Ruth Rendell - From Doon with Death

Very nice, gilt lettering and all. What’ s Doon got to say this time?

‘ An un-birthday present, Minna dear, from Doon who wishes you happy for ever and ever. June 1950.

I wonder if Mrs P. bought the lot cheap from this Minna.’

‘I suppose Minna could be Mrs P., a sort of nickname.’

‘It had just crossed my mind,’ Wexford said sarcastically. ‘They’re such good books, Mike, not the sort of things anyone would give to a church sale, and church sales seem to have been about Mrs Parsons’ mark. Look at this lot Omar Khayyam; Whitman’s Leaves of Grass; William Morris. Unless I’m much mistaken that Omar Khayyam cost three or four pounds. And there’s another one here, the Verses of Walter Savage Landor. It's an old-fashioned kind of book and the leaves haven’t even been cut.’

He read the message on the fly-leaf aloud:

I promise to bring back with me

What thou with transport will receive.

The only proper gift far thee.

Of which no mortal shall bereave.

‘Rather apt, don’t you think, Minna? Love from Doon. March 21st, 1951.’

‘It wasn’t very apt, was it? And Minna, whoever she is, didn’t receive it with transport. She didn’t even cut the pages. I’m going to have another word with Parsons, Mike, and then we’re going to have all this lot carted down to the station. This attic is giving me the creeps.’

But Parsons didn’t know who Minna was and he looked surprised when Wexford mentioned the date, March 21st.

‘I never heard anyone call her Minna,’ he said distastefully, as if the name was an insult to her memory. ‘My wife never spoke about a friend called Doon. I’ve never even seen those books properly. Margaret and I lived in the house her aunt left her till we moved here and those books have always been in the trunk. We just brought them with us with the furniture. I can’t make it out about the date - Margaret’s birthday was March 21st.’

‘It could mean nothing, it could mean everything,’ Wexford said when they were out in the car. ‘Doon talks about Foyle’s, and Foyle’s, in case you don’t know, my provincial friend, is in London in the Charing Cross Road.’

‘But Mrs P. was sixteen in 1949 and she stayed two years in Flagford. She must have been living only about five miles from here when Doon gave her those books.’

‘True. He could have lived here too and gone up to London for the day. I wonder why he printed the messages, Mike. Why didn’t he write them? And why did Mrs P. hide the books as if she was ashamed of them?’

They’d make a better impression on the casual caller than The Brides in the Bath or whatever it is,’ Burden said. “This Doon was certainly gone on her.’

Wexford took Mrs Parsons’ photograph out of his pocket. Incredible that this woman had ever inspired a passion or fired a line of verse!

‘Happy for ever and ever,’ he said softly. ‘But love isn’t what the rose is. I wonder if love could be a dark and tangled wood, a cord twisted and pulled tighter on a meek neck?’

‘A cord?’ Burden said. ‘Why not a scarf, that pink nylon thing? It's not in the house.’

‘Could be. You can bet your life that scarf is with the purse and the key. Plenty of women have been strangled with a nylon stocking, Mike. Why not a nylon scarf?’

He had brought the Swinburne and the Christina Rossetti with him. It wasn’t much to go on. Burden reflected, a bundle of old books and an elusive boy. Doon, he thought, Doon. If Minna was anything to go by Doon was bound to be a pseudonym too. Doon wouldn’t be a boy any more but a man of thirty or thirty-five, a married man with children, perhaps, who had forgotten all about his old love. Burden wondered where Doon was now. Lost, absorbed perhaps into the great labyrinth of London, or still living a mile or two away… His heart sank when he recalled the new factory estate at Stowerton, the mazy lanes of Pomfret with a solitary cottage every two hundred yards, and to the norm, Sewingbury, where road after road of postwar detached houses pushed outwards like rays from the nucleus of the ancient town. Apart from these, there was Kingmarkham itself and the daughter villages, Flagford, Forby…

‘I don’t suppose that Missal bloke could be Doon,’ he said hopefully.

‘If he is,’ Wexford said, ‘leafs changed one hell of a lot.’

The river of my years has been sluggish, Minna, flowing slowly to a sea of peace. Ah, long ago how - I yearned for the torrent of life! Then yesternight, yestere’en, Minna, I saw you. Not as I have so often in my dreams, but in life. I followed you, looking for lilies where you trod … I saw the gold band on your finger, the shackle of an importunate love, and I cried aloud in my heart, I, I, too have known the terrors of the night! But withal my feast has ever been the feast of the spirit and to that other dweller in my gates my flesh has been as an unlit candle in a fast-sealed casket. The light in my soul has guttered, shrinking in the harsh wind. But though the casket be atrophied and the flame past resuscitation, yet the wick of the spirit cries, hungering for the hand that holds the taper of companionship, the torch of sweet confidence, the spark of friends reunited.

I shall see you tomorrow and we shall ride together along the silver streets of our youth. Fear not, for reason shall sit upon my bridle and gentle moderation within my reins. Will all not be well, Minna, will all not be pleasant as the warm sun on the faces of little children?

A black Jaguar, not new but well tended, was parked outside the Missals’ house when Wexford and Burden turned in at the gate at seven o’clock.

The wheels only were soiled, their hub-caps spattered with dried mud.

‘I know that car,’ Wexford said. ‘I know it but I can’t place it. Must be getting old.’

‘Friends for cocktails’ Burden said sententiously.

‘ I could do with a spot of gracious living myself,’ Wexford grumbled. He rang the ship’s bell.

Perhaps Mrs Missal had forgotten they were coming or Inge hadn’t been primed. She looked surprised yet spitefully pleased, like her employer’s, her hair was done up on top of her head, but with less success. In her left hand she held a canister of paprika.

‘All are in,’ she said. ‘Two come for dinner. What a man! I tell you it is a waste to have men like him buried in the English countryside. Mrs Missal say, “Inge, you must make lasagna.” All will be Italian, paprika, pasta, pimentoes … Ach, it is just a game!’

‘All right. Miss Wolff. We’d like to see Mrs Missal’

‘ I show you.’ She giggled, opened the drawingroom door and announced with some serendipity, ‘Here are the policemen!’

Four people were sitting in the flowered armchairs and there were four glasses of pale dry sherry on the coffee-table. For a moment nobody moved or said anything, but Helen Missal flushed deeply. Then she turned to the man who sat between her and her husband, parted her lips and closed them again.

So that’s the character Inge was going on about in the hall. Burden thought, Quadrant! No wonder Wexford recognized the car.

‘Good evening, Mr Quadrant,’ Wexford said, indicating by a slight edge to his voice that he was surprised to see him in this company.

‘Good evening, Chief Inspector, Inspector Burden.’

Burden had long known him as a solicitor he often saw in Kingsmarkham magistrates’ court, long known and inexplicably disliked. He nodded to Quadrant and to the woman, presumably Quadrant’s wife, who occupied the fourth armchair. They were somewhat alike, these two, both thin and dark with straight noses and curved red lips. Quadrant had the features of a grandee in an El Greco portrait, a grandee or a monk, but as far as Burden knew he was an Englishman. The Latin lips might have first drawn breath in a Cornish town and Quadrant be the descendant of an Armada mariner. His wife was beautifully dressed with the careless elegance of the very rich. Burden thought she made Helen Missal’s blue shift look like something from a chain-store sale. Her fingers were heavily beringed, vulgarly so, if the stones were false, but Burden didn’t think they were false.