The Veiled One

by Ruth Rendell

  When she came up to the gates, she got hold of them as if expecting they would open, as if the padlock would fall apart and the bolts slide back. Archie got to his feet and leaned forward on the window sill. The woman was much too short to reach the top bolt; she seemed now to have realized that the padlock was fastened and the key gone, and she began to rattle the gates. Her eyes were not on him but on the phone box, which was only a few yards from her but tantalisingly outside those gates.

  She shook the gates more and more violently and they clanged and rattled. Anyone could see it was useless doing that because of the bolts and the padlock, and Archie began to wonder, because of the sudden and violent change in her demeanour, if she wasn’t quite all there, if she were a bit mad … crazy. His reaction to anything like that would usually be to ignore it, to shut his eyes or go away. But it was the phone box she wanted; all this frenzy was on account of not being able to reach the phone box. There were always the neighbours—let someone else attend to it, someone younger and stronger. Only no one ever did. Archie sometimes thought a person could be murdered in Pomeroy Street in full view, in broad daylight, and no one would do anything. The woman was shouting now—well, screaming. She was stamping her feet and shaking the gates and roaring at the top of her voice, yelling things Archie couldn’t make out but which he heard all right when he had put his cap on and his raincoat round his shoulders and was making his way out on to the pavement.

  “The police! The police! I’ve got to get the police! I’ve got to phone. I’ve got to get the police!”

  Archie crossed the road. He said, “Making all that fuss won’t help. You calm down now. What’s the matter with you?”

  “I’ve got to phone the police! There’s someone dead in there. I’ve got to phone the police—there’s a woman and they’ve tried to cut her head off!”

  Archie went cold all over; his throat came up and he tasted tea and chocolate. He thought, my heart, I’m too old for this. He said feebly, “Stop shaking those gates. Now, come on, you stop it! I can’t let you out.”

  “I want the police,” she shrieked and fell to lean heavily against the gates, hanging there with her fingers pushed through the wire mesh. The final clang reverberated and died away, as she sobbed harshly against the cold metal.

  “I can go and phone them,” Archie said and he went back indoors, leaving her sagged there, still, her hands hooked on the wire like someone shot while trying to escape.

  2

  THE PHONE RANG WHILE HE WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF going through it all with Dora. Supper had been eaten without enthusiasm and the bag containing Dora’s birthday sweater lay unregarded on the seat of a chair. He had turned the evening paper front-page downwards but—unable to resist the horrid fascination of it—picked it up again.

  “Mind you, I knew things weren’t going well with her and Andrew,” Dora said.

  “Knowing one’s daughter’s marriage is going through a bad patch is a far cry from reading in the paper that she’s getting a divorce.”

  “I think you mind about that more than about her coming up in court.”

  Wexford made himself look coolly at the newspaper. The lead story was the trial of three men who had tried to blow up the Israeli Embassy and there was something too about a by-election, but the page was Sheila’s. There were two photographs. The top picture showed a wire fence—not unlike the fence that surrounded the shopping complex he had recently left, only this one was topped with coils of razor wire. The modern world, he sometimes thought, was full of wire fences. The one in the picture had been mutilated and a flap hung loose from the centre of it, leaving a gaping hole through which a waste of mud could be seen with a hangar-like edifice in the middle of it. From the darkish background in the other photograph his daughter’s lovely face looked out, wide-eyed, apprehensive, to a father’s eye, aghast at the headlong rush of events. Wisps of pale curly hair escaped from under her woolly cap. The headline said only: “Sheila Cuts the Wire” ; the story beneath told the rest of it, giving among all the painful details of arrest and magistrates’ court appearance the surely gratuitous information that the actress currently appearing in the television serialization of Lady Audley’s Secret was seeking a divorce from her husband, businessman Andrew Thorverton.

  “I would have liked to be told, I suppose,” Wexford said. “About the divorce, I mean. I wouldn’t expect her to tell us she was going to chop up the fence round a nuclear bomber base. We’d have tried to stop her.”

