The Veiled One

by Ruth Rendell

  “How does she know it was Clifford?”

  “She gave me a good description. It was a red Metro. She’s no fool, Mike; she’s something rather high-powered, a systems analyst, though I confess I’m not sure what that is.”

  “And she says it was at a quarter to six?”

  “She was late, she was in a hurry. Women like her are always in a hurry—inevitably. She says she wanted to get home before the kids were put to bed at six. When she first got back into the car she looked at the clock—I always do that myself, I know what she means—and it was exactly five-forty-five. Which means it was a good few minutes after that by the time she’d had her slanging match with Clifford and crunched the headlight on a meter.”

  “Is that what she did?” asked Burden ruminatively, his frown threatening a further attack on women at the wheel. “Why didn’t he tell me that?”

  “Didn’t notice, I daresay. She says he moved as soon as it was too late to matter.”

  The woman’s statement would now have to be checked, thoroughly investigated, and until that had been done Burden’s interrogation of Clifford must be suspended. He didn’t go back to the interview room. The anger and frustration which might more naturally have been vented on Wexford he wanted to splash furiously over the man downstairs. He could have put through a phone call to his own office but couldn’t face explaining to Clifford, so he sent Archbold back with the message to let him go, to tell him he wouldn’t be needed again.

  “Where would you hide something, Mike, if you were Gwen Robson?”

  Smarting from his defeat, not yet fully grasping what the result of exonerating Clifford would be, Burden said sullenly, “What sort of something?”

  “Papers. A few sheets of paper.”

  “Letters, do you mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Wexford said. “Lesley Arbel was looking for papers, but I don’t think she found them. They’re not in the bank and they’re not with Kingsmarkham Safe Depository Limited—I’ve just tried there.”

  “How do you know Lesley Arbel didn’t find them?”

  “When I spoke to her on Friday she was worried and unhappy. If she’d found what she turned the house out for, she’d have been over the moon.”

  “I’m wondering if Clifford could have killed his other grandmother, his mother’s mother. He’s a very strange character altogether. He has all the salient features of the psychopath … What are you laughing at?”

  “Leave it, Mike,” Wexford said. “Just leave it. And leave the psychiatry to Serge Olson.”

  BURDEN WAS TO REMEMBER THAT LAST REMARK when Olson phoned him on the following morning. He had thought of very little apart from Clifford Sanders during the intervening time and everything he had done had been concerned with this new alibi. He had even interviewed Rosemary Whitton himself and, unable to shake her conviction of the relevant time, had questioned the Queen Street greengrocer. If no one in Queen Street remembered Clifford in the Metro, a good many shopkeepers recalled Mrs. Whitton hitting the meter post. The manager of the wine market remembered the time: it was before he closed at six, but not much before. He had turned the door sign to “Closed” immediately after he returned from inspecting the damage. Unconvinced but obliged at any rate temporarily to yield, Burden turned his attention from Clifford Sanders to Clifford Sanders’ father … As a temporary measure at any rate. He wouldn’t speak to Clifford Sanders again for a week, and in the meantime he would root out Charles Sanders and begin a new line of enquiry there. But before he could begin, Serge Olson phoned him.

  “Mike, I think you should know that I’ve just had a call from Clifford cancelling his Thursday appointment and, incidentally, all further appointments with me. I asked him why and he said he had no further need of my particular kind of treatment. So there you are.”

  Burden said rather cautiously, “Why are you telling me, Mr. Olson—Serge?”

  “Well, you’re subjecting him to some fairly heavy interrogation, aren’t you? Look, this is delicate ground—for me, at any rate. He’s my client. I am anxious not to, let’s say, betray his confidences. But it’s a serious matter when someone like Clifford abandons his therapy. Mike, Clifford needs his therapy. I’m not saying he necessarily needs what I can give him, but he needs help from someone.”

  “Maybe,” said Burden, “he’s found another psychiatrist. You needn’t worry about the possible effects of what you call heavy interrogation anyway. That’s over, at any rate for the time being.”

  “I’m glad to hear it, Mike, I’m very glad.”

  Putting it into words, that he had given up questioning Clifford, put things into perspective. Burden suddenly realized how much he hated being closeted with Clifford and hearing all these revelations. He would have no more of it—not until, that is, he had another positive lead. His mind made up, he looked out of the window to where they were putting lights in the branches of the tree that grew on the edge of the police station forecourt. It wasn’t a Christmas tree or even a conifer, come to that, but an ash whose only distinction was in its size. Burden watched the two men at work. Putting coloured lights in the tree was his idea, later backed up by the Chief Constable, in the interest of promoting jollier relations with the public. Wexford’s comment had been a derisive laugh. But surely you couldn’t go on feeling antagonistic towards or afraid of or suspicious about a friendly body that hung fairy-lights in a tree in its front garden? This morning he felt neither jolly nor friendly, in the mood rather to snap at anyone who made jokes about the tree. Diana Pettit had already had the rough side of his tongue for suggesting that all the little lamps should be blue. When the phone rang again he picked up the receiver and said, “Yes?” testily.

