The Veiled One

by Ruth Rendell

  She sat there, smiling blandly, the baby Ashtoreth now recumbent in her lap and subsiding into sleep. Wexford asked her to describe the girl.

  “I’m not very good at describing people. I mean it’s the way they are inside that counts, isn’t it? She was older than me but not all that much, and she had dark hair that was quite long and she was wearing the most amazing clothes; that’s what stuck in my memory, her amazing clothes.”

  “Are you saying she was smartly dressed?” Wexford understood at once that he was using very outdated terms and Helen Brook looked puzzled. She leaned forward as if she had misheard. “Her clothes were particularly elegant?” he corrected himself, and added, “New? Beautiful? Fashionable?”

  “Well, not specially new. Elegant—that might be the word. You know what I mean.”

  “Was she wearing a hat?”

  “A hat? No, she wasn’t wearing a hat. She had lovely hair; she looked lovely.”

  A young woman ought to be able to judge the style of a contemporary. What she had told him had confirmed Linda Naseem’s evidence—or had it? Hats, after all, can be temporarily taken off. If this were the same girl both she and Helen Brook had seen, it meant that Gwen Robson had met her in one of the aisles of the shopping centre and presumably walked through the Tesco supermarket with her, the two of them then leaving together for the underground car park. If it was the same girl …

  IT IS RARE TO RECOGNIZE SOMEONE AT THE WHEEL OF a car. Generally, it is the car we recognize, then look quickly to identify the driver. Silver Escorts attracted Wexford’s attention at present, as did red Metros, and a closer look at the one approaching showed him Ralph Robson in the driving-seat. So Lesley Arbel was without transport today …

  “Turn round,” he said to Donaldson. “Take me to Sundays.”

  When they arrived, people were coming down the steps of the Regency mansion; the course had come to an end. There were as many men as women and most of them were young. Lesley Arbel, emerging from the open double entrance doors, stood out conspicuously from the rest by her looks and her clothes. Wexford, who when he first met her had been reminded by her sleek dressing of actresses in the early days of the talking cinema, now again recollected those thirties’ films. Only in them was it possible to capture such a scene, where there was no room for doubting who were extras and who the star. But because this was not a film and Lesley Arbel no confident movie queen swanning on celluloid, her appearance was a little ridiculous by contrast with all those in tweed coats and anoraks and jackets over tracksuits. She even came rather awkwardly down those steps, her heels so high as to throw her off-balance.

  The Kingsmarkham bus passed along the Forby Road, stopping opposite the gates and Sundays Lodge, and it was no doubt this bus she meant to catch. But her heels and the long tight black skirt restricted her steps and she was making very slow strutting progress towards the avenue when Wexford put his head out of the car window and asked if they might give her a lift home. It was more than a surprise, it seemed a shock, and she jumped. He had a feeling that if more comfortably shod, she would have made a run for it. However she came cautiously up to the car. Wexford got out, opened the rear door for her and she got awkwardly in ahead of him, ducking her head and holding on to her small black grosgrain hat.

  “I thought we might have a talk in private,” he said. “Without your uncle, I mean.”

  She was too nervous to speak and sat with her hands in her lap, staring at Donaldson’s broad back. Wexford noticed that her nails—which had protruded a good half-inch from her fingertips—had been filed down and were unpainted. Donaldson began to drive slowly down the avenue, between the lines of leafless hornbeams. The sun had just set and all the trees made a black tracery against a spectacular crimson sky.

  Wexford said quietly, “You didn’t tell me you were in Kingsmarkham on the day your aunt was killed.”

  She responded quite quickly and it was as if the question had been of no great significance. So might she have replied if a friend had reproached her for failing to make a promised phone call.

  “No, I was upset and I forgot.”

  “Come now, Miss Arbel. You told me you left Orangetree House early because you weren’t feeling well.”

  She muttered, “I wasn’t feeling well.”

  “Your illness didn’t prevent your coming to Kingsmarkham.”

