[Wexford 01] From Doon & Death

by Ruth Rendell

  At last he said, 'Shall we go, then?'

  They ascended slowly, Wexford leading. Burden at the rear. It was a ridiculous procession. Burden thought. Taking their time, hands to the banister.

  They were like a troop of house hunters with an order to view or relatives bidden upstairs to visit the bedridden.

  At the first turn Wexford said:

  ‘I think we will all go into the room where Minna kept her books, the books that Doon gave her. The case began here in this house and perhaps there will be some kind of poetic justice in ending it here. But the poetry books have gone, Mr Quadrant. As Mrs Missal said, there is nothing here for you’

  He said no more, but the sounds from above had grown louder. Then, as Wexford put his hand to the door of the little room where he and Burden had read the poetry aloud, a faint sigh came from the other side.

  The attic floor was littered with books, some open and slammed face-downwards, others on their spines, their pages spread in fans and their covers ripped. One had come to rest against a wall as if it had been flung there and had fallen open at an illustration of a pigtailed girl with a hockey stick. Quadrant's wife knelt among the chaos, clutching a fistful of crumpled coloured paper.

  When the door opened and she saw Wexford she seemed to make an immense effort to behave as if this were her home, as if she was hunting in her own attic and the four who entered were unexpected guests. For a second Burden had the fantastic notion that she would attempt to shake hands. But no words came and her hands seemed paralysed. She began to back away from them and towards the window, gradually raising her arms and pressing her beringed fingers against her cheeks. As she moved her heels caught one of the scattered books, a girls' annual, and she stumbled, half falling across the larger of the two trunks. A star-shaped mark showed on her cheek-bone where a ring had dug into the flesh.

  She lay where she had fallen until Quadrant stepped forward and lifted her against him. Then she moaned softly and turned her face, hiding it in his shoulder.

  In the doorway Helen Missal stamped and said, ‘I want to go home!'

  'Will you close the door. Inspector Burden?' Wexford went to the tiny window and unlatched it as calmly as if he was in his own office. ‘I think we’ll have some air,' he said.

  It was a tiny shoe-box of a room and khaki-coloured like the interior of a shoe-box. There was no breeze but the casement swung open to let in a more wholesome heat.

  ‘I’m afraid there isn't much room,' Wexford said like an apologetic host. Inspector Burden and I will stand and you, Mrs Missal, can sit on the other trunk.'

  To Burden's astonishment she obeyed him. He saw that she was keeping her eyes on the Chief Inspector's face like a subject under hypnosis. She had grown very white and suddenly looked much more than her actual age. The red hair might have been a wig bedizening a middle-aged woman.

  Quadrant had been silent, nursing his wife as if she were a fractious child. Now he said with something of his former scorn:

  'Surete methods. Chief Inspector? How very melodramatic.'

  Wexford ignored him. He stood by the window, his face outlined against clear blue.

  ‘I’m going to tell you a love story,' he said, 'The story of Doon and Minna.' Nobody moved but Quadrant. He reached for his jacket on the trunk where Helen Missal sat, took a gold case from the pocket and lit a cigarette with a match. 'When Margaret Godfrey first came here’ Wexford began, 'she was sixteen. She'd been brought up by old-fashioned people and as a result she appeared prim and shockable. Far from being the London girl come to startle the provinces, she was a suburban orphan thrown on the sophisticated county. Isn't that so, Mrs Missal?'

  'You can put it that way if you like.'

  In order to hide her gaucheness she put on a curious manner, a manner compounded of secretiveness, remoteness, primness. To a lover these can make up a fascinating mixture. They fascinated Doon.

  Doon was rich and clever and good-looking. I don't doubt that for a time Minna - that’s the name Doon gave her and I shall refer to her by it - Minna was bowled over. Doon could give her things she could never have afforded to buy and so for a time Doon could buy her love or rather her companionship; for this was a love of the mind and nothing physical entered into it’

  Quadrant smoked fiercely. He inhaled deeply and the cigarette end glowed.

  ‘I have said Doon was clever’ Wexford went on. 'Perhaps I should add that brilliance of intellect doesn't always go with self-sufficiency. So it was with Doon. Success, the flowering of ambition, actual achievement depended in this case on close contact with the chosen one - Minna. But Minna was only waiting, biding her time. Because, you see...' He looked at the three people slowly and severally. '... You know that Doon, in spite of the wealth, the intellect, the good looks, had one insurmountable disadvantage, a disadvantage greater than any deformity, particularly to a woman of Minna's background, that no amount of time or changed circumstances could alter’

  Helen Missal nodded sharply, her eyes alight with memory. Leaning against her husband, Fabia Quadrant was crying softly.

