‘You spoke to Missal,’ Burden interrupted, ‘but you were looking at Quadrant because we were both surprised to see him there. You said, “I’d like word with your wife,” and Quadrant thought you were speaking to him.’
‘I was suspicious of him until yesterday afternoon,’ Wexford said. ‘Then when I asked him if he’d known Mrs Parsons and he laughed I knew he wasn’t Doon. I said his laughter made me go cold and no wonder. There was a lot in that laugh, Mike. He’d seen Mrs Parsons dead and he’d seen her photograph in the paper. He must have felt pretty bitter when he thought of what it was that had driven his wife out of her mind and wrecked his marriage.’
‘He said he’d never seen her alive,’ Burden said. ‘I wonder why not?’ I wonder why he didn’t try to see her.’
Wexford reflected. He folded the scarf and put it away with the purse and the key. In the drawer his fingers touched something smooth and shiny.
‘Perhaps he didn’t dare,’ he said. ‘Perhaps he was afraid of what he might do . . .’ He took the photograph out, but Burden was preoccupied, looking at another, the one Parsons had given them.
‘They say love is blind,’ Burden said. ‘What did Fabia ever see in her?’
‘She wasn’t always like that,’ Wexford said. ‘Can’t you imagine that a rich, clever, beautiful girl like Fabia was, might have found just the foil she was looking for in that . . .’ He changed the pictures over, subtracting twelve years. ‘Your pal, Miss Clarke, brought me this,’ he said. It gave me a few ideas before we ever heard from Colorado.’
Margaret Godfrey was one of five girls on the stone seat and she sat in the middle of the row. Those who stood behind rested their hands on the shoulders of the seated. Burden counted twelve faces. The others were all smiling but her face was in repose. The white forehead was very high, the eyes wide and expressionless. Her lips were folded, the corners tilted very slightly upwards, and she was looking at the camera very much as the Gioconda had looked at Leonardo . . .
Burden picked out Helen Missal, her hair in outmoded sausage curls; Clare Clarke with plaits. All except Fabia Quadrant were staring at the camera. She stood behind the girl she had loved, looking down at a palm turned uppermost, at a hand dropping, pulled away from her own. She too was smiling but her brows had drawn together and the hand that had held and caressed hung barren against her friend’s sleeve. Burden gazed, aware that chance had furnished them with a record of the first cloud on the face of love.
‘Just one more thing,’ he said. ‘When you saw Mrs Quadrant yesterday you said she was reading. I wondered if . . . I wondered what the book was.’
Wexford grinned, breaking the mood. ‘Science fiction,’ he said. ‘People are inconsistent.’
Then they pulled their chairs closer to the desk, spread the letters before them and began to read.