[Wexford 01] From Doon & Death (3 page)

'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 eigh
t-thirty-seven from the market place. I said good-bye to her. She d
idn'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 cal
m and don't worry. We'll do ever
ything 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. ‘Y
ou 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.

‘N
o
’
he said. 'She never came. There's two-and-two outstanding.' He looked curiously at Bu
rden, greedy for explanations. ‘P
eculiar, 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. If 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. 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 dining-room, 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 aunf 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 th
e bedrooms I think I'll go and li
e 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.

Chapter 3

Ere her limbs frigidly Stiffen too rigidly, Decently, kindly, Smooth and compose them, And her eyes, close them, Staring so blindly!

Thomas Hood,

The Bridge of Sighs

On Thursday morning a baker's roundsman, new to his job, called at a farm owned by a man called Prewett
on the main Kingsm
arkham-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.

I
t 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.