Wexford 14 - The Veiled One

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘I left here at six and walked to the station to get the six-seventeen train that arrives at Victoria at ten-past seven. My talk was on projection-making factors and I gave it before an audience of MAPT - that is, the Metropolitan Association of Psychotherapists - at the Association’s premises in Pimlico. I went there by taxi.’

  The man seemed to have perfect assurance. Burden looked closely at him and said, ‘Can you think of any reason, Mr Olson, why Clifford Sanders should have told us that his appointment with you was from five until six and that he left here at six?’

  He’s going to tell me he was threatened, Burden thought. He’s going to talk about threats and defensiveness and projection. Instead, Olson got up and, moving to a very untidy desk which had perhaps once been a kitchen table, slowly turned the pages of an appointment book. He seemed to be examining some particular entry with care. Then he glanced at his watch and some inner reflection made him smile. He closed the book and still standing up, turned to face Burden.

  ‘You may not know this, Michael. You may never have considered what a powerful figure time is in the human psyche. It might not be too presumptuous to suggest he could be another Jungian archetype in the collective unconscious. Certainly for some he can be an aspect of the Shadow.’

  Burden stared at him with a failure of understanding as deep as disgust.

  ‘Let’s call him Time with a capital T.’ said Olson. ‘He has been depicted as a god in a chariot with wings and even been given a personification as Old Father Time - I expect you’ve come across that. Some people seem to be enslaved by time, by this old man with a skull for a face and a scythe in his hand, by this god in the winged chariot hurrying by behind them. They are his servants and they become very worried - very anguished, indeed - if they are not there, all present and correct, to bow down to him and do his bidding. But there are others, Michael, who hate time. They fear him and because this dread is so great and so omnipresent, they have no recourse but to drive him back into the unconscious. He is too frightening and so they banish him. The result of course is a total lack of knowledge of him, a world in which he is absent. His hours and half-hours for them to pass uncounted. These are the people - and we all know them - who can never get up in the morning and at night are always astonished that it should be three or four by the time they get to bed. To be on time for a date entails for them an almost superhuman effort. Their friends get to know this and invite them to come half an hour earlier than the party begins. As for a memory of time - to ask them to have any kind of accurate record is almost an act of violence.’

  Burden blinked a little. He had seized on a point though. ‘Are you telling me that these regular five o’clock appointments with Clifford Sanders were in fact made for four- thirty?’

  Olson nodded, smiling.

  ‘But I thought you said he had the five p.m. appointment?’

  ‘I said that he comes at five; that isn’t quite the same thing.’

  ‘So last Thursday when you phoned him you must have asked him to come at four?’

  ‘And he came about ten minutes late. That is, as I said, he came at about four-forty.’ A genuinely good-humoured smile now broke across Olson’s face. ‘You’re thinking I’m dishonest with my poor clients, aren’t you, Michael? I’m pandering to their neurosis in a way perhaps that robs them of their basic human dignity - is that it? But I have to live, too, you see, and I have to recognize Time as a figure in my life. I can’t afford to waste half an hour of him any more than one of his most abject slaves.’

  Neither can I, thought Burden, getting up to take his leave. To his dismay, as he showed him out Olson laid an almost affectionate arm across his shoulder.

  ‘You won’t resent a lesson, I’m sure, Mike.’

  Burden looked at him, then at the couch, and recovered some of his aplomb. He said with an edge of sarcasm, ‘I expect it makes a change for you to talk.’

  At first Olson, frowned, then his face cleared. ‘That’s for the Freudians, the silent listening therapist. I talk quite a lot; I help them along.’ He had the happy man’s simple unclouded smile.

  It looks very much as if it was intended for your daughter, the Serious Crimes Squad man from Myringham said. You say your daughter hadn’t given you any prior warning of her intention to visit you? She hadn’t given me any prior warning, Wexford said. I don’t know about my wife, I didn’t ask. You’ll have to ask my wife. We have asked her, Mr Wexford, and no your daughter’s visit was a complete surprise to her.

  What made the bomb go off?