  “We’d have tried to stop her getting a divorce.”

  It was then that the phone rang. Since Sheila had been released on bail, pending a later court appearance, Wexford thought it must be her at the other end. He was already hearing her voice in his head, the breathy self-reproach as she tried to persuade her parents she didn’t know how the paper had got that report about her divorce … she was overcome … she was flabbergasted … it was all beyond her. And as for the wire-cutting …

  Not Sheila though. Inspector Michael Burden.

  “Mike?”

  The voice was cool and a bit curt, anxiety underlying it, but he nearly always sounded like that. “There’s a dead woman in the shopping centre car park, the underground one. I haven’t seen her yet, but there’s no chance it’s anything but murder.”

  “I was there myself,” Wexford said wonderingly. “I only left a couple of hours ago.”

  “That’s OK. Nobody thinks you did it.”

  Burden had got a lot sharper since his second marriage. Time was when such a rejoinder would never have entered his head.

  “I’ll come over. Who’s there now?”

  “Me—or I will be in five minutes. Archbold. Prentiss.” Prentiss was the Scene-of-Crimes man, Archbold a young DC. “Sumner-Quist. Sir Hilary’s away on his hols.”

  In November? Well, people went away at any old time these days. Wexford rather liked the eminent and occasionally outrageous pathologist, Sir Hilary Tremlett, finding Dr. Basil Sumner-Quist less congenial.

  “There’s no identification problem,” said Burden. “We know who she is. Her name’s Gwen Robson, Mrs. Late fifties. Address up at Highlands. A woman called Sanders found her and got hold of someone in Pomeroy Street who phoned us.”

  It was five-past eight. “I may be a long time,” Wexford said to Dora. “At any rate I won’t be back soon.”

  “I’m wondering if I ought to phone Sheila.”

  “Let her phone us,” said Sheila’s father, hardening his heart. He picked up the bag with Dora’s present in it and hid it at the back of the hall cupboard. The birthday wasn’t until tomorrow anyway.

  The car-park entrance was blocked with police cars. Lights had appeared from somewhere, the place blazed with light. Someone had shot the linked shopping trolleys across the parking area to clear a space and trolleys stood about everywhere, but at a distance, like a watching crowd of robots. The gates in the fence at the pedestrian entrance in Pomeroy Road stood wide open. Wexford pushed trolleys aside, spinning them out of his way, squeezed between the cars, opened the lift door and tried to summon the lift. It didn’t come, so he walked down the two levels. The three cars were still there—the red Metro, silver Escort and dark blue Lancia—but the blue one had been backed out of its parking slot up against the wall and reversed into the middle of the aisle, no doubt to allow room for pathologist, Scene-of-Crimes officer and photographer to scrutinize the body that lay close up against the offside of the silver Escort. Wexford hesitated a moment, then walked towards the group of people and the thing on the concrete floor.

  Burden got to his feet as Wexford approached and Archbold, who had old-fashioned manners, nodded and said, “Sir!” Sumner-Quist didn’t bother to look round. The fact that he happened at that moment to move his shoulder so that the dead woman’s face and neck were revealed was, Wexford thought, purely fortuitous. The face bore the unmistakable signs of someone who has met her death by strangulation. It was bluish, bloated, horrified, and the mark on her neck of whatever was re
sponsible for her asphyxiation was so deep that it had more the appearance of a circular cut, as if the blade of a knife had been run round throat and nape. Blazing lights in a place usually feebly lit showed up all the horror of her and of her surroundings—stained and discoloured concrete, dirty metal, litter sprawling across the floor.

  The dead woman wore a brown tweed coat with fur collar and her hat of brown and fawn checked tweed with narrow brim was still on her grey curly hair. Apparently small and slight, she had stick-like legs in brown lacy tights or stockings and on her feet brown lace-up low-heeled walking shoes. Wedding and engagement rings were on her left hand.

  “The Escort’s her car,” Burden said. “She had the keys to it in her hand when she was killed. Or that’s the way it looks, the keys were under the body. There are two bags of groceries in the boot. It looks as if she put the bags in the boot, closed the boot-lid, came round to unlock the driver’s door and then someone attacked her from behind.”

