[Wexford 01] From Doon & Death

From Doon With Death

Ruth Rendell

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This edition published by Arrow Books in 2007

Copyright © Kingsmarkham Enterprises Ltd 2007

Ruth Rendell has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

From Doon With Death
copyright © Kingsmarkham Enterprises Ltd 1978

This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual person's living or dead is entirely coincidental

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire

Since her first novel,
From Doon With Death,
published in 1964, Ruth Rendell has won many awards, including the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for 1976's best crime novel with
A Demon in My View,
and the Arts Council National Book Award - genre fiction for
The Lake of Darkness
in 1980.

In 1985 Rum Rendell received the Silver Dagger for
The Tree of Hands,
and in 1987, writing as Barbara Vine, won her third Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America for
A Dark-Adapted Eye.

She won the Gold Dagger for
Live Flesh
in 1986, for
King Solomon's Carpet
in 1991 and, as Barbara Vine, a Gold Dagger in 1987 for
A Fatal Inversion.

Ruth
Rendell won the
Sunday Times
Literary Award in 1990, and in 1991 she was awarded the Crime Writers' Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for outstanding contribution to the genre. In 1996 she was awarded the CBE, and in 1997 was made a life Peer.

Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages and are also published to great acclaim in the United States.

Ruth Rendell has a son and two grandsons, and lives in London.

The verses at the beginning of each chapter and the inscriptions in Minna's books all appear in
The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse.

FROM DOON WITH DEATH

You have broken my heart There, I have written it
.
Not for you to read, Minna, for
this
letter will never be sent, never shrink and wither under your laughter, little lips prim and pleated, laughter like dulcimer music
...

Shall I tell you of the Muse who awaited me? I wanted you to walk beside me into her vaulted halls. There were the springs of Helicon! I would furnish you with the food of the soul, the bread that is prose and the wine
that
is poetry. Ah, the wine, Minna
...
This is the rose-red blood of the troubadour!

Never shall I make that journey, Minna, for when I brought you the wine you returned to me the waters of indifference. I wrapped the bread in gold but you hid my loaves in the crock of contempt.

Truly you have broken my heart and dashed the wine-cup against the wall
...

Chapter 1

Call once yet,

In a voice that she will know, 'Margaret, Margaret!'

Matthew Arnold,

The Forsaken Merman

‘I
think you're getting things a bit out of proportion, Mr Parsons
’
Burden said. He was tired and he'd been going to take his wife to the pictures. Besides, the first things he'd noticed when Parsons brought him into the room were the books in the rack by the fireplace. The titles were enough to give the most level-headed man the jitters, quite enough to make a man anxious where no ground for anxiety existed:
Palmer the Poisoner, The Trial of Madeleine Smith, Three Drowned Brides, Famous Trials, Notable British Trials.

Don't you think your reading has been preying on your mind?'

‘I’m
interested in crim
e,' Parsons said. Ifs a hobby
of mine.'

‘I
can see that.' Burden wasn't going to sit down if he could avoid it Took, you can't say your wife's actually missing. You've been home one and a half hours and she isn't here. That's all. She's probably gone to the pictures. As a matter of fact I'm on my way there now with my wife. I expect well meet her coming out'

'Margaret wouldn't do that, Mr Burden. I know her and you don't. We've been married nearly six years and in all that time I've never come home to an empty house.'

‘I’ll
tell you what I'll do. I'll drop in on my way back. But you can bet your bottom dollar she'll be home by then.' He started moving towards the door.
‘L
ook, get on to the station if you like. It won't do any harm.'

'No, I won't do that. It was just with you living down the road and being an inspector
...'

And being off duty. Burden thought. If I was a doctor instead of a policeman I'd be able to have private patients on the side. I bet he wouldn't be so keen on my services if there was any question of a fee.

Sitting in the half-empty dark cinema he thought: Well, it is funny. Normal ordinary wives as conventional as Mrs Parsons, wives who always have a meal ready for their husbands on the dot of six, don't suddenly go off without leaving a note.

'I thought you said this was a good film,' he whispered to his wife.

'Well, the critics liked it'

'Oh, critics
’
he said.

