Ruth Rendell - From Doon with Death

He said no more, but the sounds from above had grown louder. Then, as Wexford put his hand to the door of the little room where he and Burden had read the poetry aloud, a faint sigh came from the other side.

The attic floor was littered with books, some open and slammed face-downwards, others on their spines, their pages spread in fans and their covers ripped. One had come to rest against a wall as if it had been flung there and had fallen open at an illustration of a pigtailed girl with a hockey stick. Quadrant’s wife knelt among the chaos, clutching a fistful of crumpled coloured paper.

When the door opened and she saw Wexford she seemed to make an immense effort to behave as if this were her home, as if she was hunting in her own attic and the four who entered were unexpected guests. For a second Burden had the fantastic notion that she would attempt to shake hands. But no words came and her hands seemed paralysed. She began to back away from them and towards the window, gradually raising her arms and pressing her beringed fingers against her cheeks. As she moved her heels caught one of the scattered books, a girls’ annual, and she stumbled, half falling across the larger of the two trunks. A star-shaped mark showed on her cheek-bone where a ring had dug into the flesh.

She lay where she had fallen until Quadrant stepped forward and lifted her against him. Then she moaned softly and turned her face, hiding it in his shoulder.

In the doorway Helen Missal stamped and said, ‘I want to go home!’

‘Will you close the door. Inspector Burden?’ Wexford went to the tiny window and unlatched it as calmly as if he was in his own office. ‘I think we’ll have some air,’ he said.

It was a tiny shoe-box of a room and khaki-coloured like the interior of a shoe-box. There was no breeze but the casement swung open to let in a more wholesome heat.

‘I’m afraid there isn’t much room,’ Wexford said like an apologetic host. Inspector Burden and I will stand and you, Mrs Missal, can sit on the other trunk.’

To Burden’s astonishment she obeyed him. He saw that she was keeping her eyes on the Chief Inspector’s face like a subject under hypnosis. She had grown very white and suddenly looked much more than her actual age. The red hair might have been a wig bedizening a middle-aged woman.

Quadrant had been silent, nursing his wife as if she were a fractious child. Now he said with something of his former scorn:

‘Surete methods, Chief Inspector? How very melodramatic.’

Wexford ignored him. He stood by the window, his face outlined against clear blue.

‘I’m going to tell you a love story,’ he said, ‘The story of Doon and Minna.’ Nobody moved but Quadrant. He reached for his jacket on the trunk where Helen Missal sat, took a gold case from the pocket and lit a cigarette with a match. ‘When Margaret Godfrey first came here,’ Wexford began, ‘she was sixteen. She’d been brought up by old-fashioned people and as a result she appeared prim and shockable. Far from being the London girl come to startle the provinces, she was a suburban orphan thrown on the sophisticated county. Isn’t that so, Mrs Missal?’

‘You can put it that way if you like.’

In order to hide her gaucheness she put on a curious manner, a manner compounded of secretiveness, remoteness, primness. To a lover these can make up a fascinating mixture. They fascinated Doon.

‘Doon was rich and clever and good-looking. I don’t doubt that for a time Minna - that’s the name Doon gave her and I shall refer to her by it - Minna was bowled over. Doon could give her things she could never have afforded to buy and so for a time Doon could buy her love or rather her companionship; for this was a love of the mind and nothing physical entered into it.’

Quadrant smoked fiercely. He inhaled deeply and the cigarette end glowed.

‘I have said Doon was clever,’ Wexford went on. ‘Perhaps I should add that brilliance of intellect doesn’t always go with self-sufficiency. So it was with Doon. Success, the flowering of ambition, actual achievement depended in this case on close contact with the chosen one - Minna. But Minna was only waiting, biding her time. Because, you see…’ He looked at the three people slowly and severally. ‘… You know that Doon, in spite of the wealth, the intellect, the good looks, had one insurmountable disadvantage, a disadvantage greater than any deformity, particularly to a woman of Minna’s background, that no amount of time or changed circumstances could alter.’

Helen Missal nodded sharply, her eyes alight with memory. Leaning against her husband, Fabia Quadrant was crying softly.

‘So when Dudley Drury came along she dropped Doon without a backward glance. All the expensive books Doon had given her she hid in a trunk and she never looked at them again. Drury was dull and ordinary - callow is the word, isn’t it, Mrs Quadrant? Not passionate or possessive. Those are the adjectives I would apply to Doon. But Drury was without Doon’s disadvantage, so Drury won.’

‘She preferred me!’ Burden remembered Drury’s exultant cry in the middle of his interrogation.

Wexford continued:

‘When Minna withdrew her love, or willingness to be loved, if you like, Doon’s life was broken. To other people it had seemed just an adolescent crush, but it was real all right. At that moment, July 1951, a neurosis was set up which, though quiescent for years, flared again when she returned. With it came hope. They were no longer teenagers but mature. At last Minna might listen and befriend. But she didn’t and so she had to die.’

Wexford stepped forward, coming closer to the seated man.

‘So we come to you, Mr Quadrant.’

‘If it wasn’t for the fact that you’re upsetting my wife,’ Quadrant said, ‘I should say that this is a splendid way of livening up a dull Sunday morning.’ His voice was light and supercilious, but he flung his cigarette from him across the room and out of the open window past Burden’s ear. ‘Please go on.’

‘When we discovered that Minna was missing -you knew we had. Your office is by the bridge and you must have seen us dragging the brook - you realized that the mud from that lane could be found in your car tyres. In order to cover yourself, for in your “peculiar position” (I quote) you knew our methods, and you had to take your car back to the lane on some legitimate pretext. It would hardly have been safe to go there during the day, but that evening you were meeting Mrs Missal -’

Helen Missal jumped up and cried, ‘No, it isn’t true!’

‘Sit down,’ Wexford said. ‘Do you imagine she doesn’t know about it? D’you think she didn’t know about you and all the others?’ He turned back to Quadrant. ‘You’re an arrogant man, Mr Quadrant,’ he said, ‘and you didn’t in the least mind our knowing about your affair with Mrs Missal. If we ever connected you with the crime at all and examined your car, you could bluster a little but your reason for going to the lane was so obviously clandestine that any lies or evasions would be put down to that.

‘But when you came to the wood you had to look and see, you had to make sure. I don’t know what excuse you made for going into the wood…’

‘He said he saw a Peeping Tom,’ Helen Missal said bitterly.

‘… but you did go in and because it was dark by then you struck a match to look more closely at the body. You were fascinated as well you might be and you held the match until it burnt down and Mrs Missal called out to you. Then you drove home. You had done what you came to do and with any luck nobody would ever connect you with Mrs Parsons. But later when I mentioned the name Doon to you - it was yesterday afternoon, wasn’t it? - you remembered the books. Perhaps there were letters too - it was all so long ago. As soon as you knew Parsons would be out of the house you used the dead woman’s missing key to get in, and so we found you searching for what Doon might have left behind.’