  “Attacked her with what?”

  “A thin length of cord, maybe. Like in thuggee.” Burden’s general knowledge as well as sharpness of intellect had been enhanced by marriage. But it was the birth of his son, twenty years after his first family, that had made him abandon the smart suits he had formerly favoured for wear even on occasions like this one. Jeans were what the inspector had on this evening, though jeans which rather oddly bore knife creases and contrasted not altogether happily with his camel-hair jacket.

  “More like wire than a cord,” Wexford said.

  The remark had an electric effect on Dr. Sumner-Quist who jumped up and spoke to Wexford as if they were in a drawing room, not a car park, as if there were no body on the floor and this were a social occasion, a cocktail party maybe: “Talking of wire, isn’t that frightfully pretty TV girl who’s all over the paper this evening your daughter?”

  Wexford didn’t like to imagine what effect the epithet “TV girl” would have had on Sheila. He nodded.

  “I thought so. I said to my wife it was so, unlikely as it seemed. OK, I’ve done all I can here. If the man with the camera’s done his stuff, you can move her as far as I’m concerned. Myself, I think it’s a pity these people don’t go cutting the wire in Russia.”

  Wexford made no reply to this. “How long has she been dead?”

  “You want miracles, don’t you? You think I can tell you that after five minutes’ dekko? Well, she was a goner by six, I reckon. That do you?”

  And he had been here at seven minutes past … He lifted up the grubby brown velvet curtain that lay in a heap a few inches from the dead woman’s feet. “What’s this?”

  “It was covering the body, sir,” Archbold said.

  “Covering it as might be a blanket, do you mean? Or right over the head and feet?”

  “One foot was sticking out and the woman who found her pulled it back a bit to see the face.”

  “Yes—who was it found her?”

  “A Mrs. Dorothy Sanders. That’s her car over there, the red one. She found the body, but it was a man called Greaves in Pomeroy Street phoned us. Davidson’s talking to him now. He found Mrs. Sanders screaming and shaking the gates fit to break them down. She went raving mad because the phone box is outside the gates and she couldn’t get out. Diana Pettit took a statement from her and drove her home.”

  Still holding the curtain, Wexford tried the boot-lid of the red Metro. There was shopping inside that too, food in two red Tesco carriers and a clear plastic bag full of hanks of grey knitting-wool done up with string like a parcel. He looked up at the sound of the lift, an echo from it or reverberation or something; you could always hear it. The door to the lift had opened and a man appeared. He was walking very diffidently and hesitantly towards them and when his eyes met Wexford’s he stopped altogether. Archbold went up to him and said something. He was a young man with a pale heavy face and dark moustache and he was dressed in a way which while quite suitable for a man of Wexford’s own age, looked incongruous on someone of— what? Twenty-one? Twenty-two? The V-necked grey pullover, striped tie and grey flannel trousers reminded Wexford of a school uniform.

  “I’ve come for the car,” he said.

  “One of these cars is yours?”

  “The red one, the Metro. It’s my mother’s. My mother said to come over and bring it back.”

  His eyes went fearfully to where the body lay, the body that was now entirely covered by a sheet. It lay unattended—pathologist, photographer and policeman having all moved away towards the central aisle or the exits. Wexford noted that awe-stricken glance, the quick withdrawing of the eyes and jerk of the head. He said, “Can I have your name, sir?”

  “Sanders, Clifford Sanders.”

  Burden asked, “Are you some relation of Mrs. Dorothy Sanders?”

  “Her son.”

  “I’ll come back with you,” Wexford said. “I’ll follow you; I’d like to talk to your mother.” He let Clifford Sanders, walking edgily, pass out of earshot and then said to Burden, “Mrs. Robson’s next-of-kin … ?”

  “There’s a husband, but he hasn’t been told. He’ll have to make a formal identification. I thought of going over there now.”

  “Do we know who that blue Lancia belongs to?”

