by Ruth Rendell
‘I was going to forget all about that cinema ticket, Mike, but now I'm not so sure. I'm going to have it all out again with Mrs Missal now’ He stabbed at the list. 'While I'm gone you can start contacting these women.'
It would have to be a girls' school’ Burden grumbled. 'Women change their names, men don't'
'Can't be helped’ Wexford said snappily. 'Mr Griswold's been on twice already since the inquest, breathing down my neck.'
Griswold was the Chief Constable. Burden saw what Wexford meant.
'You. know him, Mike. The least hint of difficulty and he's screaming for the Yard’ Wexford said, and went out, leaving Burden with the list and the letter.
Before embarking on his womanhunt Burden read the letter again. It surprised him because it gave an insight into Mrs Parsons' character, revealing a side he had not really previously suspected. She was turning out to be a lot less pure than anyone had thought.
... If meeting Doon means rides in the car and a few free meals I wouldn't he too scrupulous, Mrs Katz had written. But at the same time she didn't know who Doon was. Mrs Parsons had been strangely secretive, enigmatic, hiding the identity of a boy friend from a cousin who had also been an intimate friend.
A strange woman, Burden thought, and a strange boy friend. It was a funny sort of relationship she had with this Doon, he said to himself. Mrs Katz says, I can't see why you should be scared, and later on, there was never anything in that. What did she mean, anything in that? But Mrs P. was scared. What of, sexual advances? Mrs Katz says she had a suspicious mind. Fair enough, he reflected. Any virtuous woman would be scared and suspicious of a man who paid her a lot of attention. But at the same time there was never anything in it. Mrs P. mustn't be too scrupulous.
Burden groped vainly. The letter, like its recipient, was a puzzle. As he put it down and turned to the telephone he was certain of only two facts: Doon hadn't been making advances; he wanted something else, something that frightened Mrs Parsons but which was so innocuous in the estimation of her cousin that it would be showing excessive suspicion to be scrupulous about it. He shook his head like a man who has been flummoxed by an intricate riddle, and began to dial.
He tried Bertram first because mere was no Annesley in the book - and, incidentally, no Pensteman and no Sachs. But the Mr Bertram who answered said he was over eighty and a bachelor.
Next he rang the number of the only Ditchams he could find, but although he listened to the steady ringing past all reason, there was no reply.
Mrs Dolan's number was engaged. He waited five minutes and tried again. This time she answered. Yes, she was Margaret Dolan's mother, but Margaret was now Mrs Heath and had gone to live in Edinburgh. In any case, Margaret had never brought anyone called Godfrey to the house. Her particular friends had been Janet Probyn and Deirdre Sachs, and Mrs Dolan remembered them as having been a little shut-in clique on their own.
Mary Henshaw's mother was dead. Burden spoke to her father. His daughter was still in Kingsmarkham. Married? Burden asked. Mr Henshaw roared with laughter while Burden waited as patiently as he could. He recovered and said his daughter was indeed married. She was Mrs Hedley and she was in the county hospital.
‘I’d like to talk to her’ Burden said.
‘You can't do that,' Henshaw said, hugely amused. 'Not unless you put a white coat on. She's having a baby, her fourth. I thought you were them, bringing me the glad news.'
Through Mrs Ingram he was put on to Julian Ingram, now Mrs Bloomfield. But she knew nothing of Margaret Parsons except that at school she had been pretty and prim, fond of reading, rather shy.
'Pretty, did you say?'
'Yes, she was pretty, attractive in a sort of way. Oh, I know, I've seen the papers. Looks don't necessarily last, you know.'
Burden knew, but still he was surprised.
Anne Kelly had gone to Australia, Marjorie Miller...
'My daughter was killed in a car crash,' said a harsh voice, full of awakened pain. ‘I should have thought the police of all people would know that'
Burden sighed. Pensteman, Probyn, Rogers, Sachs ... all were accounted for. In the local directory alone he found twenty-six Stevenses, forty Thomases, fifty-two Williamses, twelve Youngs.
To track them all down would take best part of the afternoon and evening. Clare Clarke might be able to help him. He closed the directory and set off for Nectarine Cottage.
