The Veiled One

by Ruth Rendell

  “The bomb was meant for Sheila?”

  She said unhappily, “It looks like that. Well, it must have been. You mustn’t distress yourself, you’re supposed to rest.”

  “I’m all right. I’ve only had a bang on the head.”

  “You’ve got cuts and bruises all over you.”

  “It was meant for Sheila,” he said. “Oh God, thank God I drove it. Oh, thank God! I don’t remember, but I must have driven it. Am I in the Infirmary? In Stowerton?”

  “Where else? The Chief Constable’s downstairs and he wants to see you. And Mike’s dying to see you; he thought you were dead. It was on television about you. Lots of people thought you were dead, darling.”

  Wexford was silent digesting it. He wouldn’t think about Sheila at the moment and how near she had been to death, he wouldn’t think of that yet. A sense of humor began creeping back.

  “One thing, we shan’t have to have the fence done,” he said and then he went on, “A bomb. Yes, a bomb. Have we got any house left?”

  “Well, you mustn’t distress yourself. A bit more than half a house.”

  BURDEN WAS TEMPORARILY IN CHARGE OF THE ROBSON case. It was his belief that Wexford would be off for at least a fortnight, though Wexford himself said that a day or two would do it. That was what he said to Colonel Griswold, the Chief Constable, whose sympathy was conveyed in incredulity that Wexford could remember nothing about the bomb and unreasonable anger against Burden for going away for the night without telling anyone.

  “I’ll make them let me go home tomorrow,” he told Burden.

  “I shouldn’t—not if I’d got your home to go to.”

  “Yes. Dora says there’s only about half of it left. I never liked that garage extension; I said it was jerry-built. No doubt that’s why it fell down. I understand that people in our sort of situation usually go and live in a caravan.”

  He had a large bandage round his head. Cuts on his left cheek were dressed with a white plaster. The other side of his face was turning black—before Burden’s very eyes, it seemed. Sheila came in while he was still there and threw her arms round her father until he groaned in pain. And then the bomb expert from the Myringham Division of the Serious Crimes Squad came to question him and he and Sheila were obliged to leave. Now Burden, with Sumner-Quist’s medical report in front of him, had to make up his mind whether it would be good for Wexford to be shown it later in the day. He would probably ask for it anyway, thus taking the power of showing it or withholding it out of Burden’s hands.

  In fact, there wasn’t much in it Burden didn’t already know. The time of Mrs. Robson’s death was as firmly fixed as it ever could be at between five-thirty-five and five-fifty-five. And death had taken place on the spot where the body was found. She had died of asphyxiation as the result of a ligature being applied to her neck. Sumner-Quist went on to suggest that the ligature—he never once here used the term “garrote” —was of wire probably in some kind of plastic coating, minute particles of such a substance having being found in the neck wound. This substance, presently being subjected to lab analysis, was most likely flexible polyvinyl chloride or polyvinyl chloride in combination with one of the polymers such as styrene acrylonitrile.

  Burden winced a bit at these names, though he had a pretty good idea of the kind of stuff meant; no doubt it was much like the substance that insulated the lead on his desk lamp. It was suggested that the ligature had a handle at each end which the perpetrator must have grasped in order to secure a purchase on it and avoid cutting his or her own hands.

  Gwen Robson had been a strong and healthy woman, five feet one inch tall, weight one hundred and ten pounds. Sumner-Quist estimated her age at three years less than what it had been in fact. She had never borne a child, suffered surgery of any sort. Her heart and other major organs of the body were in sound condition. She had lost her wisdom teeth and three other molars, but otherwise her teeth were present and healthy. If someone hadn’t come up behind her in a car park with a garrote, thought Burden, she would very likely have lived another thirty years; she would long have outlived that arthritic, prematurely aged husband.

