Wexford 14 - The Veiled One

by Ruth Rendell

‘All right, Mrs Sanders, you’ve made your point,’ Burden said. He wasted no more time on her and looked away. ‘I’d like you to come back to the police station with me, Clifford. We can get a clearer picture of things there.’

  Clifford went with them in his docile way and they drove back to town. He sat at the table in the interview room and looked across it first at Burden and then at DC Marian Bayliss. His eyes went back to Burden, then were lowered towards the tiny geometric pattern on the tabletop. In a low voice, not much more than a mumble, he said, ‘You’re accusing me of murdering someone. It’s incredible, I still can’t accept what’s happening to me.’

  Much of the skill of a policeman in interrogation lies in knowing what to ignore as well as what to seize on. Burden said quietly, ‘Tell me what happened when you first got to the shopping centre and met Mrs Robson.’

  ‘I’ve already told you,’ Clifford said. ‘I didn’t meet her, I saw her dead body. I’ve told you over and over. I drove down into the car park on to the second level and I was going to park the car when I saw this person lying there, this dead person.’

  ‘How did you know she was dead?’ Marian asked.

  Clifford leaned forward on his elbows, holding on to his temples. ‘Her face was blue, she wasn’t breathing. You’re beginning to make me feel what happened isn’t true, that it wasn’t that way. You’re changing the truth with all this until I don’t know any more what happened and what didn’t. Maybe I did know her and I forgot. Maybe I’m mad and I killed her and forgot. Is that what you want me to say?’

  ‘I want you to tell me the truth, Clifford.’

  ‘I’ve told you the truth,’ he said and then, looking away for a moment, twisting in his chair, he directed a curiously appealing gaze on Burden. His voice was the same, a fairly resonant adult male voice, but the tone was that of a child of seven. ‘You used to call me Cliff. What stopped you? Was it Dodo stopped you?’

  Afterwards, when he looked back, Burden thought it was at this point that he abandoned his theory of Clifford’s being as sane as he and understood that he was mad.

  Chapter 12

  Leaning over the garden gate, the new resident of Highlands surveyed the estate that would be his home for at least the next six months. It was one of those days that sometimes occur even in December, a clear sunny day of cloudless skies and a gradually falling temperature. The frost to come that night would silver all the little grass verges and turn every one’s miniature conifers into Christmas trees. On the hill behind Wexford’s new home Barringdean Ring sat like a black velvet hat on a green cushion. The sky blazed silvery azure. At the bottom of Battle Lane he could see where Hastings Road turned off and make out the roof of Robson’s house and the Whittons’ and Dita Jago’s. It was high up here, the highest point of Highlands, so that he could even see the cluster of latter-day almshouses that made up Berry Close.

  The removal van, newly arrived with half the furniture from the bombed house, blocked any view he might have had of the town. Sylvia had taken the boys to school, then come with the van driver to help her mother move in. Wexford thought he would walk to work and then if he couldn’t face walking home Donaldson could bring him. Dora would need their car. He went back in and said goodbye to her, looking round the bare, bleak little house, trying not to prejudice what living in these cramped quarters would be like, the neighbours and their noisy children separated from these rooms only by thin dividing walls, the strips of gardens partitioned by wire fences. More wire fences! Never mind, they were lucky to have somewhere, lucky not to have to go on living with Sylvia . . . and he reproached himself for the ungrateful thought as his kind busy daughter came in carrying a crate of his favourite books.

  The air was nippy and the sunshine warm, but sun hung low on the horizon and the shadows were long. His route down into the town took him along Hastings Road and into Eastbourne Drive. There was no one about, the streets empty of people and nearly empty of cars. This was the last day of Lesley Arbel’s word-processor course, but no doubt she would spend the weekend with her uncle. It was more than two weeks since Gwen Robson’s death, nearly as long since someone had tried to kill Sheila. His cuts and bruises were nearly healed, his strength returning. He had several times driven his car, felt quite calm and assured at the wheel. The bomb experts kept on coming to him or getting him to go to them, pursuing their interminable questions. Try to remember. What exactly happened after you got into the car? Who are your enemies? Who are your daughter’s enemies? Why did you jump out of the car? What warned you? He could recall none of it and believed those lost five minutes lost for ever. It was only in the night-time, in dreams, that he relived the explosion - or rather, instead of reliving what he couldn’t remember, conjured up new versions for himself in some of which he died or Sheila died or the world itself disappeared and he hung suspended in a dark void. But last night, instead of the roar of the bomb he had heard thin reedy music and instead of Sheila’s body, he had seen wheels spinning in the darkness, circles that shone and glittered and were filled with geometric patterns . . .

