‘I think you’re getting things a bit out of proportion, Mr Parsons,’ Burden said. He was tired and he’d been going to take his wife to the pictures. Besides, the first things he’d noticed when Parsons brought him into the room were the books in the rack by the fireplace. The titles were enough to give the most level-headed man the jitters, quite enough to make a man anxious where no ground for anxiety existed: Palmer the Poisoner, The Trial of Madeleine Smith, Three Drowned Brides, Famous Trials, Notable British Trials.

   ‘Don’t you think your reading has ‘been preying on your mind?’

   ‘I’m interested in crime,’ Parsons said. ‘It’s a hobby of mine.’

   ‘I can see that.’ Burden wasn’t going to sit down if he could avoid it. ‘Look, you can’t say your wife’s actually missing. You’ve been home one and a half hours and she isn’t here. That’s all. She’s probably gone to the pictures. As a matter of fact I’m on my way there now with my wife. I expect we’ll meet her coming out.’

   ‘Margaret wouldn’t do that, Mr Burden. I know her and you don’t. We’ve been married nearly six years and in all that time I’ve never come home to an empty house.’

   ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll drop in on my way back. But you can bet your bottom dollar she’ll be home by then.’ He started moving towards the door. ‘Look, get on to the station if you like. It won’t do any harm.’

   ‘No, I won’t do that. It was just with you living down the road and being an inspector . . .’

   And being off duty, Burden thought. If I was a doctor instead of a policeman I’d be able to have private patients on the side. I bet he wouldn’t be so keen on my services if there was any question of a fee.

   Sitting in the half-empty dark cinema he thought: Well, it is funny. Normal ordinary wives as conventional as Mrs Parsons, wives who always have a meal ready for their husbands on the dot of six, don’t suddenly go off without leaving a note.

   ‘I thought you said this was a good film,’ he whispered to his wife.

   ‘Well, the critics liked it.’

   ‘Oh, critics,’ he said.

   Another man, that could be it. But Mrs Parsons? Or it could be an accident. He’d been a bit remiss not getting Parsons to phone the station straight away.

   ‘Look, love,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand this. You stay and see the end I’ve got to get back to Parsons.’

   ‘I wish I’d married that reporter who was so keen on me.’

   ‘You must be joking,’ Burden said. ‘He’d have stayed out all night putting the paper to bed. Or the editor’s secretary.’

   He charged up Tabard Road, then made himself stroll when he got to the Victorian house where Parsons lived. It was all in darkness, the curtains in the big bay downstairs undrawn. The step was whitened, the brass kerb above it polished. Mrs Parsons must have been a house-proud woman. Must have been? Why not, still was?

   Parsons opened the door before he had a chance to knock. He still looked tidy, neatly dressed in an oldish suit, his tie knotted tight. But his face was greenish grey. It reminded Burden of a drowned face he had once seen on a mortuary slab. They had put the glasses back on the spongy nose to help the girl who had come to identify him.

   ‘She hasn’t come back,’ he said. His voice sounded as if he had a cold coming. But it was probably only fear.

   ‘Let’s have a cup of tea,’ Burden said. ‘Have a cup of tea and talk about it.’

   ‘I keep thinking what could have happened to her. It’s so open round here. I suppose it would be, being country.’

   ‘It’s those books you read,’ Burden said. ‘It’s not healthy.’ He looked again at the shiny paper covers. On the spine of one was a jumble of guns and knives against a blood-red background. ‘Not for a layman,’ he said. ‘Can I use your phone?’

   ‘It’s in the front room.’

   ‘I’ll get on to the station. There might be something from the hospitals.’

   The frontroom looked as if nobody ever sat in it. With some dismay he noted its polished shabbiness. So far he hadn’t seen a stick of furniture that looked less than fifty years old. Burden went into all kinds of houses and he knew antique furniture when he saw it. But this wasn’t antique and. nobody could have chosen it because it was beautiful or rare. It was just old. Old enough to be cheap, Burden thought, and at the same time young enough not to be expensive. The kettle whistled and he heard Parsons fumbling with china in the kitchen. A cup crashed on the floor. It sounded as if they had kept the old concrete floor. It was enough to give anyone the creeps, he thought again, sitting in these high-ceilinged rooms, hearing unexplained inexplicable creaks from the stairs and the cupboard, reading about poison and hangings and blood.

   ‘I’ve reported your wife as missing,’ he said to Parsons. ‘There’s nothing from the hospitals.’

   Parsons turned on the light in the back room and Burden followed him in. It must have a weak bulb under the parchment lampshade that hung from the centre of the ceiling. About sixty watts, he thought. The shade forced all the light down, leaving the ceiling, with its plaster decorations of bulbous fruit, dark and in the corners blotched with deeper shadow. Parsons put the cups down on the side board, a vast mahogany thing more like a fantastic wooden house than a piece of furniture, with its tiers and galleries and jutting beaded shelves. Burden sat down in a chair with wooden arms and seat of brown corduroy. The lino struck cold through the thick soles of his shoes.

   ‘Have you any idea at all where your wife could have gone?’

   ‘I’ve been trying to think. I’ve been racking my brains. I can’t think of anywhere.’

   ‘What about her friends? Her mother?’

   ‘Her mother’s dead. We haven’t got any friends here. We only came here six months ago.’

   Burden stirred his tea. Outside it had been close, humid. Here in this thick-walled dark place, he supposed, it must always feel like winter.

   ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t like to say this but somebody’s bound to ask you. It might as well be me. Could she have gone out with some man? I’m sorry, but I had to ask.’

   ‘Of course you had to ask. I know, it’s all in here.’ He tapped the bookcase. ‘Just routine enquiries, isn’t it? But you’re wrong. Not Margaret. It’s laughable.’ He paused, not laughing. ‘Margaret’s a good woman. She’s a lay preacher at the Wesleyan place down the road.’

   No point in pursuing it, Burden thought. Others would ask him, probe into his private life whether he liked it or not; if she still hadn’t got home when the last train came in and the last bus had rolled into Kingsmarkham garage.

   ‘I suppose you’ve looked all over the house?’ he asked. He had driven down this road twice a day for a year but he couldn’t remember whether the house he was sitting in had two floors or three. His policeman’s brain tried to reassemble the retinal photograph on his policeman’s eye. A bay window at the bottom, two flat sash windows above it and - yes, two smaller ones above that under the slated eyelids of the roof. An ugly house, he thought, ugly and forbidding.

   ‘I looked in the bedrooms,’ Parsons said. He stopped pacing and hope coloured his cheeks. Fear whitened them again as he said: ‘You think she might be up in the attics? Fainted or something?’

   She would hardly still be there if she’d only fainted, Burden thought. A brain haemorrhage, yes, or some sort of accident. ‘Obviously we ought to look,’ he said. ‘I took it for granted you’d looked.’

   ‘I called out. We hardly ever go up there. The rooms aren’t used.’

   ‘Come on,’ Burden said.

   The light in the hall was even dimmer than the one in the dining-room. The little bulb shed a pallid glow on to a woven pinkish runner, on lino patterned to look like parquet in dark and lighter brown. Parsons went first and Burden followed him up the steep stairs. The house was biggish, but the materials which had been used to build it were poor and the workmanship unskilled. Four doors opened off the first landing and these were panelled but without beading and they looked flimsy. The flat rectangles of plywood in their frames reminded Burden of blind blocked-up windows on the sides of old houses.

   ‘I’ve looked in the bedrooms,’ Parsons said. ‘Good heavens, she may be lying helpless up there!’

   He pointed up the narrow uncarpeted flight and Burden noticed how he had said ‘Good heavens!’ and not ‘God!’ or ‘My God!’ as some men might have done.’

   ‘I’ve just remembered, there aren’t any bulbs in the attic lights.’ Parsons went into the front bedroom and unscrewed the bulb from the central lamp fitting. ‘Mind how you go,’ he said.

   It was pitchy dark on the staircase. Burden flung open the door that faced him. By now he was certain they were going to find her sprawled on the floor and he wanted to get the discovery over as soon as possible. All the way up the stairs he’d been anticipating the look on Wexford’s face when he told him she’d been there all along.

   A dank coldness breathed out of the attic, a chill mingled with the smell of camphor. The room was partly furnished. Burden could just make out the shape of a bed. Parsons stumbled over to it and stood on the cotton counterpane to fit the bulb into the lamp socket. Like the ones downstairs it gave only an unsatisfactory light, which, streaming faintly through a shade punctured all over with tiny holes, patterned the ceiling and the distempered walls with yellowish dots. The window was uncurtained. A bright cold moon swam into the black square and disappeared again under the scalloped edge of a cloud.

   ‘She’s not in here,’ Parsons said. His shoes had made dusty footprints on the white stuff that covered the bedstead like a shroud.

   Burden lifted a corner of it and looked under the bed, the only piece of furniture in the room.

   ‘Try the other room,’ he said.

   Once more Parsons went through the tedious, maddeningly slow motions of removing the light bulb. Now only the chill radiance from the window lit their way into the second attic. This was smaller and more crowded. Burden opened a cupboard and raised the lids from two trunks. He could see Parsons staring at him, thinking perhaps about what he called his hobby said about the things trunks could contain. But these were full of books, old books of the kind you sometimes see in stands outside second-hand shops.

   The cupboard was empty and inside it the paper was peeling from the wall, but there were no spiders. Mrs Parsons was a house-proud woman.

   ‘It’s half past ten,’ Burden said, squinting at his watch. ‘The last train doesn’t get in till one. She could be on that.’

   Parsons said obstinately, ‘She wouldn’t go anywhere by train.’

   They went downstairs again, pausing to restore the light bulb to the front bedroom. There was something sinister and creepy about the stair-well that could have been so easily dispelled, Burden thought, by white paint and stronger lights. As they descended he reflected momentarily on this woman and the life she lived here, going fussily about her chores, trying to bring a little smartness to the mud-coloured woodwork, the ugly ridged linoleum.

   ‘I don’t know what to do,’ Parsons said.

