Wexford 14 - The Veiled One

by Ruth Rendell

  There was no reason why he shouldn’t have found Burden’s home number, it was there in the telephone directory for anyone to see, but Burden was astonished to get the call, astonished and encouraged. A confession was surely imminent, an intuition he had which was very much substantiated by the low, wary tone in which Clifford spoke - as if he feared being overheard - and the sudden haste with which he rang off as soon as Burden said he would come. The suspicion was inescapable that Dodo Sanders had come into the room; another word and she would have guessed what Clifford was up to and surely tried to stop him.

  It was Clifford who had admitted him to the house. His mother put her head round the door of what was perhaps some kind of washroom and stared, saying nothing. Her head was swathed in a towel, obviously because she had just washed her hair in spite of visiting the hairdresser three days before. But this brought to Burden’s mind what Olson had said about the fallacy of ‘the veiled one’. Of course he had not meant anything of this sort, that particular veiling surely referring to hidden aspects of personality or nature. The turbanned head ducked back and the door closed. Burden looked at Clifford, whose appearance was much as usual. He wore his school uniform clothes, no concession to the. casual having been made for Sunday. Yet there was a subtle change in his manner, something indefinable that Burden couldn’t put his finger on. Up until yesterday, he had come into Burden’s presence grudgingly or with injured outrage or even straight fear. This afternoon Clifford had admitted him to the house not as one might a friend, not that, but at least as some visitor whose call was a necessary and inevitable evil, a tax inspector perhaps. Of course it must be remembered that he had come at Clifford’s personal invitation.

  A fire had been lit in the dining room and it was fairly warm. Burden was sure Clifford had done this himself. He had even drawn up two of the dining chairs to the fireplace - hard upright chairs, but the best he could offer. Burden sat down and Clifford launched at once into this resumed story of his life.

  ‘Children don’t question what they live on, where the money comes from, I mean. I was a lot older when my mother told me that my father had never paid her a penny. She tried to force him to pay her through the court, but he couldn’t be found; he’d just deserted her and disappeared. And he had a private income, you know; I mean he had investments of his own, just enough to live on without working. She had to go out cleaning to keep us and then she made things, sort of cottage industry things - bits she knitted and sewed. I was nearly grown-up before I knew any of this. She never told me before. I was at school while she was working and of course I never guessed.’

  Burden didn’t know what questions to ask, so he said nothing. He just listened, thinking of his confession, pinning faith on that. The recorder was on the dining table; Clifford had placed it there himself.

  ‘I owe her everything,’ Clifford went on. ‘She sacrificed her whole life to me, wore herself out to keep me in comfort. Serge says I needn’t think of it like that, that basically we all do what we want and that was what she wanted. But I don’t know. I mean I do know intellectually, I know he’s right, but that doesn’t do away with my guilt. I feel guilty about her all the time. For example, when I left school at eighteen I could have got a job; someone I knew at school, his father actually offered me an office job, but my mother insisted on my going to university. She always wanted the best for me. Of course I got the maximum grant, but I was still a drag on her; I wasn’t earning money except for a bit I got from gardening for people like Miss McPhail. When I got to Myringham University I never lived in; I came back home every night.’ Clifford shifted his eyes, looking quickly into Burden’s and then away. ‘She can’t be left alone at night, you see. Not in this house, at any rate, and she always is in this house. She hasn’t anywhere else to go, has she?’ He made the astounding statement with low-key carelessness, ‘She’s afraid of ghosts.’

  Another little shiver exacerbated Burden’s discomfort and he found himself nodding, murmuring, ‘Yes, yes, I see.’

  It was quite dark outside now. Clifford drew the brown velvet curtains, remained standing, holding the border of one of them rather too tightly and clutching it in a fist. ‘I feel guilty all the time,’ he said again. ‘I ought to be grateful, and I am in a sort of way. I ought to love her, but I don’t.’ He lowered his voice, glanced at the closed door, and then, bending towards Burden said in a near-whisper, ‘I hate her!’

  Burden just stared at him.