  You were about to back the car, weren’t you? You were going to back it out of the garage drive in order to put your own car in, your wife says. We think it was activated by the reverse gear - triggered off by putting the gear into reverse. You see, your daughter says she never had the Porsche in reverse between getting into it outside her London flat and arriving at your home about an hour and a half later. And one can see, sir, that there would have been no occasion for her to use the reverse gear.

  The bomber wasn’t bothered, you can see that. It didn’t bother him whether the bomb went off five minutes after she started and outside the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, for instance, or down here on Sunday afternoon when she was backing out to go off home. It was all the same to him as long as she was in the driving-seat.

  As long as she was in the driving-seat . . . Wexford lay in bed thinking about it. They got him up at four and made him have his tea with a lot of other men seated round a table in the middle of the ward. Some bomber had tried to kill Sheila and had failed - but he wouldn’t stop, would he, because he had failed once? He would try again and again. It might be because of her anti-nuclear activities, but on the other hand it might not. Freaks and oddballs, were envious of the famous the successful, the beautiful. There were even people who equated actors with the parts they played and who were capable of seeing Sheila as Lady Audley, a bigamist and murderess. For that she must be punished, for her beauty and her success and her lack of morals; for acting a treacherous wife and for being one . . .

  How was he going to live and go about his daily work with that ever-present fear of an assassin stalking Sheila? The newspapers were full of it; he had three daily papers lying on his bed, all of them speculating with a kind of merry cynicism as to what particular terrorists might have it in for Sheila. How was he going to stand all that?

  Sylvia came after she had fetched her son Robin from his choir practice and then Burden came at evening visiting, full of the Robson medical report, his theories about Clifford Sanders as perpetrator, Gwen Robson as arch-gossip and ferreter out of secrets in the home help sorority and a curious interview he had had with a psychiatrist.

  ‘This stuff about some people being unpunctual - because that’s really what it amounts to doesn’t really effect the issue. Sumner-Quist gives the latest time at which Mrs Robson could have been killed as five to six. Clifford could easily have got there before five to six. Without hurrying he could have got there by a quarter to.’

  Wexford made an effort. ‘Intending to meet Mrs Robson there? You’re saying it was premeditated? Because to keep in with your theory he certainly couldn’t have encountered her by chance. He wouldn’t have gone to that dreary car park to sit there for half an hour and wait for his mother. Or are you saying he was so lost to time that he didn’t know whether it was a quarter to or half-past?’

  ‘Not me,’ said Burden, ‘Olson the shrink. Anyway, I don’t go along with that. I think Clifford has a perfectly normal attitude to time when he wants to have. And why shouldn’t it have been premeditated? I don’t believe Clifford thought or imagined or fancied or however you like to put it that Gwen Robson was his mother. Anyone would have to be a total banana truck to do that. And if he wanted to kill his mother, he could do that at home. No, the motive is likely to be a good deal more practical than that, as motives usually are.’ He looked defiantly at Wexford, waiting for argument, and when none came went on, ‘Suppose Gwen Robson was
blackmailing him? Suppose she found out some secret about him and was holding it over him?’

  ‘Like what?’ said Wexford, and even to Burden his voice sounded weary and uninterested.

  ‘He could be queer - I mean, gay - and afraid of Mum finding out. I mean, that’s just a possibility since you ask.’

  ‘But you haven’t established any sort of link between them, have you? There’s no evidence they knew each other. It’s the kind of situation in which a son would only know a woman of her age if she were a friend of his mother’s - and she wasn’t. It’s not as if Clifford has ever been in the market for a home help; he’s not a housebound octogenarian or some bedridden invalid. And while Mrs Robson may have been a blackmailer, have you any actual evidence that she was?’

  ‘I will have,’ Burden said confidently. ‘Inquest in the morning. I’ll give you a complete run-down on what’s happened tomorrow.’

