‘You can put it that way if you like.’
‘In order to hide her gaucheness she put on a curious manner, a manner compounded of secretiveness, remoteness, primness. To a lover these can make up a fascinating mixture. They fascinated Doon.’
‘Doon was rich and clever and good-looking. I don’t doubt that for a time Minna - that’s the name Doon gave her and I shall refer to her by it - Minna was bowled over. Doon could give her things she could never have afforded to buy and so for a time Doon could buy her love or rather her companionship; for this was a love of the mind and nothing physical entered into it.’
Quadrant smoked fiercely. He inhaled deeply and the cigarette end glowed.
‘I have said Doon was clever,’ Wexford went on. ‘Perhaps I should add that brilliance of intellect doesn’t always go with self-sufficiency. So it was with Doon. Success, the flowering of ambition, actual achievement depended in this case on close contact with the chosen one - Minna. But Minna was only waiting, biding her time. Because, you see . . .’ He looked at the three people slowly and severally. ‘. . .You know that Doon, in spite of the wealth, the intellect, the good looks, had one insurmountable disadvantage, a disadvantage greater than any deformity, particularly to a woman of Minna’s background, that no amount of time or changed circumstances could alter.’
Helen Missal nodded sharply, her eyes alight with memory. Leaning against her husband, Fabia Quadrant was crying softly.
‘So when Dudley Drury came along she dropped Doon without a backward glance. All the expensive books Doon had given her she hid in a trunk and she never looked at them again. Drury was dull and ordinary - callow is the word, isn’t it, Mrs Quadrant? Not passionate or possessive. Those are the adjectives I would apply to Doon. But Drury was without Doon’s disadvantage, so Drury won.’
‘She preferred me!’ Burden remembered Drury’s exultant cry in the middle of his interrogation.
Wexford continued:
‘When Minna withdrew her love, or willingness to be loved, if you like, Doon’s life was broken. To other people it had seemed just an adolescent crush, but it was real all right. At that moment, July 1951, a neurosis was set up which, though quiescent for years, flared again when she returned. With it came hope. They were no longer teenagers but mature. At last Minna might listen and befriend. But she didn’t and so she had to die.’
Wexford stepped forward, coming closer to the seated man.
‘So we come to you, Mr Quadrant?
‘If it wasn’t for the fact that you’re upsetting my wife,’ Quadrant said, ‘I should say that this is a splendid way of livening up a dull Sunday morning.’ His voice was light and supercilious, but he flung his cigarette from him across the room and out of the open window past Burden’s ear. ‘Please go on.’
‘When we discovered that Minna was missing - you knew we had. Your office is by the bridge and you must have seen us dragging the brook - you realized that the mud from that lane could be found in your car tires. In order to cover yourself, for in your “peculiar position” (I quote) you knew our methods, and you had to take your car back to the lane on some legitimate pretext. It would hardly have been safe to go there during the day, but that evening you were meeting Mrs Missal - ’
Helen Missal jumped up and cried, ‘No, it isn’t true!’
‘Sit down,’ Wexford said. ‘Do you imagine she doesn’t know about it? D’you think she didn’t know about you and all the others?’ He turned back to Quadrant; ‘You’re an arrogant man, Mr Quadrant,’ he said, ‘and you didn’t in the least mind our knowing about your affair with Mrs Missal. If we ever connected you with the crime at all and examined your car, you could bluster a little but your reason for going to the lane was so obviously clandestine that any lies or evasions would be put down to that.’
‘But when you came to the wood you had to look and see, you had to make sure. I don’t know what excuse you made for going into the wood . . .’
‘He said he saw a Peeping Tom,’ Helen Missal said bitterly.
‘. . . but you did go in and because it was dark by then you struck a match to look more closely at the body. You were fascinated as well you might be and you held the match until it burnt down and Mrs Missal called out to you. Then you drove home. You had done what you came to do and with any luck nobody would ever connect you with Mrs Parsons. But later when I mentioned the name Doon to you - it was yesterday afternoon, wasn’t it? - you remembered the books. Perhaps there were letters too - it was all so long ago. As soon as you knew Parsons would be out of the house you used the dead woman’s missing key to get in, and so we found you searching for what Doon might have left behind.’
‘It’s all very plausible,’ Quadrant said. He smoothed his wife’s dishevelled hair and drew his arm more tightly around her, ‘Of course, there isn’t the remotest chance of your getting a conviction on that evidence, but we’ll try it if you like.’ He spoke as if they were about to embark on some small stratagem, the means of getting home when the car has broken down or a way of getting tactfully out of a party invitation.
‘No, Mr Quadrant,’ Wexford said, ‘we won’t waste our time on it. You can go if you wish, but I’d prefer you to stay. You see, Doon loved Minna, and although there might have been hatred too, there would never have been contempt. Yesterday afternoon when I asked you if you had ever known her you laughed. That laughter was one of the few sincere responses I got out of you and I knew then that although Doon might have killed Minna, passion would never have turned into ridicule.’
‘Moreover, at four o’clock this morning I learnt some thing else. I read a letter and I knew then that you couldn’t be Doon and Drury couldn’t be Doon. I learnt exactly what was the nature of Doon’s disadvantage.’
Burden knew what was coming but still he held his breath.
‘Doon is a woman,’ Wexford said.
Chapter 15
Love not, love not!
The thing you love may change,
The rosy lip may cease to smile on you;
The kindly beaming eye grow cold and strange;
The heart still warmly beat, yet not be true.
He would have let them arrest him, would have gone with them, Burden thought, like a lamb. Now, assured of his immunity, his aplomb had gone and panic, the last emotion Burden would have associated with Quadrant, showed in his eyes.
His wife pulled herself away from him and sat up. During Wexford’s long speeches she had been sobbing and her lips and eyelids were swollen. Her tears, perhaps because crying is a weakness of the young, made her look like a girl. She was wearing a yellow dress made of some expensive crease-less fabric that fell straight and smooth like a tunic. So far she had said nothing. Now she looked elated, breathless with unspoken words.
‘When I knew that Doon was a woman,’ Wexford said, ‘almost everything fell into place. It explained so much of Mrs Parsons’ secrecy, why she deceived her husband and yet could feel she wasn’t deceiving him; why Drury thought she was ashamed of Doon; why in self disgust she hid the books . . .’
And why Mrs Katz, knowing Doon’s sex but not her name, was so curious, Burden thought. It explained the letter that had puzzled them the day before. I don’t know why you should be scared. There was never anything in that . . . The cousin, the confidante, had known all along. For her it was secret but a fact of which she had so long been aware that she had thought it unnecessary to tell the Colorado police chief until he had probed. Then it had come out as an artless postscript to the interview.