  The Home Help Service was administered by the County Council, not the local authority, Burden soon discovered. It functioned from one of those bungalow buildings that house administrative offices in the grounds of once great private houses all over England. The great house in question was called Sundays on the Forby Road near the junction with Ash Lane. It had until recently been in private hands and, approaching it, Burden remembered the pop festival which had been held there back in the seventies and the murder of a girl during that festival. A huge sum had been spent on the purchase, causing anger among local ratepayers. But Sundays had been bought and these ugly single-storey buildings soon put up in the environs of the house. The mansion itself, though in part offices, was also available as a conference centre and for courses. Burden noted that a course in word processing was due to begin that day. His appointment was with the Home Help Supervisor, but it was her deputy who met him and began by telling him pessimistically that they could give him very little help.

  Their records went back only three years and Mrs. Robson had been gone for two. The Deputy Supervisor could remember her, but the Supervisor herself had been in her present post less than two years. She produced for Burden a list of names, with addresses, of those men and women who had been Gwen Robson’s “clients.”

  “What does a cross after a name indicate?”

  “It means they’ve died,” she said.

  Burden saw that there were more crosses than otherwise. On an initial glance no name or address leaped out significantly.

  “What did you think of Mrs. Robson?” he asked. This was Wexford’s technique and although Burden did not altogether approve of it, he thought he might as well give it a go.

  The reply came slowly, as if a good deal of thought and calculation was going into it. “She was efficient and very reliable. A great one for phoning in, if you know what I mean. She’d warn you by phone if she was going to be even ten minutes late.”

  Burden, irrepressibly, saw again the resemblance between the dead woman and Dorothy Sanders. Here was a new point of similarity—a shared obsession with time—but what he wanted was a meeting point, a location at which she and Clifford Sanders might have come into collision.

  “I don’t want to speak ill of her. That was a dreadful way to die.”

  “It won’t go any further,” said Burden, hope springing. “What you say to me will be treated in confidence.”

  “Well, then, she was a terrible gossip. Of course I didn’t have that much to do with her, and to tell you the truth I used to avoid having much contact with her, but it seemed to me sometimes that she liked nothing better than finding out some poor old dear’s private trouble or secret or whatever and spreading it round this place. Starting off always of course with that old one about it being within these four walls and she wouldn’t say it to anyone else and so forth. I don’t say there was any harm in it, mind, I don’t say there was malice. As a matter of fact it was all done quite sympathetically, though she was a bit moralistic. You know the kind of thing—how wicked it was to have a baby without being married, how unfair on the child, and people living together not knowing the rewards of a happy marriage.”

  “There doesn’t seem much in that,” Burden said.

  “Probably not. She was a great talker, she never stopped talking, and I don’t suppose there’s much in that either. I’ll give her one thing, she was devoted to her husband. She was one of those women who are married to perfectly ordinary men and go about saying how wonderful they are—one in a million—and how lucky they are to have got a man like that. I don’t know whether it’s sincere, or if they’re trying to make out they’ve got an exceptional marriage or what. I remember her going on in here one day about someone she knew who’d had a Premium Bond come up. If that happened to her, she said, the first thing she’d do would be to buy her husband some special kind
of car—I don’t know what, a Jaguar maybe—and then she’d take him on holiday to the Caribbean. Anyway, you’ve got your list; it’s the best I can do, and I hope it’s of some help.”

  Burden was disappointed. He wasn’t sure what he had expected—some name on the list, perhaps, to tally with that of a witness in the case or with someone he had talked to in connection with it. As it was, because he had gone so far, everyone whose name was here would have to be seen. Archbold or Davidson could do that. Among those whose names were followed by a cross Burden noted that of a man who had lived in the sheltered housing at Highlands opposite the Robsons’ own home: Eric Swallow, 12 Berry Close, Highlands. But what could that signify? The only difference between Eric Swallow and the others was that he was a “client” who happened to have lived on the other side of the street from his home help.

