Ruth Rendell - From Doon with Death

The milkman always came late, they had complained about it, and she might simply have put her hand out into the porch to take in the bottles.

There had been a sale at the auction rooms on the corner of Tabard Road the previous afternoon. Burden cursed to himself, for this meant that cars had been double parked along the street. Anyone looking out of her downstairs windows during the afternoon would have had her view of the opposite pavement blocked by this row of cars standing nose to tail.

He tried the bus garage, even rather wildly the car-hire firms, and drew a complete blank. Filled with foreboding, he went slowly back to the police station. Suicide now seemed utterly ruled out You didn’t chatter cheerfully about the chops you intended cooking for your husband’s dinner if you intended to kill yourself, and you didn’t go forth to meet your lover without a coat or a handbag.

Meanwhile Wexford had been through Parsons’ house from the ugly little kitchen to the two attics. In a drawer of Mrs Parsons’ dressing-table he found two winceyette nightdresses, oldish and faded but neatly folded, one printed cotton nightdress and a fourth, creased and worn perhaps for two nights, under the pillow nearest the wall on the double bed. His wife hadn’t any more nightgowns, Parsons said, and her dressing-gown, made of blue woolly material with darker blue braiding, was still hanging on a hook behind the bedroom door. She hadn’t a summer dressing-gown and the only pair of slippers she possessed Wexford found neatly packed heel to toe in a cupboard in the dining-room.

It looked as if Parsons had been right about the purse and the key. They were nowhere to be found. In the winter the house was heated solely by two open fires and the water by an immersion heater. Wexford set Gates to examining these fireplaces and to searching the dustbin, last emptied by Kingsmarkham Borough Council on Monday, but there was no trace of ash. A sheet of newspaper had been folded to cover the grate in the diningroom, and this, lightly sprinkled with soot, bore the date April 15th.

Parsons said he had given his wife five pounds housekeeping money on the previous Friday. As far as he knew she had no savings accumulated from previous weeks. Gates, searching the kitchen dresser, found two pound notes rolled up in a cocoa tin on one of the shelves. If Mrs Parsons had received only five pounds on Friday and out of this had bought food for her husband and herself for four or five days, leaving two pounds for the rest of the week, it was apparent that the missing purse could have contained at best a few shillings.

Wexford had hoped to find a diary, an address book or a letter which might give him some help. A brass letter-rack attached to the dining-room wall beside the fireplace contained only a coal bill, a circular from a firm fitting central-heating plant (had Mrs Parsons, after all, had her dreams?), two soap coupons and an estimate from a contractor for rendering and making good a damp patch on the kitchen wall.

‘Your wife didn’t have any family at all, Mr Parsons?’ Wexford asked.

‘Only me. We kept ourselves to ourselves. Margaret didn’t … doesn’t make friends easily. I was brought up in a children’s home and when she lost her mother Margaret went to live with an aunt. But her aunt died when we were engaged.’

‘Where was that, Mr Parsons? Where you met, I mean.’

‘In London, Balham. Margaret was teaching in an infants’ school and I had digs in her aunt's house.’

Wexford sighed. Balham! The net was widening. Still, you didn’t travel forty miles without a coat or a handbag. He decided to abandon Balham for the time being.

‘ I suppose no one telephoned your wife on Monday night? Did she have any letters yesterday morning?’

‘Nobody phoned, nobody came and there weren’t any letters.’ Parsons seemed proud of his empty life, as if it was evidence of respectability.. ‘We sat and talked. Margaret was knitting. I think I did a crossword puzzle part of the time.’ He opened the cupboard where the slippers were and from the top shelf took a piece of blue knitting on four needles. ‘ I wonder if it will ever be finished,’ he said. His fingers tightened on the ball of wool and he pressed the needles into the palm of his hand.

‘Never fear,’ Wexford said, hearty with false hope, ‘well find her.’

If you’ve finished in the bedrooms I think I’ll go and lie down again. The doctor’s given me something to make me sleep.’

Wexford sent for all his available men and set them to search the empty houses in Kingsmarkham and its environs, the fields that lay still unspoilt between the High Street and the Kingsbrook Road and, as afternoon came, the Kingsbrook itself. They postponed dragging operations until the shops had closed and the people dispersed, but even so a crowd gathered on the bridge and stood peering over the parapet at the wading men.

Wexford, who hated this particular kind of ghoulishness, this lust for dreadful sights thinly disguised under a mask of shocked sympathy, glowered at them and tried to persuade them to leave the bridge, but they drifted back in twos and threes. At last when dusk came, and the men had waded far to the north and the south of the town, he called off the search.

Meanwhile Ronald Parsons, dosed with sodium amytal, had fallen asleep on his lumpy mattress. For the first time in six months dust had begun to settle on the dressing-table, the iron mantelpiece and the linoed floor.

On Thursday morning a baker’s roundsman, new to his job, called at a farm owned by a man called Prewett on the main Kingsmarkham-to-Pomfret Road. There was no one about, so he left a large white loaf and a small brown one on a window-ledge and went back to where he had parked his van, leaving the gate open behind him.

Presently a cow nudged against the gate and pushed it wide open. The rest of the herd, about a dozen of them, followed and meandered down the lane. Fortunately for Mr Prewett (for the road to which they were heading was derestricted) their attention was distracted by some clumps of sow thistles on the edge of a small wood. One by one they lumbered across the grass verge, munched at the thistles, and gradually, slowly, penetrated into the thickets. The briars were thick and the wood dim. There were no more thistles, no more wet succulent grass. Trapped and bewildered, they stood still, lowing hopefully.

It was in this wood that Prewett’s cowman found them and Mrs Parsons’ body at half past one.

By two Wexford and Burden had arrived in Burden’s car, while Bryant and Gates brought Dr Crocker and two men with cameras. Prewett and the cowman, Bysouth, primed with knowledge from television serials, had touched nothing, and Margaret Parsons lay as Bysouth had found her, a bundle of damp cotton with a yellow cardigan pulled over her head.

Burden pushed aside the branches to make an arch and he and Wexford came close until they were standing over her. Mrs Parsons was lying against the trunk of a hawthorn tree perhaps eight feet high. The boughs, growing outwards and downwards like the spokes of an umbrella, made an almost enclosed igloo-shaped tent.

Wexford bent down and lifted the cardigan gently. The new dress had a neckline cut lowish at the back. On the skin, running from throat to nape to throat, was a purple circle like a thin ribbon. Burden gazed and the blue eyes seemed to stare back at him. An old-fashioned face, Jean had said, a face you wouldn’t forget. But he would forget in time, as he forgot them all. Nobody said anything. The body was photographed from various angles and the doctor examined the neck and the swollen face. Then he closed the eyes and Margaret Parsons looked at them no more.