by Ruth Rendell
‘All right. I said to tell me when it was three minutes to. Anyway, the piece of paper we had to sign was lying there on the table face-downwards. I mean we thought that’s what it was and we were right. Nina just picked it up and took one look - and what do you think it was?’
Wexford had a pretty good idea, but he decided not to steal Mrs Jago’s thunder and merely shrugged.
‘It was a will, made out on a will form. Nina didn’t get to read it because Mrs Robson snatched it away, but we could guess what was on it. It would have been leaving his money to Mrs Robson. Three thousand pounds, he used to boast he had; everyone here knew that. And she was after it - she liked money, there was no doubt about that. Well, we both shied away like anything. We told each other afterwards no way, absolutely not. Suppose that daughter had brought it up in court and we’d had to go there and say we’d signed it?’
‘What was Mrs Robson’s reaction to that?’
‘Three minutes to five, Grandma,’ Melanie said.
‘I’m coming, darling. She didn’t like it, but what could she do? I couldn’t help having a laugh when we were outside. I heard later she went trying other people down the street, but she never struck lucky; she couldn’t get anyone but her niece. It was only a few days after that they took Mr Swallow away and when he died there wasn’t a will and his daughter got his money - being his real heir, you see, as was quite right. Now I must keep my promise to these children.’
Mrs Jago put the child on the floor and the knitting on the table and got up. ‘You will stay for tea? We have Grandma’s version of sachertorte.’
Wexford thanked her but shook his head. He had told Donaldson to come back for him at five and he thought of the deep pleasure of leaning back in the car and closing his eyes. Hannah had crept quietly to the table and replaced the little horse amongst the other animals with precision, with perfectly coordinated delicate fingers, her eyes all the while on her sister, her lips not quite smiling. It reminded him of Sheila playing all those years ago with a china ornament which Sylvia (though no one else) had forbidden her to touch. And Sheila had teased like this little one, peeping over a defiant shoulder with the faintest Gioconda smile.
‘Of course, to do her justice she didn’t want money for herself,’ Dita Jago’s voice interrupted his reverie. ‘It was for him, it would have been all for him.’ It was just as he was leaving, when they were out in the hall, that she said, ‘Don’t you want to know where I was last Thursday evening?’
He smiled. ‘Tell me.’
‘My daughter always goes shopping on Thursday afternoons and usually she takes me. But last week she dropped me off at the public library in the High Street and left the girls with me. She picked us up again at five-thirty.’
Why had she insisted on telling him that? he wondered. Perhaps merely to avoid a repetition of his visit. Or was he imagining things that the tone of her voice gave no hint of - reacting in a confused, almost fuddled, way because of the huge weariness which had overtaken him? Passing a wall mirror in the hall as he made his way out, he caught sight of his discoloured face, the bruised muzzle of a prize-fighter recovering from a bout, and turned quickly away. He was no narcissist, no lover of his own image.
The front door closed on him. Her grandchildren’s demands had cut short any parting pleasantries Mrs Jago might have made. It was just before five, for her clock had been fast, and Wexford waited for the car with the anxiety of a disabled pensioner expecting an ambulance. He had to lower himself into a sitting position on the low wall, feeling his bruised body creak. Going back to work had not been a wise idea, yet it hadn’t seemed like work, more a matter of paying social calls. Mike ought to be left to himself to handle this case; he was quite capable of doing so. Someone like Serge Olson would say that he, Wexford, was at fault - only probably he wouldn’t use a word like ‘fault’ - in being unable to delegate, in refusing to yield authority to the younger man. It was very likely a sign of insecurity, fear of seeing Mike usurp his place, even his job. Psychology, he thought, and not for the first time, often just wasn’t true.
Cars passed. With a strong inner shudder, an actual shrinking, he tried to contemplate what it would be like to sit at the wheel again, start the ignition, move the shift into gear. That, of course, he wouldn’t quite have to do, just manipulate from ‘park’ to ‘drive’. But the notion of putting his hand to that lever brought a darkness before his eyes and made him hear a sound he had no recollection of hearing: the roar of the bomb. He closed his eyes, opening them to see Donaldson draw up at the kerb.
