‘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 Methodist minister hadn’t been much help to Burden. He hadn’t seen Mrs Parsons since Sunday and he’d been surprised when she didn’t come to the social evening on Tuesday. No, she had made no close friends at the church and he couldn’t recall hearing anyone use her Christian name.
Burden checked the bus times at the garage and found that five-thirty-two had left Stowerton dead on time. Moreover, the conductress on the Kingsmarkham bus, the one that left Stowerton at five-thirty-five, remembered seeing Parsons. He had asked for change for a ten-shilling note and they were nearly in Kingsmarkham before she got enough silver to change it.
‘Fun and games with Mrs Bloody Missal,’ Wexford said when Burden walked in. ‘She’s one of those women who tell lies by the light of nature, a natural crook.’
‘Where’s the motive, sir?’
‘Don’t ask me. Maybe she was carrying on with Parsons, picked him up at his office on Tuesday afternoon and bribed the entire Southern Water Board to say he didn’t leave till after five-thirty. Maybe she’d got another boyfriend she goes out with on Wednesdays, one for every day of the week. Or maybe she and Parsons and Mr X, who shall be nameless (God Almighty!), were Russian agents and Mrs Parsons had defected to the West. It’s all very wonderful, Mike, and it makes me spew!’
‘We haven’t even got the thing she was strangled with,’ Burden said gloomily. ‘Could a woman have done it?’
‘Crocker seems to think so. If she was a strong young woman, always sitting about on her backside and feeding her face.’
‘Like Mrs Missal’
‘We’re going to get down there tonight, Mike, and have the whole thing out again in front of her old man. But not till tonight. I’m going to give her the rest of the day to sweat in. I’ve got the report from the lab and there’s no cow dung on Mrs Missal’s tyres. But she didn’t have to use her own car. Her husband’s a car dealer, got a saleroom in Stowerton. Those people are always chopping and changing their cars. That’s another thing we’ll have to check up on. The inquest’s tomorrow and I want to get somewhere before then.’
Burden drove his own car into Stowerton and pulled into the forecourt of Missal’s saleroom. A man in overalls came out from the glass-walled office between the rows of petrol- pumps.
‘Two and two shots, please,’ Burden said. ‘Mr Missal about?’
‘He’s out with a client.’
‘That’s a pity,’ Burden said. ‘I looked in on Tuesday afternoon and he wasn’t here . . .’
‘Always in and out he is. In and out. I’ll just give your windscreen a wipe over.’
‘Maybe Mrs Missal?’
‘Haven’t seen her inside three months. Back in March was the last time. She come in to lend the Merc and bashed the grid in. Women drivers!’
‘Had a row, did they? That sounds like Pete.’
‘You’re not joking. He said, never again. Not the Merc or any of the cars.’
‘Well, well,’ Burden said. He gave the man a shilling; more would have looked suspicious. ‘Marriage is a battle field when all’s said and done.’
‘I’ll tell him you came in.’
Burden switched on the ignition and put the car in gear. ‘Don’t trouble,’ he said. ‘I’m seeing him tonight.’ He drove towards the exit and braked sharply to avoid a yellow convertible that swung sharply in from Maryfield Road. An elderly man was at the wheel; beside him, Peter Missal.