[Wexford 01] From Doon & Death Read Free

in character. It’ s in her wardrobe. I think she must have been wearing a cotton frock, her new one ’ He stopped and cleared his throat 'She'd just made it ’ he said.
    ‘I’ll get some things on ’ Burden said. ' ‘I’ll pick you up in half an hour and we'll go to the station together ’
    Parsons had shaved and dressed. His small eyes were wide with terror. The tea-cups they had used the night before had just been washed and were draining on a home-made rack of wooden dowel rods. Burden marvelled at the ingrained habit of respectability that made this man, at a crisis in his life, spruce himself and put his house in order.
    He tried to stop himself staring round the little hole of a kitchen, at the stone copper in the corner, the old gas stove on legs, the table with green American cloth tacked to its top. There was no washing machine, no refrigerator. Because of the peeling paint, the creeping red rust, it looked dirty. It was only by peering closely when Parsons' eyes were not on him that Burden could see it was in fact fanatically, pathetically, clean.
    'Are you fit?' he asked. Parsons locked the back door with a huge key. His hand shook against crazed mottled tiles. 'You've got the photograph all right?'
    'In my pocket ’
    Passing the dining-room he noticed the books again. The titles leapt at him from red and yellow and black covers. Now that the morning had come and she was still missing Burden wondered fantastically if Tabard Road was to join Hilldrop Crescent and Rillington Place in the chronicle of sinister streets.
    Would there one day be an account of the disappearance of Margaret Parsons under another such book-jacket with the face of his companion staring from the frontispiece? The face of a murderer is the face of an ordinary man. How much less terrifying if the killer wore the Mark of Cain for all the world to see! But Parsons? He could have killed her, he had been well instructed. His textbooks bore witness to that Burden thought of the gulf between theory and practice. He shook off fantasy and followed Parsons to the front door.
    Kingsmarkham was awake, beginning to bustle. The shops were still closed, but the buses had been running for two hours. Occasionally the sun shone in shafts of watery brilliance, then vanished again under clouds that were white and thick or bluish with rain. The bus queue stretched almost to the bridge; down towards the station men hurried, singly or in pairs, bowler-hatted, armed with cautious umbrellas, through long custom unintimidated by the hour-long commuting to London.
    Burden pulled up at the junction and waited for an orange-painted tractor to pass along the major road.
    It all goes on,' Parsons said, 'as if nothing had happened.'
    ‘J ust as well.' Burden turned left. Helps you keep a sense of proportion.'
    The police station stood appropriately at the approach to the town, a guarding bastion or a warning. It was new, white and square like a soap carton, and, rather pointlessly. Burden thought, banded and decorated here and there in a soap carton's colours. Against the tall ancient arcs of elms, only a few yards from the last Regency house, it flaunted its whiteness, its gloss, like a piece of gaudy litter in a pastoral glade.
    Its completion and his transfer to Kingsmarkham had coincided, but sometimes the sight of it still shocked him. He wat ched for Parsons' reaction as they crossed the threshold. Would he show fear or just the ordinary citizen's caution? In fact, he seemed simply awed.
    Not for the first time the place irritated Burden. People expected pitch pine and lino, green baize and echoing passages. These were at the same time more quelling to the felon, more comforting to the innocent Here the marble and the tiles, irregularly mottled with a design like stirred oil, the peg-board for the notices, the great black counter that swept in a parabola across half the foyer, suggested that order and a harmony of pattern must reign above all things. It was