  “I mean I forgot it might be important where I was.”

  She had been frightened, but she wasn’t frightened now; this must mean he had not asked the question she feared to hear. “It’s very important where you were. I understand you came here to check that you were on this course that was to start the following Monday?” She nodded, relaxing a little, her body less rigid under the stiffly padded shoulders of her pink and black striped jacket. “That can be verified, you know, Miss Arbel.”

  “I did check up on the course.”

  “You could have done that by phone, couldn’t you?”

  “I did try but their phones were out of order.”

  “And then you went to meet your aunt in the Barringdean Centre.”

  “No!” He couldn’t tell if it was a cry of denial through fear of discovery or simple astonishment that such a meeting could have been suspected. “I never saw her, I never did! Why would I go there?”

  “You must tell me that. Suppose I told you that you were seen by at least one witness?”

  “I’d say you were lying.”

  “As you were lying when you told me you were ill on November 19 and went home early from work?”

  “I wasn’t lying. I thought it wasn’t important just coming down here to look at a form and check up and then go back again. That’s all I did. I never went near the Barringdean Centre.”

  “You came and went by train?”

  She gave an anxious nod, falling into his trap.

  “You were very near the centre then, considering the pedestrian entrance is in the next street to Station Road. Wouldn’t it be right to say you returned to the station from Sundays and, remembering your aunt would be in the Barringdean Centre at that time because she always was, you went in and met her in the central aisle?”

  It was a vehement, tearful denial she made, but again Wexford had the feeling that whatever she was afraid of it was not this; it was not fear of having been seen with her aunt half an hour before her death that frightened her. And to his astonishment she suddenly exclaimed miserably, “I’ll lose my job!”

  This seemed almost an irrelevancy, at least a minor matter compared with the enormity of Gwen Robson’s death. He let her go, opening the door for her when the car stopped in Highlands outside her uncle’s house. For a few moments he stood there, watching the house. Behind drawn curtains the lights were already on. She had gone up the path at a hobbling run and was fumbling with her key when Robson opened the door to let her in. It was closed very rapidly. Now for the long evening, Wexford thought; the making of tea and perhaps scrambled eggs, the chat about the day she had passed and he had passed, complaints about his arthritis and sympathy from her, the relief of television. What had people in that situation done before television? It was unthinkable.

  Was it all out of the kindness of her heart? Was it that she had truly loved her aunt and now loved and pitied her uncle? A saint, an angel of mercy—that she must be to remain here for yet another weekend when London and her own home and friends were available to her, when there were three trains an hour to take her there. But Wexford didn’t think she was an angel of mercy; she hadn’t impressed him even as being particularly kind-hearted. Vanity and self-absorption don’t generally go with altruism—and what was the meaning of that final impassioned cry?

  Dita Jago’s daughter had called to collect her little girls and Wexford said to Donaldson. “You can take the car back and knock off if you like. I’ll walk home from here.”

  A momentary surprise crossed Donaldson’s face, then he remembered where home now was. Wexford strolled across the road. The Highlands lights were not
the gentle amber lamps of the street where his own house was but the harsh white kind, glass vases full of glare borne on concrete stilts. They stained the dark air with a livid fog and turned people and their clothes reptile colours, greenish and sour brown and sallow white. Melanie and Hannah—what was their name, Quincy?—looked tubercular, their lively dark eyes dulled and their red cheeks pallid. Their mother was wearing one of her own mother’s brilliant knitted creations, a sweater that probably had as many colours as a Persian carpet, a skirt of thick gathered folds on which the intricate stripes, no doubt of rich and varied shades, undulated like shadows in the wind … only it all looked brown and grey in that light.

  Nina was her name? As Wexford asked himself that, he heard Mrs. Jago call her by it and Nina Quincy, having settled her children in the back of the car, went up to her mother, put her arms round her and kissed her. Strange, Wexford thought; they see each other every day …. Mrs. Jago waved as the car departed; a shawl wrapped her shoulders today, a tapestry-like square with a fringed border. It seemed to suit her monumental shape, the heavy-featured face with its load of bunched coils of hair, better than contemporary dress. She acknowledged Wexford calmly.

