From Doon With Death Read online

  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 raincoats 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 schoolkid. 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 night-dress 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 a 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.

  3

  Ere her limbs frigidly

  Stiffen too rigidly,

  Decently, kindly,

  Smooth and compose them,

  And her eyes, close them,

  Staring so blindly!

  Thomas Hood, The Bridge of Sighs

  On Thursday morning a baker’
s roundsman, new to his job, called at a farm owned by a man called Prewett on the main Kingsmarkham-to-Pomfret road. There was no one about, so he left a large white loaf and a small brown one on a windowledge and went back to where he had parked his van, leaving the gate open behind him.

  Presently a cow nudged against the gate and pushed it wide open. The rest of the herd, about a dozen of them, followed and meandered down the lane. Fortunately for Mr Prewett (for the road to which they were heading was derestricted) their attention was distracted by some clumps of sow thistles on the edge of a small wood. One by one they lumbered across the grass verge, munched at the thistles, and gradually, slowly, penetrated into the thickets. The briars were thick and the wood dim. There were no more thistles, no more wet succulent grass. Trapped and bewildered, they stood still, lowing hopefully.

  It was in this wood that Prewett’s cowman found them and Mrs Parsons’ body at half past one.

  By two Wexford and Burden had arrived in Burden’s car, while Bryant and Gates brought Dr Crocker and two men with cameras. Prewett and the cowman, Bysouth, primed with knowledge from television serials, had touched nothing, and Margaret Parsons lay as Bysouth had found her, a bundle of damp cotton with a yellow cardigan pulled over her head.

  Burden pushed aside the branches to make an arch and he and Wexford came close until they were standing over her. Mrs Parsons was lying against the trunk of a hawthorn tree perhaps eight feet high. The boughs, growing outwards and downwards like the spokes of an umbrella, made an almost enclosed igloo-shaped tent.

  Wexford bent down and lifted the cardigan gently. The new dress had a neckline cut lowish at the back. On the skin, running from throat to nape to throat, was a purple circle like a thin ribbon. Burden gazed and the blue eyes seemed to stare back at him. An old-fashioned face, Jean had said, a face you wouldn’t forget. But he would forget in time, as he forgot them all. Nobody said anything. The body was photographed from various angles and the doctor examined the neck and the swollen face. Then he closed the eyes and Margaret Parsons looked at them no more.

  ‘Ah, well,’ Wexford said. ‘Ah, well.’ He shook his head slowly. There was, after all, nothing else to say.

  After a moment he knelt down and felt among the dead leaves. In the cavern of thin bending branches it was close and unpleasant, but quite scentless. Wexford lifted the arms and turned the body over, looking for a purse and a key. Burden watched him pick something up. It was a used matchstick, half burnt away.

  They came out of the hawthorn tent into comparative light and Wexford said to Bysouth:

  ‘How long have these cows been in here?’

  ‘Be three hour or more, sir.’

  Wexford gave Burden a significant look. The wood was badly trampled and the few naked patches of ground were boggy with cattle dung. A marathon wrestling match could have taken place in that wood before breakfast, but Prewett’s cows would have obliterated all traces of it by lunchtime; a wrestling match or a struggle between a killer and a terrified woman. Wexford set Bryant and Gates to searching among the maze of gnat-ridden brambles while he and Burden went back to the car with the farmer.

  Mr Prewett was what is known as a gentleman farmer and his well-polished riding boots, now somewhat spattered, did no more than pay service to his calling. The leather patches on the elbows of his tobacco-coloured waisted jacket had been stitched there by a bespoke tailor.

  ‘Who uses the lane, sir?’

  ‘I have a Jersey herd pastured on the other side of the Pomfret Road,’ Prewett said. He had a county rather than a country accent. ‘Bysouth takes them over in the morning and back in the afternoon by way of the lane. Then there is the occasional tractor, you know.’

  ‘What about courting couples?’

  ‘A stray car,’ Prewett said distastefully. ‘Of course this is a private road. Just as private in fact, Chief Inspector, as your own garage drive, but nobody respects privacy these days. I don’t think any of the local lads and lasses come up here on foot. The fields are much more – well, salubrious, shall we say? We do get cars up here. You could stick a car under those overhanging branches and anyone could pass quite close to it at night without even seeing it was there.’

  ‘I was wondering if you’d noticed any unfamiliar tyre marks between now and Tuesday, sir?’

  ‘Oh, come!’ Prewett waved a not very horny hand up towards the entrance to the lane and Burden saw what he meant. The lane was all tyre marks; in fact it was the tyre markes that made it into a road. ‘The tractors go in and out, the cattle trample it. . . .’

  ‘But you have a car, sir. With all this coming and going it’s odd nobody saw anything unusual.’

