Ruth Rendell - From Doon with Death

He got up suddenly and stared at the chair he had mutilated. Among the dirty plates was a milk bottle, half full, with yellow curds sticking to its rim.

He tipped the bottle into an empty tea-cup and drank from it, slopping a puddle into the saucer.

‘I should sit down if I were you,’ Wexford said.

He went into the hall and beckoned to Burden. They stood close together in the narrow passage. The carpet was frayed by the kitchen door and one of Drury’s children had scribbled on the wallpaper with a blue crayon.

‘Get on to The Swan, Mike,’ he said. He thought he heard Drury’s chair shift and, remembering the open french windows, turned swiftly. But Drury was still sitting at the table, his head buried in his hands.

The walls were thin and he could hear Burden’s voice in the front room, then a faint trill as the receiver went back into its rest. Burden’s feet thumped across the floor, entered the hall and stopped. There was utter silence and Wexford edged out of the door, keeping his eye on Drury through the crack.

Burden was standing by the front door. On the wall at the foot of the narrow staircase was a coat-rack, a zig-zag metal affair with gaudily coloured knobs instead of hooks. A man’s sports jacket and a child’s plastic mac hung on two of the knobs and on the one nearest to the stairs was a transparent pink nylon hood.

‘It won’t take prints,’ Wexford said. ‘Get back on that phone, Mike. I shall want some help. Bryant and Gates should be coming on about now.’

He unhooked the hood, covered the diminutive hall in three strides, and showed his find to Drury.

‘Where did you get this, Mr Drury?’

‘It must be my wife’s,’ Drury said. Suddenly assertive, he added pugnaciously. It's no business of yours!’

‘Mrs Parsons bought a hood like this one on Tuesday morning.’ Wexford watched him crumple once more in sick despair. ‘I want your permission to search this house, Drury. Make no mistake about it, I can get a warrant, but it’ll take a little longer.’

Drury looked as if he was going to cry.

‘Oh, do what you like’ he said. ‘Only, can I have a cigarette? I’ve left mine in the kitchen.’

‘Inspector Burden will get them when he comes off the phone,’ Wexford said.

They began to search, and within half an hour were joined by Gates and Bryant. Then Wexford told Burden to contact Dairy’s uncle at Pomfret, Spellman’s nursery and the manager of the supermarket.

‘The girl at The Swan isn’t on tonight’ Burden said, ‘but she lives in Flagford at 3 Cross Roads Cottages. No phone. Her name’s Janet Tipping.’

‘Well get Martin over there straight away. Try and get a phone number out of Drury where we can get hold of his wife. If she’s not gone far away - Brighton or Eastbourne - you can get down there tonight. When I’ve turned the place over I’m going to have another word with Mrs Quadrant. She admits she was “friendly” with Mrs P. and she’s practically the only person who does, apart from our friend in the next room.’

Burden stretched the pink scarf taut, testing its strength.

‘You really think he’s Doon?’ he asked incredulously.

Wexford went on opening drawers, feeling among a melee of coloured pencils, Snap cards, reels of cotton, scraps of paper covered with children’s scribble. Mrs Drury wasn’t a tidy housewife and all the cupboards and drawers were in a mess.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘At the moment it looks like it, but it leaves an awful lot of loose ends. It doesn’t fit in with my fancies, Mike, and since we can’t afford to go by fancies…’

He looked through every book in the house - there were not more than two or three dozen - but he found no more from Doon to Minna. There was no Victorian poetry and the only novels apart from The Picture of Dorian Gray were paperback thrillers.

On a hook in the kitchen cabinet Bryant found a bunch of keys. One fitted the front door lock, another the strong box in Drury’s bedroom, two more the dining-room and front-room doors, and a fifth the garage. The ignition keys to Drury’s car were in his jacket on the coat-rack and the key to the back door was in the lock. Wexford, looking for purses, found only one, a green and white plastic thing in the shape of a cat’s face. It was empty and labelled on the inside: Susan Mary Drury. Drury’s daughter had taken her savings with her to the seaside.

The loft was approached by a hatch in the landing ceiling. Wexford told Bryant to get Drury’s steps from the garage and investigate this loft. He left Gates downstairs with Drury and went out to his car. On the way he scraped some dust from the tyres of the blue Ford.

A thin drizzle was falling. It was ten o’clock and dark for a midsummer evening. If Drury had killed her at half past five, he thought, it would still have been broad daylight, much too early to need the light of a match flame. It would have to be a match they had found. Of all the things to leave behind a matchstick was surely the least incriminating! And why hadn’t she paid for her papers, what had she done with herself during the long hours between the time she left the house and, the time she met Doon? But Drury was terribly frightened … Wexford too had observed the resemblance between him and Ronald Parsons. It was reasonable to suppose, he argued, that this type of personality attracted Margaret Parsons and that she had chosen her husband because he reminded her of her old lover.

He switched on his headlights, pulled the windscreen wiper button, and started back towards Kingsmarkham.

The house looked forbidding at night. In Wexford’s headlights the rough grey granite glittered and the leaves of the flowerless wistaria which clung to it showed up a livid yellowish green.

Someone was dining with the Quadrants. Wexford pulled up beside the black Daimler and went up the steps to the front door. He rang the bell several times; then the door was opened, smoothly, almost offensively slowly, by Quadrant himself.

For dining with Helen Missal he had worn a lounge suit. At home, with his wife and guests, he ascended to evening dress. But there was nothing vulgar about Quadrant, no fancy waistcoat, no flirtation with midnight blue. The dinner jacket was black and faultless, the shirt - Wexford liked to hit on an apt quotation himself when he could - ‘whiter than new snow on a raven’s back’.

He said nothing but seemed to stare right through Wexford at the shadowy garden beyond. There was an insolent majesty about him which the tapestries that framed his figure did nothing to dispel. Then Wexford told himself sharply that this man was, after all, only a provincial solicitor.

‘I’d like another word with your wife, Mr Quadrant’

‘At this hour?’

Wexford looked at his watch and at the same time Quadrant lifted his own cuff - links of silver and onyx glinted in the muted lights - raised his eyebrow at the square platinum dial on his wrist and said:

‘It's extremely inconvenient.’ He made no move to let Wexford enter. ‘My wife isn’t a particularly strong woman and we do happen to have my parents-in-law dining with us…’

Old man Rogers and his missus, Pomfret Hall, Wexford thought vulgarly. He stood stolidly, not smiling.

‘Oh, very well,’ Quadrant said, ‘but keep it brief, will you?’

There was a faint movement in the hall behind him. A brown dress, a wisp of coffee-coloured stuff, appeared for an instant against the embroidered trees on the hangings, then Mrs Quadrant’s nanny scuttled away.