  “You’re living up here now, they tell me.”

  He nodded. “How are the memoirs?”

  “I haven’t been doing much writing.” She gave him that look peculiar to people who have something to confide but don’t know if this is the right confidant. Should I? Shouldn’t I? Will I regret it once the words are out? “Come in a moment and have a drink.”

  A chat with a neighbour on the way home. A sherry. Why not? But it wasn’t sherry she gave him, far from it. A kind of schnapps probably, Wexford thought: icy-cold, sweetish and unbelievably strong. It made his eyebrows shoot up, it made him feel as if his hair stood on end.

  “I needed that,” she said, though there had been no alteration in her pleasant friendly manner, no gasp of relief.

  The pile of manuscript was precisely where it had been when he was last in this room, a hair lying across the top of the title page. He was sure that hair had been there last time. If Mrs. Jago had not been writing she had been knitting, and the jungle landscape had grown several more inches from the long curled needle, palm trees now sprouting fronds and a sky appearing. The germ of an idea pushed a shoot into his mind.

  “Did Gwen Robson know you were writing this book?”

  “Mrs. Robson?” It sounded like a measure, if not of her indifference to her dead neighbour, of the degree of acquaintance she had had with her in life. A remoteness was implied that Wexford found himself not quite believing in. “She was only once in this house; I don’t suppose she noticed.” Wexford thought for a moment that she was going to sneer, to add that Gwen Robson wasn’t the kind to read books or be interested in them. But instead she said, in such sudden contrast as to be shocking, “My daughter and her husband have parted. ‘Split up’ is what they say, isn’t it? I hadn’t any idea of it, I hadn’t any warning. Nina just came in this afternoon and said their marriage was over. My son-in-law left this morning.”

  “My daughter’s parted from her husband too,” Wexford said.

  She said, rather sharply for her but with some justice perhaps. “That’s different, though. A famous actress, rich, with a wealthy husband, always in the public eye …”

  “Only to be expected, do you mean?”

  She was too old and experienced to blush; it was more a wince she gave. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. It’s only that Nina’s got the two girls and it’s terrible for the children. And women left on their own to bring up children, they lead a miserable existence. She earns so little from her job, it’s only part-time. He’s leaving her the house, he’ll have to support them, but—if only I could see why! I thought they were so happy.”

  “Who knows what goes on in other people’s marriages?” said Wexford.

  Leaving her, he set off to walk up the hill. Wexford’s Third Law, he thought, ought to be: always live at the foot of a hill, then you’ll be fresh for climbing it in the morning. It was quite a steep haul up and all the way he could see his new home ahead of him, glowering uncompromisingly from the crown of the hill. There was no garage, so his car stood outside with Sylvia’s behind it and behind that another unidentifiable one that might be a neighbour’s. The removal van had gone. He wasn’t out of breath as he opened the gate (wooden in the wire fence) and walked up to the front door. I must be quite fit, he was thinking as he turned his key in the lock, opened the door and had his ears at once assaulted by the voice of Sylvia—shrill, cross, loud, easily penetrating these thin walls: “You ought to think of Dad! You ought to think how you’re putting his life in danger with your heroics!”

  13

  THE OTHER CAR MUST HAVE BEEN SHEILA’S, RENTED or else a replacement for the Porsche. Both sisters were standing up, glaring at each other along the length of the room. It was a very small room and they seemed almost to be shouting into each other’s faces. There was a door into the hall and another door into the kitchen and as Wexford came in through one Dora entered by the other, accompanied by the two little boys.

  Dora said, “Stop it, stop shouting!”

  But the boys were indifferent. They had come in to secure a pocket calculator (Robin) and a drawing block (Ben), and they proceeded to forage for these items in diminutive school briefcases, undeterred by the slanging match going on between their mother and their aunt. Their reaction would have been different if this had been parents quarrelling, Wexford thought.

