The Veiled One

by Ruth Rendell

  He lowered himself slowly into the chair. Clifford, who had been gnawing at a fingernail, snatched his hand from his mouth as if he suddenly recalled nail-biting was something he must not do.

  Burden began, “Has your mother ever been ill, Clifford?”

  An uncomprehending look. “What do you mean?”

  “Was she ever ill so that she had to stay in bed? When she needed someone to look after her?”

  “She had what-do-you-call-it once. Like a kind of rash, but it aches.”

  “He means shingles,” Archbold said.

  “That’s right, shingles. She had that once.”

  “Did a home help come in to look after her, Clifford?”

  But this approach led nowhere. Dodo Sanders had been confined to bed for no more than a few hours throughout the whole of Clifford’s life. Burden abandoned this line of enquiry and carefully took Clifford through the sequence of events from the time he left Olson until he ran from the car park out of the pedestrian gates. Clifford got in a hopeless muddle with the times, saying he had got to the centre at five-thirty, later changing it to ten-past six. Burden knew he was lying. Everything was going according to his expectations and the only surprising thing which happened was when Clifford corrected him over the use of his name.

  “Why have you stopped calling me Cliff? You can call me that if you like, I don’t mind. I like it.”

  A WAITING HIM IN HIS OFFICE WAS A LAB REPORT ON that spool of plastic-covered wire. There was a great deal of technical detail—Burden found himself back among the polymers—but the plain fact easily sorted out was that the shreds of substance found in Mrs. Robson’s neck wound were quite different from the stuff coating the wire in Clifford Sanders’ tool-box. Well, he had been wrong. That might only mean, of course, that Clifford had disposed of the wire he used for his garrote—thrown it in the river or, more safely, stuck it in his own or someone else’s dustbin. In the meantime Clifford could sweat for a day or two. Wexford was his immediate concern, Dr. Crocker had strictly forbidden the Chief Inspector to return to work at the office and to see him Burden had to drive up to Sylvia’s house.

  “At any rate I shall be on the spot,” Wexford said. “I’m going to be living up at Highlands. How about that?”

  Burden grinned. “That’s right. There are two or three police houses. When are you moving in?”

  “Don’t know yet,” Wexford said, glancing through the paperwork Burden had brought him. “I don’t think the person—a useful genderless word—that the checkout girl saw talking to Mrs. Robson was Clifford Sanders at all. I think maybe it was Lesley Arbel. But I’ll tell you where I agree with you—when you say Mrs. Robson was a blackmailer. I think so too.”

  Burden nodded eagerly. He was always disproportionately pleased when Wexford approved some suggestion of his.

  “She liked money,” he said. “She was near enough prepared to do anything for money. Look at all that stuff you told me about the old man’s will. She was running up and down the street searching for witnesses to a will under which she was to be the sole beneficiary. We may laugh about her bathing someone and cutting some other old man’s toenails, but weren’t those normally distasteful tasks undertaken for a very inflated payment? There’s probably more of that sort of thing we haven’t yet uncovered.”

  “Mrs. Jago says she did what she did all for her husband. There’s an implication that this makes it all right, exonerates her. I imagine that was precisely the way Gwen Robson saw it herself.”

  “Why did Ralph Robson specifically need money anyway?” Burden asked. “Has anyone queried that one? I mean, if I said I needed money I’d really mean Jenny and Mark and me, my family. And you’d mean you and Dora, surely?”

  Wexford shrugged. “We’ve looked at her bank account at the TSB. She had rather a lot in it; I mean more than one would have expected. Robson has his own personal account and they’ve no joint savings. But Gwen Robson had something over sixteen hundred pounds and that could be the fruits of blackmail. Your idea is that Gwen Robson had evidence Clifford had done something reprehensible and was blackmailing him?”

  Burden nodded. “Something like that. And the worm finally turned. Clifford’s pretty worm-like in most respects, I’d say, so why not in that one too?”

  “What could Clifford have done? It would surely have to be an earlier murder. Nobody cares much about sexual irregularities these days.”

  Burden’s face indicated that he did. “Gwen Robson cared about them.”

