Soft footsteps sounded in the hall and behind Wexford the door opened.
‘Oh, there you are,’ Fabia Quadrant said. ‘Chief Inspector Wexford and I have been talking about young love. It all seems to me rather like the expense of spirit in a waste of shame.’
But that wasn’t young love, Wexford thought, trying to place the quotation. It was much more like what he had seen on Helen Missal’s face that afternoon.
‘Just one small point, Mrs. Quadrant,’ he said. ‘Mrs Parsons seems to have been interested in Victorian poetry during the two years she lived in Flagford. I’ve wondered if there was any special significance behind that.’
‘Nothing sinister, if that’s what you mean,’ she said. ‘Nineteenth-century verse was part of the Advanced English syllabus for Higher School Certificate when we took it in 1951. I believe they call it “A” Levels now.’
Then Quadrant did a strange thing. Crossing the library between Wexford and his wife, he took a book out of the shelves. He put his hand on it without hesitation. Wexford had the impression be could have picked it out blindfold or in the dark.
‘Oh, Douglas,’ Mrs Quadrant said, ‘he doesn’t want to see that.’
‘Look,’
Wexford looked and read from an ornate label that had been pasted inside the cover:
Presented to Fabia Rogers for distinguished results in Higher School Certificate, 1951.
In his job it didn’t do to be at a loss for words, but now he could find no phrase to foster the pride on Quadrant’s dark face, or mitigate the embarrassment on his wife’s.
‘I’ll be going now,’ he said at last.
Quadrant put the book back abruptly and took his wife’s arm. She rested her fingers firmly on his jacket sleeve. Suddenly they seemed very close, but, for all that, it was a strangely sexless communion. Brother and sister, Wexford thought, a Ptolemy and a Cleopatra.
‘Good night, Mrs Quadrant. You’ve been most cooperative. I apologize for troubling you . . .’ He looked again at his watch. ‘At this hour,’ he said, savouring Quadrant’s enmity.
‘No trouble, Chief Inspector.’ She laughed deprecatingly, confidently, as if she was really a happy wife with a devoted husband.
Together they showed him out. Quadrant was urbane, once more courteous, but the hand beneath the sleeve where his wife’s fingers lay was clenched and the knuckles showed like white flints under the brown skin.
A bicycle was propped against the police-station wall, a bicycle with a basket, practical-looking lights and a bulging tool bag. Wexford walked into the foyer and almost collided with a fat fair woman wearing a leather windcheater over a dirndl skirt.
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘No bones broken. I suppose you wouldn’t be him, this Chief Inspector bod?’
Behind the desk the sergeant grinned slightly, changed the grin to a cough, and covered his mouth with his hand.
‘I am Chief Inspector Wexford. Can I help you?’ She fished something out of her shoulder bag.
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I’m supposed to be helping you. One of your blokes came to my cottage . . .’
‘Miss Clarke,’ Wexford said. ‘Won’t you come into my office?’
His hopes had suddenly risen unaccountably. It made a change for someone to come to him. Then they fell again when he saw what she had in her hand. It was only another photograph.
‘I found it,’ she said, ‘among a lot of other junk. If you’re sort of scouring the joint for people who knew Margaret it might help.’
The picture was an enlarged snapshot. It showed a dozen girls disposed in two rows and it was obviously not an official photograph.
‘Di took it,’ Miss Clarke said. ‘Di Stevens that was. Best part of the sixth form are there.’ She looked at him and made a face as if she was afraid that by bringing it she had done something silly. ‘You can keep it if it’s any use.’
Wexford put it in his pocket, intending to look at it later, although he doubted whether it would be needed now. As he was showing Miss Clarke out he met Sergeant Martin coming back from his interview with the manager of the supermarket. No records had been kept of the number of pink hoods sold during the week, only the total sale of hoods in all colours. The stock had come in on Monday and Saturday night twenty-six hoods had been sold. The manager thought that about twenty-five per cent of the stock had been pink and on a very rough estimate he guessed that about six pink ones had been sold.
Wexford sent Martin over to Flagford in search of Janet Tipping. Then he rang Drury’s number. Burden answered. They hadn’t found anything in the house. Mrs Drury was staying with her sister in Hastings, but the sister had no telephone.
‘Martin’ll have to get down there,’ Wexford said. ‘I can’t spare you. What did Spellman say?’
‘They closed at five-thirty sharp on Tuesday. Drury collected his wife’s vegetable order on Wednesday.’
‘What’s he buying vegetables for, anyway? He grows them in the garden.’
‘The order was for tomatoes, a cucumber and a marrow, sir.’
‘That’s fruit, not vegetables. Talking of gardening, I’m going to get some lights over to you and they can start digging. I reckon that purse and that key could be interred with Drury’s potatoes.’
Dudley Drury was in a pitiful state when Wexford got back to Sparta Grove. He was pacing up and down but he looked weak at the knees.
‘He’s been sick, sir,’ Gates said.
‘Hard cheese,’ Wexford said. ‘What d’you think I am, a health visitor?’
The search of the house had been completed and the place looked a lot tidier than it had before they began. When the lighting equipment arrived Bryant and Gates started digging over the potato patch. White-faced, Drury watched from the dining-room windows as the clods of earth were lifted and turned. This man, Wexford thought, had once said life would be unlivable without Margaret Parsons. Had he really meant it would be unendurable, if another possessed her?
‘I’d like you to come down to the station now, Drury.’
‘Are you going to arrest me?’
‘I’d just like to ask you a few more questions,’ Wexford said. ‘Just a few more questions.’
Meanwhile Burden had driven over to Pomfret, awakened the ironmonger and checked his nephew’s alibi.
‘Dud always gets off early on Tuesdays,’ he grumbled ‘Gets earlier and earlier every week, it does. More like five than a quarter past.’
‘So you’d say he left around five last Tuesday?’
‘I wouldn’t like to say five. Ten past, a quarter past. I was busy in the shop. Dud came in and said, “I’m off now, Uncle.” I’d no call to go checking up on him, had I?’
‘It might have been ten past or a quarter past?’
‘It might have been twenty past for all I know.’
It was still raining softly. The main road was black and slickly gleaming. Whatever Miss Sweeting may have seen in the afternoon, the lane and the wood were deserted now. The top branches of the trees moved in the wind. Burden slowed down, thinking how strange it was that an uninteresting corner of the countryside should suddenly have become, because of the use to which someone had put it, a. sinister and dreadful hiding place, the focal point of curious eyes and the goal, perhaps for years to come, of half the visitors to the neighbourhood. From henceforth Flagford Castle would take second place to Prewett’s wood in the guide book of the ghoulish.