From Doon With Death Read online

  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, maddening 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 and 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 the 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.

  2

  One forenoon the she-bird crouch’d not on the nest,

  Nor return’d that afternoon, nor the next,

  Nor ever appear’d again.

  Walt Whitman, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

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

  The telephone range 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 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 without 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 in 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 by 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, d
issatisfaction 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.’