  Burden shook his head. “It’s a bit odd, that. Only shoppers use the car park—I mean, who else would want to? And the centre’s been closed over two hours. If it belongs to the killer, why didn’t he or she drive it away? When I first saw it I thought maybe it wouldn’t start, but we had to move it and it started first time.”

  “Better have the owner traced,” said Wexford. “My God, Mike, I was in here, I saw the three cars, I drove past her.”

  “Did you see anyone else?”

  “I don’t know, I’ll have to think.”

  Going down in the lift, he thought. He remembered the pounding footsteps descending, the girl in the red Vauxhall following him, the half-dozen people in the aboveground parking areas, the mist that was visible and obscuring but really hid nothing. He remembered the woman carrying the two bags coming from the covered way, strolling, languidly kicking the trolley aside. But that was at ten-past six and the murder had already taken place by then … He got into the car beside Archbold. Clifford Sanders in the red Metro was waiting a few yards along the roadway while a uniformed officer—someone new that Wexford didn’t recognize—trundled the scattered trolleys out of their path.

  The little red car led them along the High Street in the Stowerton direction and turned into the Forby Road. Archbold seemed to know where Sanders lived, in a remote spot down a lane that turned off about half a mile beyond the house and parkland called “Sundays.” In fact it was less than three miles outside Kingsmarkham, but the lane was narrow and very dark and Clifford Sanders drove even more slowly than the winding obscurity warranted. Thick, dark, leafless hedges rose high on either side. Occasionally a pulling-in place revealed itself, showing at least that passing would be possible if they met another vehicle. Wexford couldn’t remember ever having been down there before, he doubted if it led anywhere except perhaps finally to the gates of a farm.

  The sky was quite black, moonless, starless. The lane seemed to wind in a series of unnecessary loops. There were no hills for it to circumvent and the river to flow in the opposite direction. No longer were any pinpoints of light visible in the surrounding countryside. All was darkness but for the area immediately ahead, illuminated by their own headlights, and the twin bright points glowing red on the rear of the Metro.

  But now Clifford Sanders’ left-hand indicator was winking. Plainly, he was the kind of driver who would signal his intention to turn a hundred yards before the turning. A few seconds elapsed. There were no lights ahead, only a break in the hedge. Then the Metro turned in and Archbold followed, guided by the red taillights. With a kind of amused impatience Wexford thought how they might be in some Hitchcock movie, for he could just make out the house—a house which probably looked a lot less disagreeable by daylight but was now
almost ridiculously grim and forbidding. Behind two windows only a pallid light showed. There was no other light either by the front door or about the garden. Wexford’s eyes grew accustomed to the darkness and he saw that the house was biggish, on three floors, with eight windows here in the front and a slab of a front door. A low flight of steps without rails led up to it and there was neither porch nor canopy. But the whole facade was hung, covered, clothed in ivy. As far as he could see it was ivy, at any rate it was evergreen leaves, a dense blanket of them, through which the two pale windows peered like eyes in an animal’s shaggy face.

  A garden surrounded the house—grass and wilted foliage at any rate, extending at the back to a wooden fence. Beyond that only darkness, fields and woods, and over the low hill the invisible town which might as well have been a hundred miles away.

  Clifford Sanders went up to the front door. The bell was the very old-fashioned kind which you ring by turning a handle back and forth, but he had a key and unlocked this door, though when Wexford started to follow him he said in his flat chilly tone, “Just a minute, please.”

  Mother, evidently, had to be warned; he disappeared and after a moment or two she came out to them. Wexford’s first thought was how small she was, tiny and thin; his second that this was the woman he had seen entering the underground car park as he had left it. Within moments then she had found the body that he had missed. Her face was very pale, as near a white face as you could find, very lined and powdered even whiter, a young girl’s scarlet lipstick unbecomingly coating her mouth. She was dressed in a brown tweed skirt, beige jumper, bedroom slippers. Did her recent discovery account for the curious smell of her? She smelt of disinfectant, the apparent combination of lime and thymol which hospitals reek of.