

‘This is Ronald Parsons. She hasn’t come back. And, Mr Burden - she hasn’t taken a coat.’

It was the end of May and it had been a squally cold month. A sharp breeze ruffled his bedroom curtains. He sat up.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

‘I couldn’t sleep. I started going through her clothes and I’m positive she hasn’t taken a coat. She’s only got three: a raincoat, her winter coat and an old one she does the gardening in.’

Burden suggested a suit.

‘She’s only got one costume.’ Parsons’ use of the old-fashioned word was in character. ‘It’s in her wardrobe. I think she must have been wearing a cotton frock, her new one.’ He stopped and cleared his throat. ‘She’d just made it,’ he said.

‘I’ll get some things on,’ Burden said. ‘I’ll pick you up in half an hour and we’ll go to the station together.’

Parsons had shaved and dressed. His small eyes were wide with terror. The tea-cups they had used the night before had just been washed and were draining on a home made rack of wooden dowel rods. Burden marvelled at the ingrained habit of respectability that made this man, at a crisis in his life, spruce himself and put his house in order.

He tried to stop himself staring round the little hole of a kitchen, at the stone copper in the corner, the old gas stove on legs, the table with green American cloth tacked to its top. There was no washing machine, no refrigerator. Because of the peeling paint, the creeping red rust, it looked dirty. It was only by peering closely when Parsons’ eyes were not on him that Burden could see it was in fact fanatically, pathetically, clean.

‘Are you fit?’ he asked. Parsons locked the back door with a huge key. His hand shook against crazed mottled tiles. ‘You’ve got the photograph all right?’

‘In my pocket.’

Passing the dining-room he noticed the books again. The titles leapt at him from red and yellow and black covers. Now that the morning had come and she was still missing Burden wondered fantastically if Tabard Road was to join Hilldrop Crescent and Rillington Place in the chronicle of sinister streets.

Would there one day be an account of the disappearance of Margaret Parsons under another such book-jacket with the face of his companion staring from the frontispiece? The face of a murderer is the face of an ordinary man. How much less terrifying if the killer wore the Mark of Cain for all the world to see! But Parsons? He could have killed her, he had been well instructed. His textbooks bore witness to that. Burden thought of the gulf between theory and practice. He shook off fantasy and followed Parsons to the front door.

Kingsmarkham was awake, beginning to bustle. The shops were still closed, but the buses had been running for two hours. Occasionally the sun shone in shafts of watery brilliance, then vanished again under clouds that were white and thick or bluish with rain. The bus queue stretched almost to the bridge; down towards the station men hurried, singly or in pairs, bowler-hatted, armed with cautious umbrellas, through long custom unintimidated by the hour-long commuting to London.

Burden pulled up at the junction and waited for an orange-painted tractor to pass along the major road.

‘It all goes on,’ Parsons said, ‘as if nothing had happened.’

‘Just as well.’ Burden turned left. ‘Helps you keep a sense of proportion.’

The police station stood appropriately at the approach to the town, a guarding bastion or a warning. It was new, white and square like a soap carton, and, rather pointlessly, Burden thought, banded and decorated here and there in a soap carton’s colours. Against the tall ancient arcs of elms, only a few yards from the last Regency house, it flaunted its whiteness, its gloss, like a piece of gaudy litter in a pastoral glade.

Its completion and his transfer to Kingsmarkham had coincided, but sometimes the sight of it still shocked him. He watched for Parsons’ reaction as they crossed the threshold. Would he show fear or just the ordinary citizen’s caution? In fact, he seemed simply awed.

Not for the first time the place irritated Burden. People expected pitch pine and lino, green baize and echoing passages. These were at the same time more quelling to the felon, more comforting to the innocent. Here the marble and the tiles, irregularly mottled with a design like stirred oil, the peg-board for the notices, the great black counter that swept in a parabola across half the foyer, suggested that order and a harmony of pattern must reign above all things. It was as if the personal fate of the men and women who came through the swing doors mattered less than Chief Inspector Wexford’s impeccable records.

He left Parsons dazed between a rubber plant and a chair shaped like the bowl of a spoon, a spongy spoon, cough-mixture red. It was absurd, he thought, knocking on Wexford’s door, to build a concrete box of tricks like this amid the quiet crowded houses of the High Street. Wexford called him to come in and he pushed open the door.

‘Mr Parsons is outside, sir.’

‘All right.’ Wexford looked at his watch. ‘I’ll see him now.’