A hunch he couldn’t quite believe in - it all seemed behaviour of the crassest, most unfeeling kind - led Burden to assume that Clifford Sanders was heading for the Barringdean car park. He couldn’t follow him: he hadn’t a car immediately to hand and, making his way there on foot, he told himself he was wasting his time. No one would do that. No one would return to the scene of so horrific a crime precisely seven days to the hour later, and there go through the same prescribed ritual. With, that is, one notable exception.
He entered the shopping complex by the pedestrian entrance where, a week before, Dodo Sanders had stood rattling the gates and screaming for help. But first he went into the underground car park, descending to the second level in the lift. At least Clifford hadn’t parked the car on precisely the spot where it had been the week before, but perhaps he had not done so only because that particular space and those next to it and opposite were already occupied. This time the Sanders’ car was at the extreme opposite end to the lift and the stairs. It was empty which meant, presumably, that Clifford was somewhere in the shopping centre.
As he had been in the previous week, thought Burden, looking at his watch by the light of the glaring greenish strip lights. Six-twenty-two, but he, of course, had walked here and taken some time to locate the car. Clifford’s appointment had been at his normal time, five o’clock, so today his date to pick up his mother would be later. Six-thirty perhaps? With the centre closing at six and usually emptied by six-fifteen, would she be prepared to wait for him? But as he was speculating along these lines, watching the last cars backed out and driven away, he heard the clang of the descending lift. Clifford and his mother came out of it and Burden watched them walk towards their car, Clifford carrying two Tesco bags and a wicker basket. Burden thought he could easily be taken for a girl from the back; it was some thing to do with his plump hips and the rather short steps he took. He caught up with them as Clifford was lifting the boot-lid of the Metro.
Mrs Sanders turned and cast upon him a basilisk look.
She was hatless, her hair set in a rather bouffant, cloudy way which didn’t suit her. The red lipstick glistened in the pale face. He had wondered what that particular colour of skin reminded him of and now he knew: raw fish, a translucent, faintly pinkish white. She was perfectly calm and her voice was cold.
‘I wish I’d never told anyone about finding that dead body. I wish I’d kept quiet.’ Burden had an inkling then of the icy authority she exercised over her son and had no doubt exercised since he was an infant. There was an awful precision in that tone and it was backed by a great storehouse of nervous energy. ‘I’m not usually a fool. I should have had the sense to stay out of it; I should have followed his example.’
‘What example was that, Mrs Sanders?’ Burden asked.
Her attention was on the time by her digital watch and that indicated on the clock in the Metro which she bent down to look at. Abstractedly, she said, ‘He ran away, didn’t he?’
‘You tell me. I’ve got a very good idea what it was he did, and running away was only a small part of it.’ While Clifford unlocked the driver’s door, he said, ‘You won’t mind giving me a lift, will you? We can take your mother home first and then you and I will have another talk at the police station.’
Clifford didn’t say anything. The only sign that he had heard was when he reached inside to release the lock on the passenger door. And on the way back to Ash Lane no one said a word
. Half the carriageway of this end of the Forby Road was undergoing repairs, temporary traffic lights had been installed and a long queue of cars waited. Dodo Sanders, sitting in the front next to Clifford, pulled down her glove and lifted up her coat cuff to look at her digital watch. Why it should have been important to her to know the precise time they had left the car park and the precise time they began queueing at the lights, Burden couldn’t guess. Perhaps, though, that wasn’t the purpose of all this watch- gazing. It might be that she simply wanted to know the time, that all day long, every day, every five minutes, she had to know the time.
She spoke as Clifford drew up by the kerb. ‘I can take the things in. There’s no need to come with me.’