  ‘My other grandmother died, the one called Clifford,’ Clifford said, sitting down once more. He smiled in a slightly contemptuous way. ‘My mother’s mother, that was. My mother got her furniture and the money she had in the Post Office. It wasn’t much, just enough to buy a second-hand car. We got that Metro and I learned to drive. I can learn things, I’m quite good at that. Not much good at earning my living though, and I feel guilty about that too, because there’s a part of me knows that I ought to be able to pay my mother back for all she did for me. I ought to - well, buy her a flat to live in where she wouldn’t be afraid of the ghosts and then I could stay on alone here, couldn’t I? Actually, I think I’d like that. She’d take the glass wall with her and . . .’

  The door was suddenly opened and Dodo Sanders stood there in her brown clothes, flat polished lace-up shoes, the white lined face on those trim shoulders always a shock, the scarlet mouth a clown’s painted gash. A fresh turban concealed her hair which under the brown-patterned scarf was perhaps done up in curlers. She looked at her son, then slowly turned her head to fix her eyes on Burden. He tried to avoid meeting those eyes but he failed.

  ‘You’re wrong if you think he killed that woman.’

  Burden thought of that machine voice on his tape, wondering if it would sound more or less metallic. ‘Whatever I may think, Mrs Sanders,’ he said mildly, ‘I’m sure I’m not wrong.’

  ‘It’s impossible,’ she said. ‘I should know. My instincts would know. I know all about him.’

  Clifford seemed about to bury his head in his hands, but instead he sighed and said to Burden, ‘Could we talk some more tomorrow?’

  Burden agreed, feeling confused and helpless.

  Nothing had happened to her; she was all right. The letter had been sent to ‘the occupier’ and perhaps had not been meant for her or indeed anyone specific - was possibly a mere wanton arbitrary missive of destruction directed at whichever tenant of the flat might have the misfortune to open it. Wexford told himself all this as he descended Battle Hill, his umbrella up against the ferocious rain of Monday morning. But he didn’t believe it. Coincidence had not that long an arm.

  Next week she would appear in court to be charged, he supposed, under the Criminal Damage Act of 1971, and he repeated the charge over to himself: ‘That you on Thursday, 19th November, at RAP Lossington in the County of Northamptonshire, had in your custody or under your control a pair of wire-cutters and did use them without lawful excuse to damage certain property, namely the perimeter fence belonging to ttie Ministry of Defence . . .’ Something like that. Dora was right and Sylvia and Neil were right. She had only to make a statement in court to the effect that her action had been misguided - plead guilty, pay her fine, do no more. They would leave her alone then; they would let her live. He was tempted for a moment, seeing it briefly as such a small thing, such an easy thing to do in exchange for life and happiness, remarriage, children perhaps, a glorious career. But of course she couldn’t do it. He almost laughed out loud at the idea, walking down there through the rain, and suddenly felt a lot better.

  It wasn’t Ralph Robson who admitted him to the house, but Dita Jago. Wexford furled his dripping umbrella and left it in the porch.

  Mrs Jago said: ‘We came in to see if we could get anything for him while we’re out.’

  Nina Quincy was sitting in that cheerful but somehow comfortless room, having taken her daughters to school, and Robson was in an armchair on the opposite side of the fireplace. He had taken up the hunched, lopsided attitude arthritic people
adopt to minimize suffering, one leg stretched out, one shoulder raised. But even so his owl’s face was sharp with pain. Dita Jago’s daughter provided a cruel contrast to him, not only young and beautiful but blooming with beauty and health. Her face, innocent of make-up, was rosily flushed and her dark eyes bright; dark chestnut hair fell below her shoulders in a mass of waves. She had something of the appearance of a healthy Jane Morris, but Rossetti would have resisted painting anyone as fit and flourishing as she. Both women wore garments of unmistakable Jago manufacture, the younger a tunic of dark chenille patterned all over with stylized crimson and blue butterflies. In a stiff, rather formal way her mother introduced her to Wexford.

  She held out her hand, said unexpectedly, ‘I must tell you how I admire your daughter. We loved her in that serial. Not much like you, is she?’

  It was a little meagre voice to emanate from so much rich, colourful beauty and momentarily he marvelled that someone could look so intelligent yet in a couple of sentences reveal she was not. He acknowledged her comment with a small, dry shake of the head and turned to Robson.

  ‘Your niece has gone back to London, has she?’

  ‘She went last evening,’ Robson said. ‘I shall miss her; I don’t know what I’ll do without her.’

