Wexford 14 - The Veiled One

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘I’d like you to tell me about your experience in the Barringdean Centre car park this evening, Mrs Sanders,’ Wexford began. He forced himself to shift his eyes from the newspaper on which his daughter’s face looked out at him from between the pair of black lace-up brogues. ‘Tell me what happened from the time you came into the car park.’

  Her voice was slow and flat like her son’s, but there was something metallic about it too, almost as if throat and palate were composed of some inorganic hard material. ‘There isn’t anything to tell. I came up with my shopping to get my car. I saw something lying on the ground and went over to look and it was . . . I expect you know what it was.’

  ‘Did you touch it?’

  ‘I pulled back the bit of rag that was over it, yes.’

  Clifford Sanders was watching his mother, his eyes still and blank. He seemed not so much relaxed as sagging from despair, his hands hanging down between his parted legs.

  ‘What time was this, Mrs Sanders?’ Wexford had noted the digital watch she wore.

  ‘Exactly twelve minutes past six.’ To account for her leaving the shopping precinct so late, she gave an account of a contretemps with a fishmonger, speaking in the measured level way - too measured. Wexford, who had been wondering what her tone reminded him of, now recalled electronic voices issuing from machines. ‘I came up there at twelve minutes past six - and if you want to know how I can be sure of the time, the answer is I’m always sure of the time.’

  He nodded. Digital watches were designed for people like her who, prior to their arrival on the scene, had to make approximate guesses as to what time was doing between ten- past six and six-fifteen. Yet most of them were speedy people, always in a hurry, restless, unrelaxed. This woman seemed one of those rare creatures who are constantly aware of time without being tempted to race against it.

  She spoke softly to her son. ‘Did you lock the garage doors?’

  He nodded. ‘I always do.’

  ‘Nobody always does anything. Anybody can forget.’

  ‘I didn’t forget.’ He got up. ‘I’m going into the other room to watch TV.’

  She was a pointer, Wexford saw, a finger-post. Now the finger pointed into the hearth. ‘Don’t forget your shoes.’

  Clifford Sanders padded away with his shoes in his hand and Wexford said to Dorothy Sanders, ‘What were you doing between twelve minutes past six and six forty-five when you managed to attract the attention of Mr Greaves in Queen Street?’ He had registered very precisely the time of the phone call Greaves made to Kingsmarkham police station: fourteen minutes to seven, ‘That’s half an hour between the time you found the body and the time you got down to the gate and . . . called out.’

  She wasn’t disconcerted. ‘It was a shock. I had my shock to get over and then when I got down there I couldn’t make anyone hear.’

  He recalled Archbold’s account, albeit at third hand. She had been screaming and raving inside those gates, shaking them ‘fit to break them down’ because the phone box was on the other side. Now the woman looked at him coldly and calmly. One would have said no emotion ever disturbed her equilibrium or altered the tone of the mechanical voice.

  ‘How many cars did you see parked at that time on the second level?’

  Without hesitation she said, ‘Three, including mine.’

  She wasn’t lying; perhaps she hadn’t been lying at all. He recalled how when he had passed through the second level there had been four cars parked there. One had pulled out, the one driven by the impatient young girl, and followed him fretfully. That had been at eight or nine minutes past six. . .

  ‘Did you see anyone? Anyone at all?’

  ‘Not a soul.’

  She would be a widow, Wexford thought, nearly pensionable, without any sort of job, dependent in many ways and certainly financially dependent on this son who no doubt lived not far away. Later on, he reflected that he couldn’t have been more wrong.

  A wave of disinfectant smell hit him and she must have seen him sniffing.

  ‘Coming in contact with that corpse,’ she said, looking at him with steady, unblinking eyes, ‘I had to scrub my hands with antiseptic.’

  It was years since he had heard anyone use the word corpse. As he got up to go, she crossed the window and began to draw the curtains. The place smelt like an operating theatre. The better to observe Clifford’s arrival with the car, Wexford supposed, the curtains - of brown rep, not velvet - had been left drawn back. He watched her pull them together, giving each an impatient tug. Attached to the top of the door into the room was one of those extendable brass rails made to accomodate a draught-excluding curtain. No curtain, however, hung from it.