He was taller than Burden, thick-set without being fat, fifty-two years old, the very prototype of an actor playing a top-brass policeman. Born up the road in Pomfret, living most of his life in this part of Sussex, he knew most people and he knew the district well enough for the map on the the buttercup-yellow wall to be regarded merely as a decoration.

Parsons came in nervously. He had a furtive cautious look, and there was something defiant about him as if he knew his pride would be wounded and was preparing to defend it.

‘Very worrying for you,’ Wexford said. He spoke with out emphasizing any particular word, his voice level and strong. ‘Inspector Burden tells me you haven’t seen your wife since yesterday morning.’

‘That’s right.’ He took the snapshot of his wife from his pocket and put it on Wexford’s desk. ‘That’s her, that’s Margaret.’ He twitched his head at Burden. ‘He said you’d want to see it.’

It showed a youngish woman in cotton blouse and dirndl skirt standing stiffly, her arms at her sides, in the Parsonses’ garden. She was smiling an unnaturally broad smile straight into the sun and she looked flustered, rather short of breath, as if she had been called away from some mundane household task - the washing-up perhaps - had flung off her apron, dried her hands and run down the path to her husband, waiting with his box camera.

Her eyes were screwed up, her cheeks bunchy; she might really have been saying ‘Cheese!’ There was nothing here of the delicate cameo Jean’s words had suggested.

Wexford looked at it and said, ‘Is this the best you can do?’ Parsons covered the picture with his hand as if it had been desecrated.

He looked as if he might flare into rage, but all he said was:

‘We’re not in the habit of having studio portraits taken.’

‘No passport?’

‘I can’t afford foreign holidays.’

Parsons had spoken bitterly. He glanced quickly at the venetian blinds, the scanty bit of haircord carpet, Wexford’s chair with its mauve tweed seat, as if these were signs of a personal affluence rather than the furnishings supplied be a detached authority.

‘I’d like a description of your wife, Mr Parsons,’ Wexford said. ‘Won’t.you sit down?’

Burden called young Gates in and set him tapping with one finger at the little grey typewriter.

Parsons sat down. He began speaking slowly, shame facedly, as if he had been asked to uncover his wife’s nakedness.

‘She’s got fair hair,’ he said. ‘Fair curly hair and very light blue eyes. She’s pretty.’ He looked at Wexford defiantly and Burden wondered if he realized the dowdy impression the photograph had given. ‘I think she’s pretty. She’s got a high sort of forehead.’ He touched his own low narrow one. ‘She’s not very tall, about five feet one or two.’

Wexford went on looking at the picture.

‘Thin? Well built?’

Parsons shifted in his chair.

‘Well built, I suppose.’ An awkward flush tinged the pale face. ‘She’s thirty. She was thirty a few months ago, in March.’

‘What was she wearing?’

‘A green and white dress. Well, white with green flowers on it, and a yellow cardigan. Oh, and sandals. She never wears stockings in the summer.’

‘Handbag?’

‘She never carried a handbag. She doesn’t smoke or use make-up, you see. She wouldn’t have any use for a handbag. Just her purse and her key.’

‘Any distinguishing marks?’

‘Appendicitis scar,’ Parsons said, flushing again.

Gates ripped the sheet from the typewriter and Wexford looked at it.

‘Tell me about yesterday morning, Mr Parsons,’ he said. ‘How did your wife seem? Excited? Worried?’

Parsons slapped his hands down on to his spread knees. It was a gesture of despair; despair and exasperation.

‘She was the same as usual,’ he said. ‘I didn’t notice anything. You see, she wasn’t an emotional woman.’ He looked down at his shoes and said again, ‘She was the same as usual.’

‘What did you talk about?’

‘I don’t know. The weather. We didn’t talk much. I have to get off to work at half past eight - I work for the Southern Water Board at Stowerton. I said it was a nice day and she said yes, but it was too bright. It was bound to rain, too good to last. And she was right. It did rain, poured down all the morning.’

‘And you went to work. How? Bus, train, car?’

‘I don’t have a car . . .’

He looked as if he was about to enumerate all the other things he didn’t have, so Wexford said quickly: ‘Bus then?’

‘I always catch the eight-thirty-seven from the market place. I said good-bye to her. She didn’t come to the door. But that’s nothing. She never did. She was washing up.’

'Did she say what she was going to do with herself during the day?’

‘The usual things, I suppose, shopping and the house. You know the sort of things women do.’ He paused, then said suddenly: ‘Look, she wouldn’t kill herself. Don’t get any ideas like that. Margaret wouldn’t kill herself. She’s a religious woman.’

‘All right, Mr Parsons. Try to keep calm and don’t worry. We’ll do everything we can to find her.’

