Ruth Rendell - From Doon with Death

‘It’s all very plausible,’ Quadrant said. He smoothed his wife’s dishevelled hair and drew his arm more tightly around her. ‘Of course, there isn’t the remotest chance of your getting a conviction on that evidence, but we’ll try it if you like.’ He spoke as if they were about to embark on some small stratagem, the means of getting home when the car has broken down or a way of getting tactfully out of a party invitation.

‘No, Mr Quadrant’ Wexford said, ‘we won’t waste our time on it. You can go if you wish, but I’d prefer you to stay. You see, Doon loved Minna, and although there might have been hatred too, there would never have been contempt Yesterday afternoon when I asked you if you had ever known her you laughed. That laughter was one of the few sincere responses I got out of you and I knew men that although Doon might have killed Minna, passion would never have turned into ridicule.

‘Moreover, at four o’clock this morning I learnt something else. I read a letter and I knew then that you couldn’t be Doon and Drury couldn’t be Doon. I learnt exactly what was the nature of Doon’s disadvantage.’

Burden knew what was corning but still he held his breath.

‘Doon is a woman,’ Wexford said.

He would have let them arrest him, would have gone with them. Burden thought. like a lamb. Now, assured of his immunity, his aplomb had gone and panic, the last emotion Burden would have associated with Quadrant, showed in his eyes.

His wife pulled herself away from him and sat up. During Wexford’s long speeches she had been sobbing and her lips and eyelids were swollen.

Her tears, perhaps because crying is a weakness of the young, made her look like a girl. She was wearing a yellow dress made of some expensive creaseless fabric that fell straight and smooth like a tunic. So far she had said nothing. Now she looked elated, breathless with unspoken words.

‘When I knew that Doon was a woman,’ Wexford said, ‘almost everything fell into place. It explained so much of Mrs Parsons’ secrecy, why she deceived her husband and yet could feel she wasn’t deceiving him; why Drury thought she was ashamed of Doon; why in self-disgust she hid the books…’

And why Mrs Katz, knowing Doon’s sex but not her name, was so curious, Burden thought It explained the letter that had puzzled them the day before. I don’t know why you should be scared. There was never anything in that … The cousin, the confidante, had known all along. For her it was no secret but a fact of which she had so long been aware that she had thought it unnecessary to tell the Colorado police chief until he had probed.

Then it had come out as an artless postscript to the interview.

‘Say, what is this?’ he had said to Wexford. “You figured it was a guy?’

Helen Missal had moved back into the shade. The trunk she sat on was against the wall and the sun made a brighter splash on her bright blue skirt, leaving her face in shadow. Her hands twitched in her lap and the window was reflected ten times in her mirror-like nails.

‘Your behaviour was peculiar, Mrs Missal,’ Wexford said. ‘Firstly you lied to me in saying you didn’t know Mrs Parsons. Perhaps you really didn’t recognize her from the photograph. But with people like you if s so difficult to tell. You cry Wolf! so often that in the end we can only find out what actually happened from the conversation of others or by things you let slip accidentally.’

She gave him a savage glance.

‘For God’s sake give me one of those cigarettes, Douglas,’ she said.

‘I’d made up my mind that you were of no significance in this case,’ Wexford went on, ‘until something happened on Friday night. I came into your drawing-room and told your husband I wanted to speak to his wife. You were only annoyed but Mr Quadrant was terrified. He did something very awkward then and I could see that he was nervous. I assumed when you told me that you’d been out with him that he didn’t want us to find out about. it But not a bit of it. He was almost embarrassingly forthcoming.

‘So I thought and I thought and at last I realized that I’d been looking at that little scene from upside down. I remembered the exact words I’d used and who I’d been looking at… but we’ll leave that now and pass on.

‘Your old headmistress remembered you, Mrs Missal. Everyone thought you’d go on the stage, she said. And you said the same thing. “I wanted to act!” you said. You weren’t lying then. That was in 1951, the year Minna left Doon for Drury. I was working on the assumption that Doon was ambitious and her separation from Minna frustrated that ambition. If I was looking for a spoiled life I didn’t have to go any further.

‘In late adolescence Doon had been changed from a clever, passionate, hopeful girl into someone bitter and disillusioned. You fitted into that pattern. Your gaiety was really very brittle. Oh, yes, you had your affairs, but wasn’t that consistent too? Wasn’t that a way of consoling yourself for something real and true you couldn’t have?’

She interrupted him then and shouted defiantly:

‘So what?’ She stood up and kicked one of the books so that it skimmed across the floor and struck the wall at Wexford’s feet. ‘You must be mad if you think I’m Doon. I wouldn’t have a disgusting … a revolting thing like that for another woman!’ Flinging back her shoulders, projecting her sex at them, she denied perversion as if it would show in some deformity of her body. ‘I hate that sort of thing. It makes me feel sick! I hated it at school. I saw it all along, all the time…’

Wexford picked up the book she had kicked and took another from his pocket. The bloom on the pale green suede looked like dust.

‘This was love,’ he said quietly. Helen Missal breathed deeply. ‘It wasn’t disgusting or revolting. To Doon it was beautiful. Minna had only to listen and be gentle, only to be kind.’

He looked out of the window as if engrossed by a flock of birds flying in leaf-shaped formation. ‘Minna was only asked to go out with Doon, have lunch with her, drive around the lanes where they’d walked when they were young, listen when Doon talked about the dreams which never came to anything. Listen,’ he said. ‘It was like this.’

His finger was in the book, in its centre. He let it fall open at the marked page and began to read:

If love were what the rose is; And I were like the leaf. Our lives would grow together In sad or singing weather.. ‘

Fabia Quadrant moved and spoke. Her voice seemed to come from far away, adding to the stanza out of old memory:

‘Blown fields or flowerful closes. Green pleasure or grey grief...‘

They were the first words she had uttered. Her husband seized her wrist, clamping his fingers to the thin bones. If he had only dared. Burden thought, he would have covered her mouth.

‘If love were what the rose is,’ she said, ‘And I were like the leaf.’

She stopped on a high note, a child waiting for the applause that should have come twelve years before and now would never come. Wexford had listened, fanning himself rhythmically with the book. He took the dream from her gently and said:

‘But Minna didn’t listen. She was bored.’ To the woman who had capped his verse he said earnestly, ‘She wasn’t Minna any more, you see. She was a housewife, an ex-teacher who would have liked to talk about cooking and knitting patterns with someone of her own kind.