  'So when Dudley Drury came along she dropped Doon without a backward glance. All the expensive books Doon had given her she hid in a trunk and she never looked at them again. Drury was dull and ordinary - callow is the word, isn't it, Mrs Quadrant? Not passionate or possessive. Those are the adjectives I would apply to Doon. But Drury was without Doon's disadvantage, so Drury Won’

  'She preferred me!' Burden remembered Drury's exultant cry in the middle of his interrogation.

  Wexford continued:

  'When Minna withdrew her love, or willingness to be loved, if you like, Doon's life was broken. To other people it had seemed just an adolescent crush, but it was real all right. At that moment, July 1951, a neurosis was set up which, though quiescent for years, flared again when she returned. With it came hope. They were no longer teenagers but mature. At last Minna might listen and befriend. But she didn't and so she had to die’

  Wexford stepped forward, coming closer to the seated man.

  'So we come to you, Mr Quadrant’

  If it wasn't for the fact that you're upsetting my wife,' Quadrant said, ‘I should say that this is a splendid way of livening up a dull Sunday morning.' His voice was light and supercilious, but he flung his cigarette from him across the room and out of the open window past Burden's ear. Please go on’

  'When we discovered that Minna was missing -you knew we had. Your office is by the bridge and you must have seen us dragging the brook - you realized that the mud from that lane could be found in your car tyres. In order to cover yourself, for in your "peculiar position" (I quote) you knew our methods, and you had to take your car back to the lane on some legitimate pretext. It would hardly have been safe to go there during the day, but that evening you were meeting Mrs Missal -

  Helen Missal jumped up and cried, 'No, it isn't true!'

  'Sit down’ Wexford said. ‘Do you imagine she doesn't know about it? D'you think she didn't know about you and all the others?' He turned back to Quadrant. 'You're an arrogant man, Mr Quadrant,' he said, 'and you didn't in the least mind our knowing about your affair with Mrs Missal. If we ever connected you with the crime at all and examined your car, you could bluster a little but your reason for going to the lane was so obviously clandestine that any lies or evasions would be put down to that.

  'But when you came to the wood you had to look and see, you had to make sure. I don't know what excuse you made for going into the wood...'

  'He said he saw a Peeping Tom,' Helen Missal said bitterly.

  '... but you did go in and because it was dark by then you struck a match to look more closely at the body. You were fascinated as well you might be and you held the match until it burnt down and Mrs Missal called out to you.

  Then you drove home. You had done what you came to do and with any luck nobody would ever connect you with Mrs Parsons. But later when I mentioned the name Doon to you - it was yesterday afternoon, wasn't it? - yo
u remembered the books. Perhaps there were letters too - it was all so long ago. As soon as you knew Parsons would be out of the house you used the dead woman's missing key to get in, and so we found you searching for what Doon might have left behind’

  It's all very plausible’ Quadrant said. He smoothed his wife's dishevelled hair and drew his arm more tightly around her. 'Of course, there isn't the remotest chance of your getting a conviction on that evidence, but we'll try it if you like’ He spoke as if they were about to embark on some small stratagem, the means of getting home when the car has broken down or a way of getting tactfully out of a party invitation.

  'No, Mr Quadrant’ Wexford said, 'we won't waste our time on it. You can go if you wish, but I'd prefer you to stay. You see, Doon loved Minna, and although there might have been hatred too, there would never have been contempt Yesterday afternoon when I asked you if you had ever known her you laughed. That laughter was one of the few sincere responses I got out of you and I knew men that although Doon might have killed Minna, passion would never have turned into ridicule.

  'Moreover, at four o'clock this morning I learnt something else. I read a letter and I knew then that you couldn't be Doon and Drury couldn't be Doon. I learnt exactly what was the nature of Doon's disadvantage.'

  Burden knew what was corning but still he held his breath. ‘Doon is a woman’ Wexford said.

  Chapter 15

  Love not, love not! The thing you love may change. The rosy lip may cease to smile on you; The kindly beaming eye grow cold and strange; The heart still warmly beat, yet not be true.

  Caroline Norton, Love Not

  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 creaseless 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 no 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 if 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 close 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, t
he 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 on to 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.

  Chapter 16

  The truth is great and shall prevail.

  Coventry Patmore, Magna est Veritas

  Doon had written precisely a hundred and thirty-four letters to Minna. Not one had ever been sent or even left the Quadrants' library where, in the drawer of a writing-desk, Wexford found them that Sunday afternoon. They were wrapped in a pink scarf and beside them was a brown purse with a gilt clip. He had stood on this very spot the night before, all unknowing, his hand within inches of the scarf, the purse and these wild letters.