‘Not again!’ she said. ‘Now I know how the fox feels. He doesn’t enjoy it.’
Missal was nowhere about, but from behind a dark green barrier of macrocarpa Wexford could hear the hum of a motor mower.
‘Can we go indoors, Mrs Missal?’
She hesitated for a moment. Wexford thought she was listening, perhaps to the sounds from the other side of the hedge. The noise of the mower ceased, then, as she seemed to hold her breath, started again. She swung her legs over the hammock and he saw that her left ankle was encircled by a thin gold chain.
'I suppose so,’ she said. ‘I don’t have any choice, do I?’ She went before him through the open doors, across the cool dining-room where Quadrant had looked on the wine, and into the rhododendron room. She sat down and said:
‘Well, what is it now?’
There was something outrageous and at the same time spiteful about the way she spread her nakedness against the pink and green chintz. Wexford turned away his eyes. She was in her own home and be could hardly tell her to go and put some clothes on. Instead he took the photograph from his pocket and held it out to her.
‘Why did you tell me you didn’t know this woman?’
Fear left her eyes and they flared with surprise.
‘I didn’t know her.’
‘You were at school with her, Mrs Missal.’
She snatched the photograph and stared at it.
‘I was not.’ Her hair fell over her shoulders, bright copper like a new penny. ‘At least, I don’t think I was. I mean, she was years older than me by the look of this. She may have been in the sixth when I was in the first form. I just wouldn’t know.’
Wexford said severely: ‘Mrs Parsons was thirty, the same age as yourself. Her maiden name was Godfrey.’
‘I adore “maiden name”. It’s such a charitable way of putting it, isn’t it? All right, Chief Inspector, I do remember now. But she’s aged, she’s different . . .’ Suddenly she smiled, a smile of pure delighted triumph, and Wexford marvelled that this woman was the same age as the pathetic dead thing they had found in the wood.
‘It’s very unfortunate you couldn’t remember on Thursday evening, Mrs Missal. You’ve put yourself in a most unpleasant light, firstly by deliberately lying to Inspector Burden and myself and secondly by concealment of important facts. Mr Quadrant will tell you that I’m quite within my rights if I charge you with being an accessory - ’
Helen Missal interrupted sulkily. ‘Why pick on me? Fabia knew her too, and . . . Oh, there must be lots and lots of other people.’
‘I’m asking you,’ he said ‘Tell me about her.’
‘If I do,’ she said, ‘will you promise to go away and not come back?’
‘Just tell me the truth, madam, and I will gladly go away. I’m a very busy man.’
She crossed her legs and smoothed her knees. Helen Missal’s knees were like a little girl’s, a little girl who has never climbed a tree or missed a bath.
‘I didn’t like school,’ she said confidingly. ‘It was so restricting, if you know what I mean. I just begged and begged Daddy to take me away at the end of my first term in the sixth - ’
‘Margaret Godfrey, Mrs Missal.’
‘Oh, yes, Margaret Godfrey. Well, she was a sort of cipher - isn’t that a lovely word? I got it out of a book. A sort of cipher. She was one of the fringe people, not very clever or nice-looking or anything.’ She glanced once more at the picture. ‘Margaret Godfrey. D’you know, I can hardly believe it. I should have said she was the last girl to get herself murdered.’
‘And who would be the first, Mrs Missal?’
‘Well, someone like me,’ she said, and giggled.
‘Who were her friends, the people she went around with?’
‘Let me think. There was Anne Kelly and a feeble spotty bitch called Bertram and Diana Something . . .’
‘That would be Diana Stevens.’
‘My God, you know it all, don’t you?’
‘I meant boyfriends.’
‘I wouldn’t know. I was rather busy in that direction myself.’ She looked at him, pouting provocatively, and Wexford wondered, with the first flicker of pity he had felt for her, if her coyness would increase as her beauty declined until in age she became grotesque.
‘Anne Kelly,’ he said, ‘Diana Stevens, a girl called Bertram. What about Clare Clarke, what about Mrs Quadrant? Would they remember?’
She had said that she hated school, but as she began to speak her voice was softer than he had ever known it and her expression gentler. For a moment he forgot his anger, her lies, the provocative costume she wore, and listened.
‘It’s funny,’ she said, ‘but thinking of those names has sort of brought it back to me. We used to sit in a kind of garden, a wild old place. Fabia and me and a girl called Clarke – I see her around sometimes - and Jill Ingram and that Kelly girl and - and Margaret Godfrey. We were supposed to be working but we didn’t much. We used to talk about . . . Oh, I don’t know . . .’
‘About your boyfriends, Mrs Missal? As soon as the words were out Wexford knew he had been obtuse.
‘Oh, no,’ she said sharply. ‘You’ve got it wrong. Not then, not in the garden. It was a wilderness, an old pond, bushes, a seat. We used to talk about . . . well, about our dreams, what we wanted to do, what we were going to make of our lives.’ She stopped and Wexford could see in a sudden flash of vision a wild green place, the girls with their books and hear with his mind’s ear the laughter, the gasp of dizzy ambition. Then he almost jumped at the change in her voice. She whispered savagely, as if she had forgotten he was there: ‘I wanted to act! They wouldn’t let me, my father and my mother. They made me stay at home and it all went. It sort of dissolved into nothing.’ She shook back her hair and smoothed with the tips of two fingers the creases that had appeared between her eyebrows ‘I met Pete,’ she said, ‘and we got married.’ Her nose wrinkled. ‘The story of my life.’
‘You can’t have everything,’ Wexford said.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I wasn’t the only one . . .’
She hesitated and Wexford held his breath. He had an intuitive conviction that he was about to hear something of enormous significance, something that would iron out the whole case, wrap it up and tie it ready to hand to Mr Griswold. The green eyes widened and lit up; then suddenly the incandescence died and they became almost opaque. Outside in the hall a floorboard squeaked and Wexford heard the squashy sound of a rubber sole on thick carpet. Helen Missal’s face became quite white.
‘Oh God!’ she said. ‘Please, please don’t ask about the cinema ticket. Please don’t!’
Wexford cursed inwardly as the door opened and Missal came in. He was sweating and there were damp patches on the underarms of his singlet. He stared at his wife and in his eyes was a strange mixture of disgust and concupiscence.
‘Put something on,’ he shouted. ‘Go on, put some clothes on.’
She got up awkwardly and Wexford had the illusion that her husband’s words were scrawled across her body like the obscene scribble on a pin-up picture.
‘I was sunbathing,’ she said.
Missal wheeled round on Wexford.
‘Come to see the peep-show, have you?’ His face was crimson with exertion and with jealousy. ‘What the copper saw.’
Wexford wanted to be angry, to match the other man’s rage with his own colder kind, but he could feel only pity.