   Burden didn’t want to go back into the little dining-room with the big furniture, the cold tea-dregs in their two cups. By now Jean would be back from the cinema.

   ‘You could try phoning round her friends at the church,’ he said, edging towards the front door. If Parsons only knew how many reports they got in of missing women and how few, how tiny a percentage, turned up dead in fields or chopped in trunks . . .

   ‘At this time of night?’

   Parsons looked almost shocked, as if the habits of a lifetime, the rule that you never called on anyone after nine o’clock, mustn’t be broken even in a crisis.

   ‘Take a couple of aspirins and try to get some sleep,’ Burden said. ‘If anything comes up you can give me a ring. We’ve told the station. We can’t do anything more. They’ll let you know as soon as they hear.’

   ‘What about tomorrow morning?

   If he’d been a woman, Burden thought he’d beg me to stay. He’d cling to me and say, Don’t leave me!

   ‘I’ll look in, on my way to the station,’ he said.

   Parsons didn’t shut the door until he was half-way up the street. He looked back once and saw the white bewildered face, the faint glow from the hall falling on to the brass step. Then, feeling helpless because he had brought the man no comfort, he raised his hand in a half-wave.

   The streets were empty, still with the almost tangible silence of the countryside at night. Perhaps she was at the station now, scuttling guiltily across the platform, down the wooden stairs, gathering together in her mind the threads of the alibi she had concocted. It would have to be good, Burden thought, remembering the man who waited on the knife edge that spanned hope and panic.

   It was out of his way, but he went to the corner of Tabard Road and looked up the High Street. From here he could see right up to the beginning of the Stowerton Road where the last cars were leaving the forecourt of The Olive and Dove. The market place was empty, the only people to be seen a pair of lovers standing on the Kingsbrook Bridge. As he watched the Stowerton bus appeared between the Scotch pines on the horizon., It vanished again in the dip beyond he bridge. Hand in hand, the lovers ran to the stop in the centre of the market place as the bus pulled in close against the dismantled cattle stands. Nobody got off. Burden sighed and went home.

   ‘She hasn’t turned up,’ he said to his wife.

   ‘It is funny, you know, Mike. I should have said she was the last person to go off with some man.’

   ‘Not much to look at?’

   ‘I wouldn’t say that exactly,’ Jean said. ‘She looked so - well, respectable. Flat-heeled shoes, no make-up, tidy sort of perm with hair-grips in it. You know what I mean. You must have seen her.’

   ‘I may have done,’ Burden said. ‘It didn’t register.’

   ‘But I wouldn’t call her plain. She’s got a funny old-fashioned kind of face, the sort of face you see in family albums. You might not admire it, Mike, but you wouldn’t forget her face.’

   ‘Well, I’ve forgotten it,’ Burden said. He dismissed Mrs Parsons to the back of his mind and they talked about the film.

Burden slept quickly, used to crises. Even here, a market town be had expected to find dull after Brighton, the C.I.D. were seldom idle.

The telephone rang at seven.

   ‘Burden speaking.’

   ‘This is Ronald Parsons. She hasn’t come back. And, Mr Burden - she hasn’t taken a coat.’

   It was the end of May and it had been a squally cold month. A sharp breeze ruffled his bedroom curtains. He sat up.

   ‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

   ‘I couldn’t sleep. I started going through her clothes and I’m positive she hasn’t taken a coat. She’s only got three: a raincoat, her winter coat and an old one she does the gardening in.’

   Burden suggested a suit.

   ‘She’s only got one costume.’ Parsons’ use of the old-fashioned word was in character. ‘It’s in her wardrobe. I think she must have been wearing a cotton frock, her new one.’ He stopped and cleared his throat. ‘She’d just made it,’ he said.

   ‘I’ll get some things on,’ Burden said. ‘I’ll pick you up in half an hour and we’ll go to the station together.’

   Parsons had shaved and dressed. His small eyes were wide with terror. The tea-cups they had used the night before had just been washed and were draining on a home made rack of wooden dowel rods. Burden marvelled at the ingrained habit of respectability that made this man, at a crisis in his life, spruce himself and put his house in order.

   He tried to stop himself staring round the little hole of a kitchen, at the stone copper in the corner, the old gas stove on legs, the table with green American cloth tacked to its top. There was no washing machine, no refrigerator. Because of the peeling paint, the creeping red rust, it looked dirty. It was only by peering closely when Parsons’ eyes were not on him that Burden could see it was in fact fanatically, pathetically, clean.

   ‘Are you fit?’ he asked. Parsons locked the back door with a huge key. His hand shook against crazed mottled tiles. ‘You’ve got the photograph all right?’

   ‘In my pocket.’

   Passing the dining-room he noticed the books again. The titles leapt at him from red and yellow and black covers. Now that the morning had come and she was still missing Burden wondered fantastically if Tabard Road was to join Hilldrop Crescent and Rillington Place in the chronicle of sinister streets.

   Would there one day be an account of the disappearance of Margaret Parsons under another such book-jacket with the face of his companion staring from the frontispiece? The face of a murderer is the face of an ordinary man. How much less terrifying if the killer wore the Mark of Cain for all the world to see! But Parsons? He could have killed her, he had been well instructed. His textbooks bore witness to that. Burden thought of the gulf between theory and practice. He shook off fantasy and followed Parsons to the front door.

   Kingsmarkham was awake, beginning to bustle. The shops were still closed, but the buses had been running for two hours. Occasionally the sun shone in shafts of watery brilliance, then vanished again under clouds that were white and thick or bluish with rain. The bus queue stretched almost to the bridge; down towards the station men hurried, singly or in pairs, bowler-hatted, armed with cautious umbrellas, through long custom unintimidated by the hour-long commuting to London.

   Burden pulled up at the junction and waited for an orange-painted tractor to pass along the major road.

   ‘It all goes on,’ Parsons said, ‘as if nothing had happened.’

   ‘Just as well.’ Burden turned left. ‘Helps you keep a sense of proportion.’

   The police station stood appropriately at the approach to the town, a guarding bastion or a warning. It was new, white and square like a soap carton, and, rather pointlessly, Burden thought, banded and decorated here and there in a soap carton’s colours. Against the tall ancient arcs of elms, only a few yards from the last Regency house, it flaunted its whiteness, its gloss, like a piece of gaudy litter in a pastoral glade.

   Its completion and his transfer to Kingsmarkham had coincided, but sometimes the sight of it still shocked him. He watched for Parsons’ reaction as they crossed the threshold. Would he show fear or just the ordinary citizen’s caution? In fact, he seemed simply awed.

   Not for the first time the place irritated Burden. People expected pitch pine and lino, green baize and echoing passages. These were at the same time more quelling to the felon, more comforting to the innocent. Here the marble and the tiles, irregularly mottled with a design like stirred oil, the peg-board for the notices, the great black counter that swept in a parabola across half the foyer, suggested that order and a harmony of pattern must reign above all things. It was as if the personal fate of the men and women who came through the swing doors mattered less than Chief Inspector Wexford’s impeccable records.

   He left Parsons dazed between a rubber plant and a chair shaped like the bowl of a spoon, a spongy spoon, cough-mixture red. It was absurd, he thought, knocking on Wexford’s door, to build a concrete box of tricks like this amid the quiet crowded houses of the High Street. Wexford called him to come in and he pushed open the door.

   ‘Mr Parsons is outside, sir.’

   ‘All right.’ Wexford looked at his watch. ‘I’ll see him now.’

   He was taller than Burden, thick-set without being fat, fifty-two years old, the very prototype of an actor playing a top-brass policeman. Born up the road in Pomfret, living most of his life in this part of Sussex, he knew most people and he knew the district well enough for the map on the the buttercup-yellow wall to be regarded merely as a decoration.

   Parsons came in nervously. He had a furtive cautious look, and there was something defiant about him as if he knew his pride would be wounded and was preparing to defend it.

   ‘Very worrying for you,’ Wexford said. He spoke with out emphasizing any particular word, his voice level and strong. ‘Inspector Burden tells me you haven’t seen your wife since yesterday morning.’

   ‘That’s right.’ He took the snapshot of his wife from his pocket and put it on Wexford’s desk. ‘That’s her, that’s Margaret.’ He twitched his head at Burden. ‘He said you’d want to see it.’

   It showed a youngish woman in cotton blouse and dirndl skirt standing stiffly, her arms at her sides, in the Parsonses’ garden. She was smiling an unnaturally broad smile straight into the sun and she looked flustered, rather short of breath, as if she had been called away from some mundane household task - the washing-up perhaps - had flung off her apron, dried her hands and run down the path to her husband, waiting with his box camera.

   Her eyes were screwed up, her cheeks bunchy; she might really have been saying ‘Cheese!’ There was nothing here of the delicate cameo Jean’s words had suggested.

   Wexford looked at it and said, ‘Is this the best you can do?’ Parsons covered the picture with his hand as if it had been desecrated.

   He looked as if he might flare into rage, but all he said was:

   ‘We’re not in the habit of having studio portraits taken.’

   ‘No passport?’

   ‘I can’t afford foreign holidays.’

   Parsons had spoken bitterly. He glanced quickly at the venetian blinds, the scanty bit of haircord carpet, Wexford’s chair with its mauve tweed seat, as if these were signs of a personal affluence rather than the furnishings supplied be a detached authority.

   ‘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: ‘Look, 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?’

   ‘We’ll 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 sun-blind 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 rain coats 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 house-keeping 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, ‘we’ll 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.

When Wexford had been told the prints on the lipstick definitely hadn’t been made by Mrs Parsons they went back to the farm and questioned each of the men and the land girl (as Wexford called her in his old-fashioned vocabulary) separately. For all but one of them Tuesday afternoon bad been busy and, in a very different way from murder, exciting.

Sergeant Camb was talking to someone on the telephone when Wexford got to the station in the morning. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and said to the Chief Inspector:

   ‘A Mrs Missal for you, sir. This is the third time she’s been on.’