  “Yes, but you can’t imagine that the cramming school would—or Dodo Sanders, come to that. It would be hard to assign any sort of moral convictions to her. She strikes me as a person who has never heard of ethics, still less ever thought she needed views about them.”

  Burden wasn’t interested. “I’ll find out what it was,” he said. “I’m working on it.” He studied Wexford’s face: the bruises that were fading, the cut that might or might not leave a permanent scar. “They had to let that chap go, the one they thought was your bomber. It was on the news this morning.”

  Wexford nodded. He had had a phone call about it and a long talk had ensued, culminating in a request to take part in a conference at Scotland Yard. Dr. Crocker had sanctioned this with the utmost reluctance and there was no way he would have agreed had he known Wexford intended to drive there. When Burden had gone, Wexford wrapped himself up, adding a scarf of Robin’s that was hanging in the hall in case Dora or Sylvia should come home early and see him. His car was on the garage drive and he noticed for the first time—no one had told him—how scarred the bodywork was by chips of flying glass. He got into the driving-seat, feeling that this was unfamiliar, a strange thing to be doing, an act he hadn’t performed for a long time.

  Closing the door, he thought he would just rest for a moment or two, sit there holding the ignition key. Now if this were a thriller, he thought, a television drama maybe, and he an unimportant character or even a villain, he would put the key in and turn it and the car would blow up. He tried to laugh at that but couldn’t, which was absurd, because he had no memory of the explosion and the bangs he thought he heard were not memory but the invention of his imagination. Go on, jump, he said, pushing himself along the plank, easing to the edge of the springboard. He took a breath, pushed the key in, turned it. Nothing happened; the engine didn’t even start. Well, why would it? Dora had left it in “drive.” He moved the automatic shift before he realized what he was doing, the terrible step that was going to be his crossing point.

  Because there was nothing now but to go on, he turned the ignition key.

  BURDEN WAS WALKING DOWN THE HIGH STREET, occasionally looking into shop windows already decorated for Christmas, when he saw Serge Olson coming towards him. The psychotherapist wore a check tweed jacket, its collar of mock fur turned up against the sharp east wind.

  He greeted Burden as if they were old friends. “Hallo, Mike, good to see you. How are you?”

  Taken aback, Burden said he was fine and Serge Olson asked if he was making much progress. This wasn’t a question Burden was accustomed to being asked by those he thought of as the public and he couldn’t help thinking it a shade impertinent. But he made a non-committal, vaguely optimistic reply and then Olson surprised him very much by announcing that it was too cold to stand about and why didn’t they go into the Queen’s Cafe for a cup of tea? Burden realized at once that Olson must have something he at least thought important to tell him. Why else would he make such a suggestion? For all his use of Burden’s Christian name, the two men had met only once before and then strictly on a policeman-and-witness basis.

  But when they were seated at a table, instead of imparting secrets of the consulting room, Olson began to talk only of the recent Arab bombers’ trial, the huge sentences meted out to the three guilty men and the threat made by some allied terrorist organization to “get” the prosecuting counsel. Burden was at last moved to ask what it was in particular that Olson had wanted to talk to him about.

&n
bsp; The fierce bright animal eyes gleamed. There was an incongruity here, for Olson’s voice was always calm and leisurely and his manner placid. “Talk to you about, Mike?”

  “Well, you know, asking me in here for a cup of tea, I thought there must be some specific thing …”

  Olson shook his head gently. “Perhaps I might say Clifford Sanders could be a killer in certain circumstances? Or that his manner was very odd when he left me that evening? Or that men of twenty-three who live at home with their mothers must be psychotic by definition? No, I wasn’t going to say any of those things. I was cold and I fancied some good hot tea I didn’t have to brew up myself.”

  Unwilling to let it go at that, Burden said, “You really mean you weren’t going to say any of that?” Olson’s head shook more rapidly. “Surely it is odd a man living with his mother, even if she’s a widow. Mrs. Sanders isn’t what one would call old.”

  Olson said nearly incomprehensibly, “Have you ever heard of the Fallacy of Enkekalymmenos?”

