Burden kept his eyes on the bright, sword-like line. He tensed, scarcely daring to breathe, as the wallpaper and the wood were for a second obscured by a flash of black hair, dark cheek, white shirt shadowed with blue. Then, no more. He was not even certain where the two met, but it was not far from where he stood, and he felt rather than heard their meeting, so heavy and so desperate had the silence become.
Four people alone in the beat. Burden found himself praying that he could keep as still and at the same time as alert as Wexford. At last the heels tapped again. They had moved into the dining-room.
It was the man who spoke first and Burden had to strain to hear what he said. His voice was low and held under taut control.
‘You should never have come here,’ Douglas Quadrant said.
‘I had to see you.’ She spoke with loud urgency. ‘You said you’d meet me yesterday but you never came. You could have come, Douglas.’
‘I couldn’t get away. I was going to, but Wexford came.’ His voice died away and the rest of the sentence went unheard.
‘Afterwards you could. I know, I met him.’
In the drawing-room Wexford made a small movement of satisfaction as another loose end was tied.
‘I thought . . .’ They heard her give a nervous laugh, ‘I thought I’d said too much. I almost did . . .’
‘You shouldn’t have said anything.’
‘I didn’t. I stopped myself. Douglas, you’re hurting me!’ His reply was something savage, something they couldn’t hear.
Helen Missal was taking no pains to keep her voice down and Burden wondered why one of them should show so much caution, the, other hardly any.
‘Why have you come here? What are you looking for?’
‘You knew I would come. When you telephoned me last night and told me Parsons would be out, you knew it . . .’
They heard her moving about the room and Burden imagined the little straight nose curling in disgust, the fingers outstretched to the shabby cushions, drawing lines in the dust on the galleried sideboard,. Her laughter, disdainful and quite humourless, was a surprise.
‘Have you ever seen such a horrible house? Fancy, she lived here, she actually lived here. Little Meg Godfrey . . .’
It was then that his control snapped and, caution forgotten, he shouted aloud.
‘I hated her! My God, Helen, how I hated her! I never saw her, not till this week, but it was she who made my life what it was.’ The ornaments on the tiered shelves rattled and Burden guessed that Quadrant was leaning against the sideboard, near enough for him to touch him but for the intervening wall. ‘I didn’t want her to die, but I’m glad she’s dead!’
‘Darling!’ They heard nothing, but Burden knew as if he could see her that she was clinging to Quadrant now, her arms around his neck. ‘Let’s go away now. Please. There’s nothing here for you.’
He had shaken her off violently. The little cry she gave told them that, and the slithering sound of a chair skidding across lino.
‘I’m going back upstairs,’ Quadrant said, ‘and you must go. Now, Helen. You’re as conspicuous in that get-up as . . .’ They heard him pause, picking a metaphor, ‘. . . as a parrot in a dovecote.’
She seemed to stagger out, crippled both by her heels and his rejection. Burden, catching momentary sight of flame and blue through the door crack, made a tiny movement, but Wexford’s lingers closed on his arm. Above them in the silent house someone was impatient with waiting. The books crashing to the floor two storeys up sounded like thunder when the storm is directly overhead.
Douglas Quadrant heard it too. He leapt for the stairs, but Wexford reached them first, and they confronted each other in the hall. Helen Missal screamed and flung her arm across her mouth.
‘Oh God!’ she cried, ‘Why wouldn’t you come when I told you?’
‘No one is going anywhere, Mrs Missal,’ Wexford said, ‘except upstairs. He picked up the key in his handkerchief.
Quadrant was immobile now, arm raised, for all the world, Burden thought, like a fencer in his white shirt, a hunter hunted and snared. His face was blank. He stared at Wexford for a moment and closed his eyes.
At last he said, ‘Shall we go, then?’
They ascended slowly, Wexford leading, Burden at the rear. It was a ridiculous procession, Burden thought. Taking their time, hands to the banister, they were like a troop of house hunters with an order to view or relatives bidden upstairs to visit the bedridden.
At the first turn Wexford said:
‘I think we will all go into the room where Minna kept her books, the books that Doon gave her. The case began here in this house and perhaps there will be some kind of poetic justice in ending it here. But the poetry books have gone, Mr Quadrant. As Mrs Missal said, there is nothing here for you.’
He said no more, but the sounds from above had grown louder. Then, as Wexford put his hand to the door of the little room where he and Burden had read the poetry aloud, a faint sigh came from the other side.
The attic floor was littered with books, some open and slammed face-downwards, others on their spines, their pages spread in fans and their covers ripped. One had come to rest against a wall as if it had been flung there and had fallen open at an illustration of a pigtailed girl with a hockey stick. Quadrant’s wife knelt among the chaos, clutching a fistful of crumpled coloured paper.
When the door opened and she saw Wexford she seemed to make an immense effort to behave as if this were her home, as if she was hunting in her own attic and the four who entered were unexpected guests. For a second Burden had the fantastic notion that she would attempt to shake hands. But no words came and her hands seemed paralysed. She began to back away from them and towards the window, gradually raising her arms and pressing her be-ringed fingers against her cheeks. As she moved her heels caught one of the scattered books, a girls’ annual, and she stumbled, half falling across the larger of the two trunks. A star-shaped mark showed on her cheek-bone where a ring had dug into the flesh.
She lay where she had fallen until Quadrant stepped forward and lifted her against him. Then she moaned softly and turned her face, hiding it in his shoulder.
In the doorway Helen Missal stamped and said, ‘I want to go home!’
‘Will you close the door, Inspector Burden?’ Wexford went to the tiny window and unlatched it as calmly as if he was in his own office. ‘I think we’ll have some air,’ he said.
It was a tiny shoe-box of a room and khaki-coloured like the interior of a shoe-box. There was no breeze but the casement swung open to let in a more wholesome heat.
‘I’m afraid there isn’t much room,’ Wexford said like an apologetic host. ‘Inspector Burden and I will stand and you, Mrs Missal, can sit on the other trunk.’
To Burden’s astonishment she obeyed him. He saw that she was keeping her eyes on the Chief Inspector’s face like a subject under hypnosis. She had grown very white and suddenly looked much more than her actual age. The red hair might have been a wig bedizening a middle-aged woman.
Quadrant had been silent, nursing his wife as if she were a fractious child. Now he said with something of his former scorn:
'Sureté methods, Chief Inspector? How very melodramatic.’
Wexford ignored him. He stood by the window, his face outlined against clear blue.
‘I’m going to tell you a love story,’ he said, ‘the story of Doon and Minna.’ Nobody moved but Quadrant. He reached for his jacket on the trunk where Helen Missal sat, took a gold case from the pocket and lit a cigarette with a match. ‘When Margaret Godfrey first came here,’ Wexford began, ‘she was sixteen. She’d been brought up by old- fashioned people and as a result she appeared prim and shockable. Far from being the London girl come to startle the provinces, she was a suburban orphan thrown on the sophisticated county. Isn’t that so, Mrs Missal?’