Ruth Rendell - From Doon with Death

Burden had got what he wanted. Now he wanted to go. It was a bit late in the day for snaps. If they could have seen one on Thursday it might have helped but that was all.

‘Thank you, Miss Clarke,’ he said, ‘Mrs Plunkett. Good afternoon.’

‘Well, cheeri-bye. It's been nice meeting you.’ She giggled. ‘It's not often we see a man in here, is it, Di?’

Half-way down the overgrown path he stopped in his tracks. A woman in jodhpurs and open-necked shirt was coming up towards the cottage, whistling. It was Dorothy Sweeting.

Dodo, he thought. They’d mistaken him for someone called Dodo and Dodo was Dorothy Sweeting. From long experience Burden knew that whatever may happen in detective fiction, coincidence is more common than conspiracy in real life.

‘Good afternoon. Miss Sweeting.’

She grinned at him with cheerful innocence.

‘Oh, hallo,’ she said, ‘fancy seeing you. I’ve just come from the farm. There’s a blinking great crowd like a Cup Final in that wood. You ought to see them.’

Still not inured to man’s inhuman curiosity. Burden sighed.

‘You know that bush where they found her?’ Dorothy Sweeting went on excitedly. ‘Well, Jimmy Traynor’s flogging twigs off it at a bob a time. I told Mr Prewett he ought to charge half a crown admittance.’

‘I hope he’s not thinking of taking your advice, miss,’ Burden said in a repressive voice.

‘There’s nothing wrong in it I knew a fellow who had a plane crash on his land and he turned a whole field into a car park he had so many sightseers.’

Burden flattened himself against the hedge to let her pass.

‘Your tea will be getting cold, Miss Sweeting,’ he said.

‘Whatever next?’ Wexford said. ‘If we don’t look sharp they’ll have every stick in that wood uprooted and taken home for souvenirs.’

‘Shall I have a couple of the lads go over there, sir?’ Burden asked.

‘You do that, and go and get the street directory. Well go and see this Drury character together.’

‘You aren’t going to wait to hear from Colorado, then?’

‘Drury’s a big possibility, Mike. He could well be Doon. I can’t help feeling that whatever Parsons says about his wife’s chastity, when she came back here she met up with Doon again and succumbed to his charms. As to why he should have killed her - well, all I can say is, men do strangle women they’re having affairs with, and Mrs P. may have accepted the car rides and the meals without being willing to pay for services rendered.

The way I see it, Mike, Doon had been seeing Mrs P. and asked her out on Tuesday afternoon with a view to persuading her to become his mistress. They couldn’t meet at her home because of the risks and Doon was going to pick her up on the Pomfret Road. She took the rain-hood with her because the weather had been wet and she didn’t bank on being in the car all the time. Even if she didn’t want Doon for her lover she wouldn’t want him to see her with wet hair.’

The time factor was bothering Burden and he said so.

‘If she was killed early in the afternoon, sir, why did Doon strike a match to look at her? And if she was killed later, why didn’t she pay for her papers before she went out with him and why didn’t she explain to Parsons that she was going to be late?’

Wexford shrugged. ‘Search me,’ he said. ‘Dougie Q. uses matches, carries them in his pocket. So do most men. He’s behaving in a very funny way, Mike. Sometimes he’s co-operative, sometimes he’s actively hostile. We haven’t finished with him yet Mrs Missal knows more than she’s saying -‘

‘Then there’s Missal himself,’ Burden interrupted.

Wexford looked thoughtful. He rubbed his chin and said: ‘I don’t think there’s any mystery about what he was doing on Tuesday. He’s as jealous as hell of that wife of his and not without reason as we know. I’m willing to take a bet that he keeps tabs on her when he can. He probably suspects Quadrant and when she told him she was going out on Tuesday afternoon he nipped back to Kingsmarkham on the off-chance, watched her go out, satisfied himself that she didn’t go to Quadrant’s office and went back to Stowerton. He’d know she’d dress herself up to the nines if she was meeting Dougie. When he saw her go off in the car along the Kingsbrook Road in the same clothes she was wearing that morning he’d bank on her going shopping in Pomfret - they don’t close on Tuesdays - and he’d be able to set his mind at rest. I’m certain that’s what happened.’

It sounds like him, Burden agreed. It fits. ‘Was Quadrant here twelve years ago, sir?’

‘Oh, yes, lived here all his life, apart from three years at Cambridge and, anyway, he came down in 1949. Still, Mrs P. was hardly his style. I asked him if he knew her and he just laughed, but it was the way he laughed. I’m not kidding, Mike, it made my blood run cold.’

Burden looked at his chief with respect It must have been quite a display, he thought, to chill Wexford.

‘I suppose the others could have been just - well, playthings as it were, and Mrs P. a life-long love.’

‘Christ!’ Wexford roared. ‘I should never have let you read that book. Playthings, life-long love! You make me puke. For pity’s sake find out where Drury lives and we’ll get over there.’

According to the directory, Drury, Dudley J. and Drury, Kathleen lived at 14 Sparta Grove, Stowerton. Burden knew it as a street of tiny pre-war semidetached houses, not far from where Peter Missal had his garage. It was not the kind of background he had visualized for Doon. He and Wexford had a couple of rounds of sandwiches from the Carousel and got to Stowerton by seven.

Drury’s house had a yellow front door with a lot of neatly tied climbing roses on the trellis round the porch. In the middle of the lawn was a small pond made from a plastic bath and on its rim stood a plaster gnome with a fishing rod. Someone had evidently been polishing the Ford Popular on the garage drive. As a vehicle for clandestine touring Mrs Katz would probably have despised it, but it was certainly shiny enough to have dazzled Margaret Parsons.

The door-knocker was a cast-iron lion’s head with a ring in its mouth. Wexford banged it hard, but no one came, so he pushed open the side gate and they entered the back garden. On a vegetable plot by the rear fence a man was digging potatoes.

Wexford coughed and the man turned round. He had a red glistening face, and although it was warm, the cuffs of his long-sleeved shirt were buttoned. His sandy hair and the whiteness of his wrists confirmed Wexford’s opinion that he was probably sensitive to sunburn. Not the sort of man, Burden thought, to be fond of poetry and send snippets of verse to the girl he loved, surely not the sort of man to buy expensive books and write delicate whimsical messages in their fly-leaves.

‘Mr Drury?’ Wexford asked quietly.

Drury looked startled, almost frightened, but this could simply be alarm at the invasion of his garden by two men much larger man himself. There was sweat on his upper lip, again probably only the result of manual toil.

‘Who are you?’

It was a thin highish voice that sounded as if its development towards a greater resonance had been arrested in puberty.

‘Chief Inspector Wexford, sir, and Inspector Burden. County Police.’

Drury had looked after his garden. Apart from a couple of square yards from which potatoes had been lifted, there were various freshly turned patches all over the flower-beds. He stuck the prongs of the fork into the ground and wiped his hands on his trousers.

‘Is this something to do with Margaret?’ he asked.

‘I think we’d better go into the house, Mr Drury.’

He took them in through a pair of french windows, considerably less elegant than Mrs Missal’s, and into a tiny room crowded with post-war utility furniture.