  “The what?”

  “It means, ‘the veiled one’ and it goes something like this. ‘Can you recognize your mother?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Can you recognize this veiled one?’ ‘No.’ ‘This veiled one is your mother. Hence you can recognize your mother and not recognize her.’ “

  There was something veiled about Mrs. Sanders. Her own face was a kind of veil, thought Burden, surprised by his own imagination. But in a brusque policeman-like way he said, “What’s that got to do with Clifford?”

  “It’s got something to do with all of us and our parents, and with knowing and unknowing. Over the entrance to the oracle at Delphi were the words ‘Know thyself’ and I’m talking about a very long time ago. In the two or three thousand years since then, have we heeded that advice?” Olson smiled and, leaving a moment for his words to sink in, added, “She’s not a widow either.”

  “She’s not?” This was firmer, better charted terrain. Burden checked his sigh of relief. “Clifford’s father’s still living, then?”

  “She and her husband were divorced years ago when Clifford was a child. Charles Sanders’ people were farmers and that house had been in his family for generations. He was living there with his parents when he married. Putting it bluntly, his wife Dorothy was the family servant who came in daily to clean for them. It’s not known what the parents thought about that. Obviously Clifford doesn’t know. You needn’t look like that, Mike, I’m not being a snob. It’s not her menial status that set me wondering so much as—let’s say her unattractive personality. I suppose she was good-looking and in my job I’ve learned that in nine cases out of ten that’s enough. Five years later, he left them and he gave up the house to his wife and son.”

  “What about the grandparents?” Burden asked.

  Olson, who had eaten two elaborate iced cakes and a slice of fruit loaf, began brushing crumbs out of his beard with a green and yellow paper napkin. “Clifford remembers them, but only just. He and his mother had his grandmother living with them when the father left. The grandfather had just died. There wasn’t much money, and Charles Sanders doesn’t seem to have supported them. It was a hard, lonely sort of life. I’ve never been to the house, but I imagine it’s a bit grim and remote. She went out cleaning, did a bit of dressmaking and I’ll give her credit where it’s due; she insisted on Clifford’s going to university—the University of the South, that is, at Myringham—though he had to live at home and take jobs in the holidays. I don’t doubt she was lonely and fancied she needed him with her.”

  Burden got up to pay. He felt curiously grateful that after his earlier incomprehensible remarks, Olson had managed to avoid jargon and Greek words and talk like anyone else. But something amongst what the psychotherapist had said touched a chord in his mind, set a vibration twanging.

  “I invited you,” Olson said, “but if you’ll guarantee the ratepayers will foot the bill I’ll give in gracefully.”

  “What was that you said about Clifford taking holiday jobs?”

  “The usual sort of thing, Mike, only even that kind of job is harder to come by these days. Unskilled labour, a bit of gardening, shop work.”

  “Gardening?” Burden said.

  “I believe he did have one job like that. He told me about it at some length—largely because he hated it, I suspect. He’s not keen on an outdoor life and nor am I for that matter.”

  There wasn’t a chance, Burden thought. You didn’t get your wishes coming true like that … “You don’t remember the name, I suppose?”

  “No, I don’t. But it was an old spinster woman in a big house in Forest Park.”

  11

  WAITING IN RECEPTION, WEXFORD FELT THE GUILT that comes from disobeying a doctor’s orders. It was really a fear of being found out, of Dora or Crocker or Burden discovering that he hadn’t gone straight to Scotland Yard. In fact, he probably wouldn’t have phoned this woman, have come here, if he hadn’t been buoyed up by his own success at starting that car, at driving that car, at eventually driving himself to the station in it. Better to think of this as his reason than his anxiety over the slow progress which was being made on the case. Curious looks were no longer levelled at his face; the discoloration had nearly gone. The cut was one he might have made while shaving—if he had been drunk, for instance, or all his life up to now had worn a beard. The Bomb Squad people, when he presented himself, would hardly believe he had been the victim of an explosion. But first there was this alibi to check and some curiosity, perhaps pointlessly aroused, to satisfy.

