[Wexford 01] From Doon & Death (14 page)

'Anne Kelly,' he said, 'Diana Stevens, a
girl called Bertram What about Cl
are Clarke, what about Mrs Quadrant? Would they remember?'

She had said that she hated school, but as she began to speak her voice was softer than he had ever known it and her expression gentler. For a moment he forgot his anger, her lies, the provocative costume she wore, and listened.

Ifs funny,' she said, 'but thinking of those names has sort of brought it back to me. We used to sit in a kind of garden, a wild old place. Fabia and me and a girl called Clarke -
’I
see her around sometimes - and Jill Ingram and that Kelly girl and - and Margaret Godfrey. We were supposed to be working but we didn't much. We used to talk about
...
Oh, I don't know
...'

'About your boy friends, Mrs Missal?' As soon as ihe words were out Wexford knew he had been obtuse.

'Oh, no,' she said sharply. "You've got it wrong. Not then, not in the garden. It was a wilderness, an old pond, bushes, a seat We used to talk about
...
well, about our dreams, what we wanted to do, what we were going to make of our lives.' She stopped and Wexford could see in a sudden flash of vision a wild green place, the girls with their books and hear with his mind's ear the laughter, the gasp of dizzy ambition. Then he almost jumped at the change in her voice. She whispered savagely, as if she had forgotten he was there: 'I wanted to act! They wouldn't let me, my father and my mother. They made me stay at home and it all went. It sort of dissolved into nothing
’
She shook back her hair and smoothed with the tips of two fingers the creases that had appeared between her eyebrows.
‘I
met Pete,' she said, 'and we got married
’
Her nose wrinkled. The story of my life
’

'
You can't have ever
ything,' Wexford said.

'No,' she said, 'I wasn't the only one
..
‘

She hesitated and Wexford held his breath. He had an intuitive conviction that he was about to hear something of enormous significance, something that would iron out the whole case, wrap it up and tie it ready to hand to Mr Griswold. The green eyes widened and lit up; then suddenly the incandescence died and they became almost opaque. Outside in the hall a floorboard squeaked and Wexford heard the squashy sound of a rubber sole on thick carpet. Helen Missal's face became quite white.

'Oh God!' she said. 'Please, please don't ask about the cinema ticket. Please don't!'

Wexford cursed inwardly as the door opened and Missal came in. He was sweating and mere were damp patches on the underarms of his singlet. He stared at his wife and in his eyes was a strange mixture of disgust and concupiscence.

‘P
ut something on
’
he shouted. 'Go on, put some clothes on
’

She got tip awkwardly and Wexford had the illusion that her husband's words were scrawled across her body like the obscene scribble on a pin-up picture.

‘I
was sunbathing,' she said.

Missal wheeled round on Wexford.

'Come to see the peep-show, have you?' His face was crimson with exertion and with jealousy. 'What the copper saw.'

Wexford wanted to be angry, to match the other man's rage with his own colder kind, but he could feel only pity.

All he said was, 'Your wife has been able to help me.'

‘I’ll
bet she has.' Missal held the door open and almost pushed her through. 'Been kind, has she? That's a speciality of hers, being kind to every Tom, Dick and Harry
’
He fingered his wet shirt as if his body disgusted him. 'Go on
’
he said, 'start on me now. What were you doing in Kingsmarkham on Tuesday afternoon, Mr Missal? The name of the client, Mr Missal.
Your car was seen in the Kings
brook Road, Mr Missal. Well, go on. Don't you want to know?'

Wexford got up and walked a few paces towards the door. The heavy blossoms, pink, puce and white, brushed against his legs. Missal stood staring at him like an overfed, under-exercised dog longing to let out an uninhibited howl.

Don't you want to know? Nobody saw me. I could have been strangling that woman. Don't you want to know what I was doing? Don't you?'

Wexford didn't look at him. He had seen too many men's souls stripped to relish an unnecessary spiritual skinning.

‘I
know what you were doing,' he said, skipping the name, the 'sir'. 'You told me yourself, just now in this room
’
He opened the door. If not in so many words.'

Douglas Quadrant's house was much larger and far less pleasing to the eye than the Missals'. It stood on an eminence amid shrubby grounds some fifty feet back from the road. A huge cedar softened to some extent its austere aspect, but when he was half-way up the path Wexford recalled similar houses he had seen in the north of Scotland, granite-built, vaguely gothic and set at each end with steeple-roofed towers.

There was something odd about the garden, but it was a few minutes before he realized in what its strangeness consisted. The lawns were smooth, the shrubs conventionally chosen, but about it all was a sombre air. There were no flowers. Douglas Quadrant's garden presented a Monet-like landscape of grey and brown and many-shaded green.

After Mrs Missal's blue lilies, the rhododendrons real and artificial in her drawing-room, this stately drabness should have been restful. Instead it was hideously depressing. Undoubtedly no flowers could bloom because none had been planted, but the effect was rather that the soil was barren or the air inclement.

Wexford mounted the shallow flight of broad steps under the blank eyes of windows hung with olive and burgundy and pigeon grey, and pressed the bell. Presently the door was opened by a woman of about seventy dressed amazingly in a brown frock with a beige cap and apron. She was what was once known, Wexford thought, as 'an elderly body'. Here, he was sure, there would be no frivolous Teutonic blondes.

She in her turn looked as if she would designate him as 'a person', a creature not far removed from a tradesman, who should have known better than to present himself at the front door. He asked for Mrs Quadrant and produced his card.

'Madam is having her tea,' she said, unimpressed by Wexford's bulk, his air of justice incarnate. 'I'll see if she can speak to you.'

‘J
ust
tell her Chief Inspector Wexford would like a word with her.' Affected by the atmosphere, he added. If you please.'

