‘Did you ever meet anyone called Anne Ives?’
‘You mean Margaret’s cousin? No, I never met her. She wasn’t at school with us. She was a typist or a clerk or something.’
Just another of the hoi-polloi, Wexford thought, the despised majority, the bottom seventy-five per cent.
Quadrant sat listening, swinging one elegant leg. His wife’s condescension seemed to amuse him. He finished his tea, crumpled his napkin and helped himself to a cigarette. Wexford watched him take a box of matches from his pocket and strike one. Matches! That was odd. Surely if he had behaved consistently Quadrant would have used a lighter, one of these table lighters that look like a Georgian teapot, Wexford thought, his imagination working. There had been a single matchstick beside Mrs Parsons’ body, a single matchstick half burnt away . . .
‘Now, Margaret Godfrey’s boy friends, Mrs Quadrant. Can you remember anyone at all?’
He leant forward, trying to impress her with the urgency of his question. A tiny flash of something that might have been malice or simply recollection darted into her eyes and was gone. Quadrant exhaled deeply.
‘There was a boy,’ she said.
‘Try to remember, Mrs Quadrant.’
‘I ought to remember,’ she said, and Wexford was sure she could, certain she was only stalling for effect. ‘It was like a theatre, a London theatre.’
‘Palladium, Globe, Haymarket? Quadrant was enjoying himself ‘Prince of Wales?’
Fabia Quadrant giggled softly. It was an unkind sympathetic towards her husband, faintly hostile to the Chief Inspector. For all his infidelity Quadrant and his wife shared something, something stronger, Wexford than ordinary marital trust.
‘I know, it was Drury. Dudley Drury. He used to live in Flagford.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Quadrant. It had just crossed my mind that your husband might have known her.’
‘I?’ As he spoke the monosyllable Quadrant’s voice was almost hysterically incredulous. Then he began to rock with laughter. It was a soundless cruel mirth that to send an evil wind through the room. He made no noise, but Wexford felt scorn leap out of the laughing man like a springing animal, scorn and contempt and the wrath that is one of the deadly sins. ‘I, know her? In that sort of way? I assure you, dear Chief Inspector, that I most emphatically knew her not!’
Sickened, Wexford turned away. Mrs Quadrant was looking down into her lap. It was as if she had withdrawn into a sort of shame.
‘This Drury,’ Wexford said, ‘do you know if she ever called him Doon?’
Was it his imagination or was it simply coincidence that at that moment Quadrant’s laughter was switched off like a wrenched tap?
‘Doon?’ his wife said. ‘Oh, no, I never heard her call anyone Doon.’
She didn’t get up when Wexford rose to go, but gave him a dismissive nod and reached for the book she had been reading. Quadrant let him out briskly, closing the door before he reached the bottom of the steps as if he had been selling brushes or reading the meter. Dougie Quadrant! If there was ever a fellow who could strangle one woman and then make love to another a dozen yards away . . . But why? Deep in thought, he walked down the Kingsbrook Road, crossed to the opposite side of the road and would have passed Helen Missal’s garage unseeing but for the voice that hailed him.
‘Did you see Douglas?’ Her tone was wistful but she had cheered up since he had last seen her. The bikini had been changed for a printed silk dress, high-heeled shoes and a big hat.
The question was beneath Wexford’s dignity.
‘Mrs Quadrant was able to fill ma few gaps,’ he said.
‘Fabia was? You amaze me. She’s very discreet. Just as well, Douglas being what he is.’ For a moment her pretty face was swollen with sensuality. ‘He’s magnificent, isn’t he? He’s splendid.’ Shaking herself, she drew her hand across the face and when she withdrew it Wexford saw that the lust had been wiped away. ‘My Christ,’ she said, once more cheerful and outrageous, ‘some people don’t know when they’re well off!’ She unlocked the garage doors, opened the boot of the red Dauphine and took out a pair of flatter shoes.
‘I had the impression,’ Wexford said, ‘that there was something else you wanted to tell me.’ He paused. ‘When your husband interrupted us.’
‘Perhaps there was and perhaps there wasn’t. I don’t think I will now.’ The shoes changed, she danced up to the car and swung the door open.
‘Off to the cinema?’ Wexford asked.
She banged the door and switched on the ignition.
‘Damn you!’ Wexford heard her shout above the roar of the engine.
Chapter 10
We were young, we were merry, we were very very wise, And the door stood open at our feast . . .
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.’