Wexford considered, dissatisfaction in the lines of his face, and Parsons seemed to interpret this characteristically. He sprang to his feet, quivering.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he shouted. ‘You think I’ve done away with her. I know how your minds work. I’ve read it all up.’

Burden said quickly, trying to smooth things down. ‘Mr Parsons is by way of being a student of crime, sir.’

‘Crime?’ Wexford raised his eyebrows. ‘What crime?’

‘We’ll have a car to take you home,’ Burden said. ‘I should take the day off. Get your doctor to give you something so that you can sleep.’

Parsons went out jerkily, walking like a paraplegic, and from the window Burden watched him get into the car beside Gates. The shops were opening now and the fruiterer on the opposite side of the street was putting up his sun-blind in anticipation of a fine day. If this had been an ordinary Wednesday, a normal weekday, Burden thought, Margaret Parsons might now have been kneeling in the sun, polishing that gleaming step, or opening the windows and letting some air into those musty rooms. Where was she, waking in the arms of her lover or lying in some more final resting place?

‘She’s bolted, Mike,’ Wexford said. ‘That’s what my old father used to call a woman who eloped. A bolter. Still, better do the usual check-up. You can do it yourself since you knew her by sight.’

Burden picked up the photograph and put it in his pocket. He went first to the station but the ticket-collector and the booking clerks were sure Mrs Parsons hadn’t been through.

But the woman serving at the bookstall recognized her at once from the picture.

‘That’s funny,’ she said. ‘Mrs Parsons always comes in to pay for her papers on Tuesdays. Yesterday was Tuesday but I’m sure I never saw her. Wait a minute, my husband was on in the afternoon.’ She called, ‘George, here a sec.!’

The bookstall proprietor came round from the part of the shop that fronted on to the street. He opened his order book and ran a finger down the edge of one of the pages.

‘No,’ he said. ‘She never came. There’s two-and-two outstanding.’ He looked curiously at Burden, greedy for explanations. ‘Peculiar, that,’ he said. ‘She always pays up, regular as clockwork.’

Burden went back to the High Street to begin on the shops. He marched into the big supermarket and up to the check-out counter. The woman by the till was standing idly, lulled by background music. When Burden showed her the photograph she seemed to jerk back into life.

Yes, she knew Mrs Parsons by name as well as by sight. She was a regular customer and she had been in yesterday as usual.

‘About half ten it was,’ she said. ‘Always the same time.’

‘Did she talk to you? Can you remember what she said?’

‘Now you are asking something. Wait a minute, I do remember. It’s coming back to me. I said it was a problem to know what to give them, and she said, yes, you didn’t seem to fancy salad, not when it was raining. She said she’d got some chops, she was going to do them in a batter, and I sort of looked at her things, the things she’d got in her basket. But she said, no, she’d got the chops on Monday.’

‘Can you remember what she was wearing? A green cotton frock, yellow cardigan?’

‘Oh, no, definitely not. All the customers were in rain coats yesterday morning. Wait a tic, that rings a bell. She said, “Golly, it’s pouring.” I remember because of the way she said “Golly”, like a school-kid. She said, “I’ll have to get something to put on my head,” so I said, “Why not get one of our rain-hoods in the reduced line?” She said didn’t it seem awful to have to buy a rain-hood in May? But she took one. I know that for sure, because I had to check it separately. I’d already checked her goods.’

She left the counter and led Burden to a display of jumbled transparent scarves, pink, blue, apricot and white.

‘They wouldn’t actually keep the rain out,’ she said confidingly. ‘Not a downpour, if you know what. I mean. But they’re prettier than plastic. More glamorous. She had a pink one. I remarked on it. I said it went with her pink jumper.’

‘Thank you very much,’ Burden said. ‘You’ve been most helpful.’

He checked at the shops between the supermarket and Tabard Road, but no one remembered seeing Mrs Parsons. In Tabard Road itself the neighbours seemed shocked and helpless. Mrs Johnson, Margaret Parsons’ next-door neighbour, had seen her go out soon after ten and return at a quarter to eleven. Then, at about twelve, she thought it was, she had been in her kitchen and had seen Mrs Parsons go out into the garden and peg two pairs of socks on to the line. Half an hour later she had heard the Parsonses’ front door open and close again softly. But this meant nothing. The milkman always came late, they had complained about it, and she might simply have put her hand out into the porch to take in the bottles.