  He looked from one young woman to the other. “What’s going on?”

  Sylvia’s reply was to throw up her hands and cast herself into an armchair. Sheila—her face flushed and her hair looking wild and tangled, though this might have been by design—said, “My case comes up on Tuesday week, in the magistrates’ court. They want me to plead guilty.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “Mother and Sylvia.”

  “Excuse me,” Dora said. “I didn’t say I wanted you to do anything. I said you ought to think about it very seriously.”

  “I have thought about it. I hardly think of anything else and I’ve discussed it with Ned exhaustively. I’ve discussed it with him because he’s a lawyer as much as … well, my boyfriend, or whatever you call it. And it isn’t doing our relationship a lot of good, to tell you the truth.”

  Robin and Ben gave up the search and carried their cases outside to the kitchen. Tactfully, Ben closed the door behind him.

  It was as if this freed Sylvia to speak openly and she said in a hard, unsympathetic way, “What she does is her own business. If she wants to stand up in court and say she’s not guilty, that governments are guilty for breaking international law or whatever—well, she can do that. And when she gets fined and refuses to pay the fine, she can go to prison if that’s what she likes.”

  Wexford interrupted her. “Is that what you’re going to do, Sheila?”

  “I have to,” she said shortly. “There’s no point otherwise.”

  “But it’s not just her,” Sylvia continued. “It’s all the rest of us she involves. Everyone knows who she is, everyone knows she’s your daughter and my sister. What’s that going to do for you as a police officer, having a daughter go to prison? This is a democracy and if we want to change things we’ve got a vote to do it with. Why can’t she use her vote and change the government like the rest of us have to?”

  Sheila said tiredly, “That’s the biggest cop-out of all. If you had a hundred votes all to yourself down in this neck of the woods you couldn’t change anything, not with a sitting Member with a sixteen-thousand majority.”

  “And that’s not the worst,” Sylvia went on, ignoring this. “The worst is that when those people who tried to bomb her know what she thinks, when she gets up and says it in court, they’re going to have another go, aren’t they? They nearly got you by accident last time and maybe this time they really will. Or maybe they’ll get you on purpose—or one of my children!�
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  Wexford sighed. “I’ve been drinking schnapps with a lady of my acquaintance.” He glanced at Dora and gave her the ghost of a wink. “I rather wish I’d got the bottle with me.” How wrong of me it is, he thought, that I love one of my children more than the other. “I suppose you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, as the current phrase has it,” he said to Sheila, but as he got up and made for the kitchen door—made for the beer he trusted was in the fridge—it was Sylvia on whose shoulder he laid a caressing hand.

  “Not all that current, Pop,” said Sheila.

  Things calmed down. At any rate, Sylvia soon left to take her sons home and cook her husband’s supper. Then Sheila and her parents went out to eat, no one yet feeling comfortable in what Dora called “this horrid little house.” Sheila talked moodily about Ned not wanting it known that someone in his position was consorting with someone in hers, though she didn’t explain what his position was and Wexford, true to his principles, wouldn’t ask.

  “When peace is so beautiful,” Sheila said, “and what everyone wants, why do they treat workers for peace like criminals?”

  Passing the police station on their way back from the restaurant in Pomfret, Wexford saw a light on in one of the interview rooms. Of course there was no real reason to suppose that Burden was in there with Clifford Sanders, yet he did suppose it with a chilling sense of unease. Forgetting Sheila and her troubles for the moment, he thought: I shall be embarrassed when I next see Mike, I shall feel awkward and therefore shall postpone that meeting. What am I going to do?

  BURDEN HAD NOT MEANT TO RECALL CLIFFORD TO the police station. His intention had been to call off his dogs for the duration of the weekend and let his baited creature make a partial recovery. The metaphor was his wife’s, not his, and he reacted with some anger to it. He now regretted discussing the case with Jenny and wished he had stuck to the principle (never much honoured in the observance) of not taking his work home.