Ruth Rendell: From Doon with Death

No point in pursuing it. Burden thought. Others would ask him, probe into his private life whether he liked it or not, if she still hadn’t got home when the last train came in and the last bus had rolled into Kingsmarkham garage.

‘I suppose you’ve looked all over the house?’ he asked. He had driven down this road twice a day for a year but he couldn’t remember whether the house he was sitting in had two floors or three. His policeman’s brain tried to reassemble the retinal photograph on his policeman’s eye. A bay window at the bottom, two flat sash windows above it and -yes, two smaller ones above that under the slated eyelids of the roof. An ugly house, he thought, ugly and forbidding.

‘I looked in the bedrooms,’ Parsons said. He stopped pacing and hope coloured his cheeks. Fear whitened them again as he said: ‘You think she might be up in the attics? Fainted or something?’

She would hardly still be there if she’d only fainted, Burden thought. A brain haemorrhage, yes, or some sort of accident. ‘Obviously we ought to look,’ he said. ‘I took it for granted you’d looked.’

‘I called out. We hardly ever go up there. The rooms aren’t used.’

‘Come on,’ Burden said.

The light in the hall was even dimmer than the one in the dining-room. The little bulb shed a pallid glow on to a woven pinkish runner, on lino patterned to look like parquet in dark and lighter brown. Parsons went first and Burden followed him up the steep stairs. The house was biggish, but the materials which had been used to build it were poor and the workmanship unskilled. Four doors opened off the first landing and these were panelled but without beading and they looked flimsy. The flat rectangles of plywood in their frames reminded Burden of blind blocked-up windows on the sides of old houses.

‘I’ve looked in the bedrooms,’ Parsons said. ‘Good heavens, she may be lying helpless up there!’

He pointed up the narrow uncarpeted flight and Burden noticed how he had said ‘Good heavens!’ and not ‘God!’ or ‘My God!’ as some men might have done.

‘I’ve just remembered, there aren’t any bulbs in the attic lights.’ Parsons went into the front bedroom and unscrewed the bulb from the central lamp fitting. ‘Mind how you go,’ he said.

It was pitchy dark on the staircase. Burden flung open the door that faced him. By now he was certain they were going to find her sprawled on the floor and he wanted to get the discovery over as soon as possible. All the way up the stairs he’d been anticipating the look on Wexford’s face when he told him she’d been there all along.

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, maddeningly 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. Hat-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.’