  Wexford decided the time was not ripe to ask the question that came to his lips.

  It had fallen many times to Michael Burden’s lot to be the bearer of bad tidings of a particular kind, to break the news of a spouse’s death. He, whose own first wife had died prematurely, flinched from this task. And it was one thing having to tell someone, for instance, that his wife had died in a road accident; quite another that her murdered body had been found. No one knew better than Burden that the majority of those who are murdered have been done to death by a near relative. The chances are that a murdered wife has been murdered by her husband.

  It was only a few moments before Wexford’s arrival that he had looked inside the dead woman’s handbag. After the first photographs had been taken and the dirty brown velvet curtain lifted from the body, her handbag had been revealed lying under her, half concealed by her thigh. More photographs were taken, Sumner-Quist came and at last he was able to free the bag from where it lay and, holding it in gloved hands, undo the clasp and look inside. It was a standard cache of documents: driving licence, credit cards, dry- cleaning bill, two letters still in their envelopes. Her name and address presented themselves to him before he had even noted the other contents of the bag - chequebook, purse, pressed powder, packet of tissues, ballpoint pen and two safety-pins. Gwen P. Robson, 23 Hastings Road, Highlands, Kingsmarkham KM1O 2NW. One of the envelopes was addressed to her as Mrs G. P. Robson, the other to Mr and Mrs R. Robson.

  It might not be a shock to Robson; part of Burden’s job was to observe whether it was a shock or not. He silently framed the words he would use as the car climbed the long hill that led up to the Highlands estate. All this had been countryside when Burden first came to Kingsmarkham, heathy hillsides crowned with woods, and from the top of this incline by day you had been able to see the ancient landmark called Barringdean Ring. It was very dark tonight, the horizon defined only by an occasional point of light, and the circle of oaks was invisible. Nearer at hand Highlands was cosily lit. This was the way Gwen Robson had no doubt intended to come home, driving the silver Escort, entering Eastbourne Avenue and soon turning left into Hastings Road.

  Burden had been there only once before, though the estate had been put up by the local authority some seven years ago. Street trees and garden trees had grown up and matured: the first newness of the houses had worn off and they looked less as if built from playbox bricks by a giant’s child. Smallish blocks of flats no more than three storeys high, alternated with terraced or semi-detached houses, and opposite the block in which No. 23 was located stood a row of tiny bungalows designed as housing for the elderly. Not too far a cry from the old almshouses, thought Burden, whose wife had made him a lot more socially conscious than he used to be. On the doorstep of the Robson’s house stood a rack made for holding milkbottles; it was of red plastic-covered wire, surmounted by a plastic doll in a white coat with ‘Thank you, Mr Milkman’ in red letters under it and a clip to hold a note in its outstretched hand. This absurd object made Burden feel worse, indicative as it was of domestic cheerfulness. He looked at DC Davidson and Davidson looked at him and then he rang the bell.

  The door was answered very quickly. Anxious people fly to doors, to phones. Their anxiety, of course, may not be brought about by the obvious cause.

  ‘Mr Robson?’
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  ‘Yes. Who are you?’

  ‘Police officers, Mr Robson.’ Burden showed his warrant card. How to soften this? How to ease it? He could hardly say there was nothing to be alarmed about. ‘I am afraid we have very serious news. May we come in?’

  He was a smallish, owl-face man, rather overweight; Burden noticed that he used a stick even to bring him this short distance. ‘Not my wife?’ he said.

  Burden nodded. He nodded firmly, his eyes on Robson. ‘Let’s go in.’

  But Robson, though they were in the hall now, stood his ground. He leant on his stick. ‘The car? A car accident?’

  ‘No, Mr Robson, it wasn’t a car accident.’ The bad part was that this could all be fake, all acting. He might have been rehearsing it for the past hour. ‘If we could go into your . . .’

