From Doon With Death

Chapter 5

Sergeant Camb was talking to someone on the telephone when Wexford got to the station in the morning. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and said to the Chief Inspector:

‘A Mrs Missal for you, sir. This is the third time she’s been on.’

‘What does she want?’

‘She says she must see you. It’s very urgent.’ Camb looked embarrassed. ‘She wants to know if you can go to her house.’

‘She does, does she? Tell her if she wants me she’ll have to come here.’ He opened the door of his office. ‘Oh, and, Sergeant Camb, you can tell her I won’t be here after nine-thirty.’

When he had opened the windows and made his desk untidy - the way he liked it - he stuck his head out of the door again and called for tea.

‘Where’s Martin?’

‘Still at The Olive and Dove, sir.’

‘God Almighty! Does he think he’s on his holidays? Get on to him and tell him he can get off home.’

It was a fine morning, June coming in like a lamb, and from his desk Wexford could see the gardens of Bury Street and the window-boxes of the Midland Bank full of blown Kaiserskroon tulips. The spring flowers were passing, the summer ones not yet in bud - except for rhododendrons. Just as the first peals of the High School bell began to toll faintly in the distance Sergeant Camb brought in the tea - and Mrs Missal.

‘We’ll have another cup, please.’

She had done her hair up this morning and left off her glasses. The organdie blouse and the pleated skirt made her look surprisingly demure, and Wexford wondered if she had abandoned her hostile manner with the raffish shirt and trousers.

‘I’m afraid I’ve been rather a silly girl, Chief Inspector,’ she said in a confiding voice.

Wexford took a clean piece of paper out of his drawer and began writing on it busily. He couldn’t think of any thing cogent to put down and as she couldn’t see the paper from where she was sitting he just scribbled: Missal, Parsons; Parsons, Missal.

‘You see I didn’t tell you the entire truth.’

‘No?’ Wexford said.

‘I don’t mean I actually told lies. I mean I left bits out.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘Well, the thing is, I didn’t actually go to the pictures by myself. I went with a friend, a man friend.’ She smiled a one sophisticate to another. ‘There wasn’t anything in it, but you know how stuffy husbands are.’

‘I should,’ Wexford said. ‘I am one.’

‘Yes, well, when I got home I couldn’t find my new lipstick and I think I must have dropped it in my friend’s car. Oh, tea for me. How terribly sweet!’

There was a knock at the door and Burden came in.

‘Mrs Missal was just telling me about her visit to the cinema on Wednesday night,’ Wexford said. He went on writing. By now he had filled half the sheet.

‘It was a good picture, wasn’t it, Mrs Missal? Unfortunately I had to leave half-way through.’ Burden looked for a third tea-cup. ‘What happened to that secret-agent character? Did he marry the blonde or the other one?’

‘Oh, the other one,’ Helen Missal said easily ‘The one who played the violin. She put the message into a sort of musical code and when they got back to London she played it over to M.I.5.’

‘It’s wonderful what they think of,’ Burden said.

‘Well, I won’t keep you any longer, Mrs Missal . . .’

‘No, I must fly. I’ve got a hair appointment.’

‘If you’ll just let me have the name of your friend, the one you went to the cinema with . . .’

Helen Missal looked from Wexford to Burden and back from Burden to Wexford. Wexford screwed up the piece of paper and threw it into the wastepaper basket.

‘Oh, I couldn’t do that. I mean, I couldn’t get him involved.’

‘I should think it over, madam. Think it over while you’re having your hair done.’

Burden held the door open for her and she walked out quickly without looking back.

‘I’ve been talking to a neighbour of mine,’ he said to Wexford, ‘a Mrs Jones who lives at nine, Tabard Road. You know, she told us about the cars being parked in Tabard Road on Tuesday afternoon. Well, I asked her if she could remember any of the makes or the colours and she said she could remember one car, a bright red one with a tiger in the back. She didn’t see the number. She was looking at them from sideways on, you see, and they were parked nose to tail.’

‘How long was it there?’

‘Mrs Jones didn’t know. But she says she first saw at it about three and it was there when the kids got home from school. Of course, she doesn’t know if it was there all that time.’

‘While Mrs Missal is having her hair done, Mike,’ Wexford said, ‘I am going to have a word with Inge. As Mrs Missal says, Thank God for Inge!’

Then was a tin of polish and a couple of dusters on the dining-room floor and the Indian rugs were spread on the crazy paving outside the windows. Inge Wolff, it seemed, had duties apart from minding Dymphna and Priscilla.