   ‘What does she want?’

   ‘She says she must see you. It’s very urgent.’ Camb looked embarrassed. ‘She wants to know if you can go to her house.’

   ‘She does, does she? Tell her if she wants me she’ll have to come here.’ He opened the door of his office. ‘Oh, and, Sergeant Camb, you can tell her I won’t be here after nine-thirty.’

   When he had opened the windows and made his desk untidy - the way he liked it - he stuck his head out of the door again and called for tea.

   ‘Where’s Martin?’

   ‘Still at The Olive and Dove, sir.’

   ‘God Almighty! Does he think he’s on his holidays? Get on to him and tell him he can get off home.’

   It was a fine morning, June coming in like a lamb, and from his desk Wexford could see the gardens of Bury Street and the window-boxes of the Midland Bank full of blown Kaiserskroon tulips. The spring flowers were passing, the summer ones not yet in bud - except for rhododendrons. Just as the first peals of the High School bell began to toll faintly in the distance Sergeant Camb brought in the tea - and Mrs Missal.

   ‘We’ll have another cup, please.’

   She had done her hair up this morning and left off her glasses. The organdie blouse and the pleated skirt made her look surprisingly demure, and Wexford wondered if she had abandoned her hostile manner with the raffish shirt and trousers.

   ‘I’m afraid I’ve been rather a silly girl, Chief Inspector,’ she said in a confiding voice.

   Wexford took a clean piece of paper out of his drawer and began writing on it busily. He couldn’t think of any thing cogent to put down and as she couldn’t see the paper from where she was sitting he just scribbled: Missal, Parsons; Parsons, Missal.

   ‘You see I didn’t tell you the entire truth.’

   ‘No?’ Wexford said.

   ‘I don’t mean I actually told lies. I mean I left bits out.’

   ‘Oh, yes?’

   ‘Well, the thing is, I didn’t actually go to the pictures by myself. I went with a friend, a man friend.’ She smiled a one sophisticate to another. ‘There wasn’t anything in it, but you know how stuffy husbands are.’

   ‘I should,’ Wexford said. ‘I am one.’

   ‘Yes, well, when I got home I couldn’t find my new lipstick and I think I must have dropped it in my friend’s car. Oh, tea for me. How terribly sweet!’

   There was a knock at the door and Burden came in.

   ‘Mrs Missal was just telling me about her visit to the cinema on Wednesday night,’ Wexford said. He went on writing. By now he had filled half the sheet.

   ‘It was a good picture, wasn’t it, Mrs Missal? Unfortunately I had to leave half-way through.’ Burden looked for a third tea-cup. ‘What happened to that secret-agent character? Did he marry the blonde or the other one?’

   ‘Oh, the other one,’ Helen Missal said easily ‘The one who played the violin. She put the message into a sort of musical code and when they got back to London she played it over to M.I.5.’

   ‘It’s wonderful what they think of,’ Burden said.

   ‘Well, I won’t keep you any longer, Mrs Missal . . .’

   ‘No, I must fly. I’ve got a hair appointment.’

   ‘If you’ll just let me have the name of your friend, the one you went to the cinema with . . .’

   Helen Missal looked from Wexford to Burden and back from Burden to Wexford. Wexford screwed up the piece of paper and threw it into the wastepaper basket.

   ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that. I mean, I couldn’t get him involved.’

   ‘I should think it over, madam. Think it over while you’re having your hair done.’

   Burden held the door open for her and she walked out quickly without looking back.

   ‘I’ve been talking to a neighbour of mine,’ he said to Wexford, ‘a Mrs Jones who lives at nine, Tabard Road. You know, she told us about the cars being parked in Tabard Road on Tuesday afternoon. Well, I asked her if she could remember any of the makes or the colours and she said she could remember one car, a bright red one with a tiger in the back. She didn’t see the number. She was looking at them from sideways on, you see, and they were parked nose to tail.’

   ‘How long was it there?’

   ‘Mrs Jones didn’t know. But she says she first saw at it about three and it was there when the kids got home from school. Of course, she doesn’t know if it was there all that time.’

   ‘While Mrs Missal is having her hair done, Mike,’ Wexford said, ‘I am going to have a word with Inge. As Mrs Missal says, Thank God for Inge!’

   Then was a tin of polish and a couple of dusters on the dining-room floor and the Indian rugs were spread on the crazy paving outside the windows. Inge Wolff, it seemed, had duties apart from minding Dymphna and Priscilla.

   ‘All I know I will tell you,’ she said dramatically. ‘What matter if I get the push? Next week, anyhow, I go home to Hanover?

   Maybe, Wexford thought, and, on the other hand, maybe not. The way things were going Inge Wolff might be needed in England for the next few months.

   ‘On Monday Mrs Missal stay at home all the day. Just for shopping in the morning she go out. Also Tuesday she go shopping in the morning, for in the afternoon is closing of all shops.’

   ‘What about Tuesday afternoon, Miss Wolff?’

   ‘Ah, Tuesday afternoon she go out. First we have our dinner. One o’clock. I and Mrs Missal and the children. Ah, next week, only think, no more children! After dinner I wash up and she go up to her bedroom and lie down. When she come down she say, “Inge, I go out with the car,” and she take the key and go down the garden to the garage.’

   ‘What time would that be, Miss Wolff?’

   ‘Three, half past two. I don’t know.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Then she come back, five, six.’

   ‘How about Wednesday?’

   ‘Ah, Wednesday. I have half-day off. Very good. Dymphna come home to dinner, go back to school. I go out. Mrs Missal stay home with Priscilla. And when comes the evening she go out, seven, half past seven. I don’t know. In this house always are comings and goings. It is like a game.’

   Wexford showed her the snapshot of Mrs Parsons.

   ‘Have you ever seen this woman, Miss Wolff? Did she ever come here?’

   ‘Hundreds of women like this in Kingsmarkham. All are alike except rich ones. The ones that come here, they are not like this.’ She gave a derisive laugh. ‘Oh, no, is funny. I laugh to see this. None come here like this.’

   When Wexford got back to the station Helen Missal was sitting in the entrance hall, her red hair done in elaborate scrolls on the top of her head.

   ‘Been thinking things over, Mrs Missal?’ He showed her into his office.

   ‘About Wednesday night . . .’

   ‘Frankly, Mrs Missal, I’m not very interested in Wednesday night. Now, Tuesday afternoon . . .?

   ‘Why Tuesday afternoon?’

   Wexford put the photograph on his desk where she could see it. Then he dropped the lipstick on top of it. The little gilt cylinder rolled about on the shiny snapshot and came to rest.

   ‘Mrs Parsons was killed on Tuesday afternoon,’ he said patiently, ‘and we found your lipstick a few yards from her body. So, you see, I’m not very interested in Wednesday night.’

   ‘You can’t think . . . Oh, my God! Look, Chief Inspector, I was here on Tuesday afternoon. I went to the pictures.’

   ‘You must just about keep that place going, madam. What a pity you don’t live in Pomfret. They had to close the cinema there for lack of customers.’

   Helen Missal drew in her breath and let it out again in a deep sigh. She twisted her feet round the metal legs of the chair.

   ‘I suppose I’ll have to tell you about it,’ she said. ‘I mean, I’d better tell the truth.’ She spoke as if this was always a last distasteful resort instead of a moral obligation.

   ‘Perhaps it would be best, madam.’

   ‘Well, you see, I only said I went to the pictures on Wednesday to have an alibi. Actually, I went out with a friend.’ She smiled winningly. ‘Who shall be nameless.’

   ‘For the moment,’ Wexford said, un-won.

   ‘I was going out with this friend on Wednesday night, but I couldn’t really tell my husband, could I? So I said I was going to the pictures. Actually we just drove around the lanes. Well, I had to see the film, didn’t I? Because my husband always . . . I mean, he’d obviously ask me about it. So I went to see the film on Tuesday afternoon.’

   ‘In your car, Mrs Missal? You only live about a hundred yards from the cinema.’

   ‘I suppose you’ve been talking to that bloody little Inge. You see, I had to take the car so that she’d think I’d gone a long way. I mean, I couldn’t have gone shopping because it was early closing and I never walk anywhere. She knows that. I thought if I didn’t take the car she’d guess I’d gone to the pictures and then she’d think it funny me going again on Wednesday.’

   ‘Servants have their drawbacks,’ Wexford said.

   ‘You’re not kidding. Well, that’s all there is to it. I took the car and stuck it in Tabard Road . . . Oh God, that’s where that woman lived, isn’t it? But I couldn’t leave it in the High Street because . . .’ Again she tried a softening smile. ‘Because of your ridiculous rules about parking.’

   Wexford snapped sharply:

   ‘Did you know this woman, madam?’

   ‘Oh, you made me jump! Let me see. Oh, no, I don’t think so. She’s not the sort of person I’d be likely to know, Chief Inspector.’

   ‘Who did you go out with on Wednesday night when you lost your lipstick, Mrs Missal?’

   The smiles, the girlish confidences, hadn’t worked. She flung back her chair and shouted at him:

   ‘I’m not going to tell you. I won’t tell you. You can’t make me! You can’t keep me here.’

   ‘You came of your own accord, madam,’ Wexford said. He swung open the door, smiling genially. ‘I’ll just look in this evening when your husband’s at home and we’ll see if we can get everything cleared up.’

The murder books had been taken away and the top shelf of the bookcase was empty. If Parsons was innocent, a truly bereaved husband, Burden thought, how dreadfully their covers must have screamed at him when he came into the shabby dining-room this morning. Or had he removed them because they had served their purpose?

   ‘Chief Inspector,’ Parsons said, ‘I must know. Was she . . .? Had she . . .? Was she just strangled or was there anything else?’ He had aged in the past days or else he was a consummate actor.

   ‘You can set your mind at rest on that score,’ Wexford said quickly. ‘Your wife was certainly strangled, but I can assure you she wasn’t interfered with in any other way.’ He stared at the dull green curtains, the lino that was frayed at the skirting board, and said impersonally, ‘There was no sexual assault.’