  The brighter coloured of the two receptionists, the one with orange curls, kept assuring him that Sandra Dale wouldn’t keep him a moment, then no more than one minute, finally that she was on her way. Meanwhile Wexford contemplated Kim covers pinned up on the carpeted walls, photographs recording various Kim functions, a framed certificate or diploma commemorating the award to Kim of something or other. Someone touched him lightly on the shoulder.

  “Mr. Wexford?” He started easily but she didn’t seem to notice. She was a young girl, not in the least like the picture in the magazine. “I’m Rosie Unwin,” she said, “Sandra Dale’s assistant. Would you like to come this way, please? I’m sorry to have kept you.”

  They went down passages and up in a lift and then up a flight of stairs and along another passage. At least it wasn’t open plan, one of those office complexes where it is impossible to shut oneself away. Rosie Unwin opened a door at the end of the corridor and Wexford saw a woman seated at a desk who was scarcely more like her own photograph than her assistant was. She got up and put out her hand.

  “Sandra Dale.” She hesitated. “It really is my name.”

  “Good morning, Miss Dale.”

  The photograph was purposely designed to make her look older, plumper, more motherly—or “auntly.” Wexford didn’t think this woman was much over thirty; to him she seemed a young girl, slender, long-legged, with a broad-browed round face and soft blonde hair. The picture made her into someone to be trusted, confided in, someone wise whose advice one could rely on. She asked him to sit down, herself retreating once more behind her desk. The other girl came into the room after him and stood looking not altogether confidently at a visual display unit where amber-coloured letters and geometric figures danced.

  “Lesley’s not here,” Sandra Dale said, “but perhaps you knew that? She’s away doing a course in working those things and I’m left to manage as best I can.”

  “It’s you I want to talk to,” Wexford said, “and perhaps Miss Unwin too.”

  The office was large and extremely untidy, though perhaps there was a method underlying the apparent disorder. Letters lay all over Rosie Unwin’s desk, face-upwards, and Wexford wondered if they could be of the kind he had read in Sylvia’s copy of Kim but decided not. He wasn’t able to read any of them and those he could see were nearly all handwritten. Another pile filled Sandra Dale’s in-tray. She read his mind—or rather, misread it.

  “We average about two hundred letters a week.”


  He nodded. There was a little library of works of reference and two shelves of books: a medical dictionary and an encyclopaedia of alternative medicine, a dictionary of psychology, Eric Bearne’s A Layman’s Guide to Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis. Rosie Unwin pressed a key and the screen emptied of its dancing figures.

  “Would you like coffee?” Wexford had accepted before she added, “It’ll be instant and it comes in Styrofoam.”

  He said to Sandra Dale. “You’ll have heard about the woman who was murdered in Kingsmarkham—you know she was Lesley Arbel’s aunt?”

  “I haven’t seen Lesley since it happened. I know about it of course. Lesley’s been very brave, I think—very gallant, carrying on with the course—considering Mrs. Robson was more like a mother to her.”

  “Didn’t she have a mother of her own?”

  She looked sideways at him, not slyly but perhaps rather mysteriously. “You’ll say she was only my secretary, but I know a lot about her. We all know a lot about each other in here. Sometimes I think the way we work is a bit like a kind of ongoing encounter group. It must be the effect of our … our clients.” There it was, that word again. “Their problems—they bring things up in our own lives, I guess. Lesley wouldn’t mind my telling you that her mother abandoned her when she was twelve and her aunt and uncle just took her over. She was already at boarding school so they didn’t adopt her, but she was almost as much their daughter as if they had.” The phone on her desk whistled and she picked up the receiver, murmured into it, “Yes, yes … right,” and said to Wexford, “Excuse me just one moment. Rosie will be with you right away.”

  But for a few minutes he was left alone. Curiosity that had nothing much to do with the case in hand impelled him to read the topmost letter on Rosie Unwin’s desk. He didn’t even have to get out of his chair, only lean to one side. Eyesight lengthens as age comes on and Wexford thought his had become about as long as anyone’s could. Holding a book at arm’s length was no longer any use to him. His arms were too short.