‘All I know I will tell you,’ she said dramatically. ‘What matter if I get the push? Next week, anyhow, I go home to Hanover?

Maybe, Wexford thought, and, on the other hand, maybe not. The way things were going Inge Wolff might be needed in England for the next few months.

‘On Monday Mrs Missal stay at home all the day. Just for shopping in the morning she go out. Also Tuesday she go shopping in the morning, for in the afternoon is closing of all shops.’

‘What about Tuesday afternoon, Miss Wolff?’

‘Ah, Tuesday afternoon she go out. First we have our dinner. One o’clock. I and Mrs Missal and the children. Ah, next week, only think, no more children! After dinner I wash up and she go up to her bedroom and lie down. When she come down she say, “Inge, I go out with the car,” and she take the key and go down the garden to the garage.’

‘What time would that be, Miss Wolff?’

‘Three, half past two. I don’t know.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Then she come back, five, six.’

‘How about Wednesday?’

‘Ah, Wednesday. I have half-day off. Very good. Dymphna come home to dinner, go back to school. I go out. Mrs Missal stay home with Priscilla. And when comes the evening she go out, seven, half past seven. I don’t know. In this house always are comings and goings. It is like a game.’

Wexford showed her the snapshot of Mrs Parsons.

‘Have you ever seen this woman, Miss Wolff? Did she ever come here?’

‘Hundreds of women like this in Kingsmarkham. All are alike except rich ones. The ones that come here, they are not like this.’ She gave a derisive laugh. ‘Oh, no, is funny. I laugh to see this. None come here like this.’

When Wexford got back to the station Helen Missal was sitting in the entrance hall, her red hair done in elaborate scrolls on the top of her head.

‘Been thinking things over, Mrs Missal?’ He showed her into his office.

‘About Wednesday night . . .’

‘Frankly, Mrs Missal, I’m not very interested in Wednesday night. Now, Tuesday afternoon . . .?

‘Why Tuesday afternoon?’

Wexford put the photograph on his desk where she could see it. Then he dropped the lipstick on top of it. The little gilt cylinder rolled about on the shiny snapshot and came to rest.

‘Mrs Parsons was killed on Tuesday afternoon,’ he said patiently, ‘and we found your lipstick a few yards from her body. So, you see, I’m not very interested in Wednesday night.’

‘You can’t think . . . Oh, my God! Look, Chief Inspector, I was here on Tuesday afternoon. I went to the pictures.’

‘You must just about keep that place going, madam. What a pity you don’t live in Pomfret. They had to close the cinema there for lack of customers.’

Helen Missal drew in her breath and let it out again in a deep sigh. She twisted her feet round the metal legs of the chair.

‘I suppose I’ll have to tell you about it,’ she said. ‘I mean, I’d better tell the truth.’ She spoke as if this was always a last distasteful resort instead of a moral obligation.

‘Perhaps it would be best, madam.’

‘Well, you see, I only said I went to the pictures on Wednesday to have an alibi. Actually, I went out with a friend.’ She smiled winningly. ‘Who shall be nameless.’

‘For the moment,’ Wexford said, un-won.

‘I was going out with this friend on Wednesday night, but I couldn’t really tell my husband, could I? So I said I was going to the pictures. Actually we just drove around the lanes. Well, I had to see the film, didn’t I? Because my husband always . . . I mean, he’d obviously ask me about it. So I went to see the film on Tuesday afternoon.’

‘In your car, Mrs Missal? You only live about a hundred yards from the cinema.’

‘I suppose you’ve been talking to that bloody little Inge. You see, I had to take the car so that she’d think I’d gone a long way. I mean, I couldn’t have gone shopping because it was early closing and I never walk anywhere. She knows that. I thought if I didn’t take the car she’d guess I’d gone to the pictures and then she’d think it funny me going again on Wednesday.’

‘Servants have their drawbacks,’ Wexford said.

‘You’re not kidding. Well, that’s all there is to it. I took the car and stuck it in Tabard Road . . . Oh God, that’s where that woman lived, isn’t it? But I couldn’t leave it in the High Street because . . .’ Again she tried a softening smile. ‘Because of your ridiculous rules about parking.’

Wexford snapped sharply:

‘Did you know this woman, madam?’

‘Oh, you made me jump! Let me see. Oh, no, I don’t think so. She’s not the sort of person I’d be likely to know, Chief Inspector.’

‘Who did you go out with on Wednesday night when you lost your lipstick, Mrs Missal?’

The smiles, the girlish confidences, hadn’t worked. She flung back her chair and shouted at him:

‘I’m not going to tell you. I won’t tell you. You can’t make me! You can’t keep me here.’