  Dita Jago said with unexpected briskness, ‘Life must go on. She’s got her living to earn, she can’t stay here for ever.’

  ‘She got down to it and spring-cleaned the whole blessed house for me while she was here.’

  Spring-cleaning in December? It was an activity, anyway, which Wexford had imagined must be obsolete. Hard, too, to picture the exquisitely dressed and coiffed Lesley Arbel brushing ceilings and washing paint. His raised eyebrows elicited more information from Ralph Robson.

  ‘She said she might as well give the place a complete turn out while she was here. Not that it needed it; Gwen kept it like a new pin, as far as I could see. But Lesley insisted; she said she didn’t know when I’d get it done again and she was right there. She had all the cupboards out, and the ward robes, went through Gwen’s clothes and took them off to Oxfam. Gwen has a good winter coat - only bought it last year and I thought Lesley might have liked to keep that for herself, but maybe it wasn’t smart enough for her.’

  Wexford saw Nina Quincy’s lips twitch, her eyes shift if not quite cast up as Robson went on, ‘She even went up in the roof, but I said to leave that; I said you can’t take the blessed Hoover up there. There was no need to lift up fitted carpets either. But when Lesley does a thing she does it thoroughly and the place is like a new pin, spotless. I shall miss her, I can tell you; I’ll be lost without her.’

  Nina Quincy got up. Her attitude, her look showed her as a woman easily and quickly bored, needing new sensations. She yawned and said, ‘Shall we go if you’ve got that list?’

  Wexford parted from the two women when they reached the gate. Again he marvelled at Mrs Jago’s light, springy tread as she made for the car under the yellow and black golfing umbrella her daughter held up over them. For no reason apparent to him at that moment, he found himself thinking of Defoe who had written his Journal of the Plague Year as if it were autobiography, as if he had witnessed the plague’s horrors instead of being an infant at the time.

  Burden was in his office, awaiting the arrival of Clifford Sanders whom Davidson had gone to fetch. Clifford had asked on the previous day if they could talk again this morning and Burden was puzzled by the request, or had been for a while after it was made. But now his hopes had rallied and his expectation of a confession was restored.

  When Wexford came in he said, ‘I never thought I’d see the day when the hottest suspect in a murder case started asking to help us with our enquiries.’

  It was delicate ground for Wexford and he put on a look of polite interest.

  ‘He actually wants to come here this morning. I suppose it’s one way of skiving off work.’

  Wexford just looked at him. ‘I’ll tell you an interesting thing. Lesley Arbel’s been spring-cleaning Robson’s house, turning out all the cupboards, been up in the roof pretending to want to vacuum-clean it, had the carpets up. What was she looking for?’

  ‘Maybe she was just cleaning.’

  ‘Not she. Why would she? The house was clean enough for any normal person not a fanatic already. Young girls these days aren’t mad about cleaning, Mike. They don’t know how to do it, or else they don’t care. It would have been a different matter if she’d come down to be with Robson and found the place in a mess. Then she might have cleaned up - if she was exceptionally kind and thoughtful for her age . . . which she’s not. And then there’s the matter of her fingernails. Her nails were long and varnished earlier last week, but when I saw her last Friday they’d been cut short. That means she either broke a nail cleaning or thought it wiser to cut her nails before the cleaning started. And I should think she was the kind of girl who would be as proud of her long red nails as any Chinese emperor’s concubine.’

  ‘Maybe she had to cut them for the computer.’

  Wexford shrugged. ‘No different from a typewriter key board, is it? She’d been typing with long nails for years probably. No, she sacrificed her nails in order to perform the supremely generous task of cleaning her uncle’s house.’

  'What is it you’re trying to say?’

  ‘That she wasn’t cleaning, or that the cleaning was incidental or an excuse to make to Robson. She was looking for something; she was turning the house upside down, lifting up the carpets, going up in the loft in search of something. I don’t know what it was, though I’ve got a few ideas. I don’t know if she found it, but I think the search was what brought her here and kept her here so long, not devotion to Robson. And I don’t think we’ll see her here again very much, either because she found what she was looking for or because she realizes she isn’t going to find it. And that means it isn’t in the house or that it was very cleverly hidden indeed.’