  ‘Is she - is she gone?’

  The old euphemism. Burden repeated it. ‘Yes, she’s gone.’ and he added. ‘She’s dead, Mr Robson.’

  Burden turned and walked through the open doorway into the well-lit, warm, over-furnished living room. A fire of gas flames licking beautifully simulated smokeless fuel looked more real than the real thing. The television was on, but more indicative of Robson’s recent tension was the clock patience game laid out on a small appropriately round marquetry table in front of the armchair with its indented seat and crumpled pink silk cushions. Only a murderer who was also a genius would have dreamt up that one, Burden thought.

  Robson had turned very pale. His thin-lipped mouth trembled. Still upright but leaning heavily on the stick, he was shaking his head in a vague, uncomprehending way. ‘Dead? Gwen?’

  ‘Sit down, Mr Robson. Take it easy.’

  ‘Would you like a drink, sir?’ DC Davidson asked.

  ‘We don’t drink in this house.’

  ‘I meant water.’ Davidson went off and came back with water in a glass.

  ‘Tell me what happened.’ Robson was seated now, no longer looking at Burden, his eyes in the circle of playing cards. Absently he took a minute sip of the water.

  ‘You must prepare yourself for a shock, Mr Robson.’

  ‘I’ve had a shock.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ Burden shifted his gaze and found himself looking at the framed photograph on the mantel-shelf of a very good-looking girl who rather resembled Sheila Wexford. A daughter? ‘Your wife was killed, Mr Robson. There is no way I can make this easier to hear. She was murdered and her body was found in the Barringdean Shopping Centre car park.’

  Burden wouldn’t have been surprised if he had screamed, if he had howled like a dog. They came upon all sorts in their job. But Robson didn’t scream; he merely stared with frozen face. A long time passed, a relatively long time, perhaps nearly a minute. He stared and passed his tongue over the thin lips, then he began mumbling very rapidly.

  ‘We were married very young; we’d been married forty years. No children, we never had chick nor child, but that brings you closer; you’re closer to each other without them. She was the most devoted wife a man ever had; she’d have done anything for me, she’d have laid down her life for me.’ Great tears welled out of his eyes and flowed down his face. He sobbed and wept without covering his face, sitting upright and holding the stick with both hands, crying as most men only cried when they were very young children.

  Chapter 3

  ‘It looks as if she was garroted.’

  Sumner-Quist’s voice sounded pleasurably excited as if he had rung up to impart a piece of gossip: that the Chief Constable had run off with someone else’s wife, for instance.

  ‘Did you hear me? I said she was garroted.’

  ‘Yes, I heard,’ Wexford said. ‘Good of you to tell me.’

  ‘I thought you might go for a tasty little tidbit like that before I let you have the full report.’

  Extraordinary ideas some people have about one’s tastes, Wexford thought. He tried to assemble in his mind what he knew about garroting. ‘What was it done with?’

  ‘A garrote,’ Sumner-Quist chuckled cheerfully. ‘Search me what kind. Home-made, no doubt. That’s your problem.’ Still laughing, he told Wexford that Mrs Robson had met her death after five-thirty and before six and had not been sexually assaulted. ‘Merely garroted,’ he said.

  ‘It used to be a method of execution,’ Wexford said when Burden came into the office. ‘An iron collar was attached to a post and the victim’s neck placed inside. The mind boggles a bit when you start thinking how they got the victim’s neck inside. Then the collar was tightened until asphyxiation occurred. Did you know this method of capital punishment was still in use in Spain as late as the 1960s?’

  ‘And we thought it was only bull-fighting they went in for.’

  ‘There was also a more primitive implement consisting of a length of wire with wooden handles.’

  Burden sat on the edge of Wexford’s rosewood desk. ‘Haven’t I read somewhere that if you were up for burning by the Inquisition the executioner would garrote you for a small fee before the flames got under way?’

  ‘I expect that was where the wire-with-wooden-handles type came into its own.’