   ‘Thank God!’ Parsons spoke as if he thought there was still a God in some nonconformist heaven and as if he was really thanking Him. ‘I couldn’t bear it if there had been. I couldn’t go on living. It would just about have killed Margaret.’ He realized what he had said and put his head in his hands.

   Wexford waited until the hands came down and the tearless eyes were once more fixed on his own.

   ‘Mr Parsons, I can tell you that as far as we know there was no struggle. It looks as if your wife was sleeping until just before she was killed. There would have been just a momentary shock, a second’s pain - and then nothing.’

   Parson’s mumbled, turning away his face so that they could catch only the last words, ‘ . . . For though they be punished in the sight of man, yet is their hope full of immortality.’

   Wexford got up and went over the bookcase. He didn’t say anything about the missing library of crime, but he took a book out of one of the lower shelves.

   ‘I see this is a guide to the Kingsmarkham district.’ He opened it and Burden glimpsed a coloured photograph of the market place. ‘It isn’t a new book.’

   ‘My wife lived here - well, not here. In Flagford it was - for a couple of years after the end of the war. Her uncle was stationed with the R.A.F. at Flagford and her aunt had a cottage in the village.’

   ‘Tell me about your wife’s life.’

   ‘She was born in Balham,’ Parsons said. He winced, avoiding the Christian name. ‘Her mother and father died when she was a child and she went to live with this aunt. When she was about sixteen she came to live in Flagford, but she didn’t like it. Her uncle died - he wasn’t killed or anything - he died of heart disease, and her aunt went back to Balham. My wife went to college in London and started teaching. Then we got married. That’s all.’

   ‘Mr. Parsons, you told me on Wednesday your wife would have taken her front-door key with her. How many keys did you have between you?’

   ‘Just the two.’ Parsons took a plain Yale key from his pocket and held it up to Wexford. ‘Mine and - and Margaret’s. She kept hers on a ring. The ring has a silver chain with a horseshoe charm on the end of it.’ He added simply in a calm voice: ‘I gave it to her when we came here. The purse is a brown one, brown plastic with a gilt clip.’

   ‘I want to know if your wife was in the habit of going to Prewett’s farm. Did you know the Prewetts or any of the farm workers? There’s a girl there called Dorothy Sweeting. Did your wife ever mention her?’

   But Parsons had never even heard of the farm until his wife’s body had been found there. She hadn’t cared much for the country or for country walks and the name Sweeting meant nothing.

   ‘Do you know anyone called Missal?’

   ‘Missal? No, I don’t think so.’

   ‘A tall good-looking woman with red hair. Lives in a house opposite The Olive and Dove. Her husband’s a car dealer. Big bloke with a big green car.’

   ‘We don’t . . . we didn’t know anyone like that.’ His face twisted and he put up a hand to hide his eyes. ‘They’re a lot of snobs round here. We didn’t belong and we should never have come.’ His voice died to a whisper. ‘If we’d stayed in London,’ he said, ‘she might still be alive.’

   ‘Why did you come, Mr Parsons?’

   ‘It’s cheaper living in the country, or you think it’s cheaper till you try it.’

   ‘So your coming here didn’t have anything to do with the fact that your wife once lived in Flagford?’

   ‘Margaret didn’t want to come here, but the job came up. Beggars can’t be choosers. She had to work when we were in London. I thought she’d find some peace here.’ He coughed and the sound tailed away into a sob. ‘And she did, didn’t she?’

   ‘I believe there are some books in your attic, Mr Parsons. I’d like to have a good look through them.’

   ‘You can have them,’ Parsons said. ‘I never want to see another book as long as I live. But there’s nothing in them. She never looked at them.’

   The dark staircases were familiar now and with familiarity they had lost much of that sinister quality Burden had felt on his first visit. The sun showed up the new dust and in its gentle light the house seemed no longer like the scene of a crime but just a shabby relic. It was very muggy and Wexford opened the attic window. He blew a film of dust from the surface of the bigger trunk and opened its lid. It was crammed with books and he took the top ones out. They were novels: two by Rhoda Broughton, Evelina in the Everyman’s Library and Mrs Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman. Their fly-leaves were bare and nothing fluttered from the pages when he shook them. Underneath were two bundles of school stories, among them what looked like the complete works of Angela Brazil. Wexford dumped them on the floor and lifted out a stack of expensive-looking volumes, some bound in suede, others in scented leather or watered silk.

   The first one he opened was covered in pale green suede, its pages edged with gold. On the fly-leaf someone had printed carefully in ink:

A black Jaguar, not new but well tended, was parked out side the Missals’ house when Wexford and Burden turned in at the gate at seven o’clock. The wheels only were soiled, their hub-caps spattered with dried mud.

   ‘I know that car,’ Wexford said. ‘I know it but I can’t place it. Must be getting old.’

   ‘Friends for cocktails,’ Burden said sententiously.

   ‘I could do with a spot of gracious living myself,’ Wexford grumbled. He rang the ship’s bell.

   Perhaps Mrs Missal had forgotten they were coming or Inge hadn’t been primed. She looked surprised yet spitefully pleased. Like her employer’s, her hair was done up on top of her head, but with less success. In her left hand she held a canister of paprika.

   ‘All are in,’ she said. ‘Two come for dinner. What a man! I tell you it is a waste to have men like him buried in the English countryside. Mrs Missal say, “Inge, you must make lasagna.” All will be Italian, paprika, pasta, pimentos . . . Ach, it is just a game!’

   ‘All right, Miss Wolff. We’d like to see Mrs Missal.’

   ‘I show you.’ She giggled, opened the drawing-room door and announced with some serendipity, ‘Here are the policemen!’

   Four people were sitting in the flowered armchairs and there were four glasses of pale dry sherry on the coffee-table. For a moment nobody moved or said anything, but Helen Missal flushed deeply. Then she turned to the man who sat between her and her husband, parted her lips and closed them again.

   So that’s the character Inge was going on about in the hall, Burden thought. Quadrant!. No wonder Wexford recognized the car.

   ‘Good evening, Mr Quadrant,’ Wexford said, indicating by a slight edge to his voice that he was surprised to see him in this company.

   ‘Good evening, Chief Inspector, Inspector Burden.’

   Burden had long known him as a solicitor he often saw in Kingsmarkham magistrates’ court, long known and inexplicably disliked. He nodded to Quadrant and to the woman, presumably Quadrant’s wife, who occupied the fourth armchair. They were somewhat alike, these two, both thin and dark with straight noses and curved red lips. Quadrant had the features of a grandee in an El Greco portrait, a grandee or a monk, but as far as Burden knew he was an Englishman. The Latin lips might have first drawn breath in a Cornish town and Quadrant be the descendant of an Armada mariner. His wife was beautifully dressed with the careless elegance of the very rich. Burden thought she made Helen Missal’s blue shift look like something from a chain-store sale. Her fingers were heavily be-ringed, vulgarly so, if the stones were false, but Burden didn’t think they were false.

   ‘I’m afraid we’re intruding again, sir,’ Wexford said to Missal, his eyes lingering on Quadrant. ‘I’d just like to have a talk with your wife, if you don’t mind.’

   Missal stood up, his face working with impotent rage. In his light-weight silver-grey suit he looked fatter than ever. Then Quadrant did a strange thing. He took a cigarette out of the box on the table, put it in his mouth and lit the cork tip. Fascinated, Burden watched him choke and drop the cigarette into an ashtray.

   ‘I’m sick and tired of all this,’ Missal shouted. ‘We can’t even have a quiet evening with our friends without being hounded. I’m sick of it. My wife has given you her explanation and that ought to be enough.’

   ‘This is a murder enquiry, sir,’ Wexford said.

   ‘We were just going to have dinner.’ Helen Missal spoke sulkily. She smoothed her blue skirt and fidgeted with a string of ivory beads. ‘I suppose we’d better go into your study, Pete. Inge’ll be in and out of the dining-room. God! God damn it all, why can’t you leave me in peace?’ She turned to Quadrant’s wife and said: ‘Will you excuse me a moment, Fabia, darling? That is, if you can bear to stay and eat with the criminal classes.’

   ‘You’re sure you don’t want Douglas to go with you?’ Fabia Quadrant sounded amused, and Burden wondered if the Missals had warned them of the impending visit, suggested perhaps that this was to enquire into some parking offence. ‘As your solicitor, I mean,’ she said. But Wexford had mentioned murder and when he lit that cigarette Quadrant had been frightened.

   ‘Don’t be long,’ Missal said.

   They went into the study and Wexford closed the door.

   ‘I want my lipstick back,’ Helen Missal said, ‘and I want my dinner.’

   Unmoved, Wexford said, ‘And I want to know who you went out with when you lost your lipstick, madam.’

   ‘It was just a friend,’ she said. She looked coyly up at Wexford, whining like a little girl asking permission to have a playmate to tea. ‘Aren’t I allowed to have any friends?’

   ‘Mrs Missal, if you continue to refuse to tell me this man’s name I shall have no alternative but to question your husband.’

   Burden was becoming used to her sudden changes of mood, but still he was not quite prepared for this burst of violence.

   ‘You nasty low-down bastard!’ she said.

   ‘I’m not much affected by that sort of abuse, madam. You see, I’m accustomed to moving in circles where such language is among the terms of reference. His name, please. This is murder enquiry.’

   ‘Well, if you must know it was Douglas Quadrant.’

   And that, Burden thought, accounts for the choking act in the other room.

   ‘Inspector Burden,’ Wexford said, ‘will you just take Mr Quadrant into the dining-room (never mind about Miss Wolff’s dinner) and ask him for his version of what happened on Wednesday night? Or was it Tuesday after noon, Mrs Missal?’

   Burden went out and Wexford said with a little sigh, ‘Very well, madam, now I’d like to hear about Wednesday night all over again.’

   ‘What’s that fellow going to say in front of my husband?’