The french windows were open when Inge Wolff let Wexford into the hall and he heard the screams of quarrelling children. He followed her across the lawn and at first saw nobody but the two little girls: the elder a sharp miniature fascimile of her mother, bright-eyed, red-headed; the younger fat and fair with a freckle-blotched face. Ihey were fighting for possession of a swing-boat, a red and yellow fairground thing with a rabbit for a figurehead.
Inge rushed over to them, shouting.
'Are you little girls that play so, or rough boys? Here is one policeman come to lock you up!'
But the children only clung more tightly to the ropes, and Dymphna, who was standing up, began to kick her sister in the back.
If he's a policeman,' she asked, 'where's his uniform?'
Someone laughed and Wexford turned sharply. Helen Missal was in a hammock slung between a mulberry tree and the wall of a summerhouse and she was drinking milk-less tea from a glass. At first he could see only her face and a honey-coloured arm dangling over the edge of the canvas. Then, as he came closer, he saw that she was dressed for sunbathing. She wore only a bikini, an ice-white figure of eight and a triangle against her golden skin.
Wexford was embarrassed and his embarrassment fanned his anger into rage.
"Not again!' she said. 'Now I know how the fox feels. He doesn't enjoy it.'
Missal was nowhere about, but from behind a dark green barrier of macrocarpa Wexford could hear the hum of a motor mower.
'Can we go indoors, Mrs Missal?'
She hesitated for a moment Wexford thought she was listening, perhaps to the sounds from the other side of the hedge. The noise of the mower ceased, then, as she seemed to hold her breath, started again. She swung her legs over the hammock and he saw that her left ankle was encircled by a thin gold chain.
‘I suppose so’ she said. ‘I don't have any choice, do I?'
She went before him through the open doors, across the cool dining-room where Quadrant had looked on the wine, and into the rhododendron room. She sat down and said:
'Well, what is it now?'
There was something outrageous and at the same time spiteful about the way she spread her nakedness against the pink and green chintz. Wexford turned away his eyes. She was in her own home and he could hardly tell her to go and put some clothes on. Instead he took the photograph from his pocket and held it out to her.
'Why did you tell me you didn't know this woman?'
Fear left her eyes and they flared with surprise. ‘I didn't know her.'
'You were at school with her, Mrs Missal.'
She snatched the photograph and stared at it.
‘I was not' Her hair fell over her shoulders, bright copper like a new penny. 'At least, I don't think I was. I mean, she was years older than me by the look of this. She may have been in the sixth when I was in the first form. I just wouldn't know.'
Wexford said severely: 'Mrs Parsons was thirty, the same age as yourself. Her maiden name was Godfrey.'
‘I adore "maiden name". If s such a charitable way of putting it, isn't it? All right. Chief Inspector, I do remember now. But she's aged, she's different...' Suddenly she smiled, a smile of pure delighted triumph, and Wexford marvelled that this woman was the same age as the pathetic dead thing they had found in the wood.
Ifs very unfortunate you couldn't remember on Thursday evening, Mrs Missal. You've put yourself in a most unpleasant light, firstly by deliberately lying to Inspector Burden and myself and secondly by concealment of important facts. Mr Quadrant will tell you that I'm quite within my rights if I charge you with being an a
ccessary -'
Helen Missal interrupted sulkily. 'Why pick on me? Fabia knew her too, and ... Oh, there must be lots and lots of other people.'
‘I’m asking you,' he said. Tell me about her.'
‘If I do,' she said, 'will you promise to go away and not come back?'
Just tell me the truth, madam, and I will gladly go away. I'm a very busy man.'
She crossed her legs and smoothed her knees. Helen Missal's knees were like a little girl's, a little girl who has never climbed a tree or missed a bath.
‘I didn't like school,' she said confidingly. It was so restricting, if you know what I mean. I just begged and begged Daddy to take me away at the end of my first term m the sixth-'
'Margaret Godfrey, Mrs Missal’
'Oh, yes, Margaret Godfrey. Well, she was a sort of cipher - isn't that a lovely word? I got it out of a book. A sort of cipher. She was one of the fringe people, not very clever or nice-looking or anything’ She glanced once more at the picture. 'Margaret Godfrey. D'you know, I can hardly believe it I should have said she was the last girl to get herself murdered.'
'And who would be the first, Mrs Missal?'
