‘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.
Chapter 12
Were you and she whom I met at dinner last week, With eyes and hair of the Ptolemy black?
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.’