  Striving to dispel these ideas and look at things rationally occupied his thoughts until he reached the police station. Once there, he somehow knew before he enquired that Burden had Clifford Sanders with him and Archbold in one of their interview rooms. Late in the morning Burden came out but kept Clifford there alone, sending in coffee and biscuits. Wexford couldn’t tell what Clifford looked like after this continuous ordeal but Burden was haggard, his face pale and tense and his eyes exhausted.

  ‘You were talking about the inquisition,’ Wexford said. ‘About executioners taking payment to garrote the condemned before they were burned at the stake.’

  Burden nodded, slumped in his chair, his strained face rather ghastly in the pale, bright light from the sun.

  ‘You said you’d read about it. Well, I’ve read of Inquisitors suffering as much as their victims, of the strain wearing them out and brainwashing them till they get like you. It’s watching the torture that does it; you have to be a very special sort of person to be able to watch torture and not be affected by it.’

  ‘Clifford Sanders isn’t being tortured. I had doubts about that earlier on, but I don’t any more. He’s being put through a fairly heavy interrogation but not tortured.’

  ‘Not physically perhaps, but I don’t think you can separate mind and body like that.’

  ‘He isn’t kept awake artificially; he isn’t under bright lights or kept on his feet or starved or denied a drink. He isn’t even here all the time; he goes home to sleep. I’m going to send him home today, now; I’ve had enough for today.’

  ‘You’re wasting your time, Mike,’ Wexford said mildly. ‘You’re wasting your time and his because he didn’t do it.’

  ‘Excuse me if I differ from you there. I differ from you most strongly.’ Burden sat up revived, indignant. ‘He had the motive and the means. He has strong psychopathic tendencies. Remember that book you lent me with that piece in it about psychopaths? The Stafford-Clark? “The outstanding feature is emotional instability in its broadest and most comprehensive sense . . .” Let me see, how does it go on? I haven’t got your memory . . . “prodigal of effort but utterly lacking in persistence, plausible but insincere, demanding but indifferent to appeals, dependent only in their constant unreliability . . .”’

  ‘Mike,’ Wexford interrupted him. ‘You haven’t got any evidence. You’ve trumped up what you’ve got to suit yourself. The single piece of evidence you do have is that he saw the body and instead of reporting it, ran away. That is absolutely all you’ve got. He didn’t know Gwen Robson. He was a gardener in a place where she popped in sometimes in her home-help role, and he may once or twice have said hello to her. He wasn’t seen talking to her in the shopping centre. He doesn’t and didn’t possess a garrote or anything that could be made into a garrote.’

  ‘On the contrary, he has a hard and fast motive. I can’t yet prove it, but I’m convinced he committed a crime in the past
which Gwen Robson discovered and started blackmailing him over. Blackmailers don’t succeed for long with psychopaths.’

  ‘What crime?’

  ‘Murder, obviously,’ Burden said on a note of triumph. ‘You suggested that yourself. You said no one would care about some sex thing, it had to be murder.’ His voice grew tired again as he suppressed a yawn. ‘Who, I don’t know, but I’m working on it. I’m probing into his past. A grandmother maybe? Even Miss McPhail herself. I’m having Clifford’s past looked into for signs of any remotely possible unexplained deaths.’

  ‘You’re wasting your time. Well, not your time - ours, the public’s.’

