Burden refused the tea and sat on a wooden chair that looked fairly clean.
‘I’ve no objection if you talk while I eat,’ said Miss Clarke, bursting once more into giggles. She peered at a tin of jam and said crossly to her companion: ‘Confound it! South African. I know I shan’t fancy it now.’ She pouted and said dramatically, ‘Ashes on my tongue!’ But Burden noticed that she helped herself generously and spread the jam onto a doorstep of bread. With her mouth full she said to him:
‘Fire away. I’m all ears.’
‘All I really want to know is if you can tell me the names of any of Mrs Parsons’ boyfriends when she was Margaret Godfrey, when you knew her.’
Miss Clarke smacked her lips.
‘You’ve come to the right shop,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a memory like an elephant.’
‘You can say that again,’ said Di Plunkett, ‘and it’s not only your memory.’ They both laughed, Miss Clarke with great good humour.
‘I remember Margaret Godfrey perfectly,’ she said. ‘Second-class brain, anaemic looks, personality both prim and dim. Still, de mortuis and all that jazz, you know. (Prang that fly, Di. There’s a squeegy-weegy sprayer thing on the shelf behind your great bonce.) Not a very social type, Margaret, no community spirits Went around with a female called Bertram, vanished now into the mists of obscurity. (Got him, Di!) Chummed up with one Fabia Rogers for a while - Fabia, forsooth! not to mention Diana Stevens of sinister memory - ’
Miss or Mrs Plunkett broke in with a scream of laughter and waving the fly-killer made as if to fire a stream of liquid at Miss Clarke’s head. Burden shifted his chair out of range.
Ducking and giggling, Clare Clarke went on: ‘. . . Now notorious in the Stowerton rural district as Mrs William Plunkett, one of this one-eyed burg’s most illustrious sons!’
‘You are a scream, Clare,’ Mrs Plunkett gasped. ‘Really, I envy those lucky members of the upper fourth. When I think, of what we had to put up with - ’
‘What about boyfriends, Miss Clarke?
‘Cherchez L’homme, eh? I said you’d come to the right shop. D’you remember, Di, when she went out with him the first time and we sat behind them in the pictures? Oh, gosh, I’ll never forget that to my dying day.’
‘Talk about sloppy,’ said Mrs Plunkett. “Do you mind if I hold your hand, Margaret?” I thought you were going to burst a blood-vessel, Clare.’
‘What was his name?’ Burden was bored and at the same time angry. He thought the years had toughened him, but now the picture of the green and white bundle in the wood swam before his eyes; that and Parsons’ face. He realized that of all the people they had interviewed he hadn’t liked a single one. Was there no pity in any of them, no common mercy?
‘What was his name?’ he said - again wearily.
‘Dudley Drury. On my sacred oath, Dudley Drury.’
‘What a name to go to bed with,’ Mrs Plunkett said.
Clare Clarke whispered in her ear, but loud enough for Burden to bear: ‘She never did! Not on your sweet life.’
Mrs Plunkett saw his face and looked a little ashamed. She said defensively in a belated effort to help:
‘He’s still around if you want to trace him. He lives down by Stowerton Station. Surely you don’t think he killed Meg Godfrey?
Clare Clarke said suddenly: ‘She was quite pretty. He was very keen on her. She didn’t look, like that then, you know, not like that ghastly mockery in the paper. I think I’ve got a snap somewhere. All girls together.’
Burden had got what he wanted. Now he wanted to go. It was a bit late in the day for snaps. If they could have seen one on Thursday it might have helped but that was all.
‘Thank you, Miss Clarke,’ he said, ‘Mrs Plunkett. Good afternoon.’
‘Well, cheeri-bye. It’s been nice meeting you.’ She giggled. ‘It’s not often we see a man in here, is it, Di?’
Half-way down the overgrown path he stopped in his tracks. A woman in jodhpurs and open-necked shirt was coming up towards the cottage, whistling. It was Dorothy Sweeting.
Dodo, he thought. They’d mistaken him for someone called Dodo and Dodo was Dorothy Sweeting. From long experience Burden knew that whatever may happen in detective fiction, coincidence is more common than conspiracy in real life.
‘Good afternoon, Miss Sweeting.’
She grinned at him with cheerful innocence.
‘Oh, hallo,’ she said, ‘fancy seeing you. I’ve just come from the farm. There’s a blinking great crowd like a Cup Final in that wood. You ought to see them.’
Still not inured to man’s inhuman curiosity, Burden sighed.
‘You know that bush where they found her?’ Dorothy Sweeting went on excitedly. ‘Well, Jimmy Traynor’s flogging twigs off it at a bob a time. I told Mr Prewett he ought to charge half a crown admittance.’
‘I hope he’s not thinking of taking your advice, miss,’ Burden said in a repressive voice.
‘There’s nothing wrong in it. I knew a fellow who had a plane crash on his land and he turned a whole field into a car park as he had so many sightseers.’
Burden flattened himself against the hedge to let her pass.
‘Your tea will be getting cold, Miss Sweeting,’ he said.
‘Whatever next?’ Wexford said. ‘If we don’t look sharp they’ll have every stick in that wood uprooted and taken home for souvenirs.’
‘Shall I have a couple of the lads go over there, sir?’ Burden asked.
‘You do that, and go and get the street directory. We’ll go and see this Drury character together.’
‘You aren’t going to wait to hear from Colorado, then?
‘Drury’s a big possibility, Mike. He could well be Doon. I can’t help feeling that whatever Parsons says about his wife’s chastity, when she came back here she met up with Doon again and succumbed to his charms. As to why he should have killed her - well, all I can say is, men do strangle women they’re having affairs with, and Mrs Parsons may have accepted the car rides and the meals without being willing to pay for services rendered.’
‘The way I see it, Mike, Doon had been seeing Mrs Parsons and asked her out on Tuesday afternoon with a view to persuading her to become his mistress. They couldn’t meet at her home because of the risks and Doon was going to pick her up on the Pomfret Road. She took the rain-hood with her because the weather had been wet and she didn’t bank on being in the car all the time. Even if she didn’t want Doon for her lover she wouldn’t want him to see her with wet hair.’
The time factor was bothering Burden and he said so.
‘If she was killed early in the afternoon, sir, why did Doon strike a match to look at her? And if she was killed later, why didn’t she pay for her papers before she went out with him and why didn’t she explain to Parsons that she was going to be late?’
Wexford shrugged. ‘Search me,’ he said. ‘Dougie Quadrant uses matches, carries them in his pocket. So do most men. He’s behaving in a very funny way, Mike. Sometimes he’s cooperative, sometimes he’s actively hostile. We haven’t finished with him yet. Mrs Missal knows more than she’s saying - ’
‘Then there’s Missal himself,’ Burden interrupted.
Wexford looked thoughtful. He rubbed his chin and said:
‘I don’t think there’s any mystery about what he was doing on Tuesday. He’s as jealous as hell of that wife of his and not without reason as we know. I’m willing to take a bet that he keeps tabs on her when he can. He probably suspects Quadrant and when she told him she was going out on Tuesday afternoon he nipped back to Kingsmarkham on the off-chance, watched her go out, satisfied himself that she didn’t ‘go to Quadrant’s office and went back to Stowerton. He’d know she’d dress herself up to the nines if she was meeting Dougie. When he saw her go off in the car along the Kingsbrook Road in the same clothes she was wearing that morning he’d bank on her going shopping in Pomfret - they don’t close on Tuesdays - and he’d be able to set his mind at rest. I’m certain that’s what happened.’