[Wexford 01] From Doon & Death Read Online Free Page A

heated solely by two open fires and the water by an immersion heater. Wexford set Gates to examining these fireplaces and to searching the dustbin, last emptied by Kingsmarkham Borough Council on Monday, but there was no trace of ash. A sheet of newspaper had been folded to cover the grate in the dining-room, and this, lightly sprinkled with soot, bore the date April 15th.
    Parsons said he had given his wife five pounds housekeeping money on the previous Friday. As far as he knew she had no savings accumulated from previous weeks. Gates, searching the kitchen dresser, found two pound notes rolled up in a cocoa tin on one of the shelves. If Mrs Parsons had received only five pounds on Friday and out of this had bought food for her husband and herself for four or five days, leaving two pounds for the rest of the week, it was apparent that the missing purse could have contained at best a few shillings.
    Wexford had hoped to find a diary, an address book or a letter which might give him some help. A brass letter-rack attached to the dining-room wall beside the fireplace contained only a coal bill, a circular from a firm fitting central-heating plant (had
    Mrs Parsons, after all, had her dreams?), two soap coupons and an estimate from a contractor for rendering and making good a damp patch on the kitchen wall.
    'Your wife didn't have any family at all, Mr Parsons?' Wexford asked.
    'Only me. We kept ourselves to ourselves. Margaret didn't ... doesn't make friends easily. I was brought up in a children's home and when she lost her mother Margaret went to live with an aunt . But her aunt died when we were engaged.'
    'Where was that, Mr Parsons? Where you met, I mean.'
    'In London, Balham. Margaret was teaching in an infants' school and I had digs in her aunf s house.'
    Wexford sighed. Balham! The net was widening. Still, you didn't travel forty miles without a coat or a handbag. He decided to abandon Balham for the time being.
    ‘I suppose no one telephoned your wife on Monday night? Did she have any letters yesterday morning?'
    'Nobody phoned, nobody came and there weren't any letters.' Parsons seemed proud of his empty life, as if it was evidence of respectability.. 'We sat and talked. Margaret was knitting. I think I did a crossword puzzle part of the time.' He opened the cupboard where the slippers were and from the top shelf took a piece of blue knitting on four needles. ‘I wonder if it will ever be finished,' he said. His fingers tightened on the ball of wool and he pressed the needles into the palm of his hand.
    'Never fear,' Wexford said, hearty with false hope, 'well find her.'
    If you've finished in th e bedrooms I think I'll go and li e down again. The doctor's given me something to make me sleep.'
    Wexford sent for all his available men and set them to search the empty houses in Kingsmarkham and its environs, the fields that lay still unspoilt between the High Street and the Kingsbrook Road and, as afternoon came, the Kingsbrook itself. They postponed dragging operations until the shops had closed and the people dispersed, but even so a crowd gathered on the bridge and stood peering over the parapet at the wading men. Wexford, who hated this particular kind of ghoulishness, this lust for dreadful sights thinly disguised under a mask of shocked sympathy, glowered at them and tried to persuade them to leave the bridge, but they drifted back in twos and threes. At last when dusk came, and the men had waded far to the north and the south of the town, he called off the search.
    Meanwhile Ronald Parsons, dosed with sodium amytal, had fallen asleep on his lumpy mattress. For the first time in six months dust had begun to settle on the dressing-table, the iron mantelpiece and the linoed floor.
    Chapter 3
    Ere her limbs frigidly Stiffen too rigidly, Decently, kindly, Smooth and compose them, And her eyes, close them, Staring so blindly!
    Thomas Hood,
    The Bridge of Sighs
    On Thursday morning a baker's roundsman, new to his job,