  The alibi of Clifford Sanders was the next important question of Burden’s day. He saw from his notes that Clifford had told him he had left the psychotherapist Serge Olson at six p.m. Queen Street, where Olson had his premises in the flat over the hairdressers, was metered and except on Saturday mornings there were usually meters available. Burden, due to see Olson at half-past noon, stood in Queen Street observing that now, late on a Monday morning, three of the twelve meters were vacant. Clifford could easily have been in his car and away by two minutes past six if he left Olson at six. The worst of the Kingsmarkham rush traffic would have been over by then and he could have got into the Barringdean Shopping Centre car park with ease by ten-past six. But there was no way, if he was telling the truth, that he could have been there before five minutes to six.

  Briefly calling in at the police station, Burden had phoned Stowerton Royal Infirmary to be told that Wexford was “satisfactory and comfortable,” a formula that conveys to the nervous caller the imminence of death. Burden had wasted no more time on the Infirmary, but phoned Dora at her elder daughter’s. They had said that if Wexford continued to make good progress he could leave the hospital on Thursday. Wexford said he was going out tomorrow. Bomb experts were at the house, sifting through rubble, and until they were finished nothing could be done about clearing up the mess. Burden was early for his appointment and he walked up and down looking in the windows of the newly refurbished Midland Bank, the shoe boutique and the toy-shop, but thinking about the bomb and wondering if it had really been meant for Sheila. Why would anyone want to blow up Sheila? Because she had cut the wire round a Ministry of Defence air base?

  Burden strongly disapproved of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and “all those people.” This was one of the few issues on which he and his wife disagreed, or on which his wife had not won him over to her point of view. He thought they were all cranks and anarchists, either misguided or in the pay of the Russians. But it was quite feasible that other cranks, equally if not more reprehensible, might try to blow them up. Such a thing had been attempted—and indeed had succeeded—in the case of the Greenpeace vessel in the South Pacific. On the other hand, suppose some enemy of Wexford’s—even if it were not too farfetched, someone involved in the Robson case—knew that when Sheila stayed with him he was always in the habit of moving her car in order to put his own away? Whether or not this was true Burden was unsure but he thought it likely, knowing his chief. It had been a dark, misty evening. Would it have been possible to creep unseen across the wasteland and fasten that bomb to the underside of the Porsche? Burden found he knew very little about bombs.

  The hairdressers was called Pelage which Wexford, who had looked it up out of curiosity, said was a collective noun for the fur, hair or pelt of a mammal. It had been open only six months and the interior decor was very hi-tech, resembling nothing so much as the inside of a computer. But the building in which it was housed was as ancient as anything in this part of Kingsmarkham High Street and the narrow steep staircase up which Burden made his way was a good hundred and fifty years old. By the look of the wormholes in the treads, it wouldn’t endure much longer. If the woman descending hadn’t been as thin as Burden they would have had difficulty in passing one another, for neither had been prepared to retreat. At the top a door was slightly ajar. There was no bell, so Burden pushed open the door and walked in, calling out, “Hallo!”

  He was in an anteroom, unfurnished but for floor cushions and something folded up to large suitcase size which reminded him of a mobile bench he had once borrowed for pasting wallpaper on, but was more likely to be a massage table. The ceiling was painted rather ineptly with signs of the zodiac and on the walls hung strange posters—one of a pair of boots with no legs in them but with distinctly separate toes and toenails, which Wexford could have told him was from a Magritte painting, and another of cats in cloaks and boots riding white horses. Burden remembered what Clifford Sanders had told him about his feelings and thought that this was what he felt here; he felt threatened.

  A door at the opposite end of the room opened and a man came out in a very unhurried way. He stood just outside the door with his arms folded. He was a short man and extremely thickset without being fat; great breadth of shoulder and width of hip and thigh were not matched by a big belly. His hair— “pelage,” Burden could not help thinking—was dark and curly, long and thick as a woman’s, growing low over his forehead, linked by brown curly sideburns to his round bushy beard which itself was linked to a dense and rather more gingery moustache. Very little face showed, no more than a surprisingly fine-pointed nose, thin lips and a pair of dark eyes like those of a fierce animal.