  ‘You must remember it’s simply used for coming and going. No one hangs about here. My people have all got a job of work to do. They’re good lads and they get on with it. In any case you’ll have to discount my wife and myself. We’ve been in London from Monday until this morning and we mostly use the front entrance anyway. The lane’s a short cut, Chief Inspector. It’s fine for tractors but my own vehicle gets bogged down.’ He stopped, then added sharply, ‘When I’m in town I don’t care to be taken for a horny-handed son of toil.’

  Wexford examined the lane for himself and found only a morass of deeply rutted trenches zig-zagged with the tread marks of tractor tyres and deep round holes made by hoofs. He decided to postpone talking to Prewett’s four men and the girl agricultural student until the time of Mrs Parsons’ death had been fixed.

  Burden went back to Kingsmarkham to break the news to Parsons because he knew him. Parsons opened the door numbly, moving like a sleep-walker. When Burden told him, standing stiffly in the dining-room with the dreadful books, he said nothing, but closed his eyes and swayed.

  ‘I’ll fetch Mrs Johnson,’ Burden said. ‘I’ll get her to make you some tea.’

  Parsons just nodded. He turned his back and stared out of the window. With something like horror Burden saw that the two pairs of socks were still pegged to the line.

  ‘I’d like to be alone for a bit.’

  ‘Just the same, I’ll tell her. She can come in later.’ The widower shuffled his feet in khaki-coloured slippers.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘And thanks. You’re very good.’

  Back at the station Wexford was sitting at his desk looking at the burnt matchstick. He said musingly:

  ‘You know, Mike, it looks as if someone struck this to get a good look at her. That means after dark. Someone held it until it almost burnt his fingers.’

  ‘Bysouth?’

  Wexford shook his head.

  ‘It was light, light enough to see – everything. No, whoever struck that match wanted to make sure he hadn’t left anything incriminating behind him.’ He slipped the piece of charred wood into an envelope. ‘How did Parsons take it?’ he asked.

  ‘Difficult to say. It’s always a shock, even if you’re expecting it. He’s so doped up on what the doctor’s giving him he didn’t seem to take it in.’

  ‘Crocker’s doing the post-mortem now. Inquest at ten on Saturday.’

  ‘Can Crocker fix the time of death, sir?’

  ‘Some time on Tuesday. I could have told him that. She must have been killed between half twelve and – what time did you say Parsons rang you on Tuesday night?’

  ‘Exactly half past seven. We were going to the pictures and I was keeping an eye on the time.’

  ‘Between half twelve and seven-thirty, then.’

  ‘That brings me to my theory, sir.’

  ‘Let’s have it. I haven’t got one.’

  ‘Well, Parsons said he got home at six but no one saw him. The first anyone knew he was in the house was when he phoned me at half past seven. . . .’

  ‘Okay, I’m listening. Just stick your head out of the door and get Martin to fetch us some tea.’

  Burden shouted for tea and went on:

  ‘Well, suppose Parsons killed her. As far as we know she doesn’t know anyone else around here and, as you always say
, the husband is the first suspect. Suppose Parsons made a date with his wife to meet him at Kingsmarkham bus garage.’

  ‘What sort of a date?’

  ‘He could have said they’d go and have a meal somewhere in Pomfret, or go for a walk, a picnic . . . anything.’

  ‘What about the chops, Mike? She didn’t have a date when she was talking to your supermarket woman.’

  ‘They’re on the phone. He could have telephoned her during his lunch hour – it had begun to clear up by then – and asked her to pick up the bus at the garage at ten to six, suggested going into Pomfret for a meal. After all, maybe they make a habit of going out to eat. We’ve only got his word for what they did.’

  Martin came in with the tea and Wexford, cup in hand, went over to the window and looked down into the High Street. The bright sun made him screw up his eyes and he pulled at the cord of the blind, half closing the slats.

  ‘The Stowerton bus doesn’t go to Pomfret,’ he objected. ‘Not the five-thirty-five. Kingsmarkham is the terminus.’

  Burden took a sheet of paper out of his pocket.

  ‘No, but the five-thirty-two does. Stowerton to Pomfret, via Forby and Kingsmarkham.’ He concentrated on the figures he had written. ‘Let me put it like this: Parsons phones his wife at lunchtime and asks her to meet the Stowerton bus that gets into Kingsmarkham at five-fifty, two minutes before the other bus, the one that goes into the garage. Now, he could have made that bus if he left a minute or two early.’

  ‘You’ll have to check that, Mike.’

  ‘Anyway, Mrs P. catches the bus. It passes through Forby at six-one and reaches Pomfret at six-thirty. When they get to the nearest bus-stop to the wood by Prewett’s farm Parsons says it’s such a nice evening, let’s get off and walk the rest of the way. . . .’

  ‘It’s a good mile this side of Pomfret. Still, they might be keen on country walks.’