Ruth Rendell: From Doon with Death

‘I’d like a description of your wife, Mr Parsons,’ Wexford said. ‘Won’t you sit down?’

Burden called young Gates in and set him tapping with one finger at the little grey typewriter.

Parsons sat down. He began speaking slowly, shame-facedly, as if he had been asked to uncover his wife’s nakedness.

‘She’s got fair hair’ he said. ‘Fair curly hair and very light blue eyes. She’s pretty.’ He looked at Wexford defiantly and Burden wondered if he realized the dowdy impression the photograph had given. ‘I think she’s pretty. She’s got a high sort of forehead.’ He touched his own low narrow one. ‘She’s not very tall, about five feet one or two.’

Wexford went on looking at the picture.

‘Thin? Well built?’

Parsons shifted in his chair.

‘Well built, I suppose.’ An awkward flush tinged the pale face. ‘She’s thirty. She was thirty a few months ago, in March.’

‘What was she wearing?’

‘A green and white dress. Well, white with green flowers on it, and a yellow cardigan. Oh, and sandals. She never wears stockings in the summer.’

‘Handbag?’

‘She never carried a handbag. She doesn’t smoke or use make-up, you see. She wouldn’t have any use for a handbag. Just her purse and her key.’

‘Any distinguishing marks?’

‘Appendicitis scar,’ Parsons said, flushing again.

Gates ripped the sheet from the typewriter and Wexford looked at it.

Tell me about yesterday morning, Mr Parsons,’ he said. ‘How did your wife seem? Excited? Worried?’

Parsons slapped his hands down on to his spread knees. It was a gesture of despair; despair and exasperation.

‘She was the same as usual,’ he said. ‘I didn’t notice anything. You see, she wasn’t an emotional woman.’ He looked down at his shoes and said again, ‘She was the same as usual.’

‘What did you talk about?’

‘I don’t know. The weather. We didn’t talk much. I have to get off to work at half past eight - I work for the Southern Water Board at Stowerton. I said it was a nice day and she said yes, but it was too bright. It was bound to rain, too good to last. And she was right. It did rain, poured down all the morning.’

‘And you went to work. How? Bus, train, car?’

‘I don’t have a car…’

He looked as if he was about to enumerate all the other things he didn’t have, so Wexford said quickly: ‘Bus then?’

‘I always catch the eight-thirty-seven from the market place. I said good-bye to her. She didn’t come to the door. But that’s nothing. She never did.’

‘She was washing up.’

‘Did she say what she was going to do with herself during the day?’

‘The usual things, I suppose, shopping and the house. You know the sort of things women do.’ He paused, then said suddenly: ‘Took, she wouldn’t kill herself. Don’t get any ideas like that Margaret wouldn’t kill herself. She’s a religious woman.’

‘All right, Mr Parsons. Try to keep calm and don’t worry. We’ll do everything we can to find her.’

Wexford considered, dissatisfaction in the lines of his face, and Parsons seemed to interpret this characteristically. He sprang to his feet, quivering.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he shouted. ‘You think I’ve done away with her. I know how your minds work. I’ve read it all up.’

Burden said quickly, trying to smooth things down. ‘Mr Parsons is by way of being a student of crime, sir.’

‘Crime?’ Wexford raised his eyebrows. ‘What crime?’

‘Well have a car to take you home,’ Burden said. ‘I should take the day off. Get your doctor to give you something so that you can sleep.’

Parsons went out jerkily, walking like a paraplegic, and from the window Burden watched him get into the car beside Gates. The shops were opening now and the fruiterer on the opposite side of the street was putting up his sunblind in anticipation of a fine day. If this had been an ordinary Wednesday, a normal weekday. Burden thought, Margaret Parsons might now have been kneeling in the sun, polishing that gleaming step, or opening the windows and letting some air into those musty rooms. Where was she, waking in the arms of her lover or lying in some more final resting place?

‘She’s bolted, Mike,’ Wexford said. ‘That’s what my old father used to call a woman who eloped. A bolter. Still, better do the usual check-up. You can do it yourself since you knew her by sight.’

Burden picked up the photograph and put it in his pocket. He went first to the station but the ticket-collector and the booking clerks were sure Mrs Parsons hadn’t been through.

But the woman serving at the bookstall recognized her at once from the picture.

That’s funny,’ she said. ‘Mrs Parsons always comes in to pay for her papers on Tuesdays. Yesterday was Tuesday but I’m sure I never saw her. Wait a minute, my husband was on in the afternoon.’ She called, ‘George, here a sec!’

The bookstall proprietor came round from the part of the shop that fronted on to the street. He opened his order book and ran a finger down the edge of one of the pages.

‘No,’ he said. ‘She never came. There’s two-and-two outstanding.’ He looked curiously at Burden, greedy for explanations. ‘Peculiar, that,’ he said.

‘She always pays up, regular as clockwork.’

Burden went back to the High Street to begin on the shops. He marched into the big supermarket and up to the check-out counter. The woman by the till was standing idly, lulled by background music. When Burden showed her the photograph she seemed to jerk back into life.

Yes, she knew Mrs Parsons by name as well as by sight. She was a regular customer and she had been in yesterday as usual.

‘About half ten it was,’ she said. ‘Always the same time.’

‘Did she talk to you? Can you remember what she said?’

‘Now you are asking something. Wait a minute, I do remember. It's coming back to me. I said it was a problem to know what to give them, and she said, yes, you didn’t seem to fancy salad, not when it was raining. She said she’d got some chops, she was going to do them in a batter, and I sort of looked at her things, the things she’d got in her basket. But she said, no, she’d got the chops on Monday.’

‘Can you remember what she was wearing? A green cotton frock, yellow cardigan?’

‘Oh, no, definitely not. All the customers were in raincoats yesterday morning. Wait a tic, that rings a bell. She said, “Golly, it’s pouring.” I remember because of the way she said “Golly”, like a school-kid. She said, ‘‘I’ll have to get something to put on my head,” so I said, “Why not get one of our rain-hoods in the reduced line?” She said didn’t it seem awful to have to buy a rain-hood in May? But she took one. I know that for sure, because I had to check it separately. I’d already checked her goods.’

She left the counter and led Burden to a display of jumbled transparent scarves, pink, blue, apricot and white.

‘They wouldn’t actually keep the rain out,’ she said confidingly. ‘Not a downpour, if you know what I mean. But they’re prettier than plastic. More glamorous. She had a pink one. I remarked on it I said it went with her pink jumper.’

‘Thank you very much,’ Burden said. ‘You’ve been most helpful.’

He checked at the shops between the supermarket and Tabard Road, but no one remembered seeing Mrs Parsons. In Tabard Road itself the neighbours seemed shocked and helpless. Mrs Johnson, Margaret Parsons’ next-door neighbour, had seen her go out soon after ten and return at a quarter to eleven. Then, at about twelve, she thought it was, she had been in her kitchen and had seen Mrs Parsons go out into the garden and peg two pairs of socks on to the line. Half an hour later she had heard the Parsonses’ front door open and close again softly. But this meant nothing.