He stepped over the threshold and into the hall. It was as big as a large room and, surprisingly enough, the tapestries of hunting scenes stretched on frames and attached to the walls did nothing to diminish its size. Again there was the same absence of colour, but not quite a total absence. Worked into the coats of the huntsmen, the palfreys of their mounts, Wexford caught the gleam of dull gold, ox-blood red and a hint of heraldic murrey.

The old woman looked defiantly at him as if she was prepared to argue it out, but as Wexford closed the front door firmly behind him someone called out:

'Who is it, Nanny?'

He recognized Mrs Quadrant's voice and remembered how the night before she had smiled at Missal's crude joke.

Nanny just got to the double doors before him. She opened them in a way he had only seen done in films and, incongruously, grotesquely, there rose before his eyes a shot, ridiculous and immensely funny.

from a Marx Brothers picture. The vision fled and he entered the room.

Douglas and Fabia Quadrant were sitting alone at either end of a low table covered by a lace cloth. Tea had apparently only just been brought in because the book Mrs Quadrant had been reading was lying open and face-upwards on the arm of her chair. The soft old silver of the teapot, the cream jug and the sugar bowl was so brightly polished that it reflected her long hands against the sombre colours of the room. It was forty years since Wexford had seen a brass kettle like this one boiling gently over a spirit flame.

Quadrant was eating bread and butter, just plain bread and butter but crustless and cut thin as a wafer.

This is an unexpected pleasure,' he said, rising to his feet. This time there were no clumsy incidents with cigarettes. He restored his cup almost gracefully to the table and waved Wexford into an armchair.

'Of course, you know my wife?' He was like a cat, Wexford thought, a slim detached tom-cat who purred by day and went out on the tiles at night. And this room, the silver, the china, the long wine-coloured curtains like blood transmuted into velvet! And amidst it all Mrs Quadrant, dark-haired, elegant in black, was feeding cream to her cat. But when the lamps were lit he stole away to take his feline pleasures under the bushes in the creeping dark.

‘
Tea, Chief Inspector?' She poured a driblet of water into the pot.

'Not for me, thank you.' She had come a long way, Wexford thought, since those days in the wilderness garden, or perhaps, even then, her gym tunic had been of a more expensive make, her hair more expertly cut than the other girls'. She's beautiful, he thought, but she looks old, much older than Helen

Missal. No children, plenty of money, nothing to do all day but feed cream to a ranging cat
.
Did she mind his infidelity, did she even know about it? Wexford wondered curiously if the jealousy that had reddened Missal had blanched and aged Quadrant's wife.

'And what can I do for you?' Quadrant asked.
‘I
half expected a visit this morning. I gather from the newspapers that you aren't making a great deal of headway.' Lining himself up on the side of the law, he added, 'An elusive killer this time, am I right?'

'Things are sorting themselves out
’
Wexford said heavily. 'As a matter of fact it was your wife I wanted to speak to
’

To me?' Fabia Quadrant touched one of her platinum ear-rings and Wexford noticed that her wrists were thin and her arms already corded like a much older woman's. 'Oh, I see. Because I knew Margaret, you mean. We were never very close. Chief Inspector. There must be dozens of people who could tell you more about her than I can.'

Possibly, Wexford thought, if I only knew where to find them.

‘I
didn't see her at all after her family moved away from Flagford
until just a few weeks ago. We met in the High Street and had coffee. We discovered we'd gone our separate ways and - well!'

And that, Wexford said to himself, contrasting Tabard Road with the house he was in, must be the understatement of the case. For a second, building his impressions as he always did in a series of pictures, he glimpsed that meeting: Mrs Quadrant with her rings, her elaborately straight hair, and Margaret Parsons awkward in the cardigan and sandals that had seemed so comfortable until she came upon her old companion. What had they in common, what had they talked about?

'What did she talk about, Mrs Quadrant?'

'Oh, the changes in the place, people we'd known at school, that sort of thing.' The governess and the lady of the manor. Wexford sighed within himself.

‘D
id you ever meet anyone called Anne Ives?'

'You mean Margaret's cousin? No, I never met her. She wasn't at school with us. She was a typist or a clerk or something
’

Just another of the hoi-polloi, Wexford thought, the despised majority, the bottom seventy-five per cent.

Quadrant sat listening, swinging one elegant leg. His wife's condescension seemed to amuse him. He finished his tea, crumpled his napkin and helped himself to a cigarette. Wexford watched him take a box of matches from his pocket and strike one. Matches! That was odd. Surely if he had behaved consistently Quadrant would have used a lighter, one of these table lighters that look like a Georgian teapot, Wexford thought, his imagination working. There had been a single matchstick beside Mrs Parsons' body, a single matchstick half burnt away
...

'Now, Margaret Godfrey's boy friends, Mrs Quadrant. Can you remember anyone at all?'

He leant forward, trying to impress her with the urgency of his question. A tiny flash of something that might have been malice or simply recollection darted into her eyes and was gone. Quadrant exhaled deeply.

There was a boy,' she said.

Try to remember, Mrs Quadrant.'

‘I
ought to remember
’
she said, and Wexford was sure she could, certain she
was only stalling for effect. I
t was like a theatre, a London theatre.'

‘P
alladium, Globe, Haymarket?' Quadrant was enjoying himself. 'Prince of Wales?'

Fabia Quadrant giggled softly. It was an unkind titter, sympathetic towards her husband, faintly hostile to the Chief Inspector. For all his infidelity Quadrant and his wife shared something, something stronger, Wexford guessed, than ordinary marital trust

‘I
know, it was Drury. Dudley Drury. He used to live in Flagford
’

'Thank you, Mrs Quadrant It had just crossed my mind that your husband might have known her
’