   ‘Inspector Burden is a very discreet officer. Provided I find everything satisfactory I’ve no doubt you can convince your husband that Mr Quadrant was consulted simply in his capacity as your solicitor.’

   This was the line Burden took when he went back into the drawing-room.

   ‘Is there some difficulty about Mrs Missal, then, Inspector?’ Fabia Quadrant asked. She might have been asking some minion if he had attended to the wants of a guest. ‘I expect my husband can sort it out.’

   Quadrant got up lazily. Burden was surprised that he offered no resistance. They went into the dining-room and Burden pulled out two chairs from the side of the table. It was laid with place mats, tall smoky purple glasses, knives and forks in Swedish steel and napkins folded into the shape of water-lilies.

   ‘A man must live,’ Quadrant said easily when Burden asked him about his drive with Helen Missal. ‘Mrs Missal is perfectly happily married. So am I. We just like to do a little dangerous living together from time to time. A drive, a drink . . . No harm done and everyone the happier for it.’ He was being disarmingly frank.

   Burden wondered why. It didn’t seem to tie up with his manner when they had first arrived. Everyone the happier for it? Missal didn’t look happy . . . and the woman with the rings? She had her money to console her. But what had all this to do with Mrs Parsons?

   ‘We drove to the lane, Quadrant said, ‘parked the car and stood on the edge of the wood to have a cigarette. You know how smoky it gets inside a car, Inspector.’ Burden was to be brought in as another man of the world. ‘I’m afraid I know nothing about the lipstick. Mrs Missal is rather a happy-go-lucky girl. She tends to be careless about unconsidered trifles.’ He smiled. ‘Perhaps that’s what I like about her.’

   Had he seen him? Part of the time, yes, but he certainly hadn’t had Quadrant under his eye all day.

   ‘I suppose all this did happen on Wednesday,’ Burden said, ‘not Tuesday afternoon?’

   ‘Now, come, Inspector. I was in court all day Tuesday. You saw me yourself.’

   ‘We’d like to have a look at your car tires, sir.’ But as he said it Burden knew it was hopeless. Quadrant admitted visiting the lane on Wednesday.

   In the study Wexford was getting much the same story from Helen Missal.

   ‘We didn’t go into the wood,’ she said. ‘We just stood under the trees. I took my handbag with me because it had got quite a bit of money in it and I think I must have dropped my lipstick when I opened the bag to get my hanky out.’

   ‘You never went out of sight of the car?’

   The net was spread and she fell in it.

   ‘We never went out of sight of the car,’ she said. ‘We just stood under the trees and talked.’

   ‘What a nervous person you must be, Mrs Missal, nervous and extremely cautious. You had Mr Quadrant with you and you were in sight of the car, but you were afraid someone might try to steal your handbag under your very eyes.’

   She was frightened now and Wexford was sure she hadn’t told him everything.

   ‘Well, that’s how it happened. I can’t be expected to account for everything I do.’

   ‘I’m afraid you can, madam. I suppose you’ve kept your cinema ticket?’

   ‘Oh, my God! Can’t you give me any peace? Of course I don’t keep cinema tickets.’

   ‘You don’t show much foresight, madam. It would have been prudent to have kept it in case your husband wanted to see it. Perhaps you’ll have a look for that ticket and when you’ve found it I’d like you to bring it down to the station. The tickets are numbered and it will be simple to determine whether yours was issued on Tuesday or Wednesday.’

   Quadrant was waiting for him in the dining-room, standing by the sideboard now and reading the labels on two bottles of white wine. Burden still sat at the table.

   ‘Ah, Chief Inspector,’ Quadrant said in the tone he used for melting the hearts of lay magistrates. ‘“What a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive”!’

   ‘I wish you could convince Mrs Missal of the truth of that maxim, sir. Very unfortunate for you that you happened to choose that particular lane for your . . . your talk with her on Wednesday night.’

   ‘May I assure you, Chief Inspector, that it was merely a matter of misfortune.’ He continued to look, at the bottles of Barsac, misted and ice-cold. ‘Had I been aware of the presence of Mrs Parsons’ body in the wood I should naturally have come straight to you. In my position, my peculiar position, I always take it upon myself to give every possible assistance to you good people.’

   ‘It is a peculiar position, isn’t it, sir? What I should call a stroke of malignant fate.’

   In the drawing-room Missal and Mrs Quadrant were sitting in silence. They looked, Burden thought, as if they had little in common. Helen Missal and the solicitor filed in, smiling brightly, as if they had all been playing some party game. The charade had been acted, the word discovered. Now they could all have their dinner.

   ‘Perhaps we can all have our dinner now,’ Missal said. Wexford looked at him.

   ‘I believe you were in Kingsmarkham on Tuesday afternoon, Mr Missal? Perhaps you’ll be good enough to tell me where you were exactly and if anyone saw you.’

   ‘No, I won’t,’ Missal said. ‘I’m damned if I do. You send your henchman - ’

   ‘Oh, Peter,’ Fabia Quadrant interrupted. ‘Henchman! What a word.’

   Burden stood woodenly, waiting.

   ‘You send your underling to show me up in front of my clients and my staff. You persecute my wife. I’m damned if I tell you what I do with every minute of my time!’

   ‘Well, I had to,’ Helen Missal said. She seemed pleased with herself, delighted that the focus of attention had shifted from herself to her husband.

   ‘I’d like a sample from your car tires,’ Wexford said, and Burden wondered despairingly if they were going to have to scrape mud from the wheels of every car in Kingsmarkham.

   ‘The Merc’s in the garage,’ Missal said. ‘Make yourself at home. You do inside, so why not make free with the grounds? Maybe you’d like to borrow the lawn for the police sports.’

   Fabia Quadrant smiled slightly and her husband pursed his lips and looked down. But Helen Missal didn’t laugh. She glanced quickly at Quadrant and Burden thought she gave the ghost of a shiver. Then she lifted her glass and drained the sherry at a single gulp.

A bird was singing outside Wexford’s office window; a blackbird, Burden supposed. He had always rather liked listening to it until one day Wexford said it sang the opening bars of ‘The Thunder and Lightning Polka’, and after that its daily reiteration annoyed him. He wanted it to go on with the tune or else vary a note or two. Besides, this morning he had had enough of blackbirds and larks and nightingales, enough of castle-bound maidens dying young and anaemic swains serenading them with lute and tabor. He had sat up half the night reading the Oxford Book and he was by no means convinced that it had had anything to do with Mrs Parsons’ death.

   It was going to be a beautiful day, too beautiful for an inquest. When Burden walked in Wexford was already at his desk, turning the pages of the suede-covered Swinburne. The rest of the Doon books had been removed from the house in Tabard Road and dumped on Wexford’s filing cabinet.

   ‘Did you get anything, sir?’ Burden asked.

   ‘Not so’s you’d notice,’ Wexford said, ‘but I did have an idea. I’ll tell you about it when you’ve read the report from Balham. It’s just come in.’

   The report was typed on a couple of sheets of foolscap. Burden sat down and began to go through it:

   Margaret Iris Parsons (he read) was born Margaret Iris Godfrey to Arthur Godfrey, male nurse, and his wife, Iris Drusilla Godfrey, at 213 Holderness Road, Balham, on March 21st, 1933. Margaret Godfrey attended Holderness Road Infants’ School from 1938 until 1940 and Holderness Road Junior School from 1940 until 1944. Both parents killed as a result of enemy action, Balham, 1942, after which Margaret resided with her maternal aunt and legal guardian, Mrs Ethel Mary Ives, wife of Leading Aircraftman Geoffrey Ives, a member of the regular Air Force, at 42 St John’sRoad, Balham. At this time the household included Anne Mary Ives, daughter of the above, birth registered at Balham, February 1st, 1932.

   Leading Aircraftman Ives was transferred to Flagford, Sussex, R.A.F. Station during September 1949 (date not known). Mrs Ives, Anne Ives and Margaret Godfrey left Balham at this time, Mrs Ives having let her house in St John’s Road, and took up residence in Flagford.

   On the death of Geoffrey Ives from coronary thrombosis (Sewingbury R.A.F. Hospital, July 1951) Mrs Ives, her daughter and Margaret Godfrey returned to Balham and lived together at 42 St John’s Road. From September 1951 until July 1953 Margaret Godfrey was a student at Albert Lake Training College for Women, Stoke Newington, London

   On August 15th, 1952, Anne Ives married Private Wilbur Stobart Katz, U.S. Army, at Balham Methodist Chapel, and left the United Kingdom for the United States with Private Katz in October 1952 (date not known).

   Margaret Godfrey joined staff of Holderness Road Infants’ School, Balham, September 1953.

   Ronald Parsons (clerk) aged twenty-seven, became a lodger at 42 St John’s Road, in April 1954. Death of Mrs Ethel Ives from cancer (Guy’s Hospital, London), registered at Balham by Margaret Godfrey, May 1957. Margaret Godfrey and Ronald Parsons married at Balham Methodist Chapel, August 1957, and took up residence at St John’s Road, the house having been left jointly to Mrs Parsons and Mrs Wilbur Katz under the will of Mrs Ives.

   42 St. John’s Road was purchased compulsorily by Balham Council, November 1962, whereupon Mr and Mrs Parsons removed to Kingsmarkham, Sussex, Mrs Parsons having resigned from the staff of Holderness Road School.

   (Refs: Registrar of Births and Deaths, Balham; Rev. Albert Derwent,. Minister, Methodist Chapel, Balham; Royal Air Force Records; United States Air Force Records; London County Council Education Dept.; Guy’s Hospital; Balham Borough Council.)

   ‘I wonder where Mrs Wilbur Katz is now?’ Burden said. ‘You got any cousins in America, Mike?’ Wexford asked in a quiet, deceptively gentle voice.

   ‘I believe I have.’

   ‘So have I and so have half the people I’ve ever met. But nobody ever does know where they are or even if they’re alive or dead.’

   ‘You said you’d had an idea, sir?’

   Wexford picked up the report and stabbed at the second paragraph with his thick forefinger.