  But Wexford seemed no longer to be following what he said - to be distracted by some action of his neighbour in the next bed, and then by the arrival of a nurse with a drugs trolley - and Burden, looking at him with slightly exasperated sympathy, thought how true it was that patients in hospital rapidly lose all interest in the outside world. The ward and its inmates, what they had for lunch and what sister said, these things are their microcosm.

  The inquest opened and was adjourned, as Burden had expected. It could hardly have been otherwise. Evidence was taken from Dr Sumner-Quist, who was again making very free with the term ‘garrote’. And a lab expert was able to treat the coroner to some very abstruse stuff about polymers and long-chain linear polyesters and a substance called polyethylene terephthalate. It was all by way of discovering what the wire of the garrote had been coated in and Burden wasn’t much wiser when the expert had finished, though he gathered it all amounted to grey plastic.

  Robson was not in court. There was no reason for him to have attended. Clifford Sanders and his mother were both there; Clifford due for a drubbing from the coroner, Burden thought, for his curious action in covering up the body and running away. But the first witness of all was Dorothy Sanders, who went into the box with deliberate self-assured deportment - having dressed herself, no doubt by chance, in clothes very like those found on the dead woman, even to the lacy brown stockings.

  The man who had evidently come with them and who now sat beside Clifford he recognized as the farmer he had seen in Ash Lane, and who had come out on to the doorstep with his dog to stare after Burden’s departing car.

  Chapter 7

  Houses without women - Burden could always recognize them. It was not that such places were particularly dirty or uncared-for, but rather that the absence of a woman’s hand showed in an asymmetry, a placing of objects in bizarre ways, clumsy makeshifts. The kitchen of Ash Farm Lodge - a large kitchen, since the bungalow had obviously been purpose-built for a farmer - was like that: the table littered with account books and pamphlets, a pair of boots standing on a magazine on top of the oven, a dishcloth spread out to dry on the back of a Windsor chair, a twelve-bore shotgun suspended from what was originally a saucepan rack.

  The man Burden had seen in court said his name was Roy Carroll. He looked about fifty, perhaps more. His hands were particularly large, red and calloused, and the skin of his face was a darkly-veined red. The dog lay curled up not in a basket but a large drawer. Burden had the feeling that before it dared wake up it would have to indicate in some canine way a request for permission to do so.

  Carroll was brusque and uncouth. He had admitted Burden to the house in a grudging fashion and his replies to questions were hardly fulsome, a ‘Yes’ and a ‘No’ and a ‘Yes’ and other grunted monosyllables. He knew ‘Dodo’ Sanders, he knew Clifford Sanders; he had lived in this house since it was built. When was that? Twenty-one years ago.

  ‘Dodo?’ Burden queried.

  ‘That’s what they called her, her husband and that. His mum. Dodo they called her, that’s what I call her.’

  ‘You’re friends?’

  ‘What does that mean? I know her, I’ve done odd jobs for her.’

  Burden asked him if he was married.

  ‘Never you mind that,’ Carroll said. ‘I’m not now.’

  Gwen Robson? He had never heard of her until her death was on television. He had never had a home help in the house. Where was he on the previous Thursday afternoon? Carroll looked incredulous at being asked. Out shooting, he said, getting a rabbit for the pot. This time of the year he was out shooting most days at dusk. Burden noticed some thing that was interesting but surely of no importance. The magazine the boots stood on was a copy of Kim, the last kind of reading matter to associate with a man of Carroll’s sort. It brought to mind the poster in Olson’s room, the one with the boots that had five toe-nailed toes but no legs in them, and unaccountably he shuddered.

  A weekday morning and Clifford very likely at work. Burden phoned Munster’s, the school which ran crash courses for A levels, and asked to speak to Mr Sanders. He wasn’t even sure Clifford worked there, but it turned out to have been an intelligent guess. Mr Sanders was teaching. Could they take a message? Wexford would have treated this more delicately, Burden knew that, but he didn’t see why he should be tender towards the feelings of someone who was probably a layabout and certainly a liar, who was very probably homosexual, who had mixed-up feelings of confusion between his mother and dead women and was a psychopath anyway. He asked the woman who answered the phone to give Clifford Sanders a message that Detective Inspector Burden had called and would like him to come to the police station and ask for him as soon as his class was finished.