  On the phone Burden had given his full name, but Olson extended his hand and said, “Come in here, Michael—or is it Mike?”

  Burden had an old-fashioned and (his wife said) ridiculous antipathy to being called by his Christian name except by friends. But he was aware too of how foolish it made him look to stand on his dignity with a contemporary, so he merely shrugged and followed Olson into … what? A consulting room? A therapy room? There was a couch and it was so much like the famous one in the Freud museum in London that Burden and Jenny had been to, even to the scattered oriental rugs, that he was sure a deliberate attempt at duplication had been made. Apart from the couch the room was cluttered with cheap ugly furniture and hung with posters, including an antinuclear one which pictured a devastated globe and above it a quote from Einstein: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our modes of thinking and thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe.” This obscurely reminded Burden of Wexford and recalled to him with how much more of an open mind his chief would have approached this man … yet, how could you, at his age, conquer your prejudices?

  Olson had sat down at the head of the couch, no doubt a customary position for him. He gazed at Burden in silence, again probably a habitual pose.

  Burden began, “I understand Mr. Clifford Sanders is a patient of yours, Dr. Olson.”

  “A client, yes.” There it was again, that word. Patients, customers, guests—all in his contemporary world had become clients. “And I’m not a doctor,” Olson went on.

  This immediately recalled to Burden indignant articles he had read about purveyors of various forms of psychiatry being permitted to practise without medical degrees. “But you have some sort of qualification?”

  “A psychology degree.” Olson spoke with a kind of calm economy. It was as if he would attempt to justify nothing, explain nothing; there he was, to be taken or left. Such a manner always gives an impression of transparent honesty and therefore made Burden suspicious. It was time for Olson to ask him precisely what it was that Burden wanted to see him about—they always did ask at this point—but Olson didn’t ask, he merely sat. He sat and looked at Burden with a calm, mild almost compassionate interest.

  “I am sure you have your own code of professional conduct,” Burden said, “so I won’t—at any rate, at this stage—ask you to divulge anything you may have diagnosed in Mr. Sanders’ … personality.” He frankly thought he was being magnanimous and rather resented
Olson’s faint smile and inclination of the head. “It’s a more practical matter I’m concerned with—the times of Mr. Sanders’ last appointment with you, in fact. Now as I understand it, he had a five o’clock appointment for a one-hour session and left you at six?”

  “No,” said Olson.

  “No? That isn’t so?”

  Shifting his gaze with what seemed perfect control, Olson turned his eyes on to the grey and cratered globe and the Einstein prediction. “Clifford,” he said, “comes at five as a general rule, but sometimes I’ve had to ask him to change and I did that last Thursday. I was giving a lecture in London at seven-thirty and I wanted to allow myself more time.”

  “Do you mean to say Mr. Sanders didn’t come to you last Thursday?”

  Olson was perhaps a man who would always smile indulgently at needless consternation. His smile was slight and a little sad. “He came. I asked him to come half an hour earlier and in fact he came about twenty minutes earlier. And he left me at five-thirty.”

  “Do you mean five-thirty, Mr. Olson? Or with time for various parting remarks and fresh appointments and so on, would that be nearer twenty to six, say?”

  Olson took off his watch, laid it on the table beside him and, indicating it, said “At five-thirty I pick up my watch and tell the client—in this case, Clifford—that time’s up and I’ll see him next week. There are no parting remarks.”

  Jenny, Burden’s wife, had been in analysis during her pregnancy. Had it been like this? Burden realized he had never exactly asked her. If you lay on that couch—did you? or wasn’t it for lying on?—if you talked to this man, then, and opened your heart and spoke of your inmost secrets, he would be like an enormous impersonal ear … Burden, without liking or trusting him, suddenly understood that this of course was what was required.

  “So Clifford Sanders left here at five-thirty sharp?”

  Olson nodded indifferently; there was no question of Burden’s disbelieving him. He said, “You went to London? Where were you … lecturing?”