Wexford checked with the vet and decided that, apart from mystery story miracles, no one had had time o murder Mrs Parsons and conceal her body in the wood. Only Bysouth had used the lane that passed the wood, and unless he had abandoned his charges dangerously near a derestricted road he was beyond suspicion. To be sure, Mrs Creavey had been alone and out of sight from three-thirty until six-thirty, but she was at least sixty, fat and notoriously arthritic.
Wexford tried to fix the time Bysouth had passed down and then up the lane, but the cowman didn’t wear ‘a watch and his life seemed to be governed by the sun. He protested vehemently that his mind had been on the sow’s travail and that he had seen no one on the track, in the wood or walking in the fields.
Dorothy Sweeting was the only one of them who might remotely be supposed to have owned the Arctic Sable lip stick. But there is a particularly naked raw look about the face of a woman in an unpainted state when that woman habitually uses make-up. Dorothy Sweeting’s face was sunburnt and shiny; it looked as if it had never been protected from the weather by cream and powder. The men were almost derisive when Wexford asked them if they had ever seen lipstick on her mouth.
‘You didn’t go to the farm all day, Miss
Dorothy Sweeting laughed a lot. Now she laughed heartily. It seemed that to her the questioning was just like part of a serial or a detective story come to life.
‘Not to it,’ she said, ‘but I went near it. Guilty, my lord!’ Wexford didn’t smile, so she went on: ‘I went to see my auntie in Sewingbury after the lecture and it was such a lovely afternoon I got off the bus a mile this side of Pomfret and walked the rest of the way. Old Bysouth was bringing the cows in and I did just stop and have a chat with him.’
‘What time would that have been?’
‘Fiveish. It was the four-ten bus from Sewingbury.’
‘All right, Miss Sweeting. Your prints will be destroyed after the check has been made.’
She roared with laughter. Looking at her big broad hands, her forearms like the village blacksmith’s, Burden wondered what she intended to do with her life after she had qualified for whatever branch of bucolic craft she was studying.
‘Hang on to them by all means,’ she said. ‘I’d like to take my place in the rogues’ gallery.’
They drove back to Kingsmarkham along the quiet half-empty road. There was still an hour to go before the evening rush began. The sun had dimmed and the mackerel sky thickened until it looked like curds and whey. On the hedges that bordered the road the May blossom still lingered, touched now with brown as if it had been singed by fleeting fire.
Wexford led the way into the police station and they had Miss Sweeting’s prints checked with the ones on the lip stick. As Wexford had expected, they didn’t match. The student’s big pitted fingertips were more like a man’s than a woman’s.
‘I want to find the owner of that lipstick, Mike,’ he said again. ‘I want every chemist’s shop in this place gone over with a small toothcomb. And you’d better do it yourself because it’s not going to be easy.’
‘Does it have to have any connection with Mrs Parsons, sir? Couldn’t it have been dropped by someone going up the track?’
‘Look, Mike, that lipstick wasn’t by the road. It was right on the edge of the wood. Apart from the fact that they don’t use the lane, Sweeting and Mrs Creavey don’t wear lipstick and even if they did they wouldn’t be likely to have one in a peculiar shade of pinkish brown like this. You know as well as I do, when a woman only uses lipstick on high days and holidays, for some reason or other, a sense of daring probably, she always picks a bright red. This is a filthy colour, the sort of thing a rich woman might buy if she’d already got a dozen lipsticks and wanted the latest shade for a gimmick.’
Burden knew Kingsmarkham well, but he got the local trade directory to check and found that there were seven chemists in Kingsmarkham High Street, three in side roads and one in a village which had now been absorbed as a suburb into Kingsmarkham itself. Bearing in mind what Wexford had said about a rich woman, he started on the High Street.
The supermarket had a cosmetics counter, but they kept only a limited stock of the more expensive brands. The assistant knew Mrs Parsons by name, having read that she was missing in a newspaper. She also knew her by sight and was agog. Burden didn’t tell her the body had been found and he didn’t waste any more time on questions when he learnt that, as far as the girl could remember, Mrs Parsons had bought only a tin of cheap talcum powder in the past month.
‘That’s a new line, said the assistant in the next shop. ‘It’s only just come out. It comes in a range of fur shades, sort of soft and subtle, but we don’t stock it. We wouldn’t have the sale for it, you see.’
He walked up towards the Kingsbrook bridge past the Georgian house that was now the Youth Employment Bureau, past the Queen Anne house that was now a solicitor’s office, and entered a newly opened shop in a block with maisonettes above it. It was bright and clean, with a dazzling stock of pots and jars and bottles of scent. They kept a large stock of the brand, he was told, but were still awaiting delivery of the fur range.
The waters of the brook had settled and cleared. Burden could see the flat round stones on the bottom. He leaned over the parapet and saw a fish jump. Then he went on, weaving his way between groups of schoolchildren, High School girls in panamas and scarlet blazers, avoiding prams and baskets on wheels. He had called at four shops before he found one that stocked the fur range. But they had only sold one and that in a colour called Mutation Mink, and they didn’t put prices on their goods. The girl in the fifth shop, a queenly creature with hair like pineapple candy-floss, said that she was wearing Arctic Sable herself. She lived in a flat above the shop and she went upstairs to fetch the lipstick. It was identical to the one found in the wood except that it had no price written on its base.
‘It’s a difficult shade to wear,’ the girl said. ‘We’ve so1d a couple in the other colours but that sort of brownish tint puts the customers off.’
Now there were no more shops on this side of the High Street, only a couple of big houses, the Methodist Church - Mrs Parsons’ church - standing back from the road behind a sweep of gravel, a row of cottages, before the fields began. He crossed the street at The Olive and Dove and went into a chemist’s shop between a florist’s and an estate agent’s. Burden had sometimes bought shaving cream in this shop and he knew the man who came out from the dispensary at the back. But he shook his head at once. They didn’t stock any cosmetics of that make.
There were only two left: a little poky place with jars of hair cream and toothbrushes in the window, and an elegant emporium, double-fronted, with steps up to the door and a bow window. The vendor of hair cream had never even heard of Arctic Sable. He climbed up a short ladder and took from a shelf a cardboard box of green plastic cylinders.
‘Haven’t sold a lipstick inside a fortnight,’ he said.
Burden opened the door of the double-fronted shop and stepped on to wine-coloured carpet. All the perfumes of Arabia seemed to be assembled on the counters and the gilded tables. Musk and ambergris and new-mown hay assaulted his nostrils. Behind a pyramid of boxes, encrusted with glitter and bound with ribbon, he could see the back of a girl’s head, a girl with short blonde curls wearing a primrose sweater. He coughed, the girl turned and he saw that it was a young man.
‘Isn’t it a delightful shade?’ the young man said. ‘So young and fresh and innocent. Oh, yes, definitely one of ours. I mark everything with this.’ And he picked up a purple ball-point pen from beside the cash register.