   ‘It came to me in the night,’ he said, ‘in the interval between Whitman and Rossetti - sound like a couple of gangsters, don’t they? Sweet Christ, Mike, I ought to have thought of it before! Parsons said his wife came here when she was sixteen and even then it didn’t click. I assumed, backwoods copper that I am, that Mrs Parsons had left school by then. But, Mike, she was a teacher, she went to a training college. When she was in Flagford she must have gone to school! I reckon they came to Flagford just after she’d taken her School Cert., or whatever they call it these days, and when she got here she went right on going to school.’

   ‘There are only two girls’ schools around here,’ Burden said. ‘The Kingsmarkham County High and that convent place in Sewingbury. St Catherine’s.’

   ‘Well, she wouldn’t have gone there. She was a Methodist and, as far as we know, her aunt was too. Her daughter got married in a Methodist chapel at any rate. It’s just our luck that’s it’s Saturday and the school’s shut.’

   ‘I want you to root out the head - you can dip out on the inquest, I’ll be there. The head’s a Miss Fowler and she lives in York Road. See what you can dig up. They must keep records. What we want is a list of the girls who were in Margaret Godfrey’s class between September 1949 and July 1951.’

   ‘It’ll be a job tracing them, sir.’

   ‘I know that, Mike, but somehow or other we’ve got to have a break. This just might be it. We know all about Margaret Parsons’ life in Balham, and by the look of it - it was mighty dull. Only two sensational things ever happened to her as far as I can see. Love and death, Mike, love and death. The thing is they both happened here in my district. Somebody loved her here and when she came back some body killed her. One of those girls may remember a boyfriend, a possessive boy friend with a long memory.’

   ‘I wish,’ Burden said, ‘I wish some decent public-spirited cop-loving citizen would walk in here and just tell us he knew Mrs Parsons, just tell us he’d taken her out in 1950 or even seen her in a shop last week.’ He brooded for a second over the Balham report. ‘They were an unhealthy lot, weren’t they, sir? Cancer, coronary thrombosis . . .’

   Wexford said slowly: ‘When Parsons was telling us a bit of his wife’s history I did just wonder why he said, “Her uncle died, he wasn’t killed.” It’s a small point, but I see it now. Her parents were killed, but not in the way we mean when we talk about killing.’

   After he had gone across the courthouse behind the police station Burden telephoned Miss Fowler. A deep cultured voice answered, carefully enunciating the name of the exchange and the number. Burden began to explain but Miss Fowler interrupted him. Yes, Margaret had been at the High School, although she could scarcely remember her from that time. However, she had seen her recently in Kingsmarkham and had recognized her as the murdered woman from a newspaper photograph.

   ‘Honestly, Inspector,’ she said, ‘what a very shocking thing!’ She spoke as if the killing had offended rather than distressed her, or, Burden thought, as if the education meted out at her school should automatically have exempted any pupil from falling victim to a murderer.

   He apologized for troubling her and asked if she could let him have the list Wexford wanted.

   ‘I’ll just give our school secretary, Mrs Mortlock, a ring,’ Miss Fowler said. ‘I’ll get her to nip along to school and have a look through the records. If you could call on me about lunchtime, Inspector?’

   Burden said he was most grateful.

   ‘Not at all. It’s no trouble,’ Miss Fowler said. ‘Honestly.’

   The inquest was over in half an hour and Dr Crocker’s evidence occupied ten minutes of that time. Death, he said, was caused by strangulation by means of a ligature; a scarf possibly or a piece of cloth. Mrs Parsons’ body was otherwise unbruised and there had been no sexual assault. She had been a healthy woman, slightly overweight for her height. In his evidence Wexford gave his opinion that it was impossible to say whether or not there had been a struggle as the wood had been heavily trampled by Prewett’s cows. The doctor was recalled and said that he had found a few superficial scratches on the dead woman’s legs. These were so slight that he would not care to say whether they had been made before or after death.

   A verdict was returned of murder by person or persons unknown.

   Ronald Parsons had sat quietly throughout the inquest, twisting a handkerchief in his lap. He kept his head bowed as the coroner offered some perfunctory expressions of sympathy and indicated that he heard only by a slight movement, a tiny nod. He seemed so stunned with misery that Wexford was surprised when he caught up with him as he was crossing the flagged courtyard and touched him on the sleeve.

   Without preamble he said, ‘A letter came for Margaret this morning.’

   ‘What d’you mean, a letter?’ Wexford stopped. He had seen some of Mrs Parsons’ letters; advertisements and coal bills.

   ‘From her cousin in the States,’ Parsons said. He took a deep breath and shivered in the warm sun.

   Looking at him, Wexford realized that he was no longer stupefied. Some fresh bitterness was affecting him.

   ‘I opened it.’

   He spoke with a kind of guilt. She was dead and they had plundered her possessions. Now even her letters, letters posthumously received, were to be picked over, their words dissected as meticulously as her own body had been examined and exposed.

   ‘I don’t know . . . I can’t think,’ he said, ‘but there’s something in it about someone called Doon.’

   ‘Have you got it with you?’ Wexford asked sharply.

   ‘In my pocket.’

   ‘We’ll go into my office.’

   If Parsons noticed his wife’s books spread about the room he gave no sign. He sat down and handed an envelope to Wexford. On the flap, just beneath the ragged slit Parsons had made, was a handwritten address: From Mrs Wilbur S. Katz, 1183 Sunflower Park, Slate City, Colorado, U.S.A.

   ‘That would be Miss Anne Ives,’ Wexford said. ‘Did your wife correspond with her regularly?’

   Parsons looked surprised at the name.

   ‘Not to say regularly,’ he said. ‘She’d write once or twice a year. I’ve never met Mrs Katz.’

   ‘Did your wife write to her recently, since you came here?’

   ‘I wouldn’t know, Chief Inspector. To tell you the truth, I didn’t care for what I knew of Mrs Katz. She used to write and tell Margaret all about the things she’d got - cars, washing machines, that sort of thing . . . I don’t know whether it upset Margaret. She’d been very fond of her cousin and she never said she minded hearing about all those things. But I made it plain what I thought and she stopped showing me the letters.’

   ‘Mr Parsons, I understand Mrs Ives’ house was left jointly to your wife and Mrs Katz. Surely - ?’

   Parsons interrupted bitterly: ‘We bought our share off her, Chief Inspector. Every penny of seven hundred pounds we paid - through a bank in London. My wife had to work full-time so that we could do it, and when we’d paid the lot, just paid off the lot, the council bought the place off us for nine hundred. They had a sort of order.’

   ‘A compulsory-purchase order,’ Wexford said. ‘I see.’ He stuck his head round the door. ‘Sergeant Camb! Tea, please, and an extra cup. I’ll just read that letter, if you don’t mind, Mr Parsons.’

   It was written on thin blue paper and Mrs Katz had found plenty to tell her cousin. The first two pages were entirely taken up with an account of a holiday Mr and Mrs Katz and their three children had spent in Florida; Mrs Katz’s new car; a barbecue her husband had bought her. Mr and Mrs Parsons were invited to come to Slate City for a holiday. Wexford began to see what Parsons had meant.

   The last page was more interesting.

   ‘Lyn Annesley, Joan Bertram, Clare Clarke, Wendy Ditcham, Margaret Dolan, Margaret Godfrey, Mary Henshaw, Jilian Ingram, Anne Kelly, Helen Laird, Marjorie Miller, Hilda Pensteman, Janet Probyn, Fabia Rogers, Deirdre Sachs, Diana Stevens, Winifred Thomas, Gwen Williams, Yvonne Young.’

Nectarine Cottage lay in a damp hollow, a bramble-filled basin behind the Stowerton Road. The approach down a winding path was hazardous and Miss Clarke was taking no chances. Notices pencilled on lined paper greeted Burden at intervals as he descended. The first on the gate had commanded Lift and push hard; the second, some ten feet down the path, Mind barbed wire. Presently the brambles gave place to faint traces of cultivation. This was of a strictly utilitarian kind, rows of sad cabbages among the weeds, a splendid marrow plant protected from the thistles by a home-made cloche. Someone had pinned a sheet of paper to its roof, Do not remove glass. Evidently Miss Clarke had clumsy friends or was the victim of trespassers. This Burden could understand, for there was nothing to indicate habitation but the vegetables and the notices, and the cottage only came into view when he was almost upon it at the end of the path.

   The door stood wide open and from within came rich gurgling giggles. For a moment he thought that, although there were no other houses in the lane, he had come to the wrong place. He rapped on the door, the giggles rose to a gale and someone called out:

   ‘Is that you, Dodo? We’d almost given you up.’

   Dodo might be a man or a woman, probably a woman. Burden gave a very masculine cough.

   ‘Oh, gosh, it isn’t,’ said the voice. ‘I tell you what, Di. It must be old Fanny Fowler’s cop, a coughing cop.’

   Burden felt uncommonly foolish. The voice seemed to come from behind a closed door at the end of the passage.

   He called loudly, ‘Inspector Burden, madam!’

   The door was immediately flung open and a woman came out dressed like a Tyrolean peasant. Her fair hair was drawn tightly back and twisted round her head in plaits.

   ‘Oh, gosh,’ she said again. ‘I didn’t realize the front door was still open. I was only kidding about you being Miss Fowler’s cop. She rang up and said you might come.’

   ‘Miss Clarke?’ 

   ‘Who else?’ Burden thought she looked very odd, a grown woman dressed up as Humperdinck’s Gretel. ‘Come and pig it along with Di and me in the dungeon,’ she said.

   Burden followed her into the kitchen. Mind the steps, said another notice pinned to the door and he saw it just in time to stop himself crashing down the three steep steps to the slate-flagged floor. The kitchen was even nastier than Mrs Parsons’ and much less clean. But outside the window the sun was shining and a red rose pressed against the diamond panes.

   There was nothing odd about the woman Miss Clarke had called Di. It might have been Mrs Parsons’ double sitting at the table eating toast, only this woman’s hair was black and she wore glasses.