  He wondered digressively if Burden’s jeans were the kind called ‘designer’. They were rather narrow at the ankle and matched the inspector’s socks that were probably of a ‘denim blue’ shade. Unconscious of this rather puzzled scrutiny, Burden said, ‘Is Sumner-Quist saying that’s what was used on Gwen Robson?’

  ‘He doesn’t know, he just says “a garrote”. But it had to have been something of that kind. And the murderer has to have had it with him or her, ready-made; all prepared - which when you come to think of it, Mike, is pretty strange. It argues unquestionably premeditated murder, yet in a situation where no one could have forecast the prevailing conditions. The car park might have been full of people, for instance. Unless our perpetrator carries a garrote about with him as you or I might carry a pen . . . I don’t think we can say much more about that until we get the full forensic report. In the meantime, what’s the sum total of our knowledge of Gwen Robson?’

  She was fifty-eight years old, childless, a former home help in the employment of Kingsmarkham Borough Council but now retired. Her husband was Ralph Robson, also a former Borough Council employee, retired two years before from the Housing Department. Mrs Robson had been married at eighteen and she and her husband had lived first with his parents at their home in Stowerton, later on in a rented flat and then a rented cottage. Their names high on the borough housing list, they had been allocated one of the new houses at Highlands as soon as they were built. Neither was yet eligible for the state retirement pension, but Robson derived a pension from the local authority on which they had contrived to live in reasonable comfort. For instance, they had managed to run the two-year-old Escort. As a general rule they took an annual holiday in Spain and had been prevented from doing so this year only by Ralph Robson’s arthritis, which was seriously affecting his right hip.

  All this had been learned both from Ralph Robson himself and from his niece Lesley Arbel, the original of the photo graph that had so much reminded Burden of Sheila Wexford.

  ‘This niece - she doesn’t live with them, does she?’

  ‘She lives in London, Burden said, ‘but she spent a lot of time down here with them. More like a daughter than a niece, I gather, and an unusually devoted daughter at that. Or that’s how it appears. She’s staying with Robson now - came as soon as he told her what had happened to his wife.’

  According to Robson, his wife had been in the habit of doing their weekly shopping every Thursday afternoon. Up until six months ago he had always gone with her, but his arthritis had made this impossible. On the previous Thurs day, two days before, she had gone out in their car just before four-thirty. He had never seen her again. And where had he been himself between four-thirty and seven? At home alone in Hastings Road, watching television, making himself tea. Much the same as Archie Greaves, Wexford thought, whom he had been to see earlier that morning.

  A policeman�
�s dream of a witness, the old man was. The narrowness of his life, the confined span of his interests made him into a camera and tape device for the perfect recording of incidents in his little world. Unfortunately, there had not been much for him to observe: the shoppers leaving, the lights dwindling and going out, Sedgeman closing and locking the gates.

  ‘There was this young chap running,’ he said to Wexford. ‘It was just on six, a minute or two after. There were a lot of people leaving, mostly ladies with their shopping, and he came running from round the back of that wall.’

  Wexford followed his gaze out of the window. The wall in question was the side of the underground car-park entrance beside which stood a small crowd of ghoulish onlookers. There was nothing to see, but they waited in hope. The gates stood open, an empty food package rolled about the tarmac propelled by gusts of wind. The pennants on the turrets streamed in the wind, taut and fluttering. I was there, Wexford thought, almost with a groan, I came out of there at ten-past six and saw - nothing. Well, nothing but the Sanders woman.

  ‘I reckoned he was in trouble,’ Archie Greaves said. I reckoned he’d done something he shouldn’t and been spotted and they was after him.’ The man was so old that his face as well as the skin of his hands was discoloured with the liver spots that are called ‘grave marks’. He was thin with age, his knitted cardigan and flannel trousers baggy on a bony, tremulous body. But the pale blue eyes, pink-rimmed, could see like those of someone half his age. ‘He was just a boy with one of them woolly hats on his head and a zip-up jacket and he was running like a bat out of hell.’