  This was an accusation to which Burden was particularly sensitive. He was beginning to look angry as well as tired and his face grew pinched as it always did when he was cross. He spoke coldly. ‘He met her by chance in the shop ping centre, she asked for more money and after he had followed her down into the car park, he killed her by strangling her with a length of electric lead he was carrying in the boot of the car along with that curtain. This he took with him and threw away on his way home.’

  ‘Why cover the body and run away?’

  ‘You can’t account for inconsistencies of that sort in a psychopath, though probably he thought that if he covered the body it might not be found for a rather longer time than if he left it exposed. Linda Naseem saw him talking to Mrs Robson. Archie Greaves saw him running away.’

  ‘Mike, we know he ran away, he admits that himself. And it was a girl with a hat on that Linda Naseem saw.’

  Burden got up and walked the length of the room, then came back to lean on the edge of Wexford’s desk. He had the air of someone who is bracing himself to say something unpleasant in the nicest possible way. ‘Look, you’ve had a bad shock and you’re still not well. You saw what happened when you came back to work too soon. And for God’s sake, I know you’re worried about Sheila.’

  Wexford said dryly but as pleasantly as he could, ‘OK, but my mind’s not affected.’

  ‘Well, isn’t it? It would be only natural to think it was - temporarily, that is. All the evidence in this case points to Clifford and, moreover, not a shred to anyone else. Only for some reason you refuse to see that, and in my opinion the reason is that you’re not right yet, you’re not over the shock of that bomb. Frankly, you should have stayed at home longer.’

  And left it all to you, Wexford thought, saying nothing but aware of a cold anger spreading through him rather like a draught of icy water trickling down his gullet.

  ‘I shall break Clifford on my own. It’s only a matter of time. Leave it to me, I’m not asking for help - or advice, come to that. I know what I’m doing. And as for torture, that’s a laugh. I haven’t even approached anything the Judges’ Rules would object to.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ Wexford said. ‘Perhaps you should remember the last lines of that passage you like so much defining a psychopath, the bit about the ruthless and determined pursuit of gratification.’

  Burden looked hard at him, looked in near-disbelief, then walked out, slamming the door resoundingly.

  A quarrel with Mike was something that had never happened before. Disagreements, yes, and tough arguments. There had been the time, for instance, when Mike had lost his first wife and gone to pieces and later had that peculiar love affair - Wexford had been angry with him then and perhaps paternalistic. But they had never come to hurling abuse at each other. Of course he hadn’t meant to infer that Mike was a psychopath, or had psychopathic tendencies or anything of that sort, but he had to admit it must have sounded like that. What had he meant then? As with most people in most quarrels, he had said the first hurtful, moderately clever thing that came into his head.

  Some of the things Mike had said he was sure were right. In his assessment of the character of Gwen Robson he was right. She would do a great deal for money, almost anything, and what she had done had led to her death. He knew that and Burden knew it too. But he had chosen the wrong person from among her possible . . . what? Clients? Perhaps that was the best word even in this context. Clifford Sanders was not Gwen Robson’s murderer.

  Wexford looked out of the window and saw him being shepherded out to one of the cars. Davidson was about to drive him home. Clifford neither trudged nor shuffled, he didn’t walk with his head bowed or his shoulders hunched, yet there was something of desperation in his bearing. He was like one caught in a recurring dream from which to awaken is to escape, but which will inexorably return the next night. Fanciful nonsense, Wexford told himself, but his thoughts persisted in dwelling on Burden’s chosen perpetrator as Davison drove out of the forecourt and on to the road, and all that could be seen of Clifford Sanders was his solid heavy-shouldered shape through the rear window, his round cropped skull. What would he go home to? That cold, dictatorial woman, that house which was big and bare and always chilly and where, according to Burden, everything that might have made it comfortable was stored away up in the attics. Useless to ask why he stayed. He was young and fit and educated; he could leave, make a life of his own. Wexford knew that so many people are their own prisoners, jailers of themselves, that the doors which to the outside world seem to stand open they have sealed with invisible bars. They have blocked off the tunnels to freedom, pulled down the blinds to keep out the light. Clifford, if asked, would no doubt say, ‘I can’t leave my mother, she’s done everything for me, brought me up single-handed, devoted her life to me. I can’t leave her, I must do my duty.’ But perhaps it was something very different he said when alone with Serge Olson.