   ‘Di Plunkett, Inspector Burden,’ Clare Clarke said. ‘Sit down, Inspector - not that stool. It’s got fat on it - and have a cup of tea.’

Drury came back, smiling cautiously. He had rolled up his sleeves and his hands were pink. When he saw the book Wexford was holding the smile faded and he said aggressively:

   ‘I think you’re taking a liberty.’

   ‘Where did you get this book, Mr Drury?’

   Drury peered at the printing, looked at Wexford and blushed. The tic returned, pumping his chin.

   ‘Oh dear,’ he said, ‘she gave it me. I’d forgotten I’d got it.’

   Wexford had become stern. His thick lower lip stood out, giving him a prognathous look.

   ‘Look here, she gave me that book when I was taking her out. It says July here and that’s when it must have been. July, that’s right.’ The blush faded and he went white. He sat down heavily. ‘You don’t believe me, do you? My wife’ll tell you. It’s been there ever since we got married.’

   ‘Why did Mrs Parsons give it to you, Mr Drury?’

   ‘I’d been taking her out for a few weeks.’ He stared at Wexford with eyes like a hare’s caught in the beam of head lights. ‘It was the summer of - I don’t know. What does it say there? Fifty-one. We were in her aunt’s house. A parcel came for Margaret and she opened it. She looked sort of mad and she just chucked it down, chucked it on the floor, you see, but I picked it up. I’d heard of it and I thought . . . well, I thought it was a smutty book if you must know, and I wanted to read it. She said, “Here, you can have it, if you like.” Something like that. I can’t remember the details of what she said. It was a long time ago. Minna had got fed up with this Doon and I thought she was sort of ashamed of him . . .’

   ‘Minna?’

   ‘I started calling her Minna then because of the name in the book. What have I said? For God’s sake, don’t look at me like that!’

   Wexford stuck the book in his pocket.

   ‘When did you last see her?’

   Drury picked at the cord that bound the seat of his chair. He began pulling out little shreds of red cotton. At last he said:

   ‘She went away in the August. Her uncle had died . . .’

   ‘No, no. I mean recently’

   ‘I saw her last week. That isn’t a crime, is it, seeing some body you used to know? I was in the car and I recognized her. She was in the High Street, in Kingsmarkham. I stopped for a minute and asked her how she was, that sort of thing . . .’

   ‘Go on. I want all the details.’

   ‘She said she was married and I said so was I. She said she’d come to live in Tabard Road and I said we must get together sometime with her husband and Kathleen. Kathleen’s my wife. Anyway, I said I’d give her a ring, and that was all.’

   ‘She told you her married name?’

   ‘Of course she did. Why shouldn’t she?’

   ‘Mr Drury, you said you recognized her photograph. Didn’t you recognize her name?’

   ‘Her name, her face, what’s the odds? I’m not in court. I can’t watch every word I say.’

   ‘Just tell the truth and you won’t have to watch your words. Did you telephone her?’

   ‘Of course I didn’t. I was going to, but then I read she was dead.’

   ‘Where were you on Tuesday between twelve-thirty and seven?’

   ‘I was at work. I work in my uncle’s hardware shop in Pomfret. Ask him, he’ll tell you I was there all day.’

   ‘What time does the shop close?’

   ‘Half past five, but I always try to get away early on Tuesdays. Look, you won’t believe me.’

   ‘Try me, Mr Drury.’

   ‘I know you won’t believe me, but my wife’ll tell you, my uncle’ll tell you. I always go to Flagford on Tuesdays to collect my wife’s vegetable order. There’s a nursery there, see, on the Clusterwell Road. You have to get there by half five otherwise they’re closed. Well, we were busy last Tuesday and I was late. I try to get away by five, but it was all of a quarter past. When I got to Spellman’s there wasn’t anybody about. I went round the back of the greenhouses and I called out, but they’d gone.’

   ‘So you went home without the vegetables?’

   ‘No, I didn’t. Well, I did, but not straight away. I’d had a hard day and I was fed up about the place being closed, so I went into The Swan and had a drink. A girl served me, I’ve never seen her before. Look, does my wife have to know about that? I’m a Methodist, see? I’m a member of the chapel. I’m not supposed to drink.’

   Burden drew in his breath. A murder enquiry and he was worrying about his clandestine pint

   ‘You drove to Flagford along the main Pomfret Road?’

   ‘Yes, I did. I drove right past that wood where they found her.’ Drury got up and fumbled in vain along the mantelpiece for cigarettes. ‘But I never stopped. I drove straight to Flagford. I was in a hurry to get the order . . . Look, Chief Inspector, I wouldn’t have done anything to Minna. She was a nice kid. I was fond of her. I wouldn’t do a thing like that, kill someone!’

   ‘Who else called her Minna apart from you?’

   ‘Only this Doon fellow as far as I know. She never told me his real name. I got the impression she was sort of ashamed of him. Goodness knows why. He was rich and he was clever too. She said he was clever. He drew himself up and looked at them belligerently. ‘She preferred me,’ he said.

   He got up suddenly and stared at the chair he had mutilated. Among the dirty plates was a milk bottle, half full, with yellow curds sticking to its rim. He tipped the bottle into an empty tea-cup and drank from it, slopping a puddle into the saucer.

   ‘I should sit down if I were you,’ Wexford said.

   He went into the hall and beckoned to Burden. They stood close together in the narrow passage. The carpet was frayed by the kitchen door and one of Drury’s children had scribbled on the wallpaper with a blue crayon.

   ‘Get on to The Swan, Mike,’ he said. He thought he heard Drury’s chair shift and, remembering the open french windows, turned swiftly. But Drury was still sitting at the table, his head buried in his hands.

   The walls were thin and he could hear Burden’s voice in the front room, then a faint trill as the receiver went back into its rest. Burden’s feet thumped across the floor, entered the hall and stopped. There was utter silence and Wexford edged out of the door, keeping his eye on Drury through the crack.

   Burden was standing by the front door. On the wall at the foot of the narrow staircase was a coat-rack, a zig-zag metal affair with gaudily coloured knobs instead of hooks. A man’s sports jacket and a child’s plastic mac hung on two of the knobs and on the one nearest to the stairs was a transparent pink nylon hood.

   ‘It won’t take prints,’ Wexford said. ‘Get back on that phone, Mike. I shall want some help. Bryant and Gates should be coming on about now.’

   He unhooked the hood, covered the diminutive hall in three strides, and showed his find to Drury.

   ‘Where did you get this, Mr Drury?’

   ‘It must be my wife’s,’ Drury said. Suddenly assertive, he added pugnaciously, ‘It’s no business of yours!’

   ‘Mrs Parsons bought a hood like this one on Tuesday morning.’ Wexford watched him crumple once more in sick despair. ‘I want your permission to search this house, Drury. Make no mistake about it, I can get a warrant, but it’ll take a little longer.’

   Drury looked as if he was going to cry.

   ‘Oh, do what you like,’ he said. ‘Only, can I have a cigarette? I’ve left mine in the kitchen.’

   ‘Inspector Burden will get them when he comes off the phone,’ Wexford said.

   They began to search, and within half an hour were joined by Gates and Bryant. Then Wexford told Burden to contact Drury’s uncle at Pomfret, Spellman’s nursery and the manager of the supermarket.

   ‘The girl at The Swan isn’t on tonight,’ Burden said, ‘but she lives in Flagford at 3 Cross Roads Cottages. No phone. Her name’s Janet Tipping.’

   ‘We’ll get Martin over there straight away. Try and get a phone number out of Drury where we can get hold of his wife. If she’s not gone far away - Brighton or Eastbourne -  you can get down there tonight. When I’ve turned the place over I’m going to have another word with Mrs Quadrant. She admits she was “friendly” with Mrs Parsons and she’s practically the only person who does, apart from our friend in the next room.’

   Burden stretched the pink scarf taut, testing its strength.

   ‘You really think he’s Doon?’ he asked incredulously.

   Wexford went on opening drawers, feeling among a mêlée of coloured pencils, Snap cards, reels of cotton, scraps of paper covered with children’s scribble. Mrs Drury wasn’t a tidy housewife and all the cupboards and drawers were in a mess.

   ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘At the moment it looks like it, but it leaves an awful lot of loose ends. It doesn’t fit in with my fancies, Mike, and since we can’t afford to go by fancies . . .’

   He looked through every book in the house - there were not more than two or three dozen - but he found no more from Doon to Minna. There was no Victorian poetry and the only novels apart from The Picture of Dorian Gray were paperback thrillers.

   On a hook in the kitchen cabinet Bryant found a bunch of keys. One fitted the front door lock, another the strong box in Drury’s bedroom, two more the dining-room and front-room doors, and a fifth the garage. The ignition keys to Drury’s car were in his jacket on the coat-rack and the key to the back door was in the lock. Wexford, looking for purses, found only one, a green and white plastic thing in the shape of a cat’s face. It was empty and labelled on the inside: Susan Mary Drury. Drury’s daughter had taken her savings with her to the seaside.

   The loft was approached by a hatch in the landing ceiling. Wexford told Bryant to get Drury’s steps from the garage and investigate this loft. He left Gates downstairs with Drury and went out to his car. On the way he scraped some dust from the tires of the blue Ford.

   A thin drizzle was falling. It was ten o’clock and dark for a midsummer evening. If Drury had killed her at half past five, he thought, it would still have been broad daylight, much too early to need the light of a match flame. It would have to be a match they had found. Of all the things to leave behind a matchstick was surely the least incriminating! And why hadn’t she paid for her papers, what had she done with herself during the long hours between the time she left the house and the time she met Doon? But Drury was terribly frightened . . . Wexford too had observed the resemblance between him and Ronald Parsons. It was reasonable to suppose, he argued, that this type of personality attracted Margaret Parsons and that she had chosen her husband because he reminded her of her old lover.

   He switched on his headlights, pulled the windscreen wiper button, and started back towards Kingsmarkham.