  Instead of asking the obvious question, Burden said, ‘We haven’t searched the place ourselves. Should we?’

  Wexford was hesitating when the phone rang and Burden picked up the receiver. Apparently Clifford had arrived.

  ‘I’ll have to go. What was she looking for, anyway?’

  ‘The documentary evidence on which Gwen Robson based her blackmailing activities, of course.’

  ‘Oh, there wasn’t any of that,’ Burden said breezily. ‘It was all hearsay, all just what she’d heard or suspected.’ He didn’t wait for Wexford’s reply, but went off down to the interview room on the ground floor, the one done up in shades of ancient spaniel. Rain was streaming down the window, making the glass opaque. Clifford sat at the table with a styrofoam beaker of coffee in front of him, Diana Pettit on the opposite side reading the legal page of the Independent. She got up and Burden gave her the sideways nod that meant to leave them with the tape recorder running. Clifford half rose and put out his hand; Burden was so surprised that he had shaken it almost before he knew what he was doing.

  ‘Can we start?’ Clifford asked eagerly.

  It was difficult for Burden to handle this. For the first time in his career as a policeman he had the feeling that he had been insufficiently trained or that a branch of his training had been neglected. ‘What is it you want to tell me?’ he asked in a voice he knew sounded tentative and unsure.

  ‘I’m telling you about the sort of person I am. I’m talking about my feelings.’ Clifford’s eyes moved and to Burden’s astonishment a mischievous gleam appeared in them; it was so incongruous as to be shocking. He laughed gleefully. ‘I’m trying to tell you what made me do it.’

  ‘Do it?’ Burden leaned forward across the table.

  ‘Do what I do,’ Clifford said blandly. ‘Lead the life I do.’ He laughed again. ‘That was a joke. It was meant to make you think I was going to say “murder Mrs Robson”. Sorry, it wasn’t very funny.’ Drawing a long breath, he made a throat-clearing sound. ‘I am a prisoner. Did you know that?’

  Burden said
nothing. What was there to say?

  ‘I am my own jailer, Dodo has seen to that. Why does she want that, you ask? Some are born to be jailers. It’s for power. I am the first person she has really had in her power, you see - the only one. The others resisted, they got away. Shall I tell you how she met my father? My father was quite an upper class sort of person, you know; he had an uncle who was the High Sheriff of the county. I don’t know what that really means, but it’s very important. My grandfather was a gentleman farmer, he owned three hundred acres of land. It was all sold when my father was young so that they could keep on living in the style they were accustomed to. A lot of Kingsmarkham is actually built on my grandfather’s land.’

  Looking at him with mounting exasperation, Burden felt resentful at the stupid trick which Clifford had tried to play on him, pretending he was about to make a confession. And Clifford said, annoying him still further, ‘Your own house, wherever that is, is probably on a bit of land that was my family’s.’

  Clifford drank his coffee, clasping the small beaker in both hands and affording Burden a close-up of his cruelly bitten nails. ‘Dodo came to work for my father’s parents as a cleaner. That surprises you, doesn’t it? Not a maid - oh, no - but a daily cleaner they had to do the rough work. They had had maids, and a chauffeur, but that was before the war. After the war they had to make do with my mother. I don’t know how she got my father to marry her. She says “love” but she would. I wasn’t born till they’d been married two years, so it wasn’t that. Once she was married, she wanted to own the place, to be the boss and the jailer.’

  ‘How can you know that?’ Burden found himself saying uncomfortably, for he was beginning to understand that Olson had meant with his fallacy of recognizing and not recognizing.

  Clifford seemed to underline this when he went on, ‘I know my mother. My grandfather died; he was very old and he’d been ill a long time. As soon as the funeral was over, my father left us - the very next day it was, I can remember all that. I was five, you see. I can remember going to the funeral with my mother and my father and my grandmother. I had to go; there wasn’t anyone to leave me with, it was before I started school. My mother wore a bright red hat with a little veil and a bright red coat. It was new and she’d never had it on before and when I saw her in it I thought that was what women wore to funerals - bright red. I thought it must be the correct thing because I’d never seen her in that colour before. When my grandmother came down, she was in black and I said to her, “Why aren’t you in red, Grandma?” and Dodo laughed.