  In the meantime, he made an application for a warrant to search the Sanders’ house in the expectation of finding something in the nature of a garrote somewhere. Of course he could simply have asked Mrs Sanders’ permission to search, most people don’t refuse this request, but he felt she would. While he was waiting for Clifford he suddenly remembered Robson’s shopping bags, so he summoned DC Davidson to find them, locate their contents and have the lot taken round to Highlands. The bags were red Tesco carriers and Burden had had intensive enquiries made at the Tesco store in the Barringdean Shopping Centre. Dressed in brown clothes similar to those worn by Mrs Robson, Marian Bayliss had retraced her possible steps through the centre. One of the checkout assistants remembered her passing through on the previous Thursday and put the time at about five-thirty. Burden began re-reading DC Archbold’s report.

  Linda Naseem knew Mrs Robson by sight, indeed knew her well enough to comment on the weather and ask after her husband. Gwen Robson was a regular shopper in the store and almost always came in on a Thursday afternoon, but what most interested Burden about this evidence was that Linda Naseem claimed to have seen Mrs Robson in conversation with a girl. This encounter, she said, took place immediately after Mrs Robson had paid and received her change, and when she was standing at the end of the check out counter putting the goods she had bought into a carrier.

  Describe the girl? She had been attending to her next customer and she hadn’t taken much notice. Indeed, she hadn’t seen the girl’s face at all, only her back and the back of her head. She had been wearing a beret or some sort of hat. When Mrs Robson finished packing her bag, she and this girl went off together. At least, they went off. Linda Naseem couldn’t absolutely say they went together.

  Clifford came to the police station about half an hour after Burden had made his phone call; Munster’s School was only about two hundred yards down the High Street. Burden’s own office was rather a pleasant, comfortable place where any visitor might have felt he was paying a social call, so Burden didn’t take him in there but into one of the interview rooms at the back on the ground floor. The walls were bare, painted the colour of scrambled eggs, and the floor was of grey vinyl tiles. Burden motioned Clifford into one of the grey metal chairs and himself sat down opposite him at the plastic-topped yellow table.

  Almost without preamble, he began, ‘You told me you didn’t know
Mrs Robson. That wasn’t true, was it?’

  Clifford looked truculent to Burden, his dull face sullen. He wasn’t showing any obvious symptoms of fear as he spoke in his slow, monotonous voice. ‘I didn’t know her.’

  There was a point in any interrogation or enquiry when Burden simply changed from using a suspect’s surname and title to his or her first name. Wexford asked permission before he did this, but Burden never did. Using people’s surnames and titles, in his opinion, was very tied up with feeling respect for them. This was why he needed to be called ‘Mr’ himself. He would have said he reached a stage when he lost respect for the person he was questioning and therefore pushed them a few rungs down the ladder of his esteem. If we had a language - where you could tutoyer and vouvoyer, said Wexford, you’d start thouing them.

  ‘Now, Clifford, I’ll be honest with you. Frankly, I don’t yet know where you met her or how you knew her, but I know you did. Why not tell me and save me the trouble of finding out?’

  ‘But I didn’t know her.’

  ‘When you say that, you’re not helping yourself or deceiving me. All you’re doing is wasting time.’

  Clifford repeated doggedly now, ‘I did not know Mrs Robson.’ He laid his hands on the table and contemplated them. The nails were closely bitten, Burden noticed for the first time, this gave them the look of a child’s hands, pink and pudgy.

  ‘All right, I can wait. You’ll tell me in your own good time.’

  Did he really take that phrase literally or is he sending me up? Burden wondered. Not a gleam of humour showed on the round blank face when Clifford said, ‘I don’t have my own good time.’

  A change of subject and Burden said, ‘You must have been in that car park well before six. Mr Olson has told me you left him not at six but at five-thirty. You must have been there by five-forty-five at the latest. Would you like to know when Mrs Robson died? It was between five-thirty-five and five-fifty-five.’