The house looked forbidding at night. In Wexford’s headlights the rough grey granite glittered and the leaves of the flowerless wistaria which clung to it showed up a livid yellowish green.

   Someone was dining with the Quadrants. Wexford pulled up beside the black Daimler and went up the steps to the front door. He rang the bell several times; then the door was opened, smoothly, almost offensively slowly, by Quadrant himself.

   For dining with Helen Missal he had worn a lounge suit. At home, with his wife and guests, he ascended to evening dress. But there was nothing vulgar about Quadrant, no fancy waistcoat, no flirtation with midnight blue. The dinner jacket was black and faultless, the shirt - Wexford liked to hit on an apt quotation himself when he could -  ‘whiter than new snow on a raven’s back’.

   He said nothing but seemed to stare right through Wexford at the shadowy garden beyond. There was an insolent majesty about him which the tapestries that framed his figure did nothing to dispel. Then Wexford told himself sharply that this man was, after all, only a provincial solicitor.

   ‘I’d like another word with your wife, Mr Quadrant.’

   ‘At this hour?’

   Wexford looked at his watch and at the same time Quadrant lifted his own cuff - links of silver and onyx glinted in the muted lights - raised his eyebrow at the square platinum dial on his wrist and said:

   ‘It’s extremely inconvenient.’ He made no move to let Wexford enter. ‘My wife isn’t a particularly strong woman and we do happen to have my parents-in-law dining with us . . .’

   Old man Rogers and his missus, Pomfret Hall, Wexford thought vulgarly. He stood stolidly, not smiling.

   ‘Oh, very well,’ Quadrant said, ‘but keep it brief, will you?’

   There was a faint movement in the hall behind him. A brown dress, a wisp of coffee-coloured stuff, appeared for an instant against the embroidered trees on the hangings, then Mrs Quadrant’s nanny scuttled away.

   ‘You’d better go into the library.’ Quadrant showed him into a room furnished with blue leather chairs. ‘I won’t offer you a drink since you’re on duty.’ The words were a little offensive. Then Quadrant gave his quick cat-like smile. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘while I fetch my wife.’ He turned with the slow graceful movement of a dance measure, paused briefly and closed the door behind him, shutting Wexford in.

   So he wasn’t going to let him bust in on any family party, Wexford thought. The man was nervous, hiding some nebulous fear in the manner of men of his kind, under a massive self-control.

   As he waited he looked about him at the books. There were hundreds here, tier upon tier of them on every wall. Plenty of Victorian poetry and plenty of Victorian novels, but just as much verse from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Wexford shrugged. Kingsmarkham was surrounded by such houses as this one, a bastion of affluence, houses with libraries, libraries with books.

   Fabia Quadrant came in almost soundlessly. Her long dress was black and he remembered that black was not a colour but just a total absorption of light. Her face was gay, a little hectic, and she greeted him cheerfully.

   ‘Hallo again, Chief Inspector.’

   ‘I won’t keep you long, Mrs Quadrant.’

   ‘Won’t you sit down?’

   ‘Thank you. Just for a moment.’ He watched her sit down and fold her hands in her lap. The diamond on her left hand burned in the dark nest between her knees. ‘I want you to tell me everything you can remember about Dudley Drury,’ he said.

   ‘Well, it was my last term at school,’ she said. ‘Margaret told me she’d got a boyfriend - her first, perhaps. I don’t know. It’s only twelve years ago, Chief Inspector, but we weren’t like the adolescents of today. It wasn’t remarkable to be without a boyfriend at eighteen. Do you understand?’ She spoke clearly and slowly, as if she were instructing a child. Something about her manner angered Wexford and he wondered if she had ever had to hurry in her life, ever had to snatch a meal standing up or run to catch a train. ‘It was a little unusual, perhaps, but not odd, not remarkable. Margaret didn’t introduce me to her friend but I remember his name because it was like Drury Lane and I had never heard it before as a surname.’

   Wexford tried to crush his impatience.

   ‘What did she tell you about him, Mrs Quadrant?

   ‘Very little.’ She paused and looked at him as if she was anxious not to betray a man in danger. ‘There was only one thing. She said he was jealous, jealous to the point of fanaticism.’

   ‘I see.’

   ‘He didn’t care for her to have any other friends. I had the impression that he was very emotional and possessive.’

   Traits you would hardly understand, Wexford thought, or would you? He remembered Quadrant’s inconstancies and wondered again. Her voice, uncharacteristically sharp and censorious, interrupted his reverie.

   ‘He was very upset that she was moving back to London. She said he was in a terrible state, his life wouldn’t be worth living without her. You can imagine the sort of thing.’

   ‘But he’d only known her a few weeks.’

   ‘I’m simply telling you what she said, Chief Inspector.’ She smiled as if she was an immense distance from Drury and Margaret Godfrey, light years, an infinity of space. ‘She didn’t seem to care. Margaret wasn’t a sensitive person.’

   Soft footsteps sounded in the hall and behind Wexford the door opened.

   ‘Oh, there you are,’ Fabia Quadrant said. ‘Chief Inspector Wexford and I have been talking about young love. It all seems to me rather like the expense of spirit in a waste of shame.’

   But that wasn’t young love, Wexford thought, trying to place the quotation. It was much more like what he had seen on Helen Missal’s face that afternoon.

   ‘Just one small point, Mrs. Quadrant,’ he said. ‘Mrs Parsons seems to have been interested in Victorian poetry during the two years she lived in Flagford. I’ve wondered if there was any special significance behind that.’

Margaret Godfrey was one of five girls on the stone seat and she sat in the middle of the row. Those who stood behind rested their hands on the shoulders of the seated. Wexford counted twelve faces. The snapshot Diana Stevens had taken was very sharp and clear and the likenesses, even after so long, were good. He re-created in his mind the face he had seen on the damp ground, then stared with awakened curiosity at the face in the sun.

   The others were all smiling, all but Margaret Godfrey, and her face was in repose. The white forehead was very high, the eyes wide and expressionless; her lips were folded, the corners tilted very slightly upwards, and she was looking at the camera very much as the Gioconda had looked at Leonardo. Secrecy vied with something else in those serene features. This girl, Wexford thought, looked as if she had undergone an experience most of her fellows could never have fathomed, and it had marked her not with suffering or sham but simply with smug tranquillity.

   The gym tunic was an incongruity. She could have worn a high-necked dress with puffy sleeves. Her hair, soft then, not crimped and waved as it had been later, skimmed her cheek-bones and lay across her temples in two shining arcs.

Parsons was dressed in a dark suit. His black tie, not new and worn perhaps on previous mourning occasions, showed the shiny marks of a too-hot inexpertly handled iron. Sewn to his left sleeve was a diamond-shaped patch of black cotton.

   ‘We’d like to go over the house again,’ Burden said, ‘if you wouldn’t mind leaving me the key.’

   ‘I don’t care what you do,’ Parsons said. ‘The minister’s asked me to Sunday dinner. I shan’t be back till this afternoon.’ He began to clear his breakfast things from the table, putting the teapot, the marmalade jar away carefully in the places the dead woman had appointed for them. Burden watched him pick up the Sunday paper, unopened and unread, and tip his toast crusts on it before depositing it in a bucket beneath the sink. ‘I’m selling this place as soon as I can,’ he said.

   ‘My wife thought of going along to the service,’ Burden said.

   Parsons kept his back turned to him. He poured water from a kettle over the single cup, the saucer, the plate.

   ‘I’m glad,’ he said. ‘I thought people might like to come, people who won’t be able to get along to the funeral tomorrow.’ The sink was stained with brown now; crumbs and tea-leaves dung along a greasy tide-mark. ‘I suppose you haven’t got a lead yet? On the killer, I mean.’ It was grotesque. Then Burden remembered what this man had read while his wife knitted.

   ‘Not yet.’

   He dried the crockery, then his hands, on the tea towel.

   ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said wearily. ‘It won’t bring her back.’

   It was going to be a hot day, the first really hot day of the summer. In the High Street the heat was already making water mirages, lakes that sparkled and then vanished as Burden approached; in the road where actual water had lain the night before phantom water gleamed on the tar. Cars were beginning the nose-to-tail pilgrimage to the coast and at the junction Gates was directing the traffic, his arms flailing in blue shirt sleeves. Burden felt the weight of his own jacket.

   Wexford was waiting for him in his office. In spite of the open windows the air was still.

   ‘The air conditioning works better when they’re shut,’ Burden suggested.

   Wexford walked up and down, sniffing the sunlight.

   ‘It feels better this way,’ he said. ‘We’ll wait till eleven. Then we’ll go.’

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 crease-less 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 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 it’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:

Doon had written precisely a hundred and thirty-four setters to Minna. Not one had ever been sent or even left the Quadrants’ library where, in the drawer of a writing-desk, Wexford found them that Sunday afternoon. They were wrapped in a pink scarf and beside them was a brown purse with a gilt clip. He had stood on this very spot the night before, all unknowing, his hand within inches of the scarf, the purse and these wild letters.

   Scanning them quickly, Burden understood now why Doon had printed the inscriptions in Minna’s books. The handwriting daunted him. It was spidery and difficult to decipher.

   ‘Better take them away, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Are we going to have to read them all, sir?’

   Wexford had looked more closely, sifting the significant from the more obviously insane.

   ‘Only the first one and the last two, I fancy,’ he said. ‘Poor Quadrant. What a hell of a life! We’ll take all this lot down to the office, Mike. I’ve got an uneasy feeling Nanny’s listening outside the door.’

   Outside, the heat and the bright light had robbed the house of character. It was like a steel engraving. Who would buy it, knowing what it had sheltered? It could become a school, Burden supposed, or an hotel or an old people’s home. The aged might not care, chatting, reminiscing, watching television in the room where Fabia Quadrant had written to the woman she killed.

   They crossed the lawn to their car.

   ‘“Green pleasure and grey grief”,’ Wexford said. ‘That just about sums this place up.’

   He got into the passenger seat and they drove away.