But he got out of the car, removed the bags from the boot and carried them up to the front door. He unlocked the door and stood back for her to pass in ahead of him. Burden understood it all. She was one of those people who say things like that but don’t mean them. She was the sort who would say, ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll be all right on my own’, or ‘Don’t bother to write me a thank-you letter’, and then create hell when she got left alone or when no letter came. His mother-in-law was a bit like that, though Mrs Sanders was a thousand times worse.
Clifford got back into the driving-seat and Burden stayed where he was, in the back. He didn’t care whether they talked or not; they would talk at the station. The driving was done with the slow care, the superfluous signals and excessive braking habitual to Clifford. He broke the silence as they turned in to find the last remaining parking space.
‘What is it you suspect me of?’
Burden felt a reluctance to answer questions of that kind. They seemed to bring him down to Clifford’s level of ingenuousness and simplicity. Simple-mindedness expressed it better, perhaps. ‘Let’s leave that until we’re inside, shall we?’ he suggested.
He called up Diana Pettit and together they shepherded Clifford into that grey-tiled interview room. It was dark now, of course, had been dark for two hours, and the lights in this room were as grim and uncompromising as those in the Barringdean Centre car park, but much brighter. The central heating was on in here, though, just as it was all over the building. Police officers just as much as those they inter viewed, as Burden had once told someone without irony, were often obliged to sit there for hours. The immediate warmth, a much greater heat than he enjoyed in his own home, made Clifford ask to take off his hat and coat. He was one who would ask permission before he did almost anything; no doubt asking for leave had been a requirement of right conduct dinned into him from his earliest years. He sat down and looked from Diana to Burden and Burden back to Diana, like a puzzled new boy whom school rules bewilder.
‘I’d like you to tell me what you’re accusing me of.’
‘I’m not accusing you of anything yet,’ Burden said.
‘What you suspect me of, then.’
‘Don’t you know, Clifford? Haven’t you got a clue? What do you think it is - helping yourself out of the collection in church?’
‘I don’t go to church.’ He essayed a faint smile and it was the first Burden had ever seen him give. The smile seemed contrived with difficulty as if a mechanical process had to be set in motion, a series of button-pressing and lever-pulling only half-remembered. It irritated Burden.
‘Perhaps you stole a car then. Or nicked a lady’s handbag.’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re getting at.’
Burden said abruptly. ‘Have you any objection if I record this interview? Tape it, I mean?’
‘Would it make any difference if I had?’
‘Certainly it would. This isn’t a police state.’
‘Do as you like,’ Clifford said indifferently and he watched Diana begin recording. ‘You were going to tell me what I’m supposed to have done.’
‘Let me tell you what I think happened. I think you met Mrs Robson inside the shopping centre, in Tesco’s. You hadn’t seen her for quite a while, but you knew her and she knew you - and she knew something about you you’d like kept secret. I wonder what it was. I don’t know yet, I honestly don’t know, but you’ll tell me. I hope you’ll tell me tonight.’
Clifford said in an uneven voice, ‘When I first saw Mrs Robson, she was dead. I never saw her before in my life.’
‘What you saw, Clifford, was your opportunity. You and she were alone and you very much wanted her out of the way . . .’
He had to remind himself that this was a man, not a boy, not a teenager. And not simple-minded, not retarded. He was a teacher; he had a university degree. The blank, soft face looked even more spongy, but a spark showed in each dull eye. Clifford’s voice squeaked. Fear or guilt or God- knows-what had done something to the vocal cords, leaving him with a eunuch’s soprano.
‘You don’t mean you think I’d kill someone? Me? Is that what you mean?’
Not wanting to fall in with this play-acting, this vanity - for what else would explain it? - that made a man believe he could do as he pleased without fear of discovery, Burden said drily, ‘He’s cottoned on at last.’
Next moment he was on his feet and Diana too, stepping back from the table. Clifford had leapt up, face and lips white as if in genuine shock, his hands grasping the table edge and shaking it, vibrating it as his mother had shaken the wire gates.
‘Me? Kill someone? You’re mad! You’re all crazy! Why’ve you picked on me? I never knew you meant that with all your questions, I never dreamed . . . I thought I was just a witness. Me kill someone? People like me don’t kill people!’