Another man, that could be it. But Mrs Parsons? Or it could be an accident. He'd been a bit remiss not getting Parsons to phone the station straight away.

'Look, love,' he said.
‘I
can't stand this. You stay and see the end. I've got to get back to Parsons.'

‘I
wish I'd married
that
reporter who was so keen on me.'

'You must be joking,' Burden said. 'He'd have stayed out all night putting the paper to bed. Or the editor's secretary.'

He charged up Tabard Road, then made himself stroll when he got to the Victorian house where Parsons lived. It was all in darkness, the curtains in the big bay downstairs undrawn. The step was whitened, the brass kerb above it polished. Mrs Parsons must have been a house-proud woman. Must have been? Why not, still was?

Parsons opened the door before he had a chance to knock. He still looked tidy, neatly dressed in an oldish suit, his tie knotted tight. But his face was greenish grey. It reminded Burden of a drowned face he had once seen on a mortuary slab. They had put the glasses back on the spongy nose to help the girl who had come to identify him.

'She hasn't come back
’
he said. His voice sounded as if he had a cold coming. But it was probably only fear.

'Let's have a cup of tea
’
Burden said. 'Have a cup of tea and talk about it'

‘I
keep thinking what could have happened to her. If s so open round here. I suppose it would be, being country.'

‘It’s
those books you read
’
Burden said. If s not healthy.' He looked again at the shiny paper covers. On the spine of one was a jumble of guns and knives against a blood-red background. 'Not for a layman,' he said. 'Can I use your phone?'

‘It’s
in the front room.'

‘I’ll
get on to the station. There might be something from the hospitals.'

The front room looked as if nobody ever sat in it
.
With some dismay he noted its polished shabbiness. So far he hadn't seen a stick of furniture that looked less than fifty years old. Burden went into all kinds of houses and he knew antique furniture when he saw it But this wasn't antique and nobody could have chosen it because it was beautiful or rare. It was just old. Old enough to be cheap. Burden thought, and at the same time young enough not to be expensive. The kettle whistled and he heard Parsons fumbling with china in the kitchen. A cup crashed on
th
e floor. It sounded as if they had kept the old concrete floor. It was enough to give anyone the creeps, he thought again, sitting in these high-ceilinged rooms, hearing unexplained inexplicable creaks from the stairs and the cupboard, reading about poison and hangings and blood.

‘I’ve
reported your wife as missing
’
he said to Parsons. There's nothing from the hospitals
’

Parsons turned on the light in the back room and Burden followed him in. It must have a weak bulb under the parchment lampshade that hung from the centre of the ceiling. About sixty watts, he thought. The shade forced all the light down, leaving the ceiling, with its plaster decorations of bulbous fruit, dark and in the corners blotched with deeper shadow. Parsons put the cups down on the sideboard, a vast mahogany thing more like a fantastic wooden house than a piece of furniture, with its tiers and galleries and jutting beaded shelves. Burden sat down in a chair with wooden arms and seat of brown corduroy. The lino struck cold through the thick soles of his shoes.

Have you any idea at all where your wife could have gone?'

‘I’ve
been trying to think. I've been racking my brains. I can't think of anywhere
’

'What about her friends? Her mother?'

'Her mother's dead. We haven't got any friends here. We only came here six months ago.'

Burden stirred his tea. Outside it had been close, humid. Here in this thick-walled dark place, he supposed, it must always feel like winter.

'Look,' he said, 'I don't like too say this, but somebody's bound to ask you. It might as well be me. Could she have gone out with some man? I'm sorry, but I had to ask.'

'Of course you had to ask. I know,
it’s
all in here
’
He tapped the bookcase,
j
ust
routine enquiries, isn't it? But you're wrong. Not Margaret. Ifs laughable.' He paused, not laughing. 'Margaret's a good woman. She's a lay preacher at the Wesleyan place down the road.'

No point in pursuing it. Burden thought. Others would ask him, probe into his private life whether he liked it or not, if she still hadn't got home when the last train came in and the last bus had rolled into Kingsmarkham garage.