'Well, someone like me,' she said, and giggled.
'Who were her friends, the people she went around with?'
‘Let me think. There was Anne Kelly and a feeble spotty bitch called Bertram and Diana Something...'
That would be Diana Stevens.'
'My God, you know it all, don't you?'
‘I meant boy friends.'
‘I wouldn't know. I was rather busy in that direction myself.' She looked at him, pouting provocatively, and Wexford wondered, with the first flicker of pity he had felt for her, if her coyness would increase as her beauty declined until in age she became grotesque.
'Anne Kelly,' he said, 'Diana Stevens, a girl called Bertram What about Clare Clarke, what about Mrs Quadrant? Would they remember?'
She had said that she hated school, but as she began to speak her voice was softer than he had ever known it and her expression gentler. For a moment he forgot his anger, her lies, the provocative costume she wore, and listened.
Ifs funny,' she said, 'but thinking of those names has sort of brought it back to me. We used to sit in a kind of garden, a wild old place. Fabia and me and a girl called Clarke -’I see her around sometimes - and Jill Ingram and that Kelly girl and - and Margaret Godfrey. We were supposed to be working but we didn't much. We used to talk about... Oh, I don't know...'
'About your boy friends, Mrs Missal?' As soon as ihe words were out Wexford knew he had been obtuse.
'Oh, no,' she said sharply. "You've got it wrong. Not then, not in the garden. It was a wilderness, an old pond, bushes, a seat We used to talk about... well, about our dreams, what we wanted to do, what we were going to make of our lives.' She stopped and Wexford could see in a sudden flash of vision a wild green place, the girls with their books and hear with his mind's ear the laughter, the gasp of dizzy ambition. Then he almost jumped at the change in her voice. She whispered savagely, as if she had forgotten he was there: 'I wanted to act! They wouldn't let me, my father and my mother. They made me stay at home and it all went. It sort of dissolved into nothing’ She shook back her hair and smoothed with the tips of two fingers the creases that had appeared between her eyebrows. ‘I met Pete,' she said, 'and we got married’ Her nose wrinkled. The story of my life’
'You can't have everything,' Wexford said.
'No,' she said, 'I wasn't the only one.. ‘
She hesitated and Wexford held his breath. He had an intuitive conviction that he was about to hear something of enormous significance, something that would iron out the whole case, wrap it up and tie it ready to hand to Mr Griswold. The green eyes widened and lit up; then suddenly the incandescence died and they became almost opaque. Outside in the hall a floorboard squeaked and Wexford heard the squashy sound of a rubber sole on thick carpet. Helen Missal's face became quite white.
'Oh God!' she said. 'Please, please don't ask about the cinema ticket. Please don't!'
Wexford cursed inwardly as the door opened and Missal came in. He was sweating and mere were damp patches on the underarms of his singlet. He stared at his wife and in his eyes was a strange mixture of disgust and concupiscence.
‘Put something on’ he shouted. 'Go on, put some clothes on’
She got tip awkwardly and Wexford had the illusion that her husband's words were scrawled across her body like the obscene scribble on a pin-up picture.
‘I was sunbathing,' she said.
Missal wheeled round on Wexford.
'Come to see the peep-show, have you?' His face was crimson with exertion and with jealousy. 'What the copper saw.'
Wexford wanted to be angry, to match the other man's rage with his own colder kind, but he could feel only pity.
All he said was, 'Your wife has been able to help me.'
‘I’ll bet she has.' Missal held the door open and almost pushed her through. 'Been kind, has she? That's a speciality of hers, being kind to every Tom, Dick and Harry’ He fingered his wet shirt as if his body disgusted him. 'Go on’ he said, 'start on me now. What were you doing in Kingsmarkham on Tuesday afternoon, Mr Missal? The name of the client, Mr Missal. Your car was seen in the Kingsbrook Road, Mr Missal. Well, go on. Don't you want to know?'
Wexford got up and walked a few paces towards the door. The heavy blossoms, pink, puce and white, brushed against his legs. Missal stood staring at him like an overfed, under-exercised dog longing to let out an uninhibited howl.
Don't you want to know? Nobody saw me. I could have been strangling that woman. Don't you want to know what I was doing? Don't you?'