‘You came of your own accord, madam,’ Wexford said. He swung open the door, smiling genially. ‘I’ll just look in this evening when your husband’s at home and we’ll see if we can get everything cleared up.’

The Methodist minister hadn’t been much help to Burden. He hadn’t seen Mrs Parsons since Sunday and he’d been surprised when she didn’t come to the social evening on Tuesday. No, she had made no close friends at the church and he couldn’t recall hearing anyone use her Christian name.

Burden checked the bus times at the garage and found that five-thirty-two had left Stowerton dead on time. Moreover, the conductress on the Kingsmarkham bus, the one that left Stowerton at five-thirty-five, remembered seeing Parsons. He had asked for change for a ten-shilling note and they were nearly in Kingsmarkham before she got enough silver to change it.

‘Fun and games with Mrs Bloody Missal,’ Wexford said when Burden walked in. ‘She’s one of those women who tell lies by the light of nature, a natural crook.’

‘Where’s the motive, sir?’

‘Don’t ask me. Maybe she was carrying on with Parsons, picked him up at his office on Tuesday afternoon and bribed the entire Southern Water Board to say he didn’t leave till after five-thirty. Maybe she’d got another boyfriend she goes out with on Wednesdays, one for every day of the week. Or maybe she and Parsons and Mr X, who shall be nameless (God Almighty!), were Russian agents and Mrs Parsons had defected to the West. It’s all very wonderful, Mike, and it makes me spew!’

‘We haven’t even got the thing she was strangled with,’ Burden said gloomily. ‘Could a woman have done it?’

‘Crocker seems to think so. If she was a strong young woman, always sitting about on her backside and feeding her face.’

‘Like Mrs Missal’

‘We’re going to get down there tonight, Mike, and have the whole thing out again in front of her old man. But not till tonight. I’m going to give her the rest of the day to sweat in. I’ve got the report from the lab and there’s no cow dung on Mrs Missal’s tyres. But she didn’t have to use her own car. Her husband’s a car dealer, got a saleroom in Stowerton. Those people are always chopping and changing their cars. That’s another thing we’ll have to check up on. The inquest’s tomorrow and I want to get somewhere before then.’

Burden drove his own car into Stowerton and pulled into the forecourt of Missal’s saleroom. A man in overalls came out from the glass-walled office between the rows of petrol- pumps.

‘Two and two shots, please,’ Burden said. ‘Mr Missal about?’

‘He’s out with a client.’

‘That’s a pity,’ Burden said. ‘I looked in on Tuesday afternoon and he wasn’t here . . .’

‘Always in and out he is. In and out. I’ll just give your windscreen a wipe over.’

‘Maybe Mrs Missal?’

‘Haven’t seen her inside three months. Back in March was the last time. She come in to lend the Merc and bashed the grid in. Women drivers!’

‘Had a row, did they? That sounds like Pete.’

‘You’re not joking. He said, never again. Not the Merc or any of the cars.’

‘Well, well,’ Burden said. He gave the man a shilling; more would have looked suspicious. ‘Marriage is a battle field when all’s said and done.’

‘I’ll tell him you came in.’

Burden switched on the ignition and put the car in gear. ‘Don’t trouble,’ he said. ‘I’m seeing him tonight.’ He drove towards the exit and braked sharply to avoid a yellow convertible that swung sharply in from Maryfield Road. An elderly man was at the wheel; beside him, Peter Missal.

‘There he is, if you want to catch him,’ the pump attendant shouted.

Burden parked his own car and pushed open the swing doors. He waited beside a Mini-car revolving smoothly on a scarlet roundabout. Outside he could see Missal talking to the driver of the convertible. Apparently the deal was off for the other man left on foot and Missal came into the saleroom.

‘What now?’ he said to Burden. ‘I don’t like being hounded at my place of business.’

‘I won’t keep you,’ Burden said. ‘I’m just checking up on Tuesday afternoon. No doubt you were here all day. In and out, that is.’

‘It’s no business of yours where I was.’ Missal flicked a speck of dust from the Mini’s wing as it circled past. ‘As a matter of fact I went into Kingsmarkham to see a client. And that’s all I’m telling you. I respect personal privacy and it’s a pity you don’t do the same.’

‘In a murder case, sir, one’s private life isn’t always one’s own affair. Your wife doesn’t seem to have grasped that either.’ He went towards the doors.

‘My wife . . .’ Missal followed him and, looking to either side of him to make sure there was no one about, hissed in an angry half-whisper: ‘You can take that heap of scrap metal off my drive-in. It’s causing an obstruction.’