‘I
suppose you've looked all over the house?' he asked. He had driven down this road twice a day for a year but he couldn't remember whether the house he was sitting in had two floors or three. His policeman's brain tried to reassemble the retinal photograph on his policeman's eye. A bay window at the bottom, two flat sash windows above it and -yes, two smaller ones above that under the slated eyelids of the roof. An ugly house, he thought, ugly and forbidding.

‘I
looked in the bedrooms
’
Parsons said. He stopped pacing and hope coloured his cheeks. Fear whitened them again as he said: 'You think she might be up in the attics? Fainted or something?'

She would hardly still be there if she'd only fainted. Burden thought A brain haemorrhage, yes, or some sort of accident. 'Obviously we ought to look,' he said.
‘I
took it for granted you'd looked.'

‘I
called out. We hardly ever go up there. The rooms aren't used.'

'Come on,' Burden said.

The light in the hall was even dimmer than the one in the dining-room. The little bulb shed a pallid glow on to a woven pinkish runner, on lino patterned to look like parquet in dark and lighter brown. Parsons went first and Burden followed him up the steep stairs. The house was biggish, but the materials which had been used to build it were poor and the workmanship unskilled. Four doors opened off the first landing and these were panelled but without beading and they looked flimsy. The flat rectangles of plywood in their frames reminded Burden of blind blocked-up windows on the sides of old houses.

‘I’ve
looked in the bedrooms
’
Parsons said. 'Good heavens, she may be lying helpless up there!'

He pointed up the narrow uncarpeted flight and Burden noticed how he had said 'Good heavens!' and not 'God!' or 'My God!' as some men might have done.

‘I’ve
just remembered, there aren't any bulbs in the attic lights.' Parsons went into the front bedroom and unscrewed the bulb from the central lamp fitting. 'Mind how you go,' he said.

It was pitchy dark on the staircase. Burden flung open the door that faced him. By now he was certain they were going to find her sprawled on the floor and he wanted to get the discovery over as soon as possible. All the way up the stairs he'd been anticipating the look on Wexford's face when he told him she'd been there all along.

A dank coldness breathed out of the attic, a chill mingled with the smell of camphor. The room was partly furnished. Burden could just make out the shape of a bed. Parsons stumbled over to it and stood on the cotton counterpane to fit the bulb into the lamp socket. like the ones downstairs it gave only an unsatisfactory light, which, streaming faintly through a shade punctured all over with tiny holes, patterned the ceiling and the distempered walls with yellowish dots. The window was uncurtained. A bright cold moon swam into the black square and disappeared again under the scalloped edge of a cloud.

'She's not in here
’
Parsons said. His shoes had made dusty footprints on the white stuff that covered the bedstead like a shroud.

Burden lifted a corner of it and looked under the bed, the only piece of furniture in the room.

Try the other room
’
he said.

Once more Parsons went through the tedious, maddeningly slow motions of removing the light bulb. Now only the chill radiance from the window lit their way into the second attic. This was smaller and more crowded. Burden opened a cupboard and raised the lids from two trunks. He could see Parsons staring at him, thinking perhaps about what he called his hobby and about the things trunks could contain. But these were full of books, old books of the kind you sometimes see in stands outside second-hand shops.

The cupboard was empty and inside it the paper was peeling from the wall, but there were no spiders. Mrs Parsons was a house-proud woman.

If s half past ten
’
Burden said, squinting at his watch. The last train doesn't get in till one. She could be on that'

Parsons said obstinately, 'She wouldn't go anywhere by train.'

They went downstairs again, pausing to restore the light bulb to the front bedroom There was something sinister and creepy about the stair-well that could have been so easily dispelled, Burden thought, by white paint and stronger lights. As they descended he reflected momentarily on this woman and the life she lived here, going fussily about her chores, trying to bring a little smartness to the mud-coloured woodwork, the ugly ridged linoleum.

‘I
don't know what to do
’
Parsons said.

Burden didn't want to go back into the little dining-room with the big furniture, the cold tea-dregs in their two cups. By now Jean would be back from the cinema.

'You could try phoning round her friends at the church
’
he said, edging towards the front door. If Parsons only knew how many reports they got in of missing women and how few, how tiny a percentage, turned up dead in fields or chopped in trunks
...