There had been a sale at the auction rooms on the corner of Tabard Road the previous afternoon. Burden cursed to himself, for this meant that cars had been double parked along the street. Anyone looking out of her downstairs windows during the afternoon would have had her view of the opposite pavement blocked by this row of cars standing nose to tail.

He tried the bus garage, even rather wildly the car-hire firms, and drew a complete blank. Filled with foreboding, he went slowly back to the police station. Suicide now seemed utterly ruled out. You didn’t chatter cheerfully about the chops you intended cooking for your ‘husband’s dinner if you intended to kill yourself, and you didn’t go forth to meet your lover without a coat or a handbag.

Meanwhile Wexford had been through Parsons’ house from the ugly little kitchen to the two attics. In a drawer of Mrs Parsons’ dressing-table he found two winceyette nightdresses, oldish and faded but neatly folded, one printed cotton nightdress and a fourth, creased and worn perhaps for two nights, under the pillow nearest the wall on the double bed. His wife hadn’t any more nightgowns, Parsons said, and her dressing-gown, made of blue woolly material with darker blue braiding, was still hanging on a hook behind the bedroom door. She hadn’t a summer dressing-gown and the only pair of slippers she possessed Wexford found neatly packed heel to toe in a cupboard in the dining-room.

It looked as if Parsons had been right about the purse and the key. They were nowhere to be found. In the winter the house was heated solely by two open fires and the water by an immersion heater. Wexford set Gates to examining these fireplaces and to searching the dustbin, last emptied by Kingsmarkham Borough Council on Monday, but there was no trace of ash. A sheet of newspaper had been folded to cover the grate in the dining-room, and this, lightly sprinkled with soot, bore the date April 15th.

Parsons said he had given his wife five pounds house-keeping money on the previous Friday. As far as he knew she had no savings accumulated from previous weeks. Gates, searching the kitchen dresser, found two pound notes rolled up in a cocoa tin on one of the shelves. If Mrs Parsons had received only five pounds on Friday and out of this had bought food for her husband and herself for four or five days, leaving two pounds for the rest of the week, it was apparent that the missing purse could have contained at best a few shillings.

Wexford had hoped to find a diary, an address book or a letter which might give him some help. A brass letter-rack attached to the dining-room wall beside the fireplace contained only a coal bill, a circular from a firm fitting central-heating plant (had Mrs Parsons, after all, had her dreams?), two soap coupons and an estimate from a contractor for rendering and making good a damp patch on the kitchen wall.

‘Your wife didn’t have any family at all, Mr Parsons?’ Wexford asked.

‘Only me. We kept ourselves to ourselves. Margaret didn’t - doesn’t make friends easily. I was brought up in a children’s home and when she lost her mother Margaret went to live with an aunt. But her aunt died when we were engaged.’

‘Where was that, Mr Parsons? Where you met, I mean.’

‘In London. Balham. Margaret was teaching in an infants’ school and I had digs in her aunt’s house.’

Wexford sighed. Balham! The net was widening. Still, you didn’t travel forty miles without a coat or a handbag. He decided to abandon Balham for the time being

‘I suppose no one telephoned your wife on Monday night? Did she have any letters yesterday morning?’

‘Nobody phoned, nobody came and there weren’t any letters.’ Parsons seemed proud of his empty life, as if it was evidence of respectability. ‘We sat and talked. Margaret was knitting. I think I did a crossword puzzle part of the time.’ He opened the cupboard where the slippers were and from the top shelf took a piece of blue knitting on four needles. ‘I wonder if it will ever be finished,’ he said. His fingers tightened on the ball of wool and he pressed the needles into the palm of his hand.

‘Never fear,’ Wexford said, hearty with false hope, ‘we’ll find her.’

‘If you’ve finished in the bedrooms I think I’ll go and lie down again. The doctor’s given me something to make me sleep.’

Wexford sent for all his available men and set them to search the empty houses in Kingsmarkham and its environs, the fields that lay still unspoilt between the High Street and the Kingsbrook Road and, as afternoon came, the Kingsbrook itself. They postponed dragging operations until the shops had closed and the people dispersed, but even so a crowd gathered on the bridge and stood peering over the parapet at the wading men. Wexford, who hated this particular kind of ghoulishness, this lust for dreadful sights thinly disguised under a mask of shocked sympathy, glowered at them and tried to persuade them to leave the bridge, but they drifted back in twos and threes. At last when dusk came, and the men had waded far to the north and the south of the town, he called off the search.

Meanwhile Ronald Parsons, dosed with sodium amytal, had fallen asleep on his lumpy mattress. For the first time in six months dust had begun to settle on the dressing-table, the iron mantelpiece and the linoed floor.