Ruth Rendell - From Doon with Death

‘It is a peculiar position, isn’t it, sir? What I should call a stroke of malignant fate.’

In the drawing-room Missal and Mrs Quadrant were sitting in silence. They looked. Burden thought, as if they had little in common. Helen Missal and the solicitor filed in, smiling brightly, as if they had all been playing some party game. The charade had been acted, the word discovered. Now they could all have their dinner.

‘Perhaps we can all have our dinner now,’ Missal said.

Wexford looked at him.

‘I believe you were in Kingsmarkham on Tuesday afternoon, Mr Missal? Perhaps, you’ll be good enough to tell me where you were exactly and if anyone saw you.’

‘No, I won’t,’ Missal said. ‘I’m damned if I do. You send your henchman -‘

‘Oh, Peter,’ Fabia Quadrant interrupted. ‘Henchman! What a word.’

Burden stood woodenly, waiting.

‘You send your underling to show me up in front of my clients and my staff. You persecute my wife. I’m damned if I tell you what I do with every minute of my time!’

‘Well, I had to,’ Helen Missal said. She seemed pleased with herself, delighted that the focus of attention had shifted from herself to her husband.

‘I’d like a sample from your car tyres,’ Wexford said, and Burden wondered despairingly if they were going to have to scrape mud from the wheels of every car in Kingsmarkham.

‘The Merc’s in the garage’ Missal said. ‘Make yourself at home. You do inside, so why not make free with the grounds? Maybe you’d like to borrow the lawn for the police sports.’

Fabia Quadrant smiled slightly and her husband pursed his lips and looked down. But Helen Missal didn’t laugh. She glanced quickly at Quadrant and Burden thought she gave the ghost of a shiver. Then she lifted her glass and drained the sherry at a single gulp.

Wexford sat at his desk, doodling on a piece of paper. It was time to go home, long past time, but they still had the events of the day, the stray remarks, the evasive answers, to sift through and discuss. Burden saw that the Chief Inspector was writing, apparently aimlessly, the pair of names he had scribbled that morning when Mrs Missal had first come to him: Missal, Parsons; Parsons, Missal.

‘ But what’s the connection, Mike? There must be a connection.’ Wexford sighed and drew a thick black line through the names. ‘You know, sometimes I wish this was Mexico. Then we could keep a crate of hooch in here. Tequila or some damn’ thing. This everlasting tea is making me spew.’

‘Quadrant and Mrs Missal…’ Burden began slowly.

They’re having a real humdingin’ affair,’ Wexford interrupted, ‘knocking it off in the back of his Jag.’ Burden was shocked.

‘A woman like that?’ he said. ‘Why wouldn’t they go to an hotel?’

‘The best bedroom at The Olive and Dove? Be your age. He can’t go near her place because of Inge and she can’t go to his because of his wife.’

‘Where does he live?’

‘You know where Mrs Missal keeps her car? Well, up on the other side, on the corner of what our brothers in the uniformed branch call the junction with the Upper Kingsbrook Road. That place with the turrets. She couldn’t go there because of darling Fabia. My guess is they went to that lane because Dougie Q. knows it well, takes all his bits of stuff there. It’s quiet, if s dark and if s nasty. Just the job for him and Mrs M. When they’ve had their fun and games in the back of the car they go into the wood…’

‘Perhaps Mrs Missal saw a rabbit, sir,’ Burden said innocently.

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Wexford roared. ‘I don’t know why they went into the wood, but Mrs Missal might well fancy having a bit more under the bushes in God’s sweet air. Maybe they saw the body…’

‘Quadrant would have come to us.’

‘Not if Mrs Missal persuaded him not to, not if she said it would mean her Peter and his Fabia finding out about them. She got to work on him and our courteous Dougie, whom ne’er the word of No woman heard speak - I can read, Mike - our courteous Dougie agrees to say nothing about it.’

Burden looked puzzled. Finally he said: ‘Quadrant was scared, sir. He was scared stiff when we came in.’

‘I suppose he guessed it was going to come out. His wife was there. That’s quite natural.’

‘Then wouldn’t you have expected him to have been more cagey about it all? But he wasn’t. He was almost too open about it.’

‘Perhaps,’ Wexford said, ‘he wasn’t scared we were going to ask about it. He was scared of what we were going to ask.’

‘Or of what Mrs Missal might say.’

‘Whatever it was, we didn’t ask it or she gave the right answer. The right answer from his point of view, I mean.’

‘I asked him about Tuesday. He said he was in court all day. Says I saw him there. I did, too, off and on.’

Wexford groaned, ‘Likewise,’ he said. ‘I saw him but I wasn’t keeping a watch on him and that makes a mighty lot of difference. I was up in Court One. He was defending in that drunk driving case downstairs. Let me think. They adjourned at one, went back at two.’

‘We went into the Carousel for lunch…’

‘So did he. I saw him. But we went upstairs, Mike. He may have done too. I don’t know. He was back in court by two and he didn’t have the car. He walks when he’s that near home.’

‘Missal could do with taking a leaf out of his book,’ Burden said. ‘Get his weight down. He’s a nasty piece of work, sir. Henchman!’ he added in disgust.

‘Underling, Mike,’ Wexford grinned. ‘What’s stopping him telling us where he was on Tuesday?’

‘God knows, but those tyres were as clean as a whistle.’

‘He could have left the car on the Pomfret Road.’

‘True.’

‘I suppose Mrs Missal could have got some idea into her head that Quadrant was carrying on with Mrs P.-‘

Wexfordhad begun to look fretful. ‘Oh, come off it,’ he said. ‘Dougie Q. and Mrs P.? He’s been knocking it off on the side for years. It’s common knowledge. But have you seen the sort of things his taste runs to? I tell you, on Saturday mornings the High Street is littered with his discards, consoling themselves for their broken maidenheads or their broken marriages by showing off their new Mini-Minors. Mrs P. just wasn’t his style. Anyway, Mrs Missal wouldn’t have done murder for him. He was just a different way of passing a dull evening, one degree up on the telly.’

‘I thought it was only men who looked at it that way.’ Burden was always startled by his chief’s occasional outbursts of graphic frankness. Wexford, who was always intuitive, sometimes even lyrical, could also be coarse. ‘She was risking a lot for a casual affair.’

‘You want to buck your ideas up, Mike,’ Wexford snapped. ‘Minna’s Oxford Book of Victorian Verse is just about your mark. I’m going to lend it to you for your bedtime reading.’

Burden took the book and flicked through the pages: Walter Savage Landor, Coventry Patmore, Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton … The names seemed to come from far away, the poets long dust What possible connection could they have with dead, draggled Minna, with the strident Missals? Love, sin, pain - these were the words that sprang from almost every verse. After Quadrant’s flippancies they sounded like ridiculous anachronisms.

‘A connecting link, Mike,’ Wexford said. ‘That’s what we want, a connection.’

But there was none to be found that night. Wexford took three of the other books (‘Just in case our Mr Doon underlined anything or put in any fancy little ticks’) and they walked out into the evening air. Beyond the bridge Quadrant’s car still waited.