Wexford didn't look at him. He had seen too many men's souls stripped to relish an unnecessary spiritual skinning.
‘I know what you were doing,' he said, skipping the name, the 'sir'. 'You told me yourself, just now in this room’ He opened the door. If not in so many words.'
Douglas Quadrant's house was much larger and far less pleasing to the eye than the Missals'. It stood on an eminence amid shrubby grounds some fifty feet back from the road. A huge cedar softened to some extent its austere aspect, but when he was half-way up the path Wexford recalled similar houses he had seen in the north of Scotland, granite-built, vaguely gothic and set at each end with steeple-roofed towers.
There was something odd about the garden, but it was a few minutes before he realized in what its strangeness consisted. The lawns were smooth, the shrubs conventionally chosen, but about it all was a sombre air. There were no flowers. Douglas Quadrant's garden presented a Monet-like landscape of grey and brown and many-shaded green.
After Mrs Missal's blue lilies, the rhododendrons real and artificial in her drawing-room, this stately drabness should have been restful. Instead it was hideously depressing. Undoubtedly no flowers could bloom because none had been planted, but the effect was rather that the soil was barren or the air inclement.
Wexford mounted the shallow flight of broad steps under the blank eyes of windows hung with olive and burgundy and pigeon grey, and pressed the bell. Presently the door was opened by a woman of about seventy dressed amazingly in a brown frock with a beige cap and apron. She was what was once known, Wexford thought, as 'an elderly body'. Here, he was sure, there would be no frivolous Teutonic blondes.
She in her turn looked as if she would designate him as 'a person', a creature not far removed from a tradesman, who should have known better than to present himself at the front door. He asked for Mrs Quadrant and produced his card.
'Madam is having her tea,' she said, unimpressed by Wexford's bulk, his air of justice incarnate. 'I'll see if she can speak to you.'
‘Just tell her Chief Inspector Wexford would like a word with her.' Affected by the atmosphere, he added. If you please.'
He stepped over the threshold and into the hall. It was as big as a large room and, surprisingly enough, the tapestries of hunting scenes stretched on frames and attached to the
walls did nothing to diminish its size. Again there was the same absence of colour, but not quite a total absence. Worked into the coats of the huntsmen, the palfreys of their mounts, Wexford caught the gleam of dull gold, ox-blood red and a hint of heraldic murrey.
The old woman looked defiantly at him as if she was prepared to argue it out, but as Wexford closed the front door firmly behind him someone called out:
'Who is it, Nanny?'
He recognized Mrs Quadrant's voice and remembered how the night before she had smiled at Missal's crude joke.
Nanny just got to the double doors before him. She opened them in a way he had only seen done in films and, incongruously, grotesquely, there rose before his eyes a shot, ridiculous and immensely funny.
from a Marx Brothers picture. The vision fled and he entered the room.
Douglas and Fabia Quadrant were sitting alone at either end of a low table covered by a lace cloth. Tea had apparently only just been brought in because the book Mrs Quadrant had been reading was lying open and face-upwards on the arm of her chair. The soft old silver of the teapot, the cream jug and the sugar bowl was so brightly polished that it reflected her long hands against the sombre colours of the room. It was forty years since Wexford had seen a brass kettle like this one boiling gently over a spirit flame.
Quadrant was eating bread and butter, just plain bread and butter but crustless and cut thin as a wafer.
This is an unexpected pleasure,' he said, rising to his feet. This time there were no clumsy incidents with cigarettes. He restored his cup almost gracefully to the table and waved Wexford into an armchair.
'Of course, you know my wife?' He was like a cat, Wexford thought, a slim detached tom-cat who purred by day and went out on the tiles at night. And this room, the silver, the china, the long wine-coloured curtains like blood transmuted into velvet! And amidst it all Mrs Quadrant, dark-haired, elegant in black, was feeding cream to her cat. But when the lamps were lit he stole away to take his feline pleasures under the bushes in the creeping dark.
‘Tea, Chief Inspector?' She poured a driblet of water into the pot.
'Not for me, thank you.' She had come a long way, Wexford thought, since those days in the wilderness garden, or perhaps, even then, her gym tunic had been of a more expensive make, her hair more expertly cut than the other girls'. She's beautiful, he thought, but she looks old, much older than Helen