  Wexford might not have gone to Sundays that day, might have sat on his office for a long time brooding over his quarrel with Burden, but a call came through from a man called Brook, Stephen Brook. The name meant nothing, then recall came with a recollection of the blue Lancia and a woman who had gone into labour while in the shopping centre. Brook said his wife had something to tell the police and Wexford’s thoughts went at once to Clifford Sanders. Suppose this woman wanted to tell him something that would put Clifford entirely beyond suspicion? She might know him. It could, with some exaggeration, be said that in a place like Kingsmarkham everyone knew everyone else. It would bring him considerable satisfaction to have Clifford exonerated and might also heal the breach between himself and Burden - without if possible Burden’s losing face.

  The Brooks lived at the Forby Road end of town, their home a flat in the local authority housing area of the Sundays estate. From the window of their living room Sundays Park could be seen - its hornbeam avenue, its lawns and cedars, the cars of those taking the word-processor course parked at the side of the big white house. This small room was very warm and Mrs Brook’s baby lay uncovered in a wicker cradle. The Brooks’ furniture consisted of two battered chairs and a table and a great many small crates and boxes, all of them covered or draped with lengths of patterned material and shawls and coloured blankets. There were posters on the walls and dried grasses in stoneware mustard jars. It had all been done at the lowest possible cost and the effect was rather charming.

  Mrs Brook was all in black. Dusty black knitted draperies was the way Wexford would have described her clothes if he had had to do so. She wore wrinkled black and white striped stockings and black trainers, and a very curious contemporary madonna she looked when she lifted the baby and, unbuttoning black cardigan and black shirt, presented one round white breast to its mouth. Her husband - in jeans, shirt and zipper-jacket uniform - would have appeared more conventional if he had not dyed his spiky hair to resemble the bird of paradise flower, a tropical blue and, orange. Their modulated Myringham University accents came as a slight shock, though Wexford told himself he should have known better. Both of them were about the age of Clifford Sanders, but how different a life they had made for themselves!

  ‘I didn’t tell you before,’ Helen Brook said, ‘because I didn’t know who she was. I mean, I was in hospital having Ashtoreth and I didn’t really think much about all that.’

  Ashtoreth. Well
, it sounded pretty and was just another goddess like Diana.

  ‘I mean, it was all a shock really. I meant to have her at home and I was all set to do that. Squatting, you know, not lying down which is so unnatural, and three of my friends were coming to perform the proper rites. The people at the hospital had been really angry at me for wanting to have her the natural way, but I knew I could prove to them my way was right. And then of course they caught me. It was almost as if they set a trap to get me into hospital, though Steve says not - they couldn’t have.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s paranoia, love,’ said Stephen Brook.

  ‘Yes, I just started these labour pains - how about that? I was in Demeter and these pains just started.’

  ‘In what?’ Wexford said before he remembered this was the Barringdean Centre’s health food shop. Briefly, it had sounded like some obstetrical condition.

  ‘In Demeter,’ she said again, ‘getting my calendula capsules. And I sort of looked up and through the window and I saw her outside talking to this girl. And I thought I’ll go out and show myself to her and I wonder what she’ll think - the way she used to go on saying she hoped I’d never have children, that was all.’

  ‘He doesn’t know what you’re on about, love.’

  Wexford nodded his assent to this as Helen Brook shifted the child to her other breast, cupping the soft downy head in her hand. ‘Saw whom?’ he asked.

  ‘That woman who got killed. Only I didn’t know; I mean, I didn’t know what her name was. I just knew I knew her, then when we read in the paper that she’d been a home help and where she lived I said to Steve, that’s the woman who used to look after the lady next door to Mum. I was in Demeter and I recognized her, I hadn’t seen her for yonks. You see, she’d heard about the way Steve and I got married and she was all peculiar about it.’

  ‘The way you got married?’