‘What kind do then, Clifford?’ Burden spoke calmly as he lowered himself once more into his chair. ‘Some say every one’s capable of murder.’
He met the other man’s round staring eyes. A dew of sweat had appeared all over the putty-like skin, the pudgy features, and a drop trickled down his upper lip between the two wings of the moustache. Burden felt for him an impatient contempt. He wasn’t even a good actor. It would be interesting to hear how all that would play back, that stuff about killing people. He’d play it to Wexford, see what he thought.
‘Sit down, Cliff,’ he said, his growing contempt making him accord the man less than the dignity of his unabridged Christian name. ‘We’re going to have a long talk.’
Exhausted when the car dropped him at Sylvia’s, Wexford would have liked a home of his own to recover in, the sole companionship of his own wife. He had to settle for a drink, the whisky Dr Crocker strictly forbade. Someone had brought in an evening paper; a story on the front page was about a man who had all day been ‘helping the police with their enquiries into the Kingsmarkham bomb outrage’. There was no picture and of course no name or description, nothing to make even tentatively possible the identification of this man who had wanted Sheila dead, who had conceived for her that particular brand of cold, impersonal, political hatred.
The boys were watching television, Sylvia trying to write an essay on the psychological abuse of the elderly.
‘I know all about that,’ Wexford said. ‘Would you like to interview me?’
‘You’re not elderly, Dad.’
‘I feel it.’
Dora came and sat beside him. ‘I’ve been to look at our house,’ she said. ‘The builders have been in and weather-proofed it. At least the rain can’t get in. Oh, and the Chief Constable phoned, something about a house we can have if we like. We do like, don’t we, Reg?’
A leap of the heart before he started feeling ungrateful to Sylvia. ‘Did he say where it is?’
‘Up at Highlands, I think. I’m almost sure he said Highlands.’
Chapter 10
Remorse was perhaps too strong a word; it was distaste tempered with a hint of shame that Burden felt throughout that weekend. He said to himself, and he even said it to his wife who was home again with their son, that this was what the job was about, this was police work.
‘The end justifies the means, Mike?’ she said.
‘It’s the merest idealism to deny that.
Every day in every thing we do, it’s implicit even if we don’t come out and say it. When we were going through that bad patch with Mark and we decided the only way was to let him cry, that two nights of that would cure him, we were saying the end justifies the means.’
He took the child on his lap and Jenny smiled.
‘Don’t teach it to him though, will you?’
He spared himself half an hour to play with Mark and eat his lunch and then he was back at the police station in that interview room, confronting Clifford Sanders once more. But on the way the task behind him and the task ahead goaded him, made him wrinkle up his nose at the nastiness of it. How far removed from torture was it, after all? Clifford had to sit there in that comfortless room, left alone for part of the time for as much as an hour, food brought to him on trays by an indifferent police constable. And it would not have been quite so bad if Clifford had’ been tougher, less like a child. He looked like a big child, a kind of fined-down Billy Bunter. A stoicism had succeeded his bewilderment, an air of being a brave boy and sticking it out a little longer. But here Burden told himself he was being a fool. The man was a man, educated, neurotic perhaps but sane, simply lacking character and strength of mind. And look what he had done. The facts spoke for themselves. Clifford had been in the shopping centre, had been seen with Mrs Robson, had a garrote in his possession, had run away.
Was it likely that he had found the body, covered it up because it looked like his mother and then fled? Nobody behaved like that outside the pages of popular psychiatry. All that stuff which Serge Olson no doubt dispensed - about neurotics choosing girlfriends because they were looking for a mother, or employers as father-figures, or being put off sex because you’d seen your mother in her underwear - that was strictly for the books and the couch as far as Burden was concerned. And he was a fool to let himself feel a sneaking pity for Clifford Sanders. The man had meant to kill Mrs Robson and had succeeded. Hadn’t he gone specifically to meet her armed with a garrote?