  It was Clifford Sanders. “Can I come and see you?”

  “What about?” asked Burden.

  “To talk.” No time was mentioned and Burden knew what Clifford was like about time. “You made me finish early yesterday and I’d a lot more to say. I just wondered when we could start again.”

  In my own good time, my lad, Burden thought. Next week maybe, next month. But what he said was, “No, that’s it. That’s all. You can get back to work, get on with your life—OK?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but put the phone down.

  It rang again ten minutes later. By that time the younger and more intrepid of the two men had climbed to the top of the ladder and threaded the lead with bulbs on it through some of the highest branches. Burden thought how disastrous it would be, and what the media would make of it, if the man fell and got hurt. He spoke a milder “Yes?” into the phone and got Clifford’s voice suggesting in an eager, urgent tone that previously they had been cut off. Burden said that as far as he knew they hadn’t been cut off. All that needed to be said had been said, hadn’t it?

  “I’d like to come and see you this afternoon if that’s all right.”

  “It’s not all right,” Burden said, aware that he was back into an earlier mode of addressing Clifford—talking as if he were a child, but unable to do otherwise. “I’m busy this afternoon.”

  “I can come tomorrow morning then.”

  “Clifford, I’m going to ring off now. OK, is that understood? We’re not being cut off, I’ve finished, I can’t discuss this any more. Goodbye.”

  For some reason this second call disturbed Burden. It gave him a curious feeling very much like that experienced by those who, having had little to do with the handicapped, are brought into unexpected contact with someone who lolls and drools and paws at them with spastic hands. Their recoil and gasp are unforgivable, are outrageous, and Burden felt a little ashamed of himself as he put the phone down sharply, as he stepped back, looking at the phone as if Clifford or something of Clifford actually lived inside the brown plastic instrument. What a fool! What was the matter with him? He lifted the receiver once more and gave instructions to the switchboard to put no more calls from Clifford Sanders through to him; furthermore, to monitor all calls that came.

  IT WOULD BE USELESS TO SEARCH THE HOUSE
. LESLEY Arbel had had two weeks in which to do that and she might be less experienced at searching than Wexford’s officers were, but she had had more time and presumably a personal interest in what she was seeking—whatever that was. A will? Gwen Robson had had nothing to leave. Something that would incriminate a guilty, frightened person? Wexford couldn’t imagine her blackmailing her own, surely loved, niece. And yet Lesley had been desperate to find those papers, if it was papers.

  “I’ll lose my job!” she had cried out to him.

  It seemed quite inconsequential. At one moment he had been asking her why she had not told him she was in Kingsmarkham that Thursday; the next, she was bewailing her threatened job. He walked up the path to Mrs. Jago’s house and rang the bell. She came quickly to the door—large, smiling, light-footed. The smile looked a little forced but not, he thought, because he as a policeman was unwelcome.

  “All alone today?” he asked.

  “Nina doesn’t work on Tuesday or go shopping. I saw her yesterday.” They were in the living room now, in the jungle of knitted flowers and trees, but the manuscript was no longer on the table. Dita Jago followed the direction of his eyes. “I didn’t want to see her today. I’d had enough, I didn’t feel I could take any more.”

  The miseries of a deserted wife, did she mean? The plaints of a young woman abandoned to bring up two children on her own? He didn’t enquire. He asked her where she thought Gwen Robson would have hidden whatever it was she had to hide, but as he did so he remembered how she had disclaimed all but a bare acquaintance with the dead woman. She picked up the circular needle from which the great tropical landscape hung and he saw that she had reached the sky, a blue expanse with tiny clouds. But instead of resuming her work, she sat clasping the two reinforced points of her needle in her hands. She looked at him and away.

  “I knew her so little. How can I say?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “The house is the same as this one. I was thinking there might be some peculiarity, some feature of the house well known to residents but absolutely unknown to outsiders.”

  “A secret panel?”

  “Not exactly that.”

  “Perhaps the murderer took this mysterious thing away, whatever it was. Would you like a drink?”

  He shook his head rather too quickly and her eyebrows rose.

  “What’s become of the book?” he asked for something to say. “You’ve finished it and sent it to a publisher?”

  “I haven’t finished it and I never will. I nearly burned it last night and then I thought—who needs emotional gestures, dramas? Just put it away in a drawer—so I did. I had such a day yesterday, it upset me so. It’s a funny thing, but I’d like to tell you about it. May I? There doesn’t seem to be anyone else I could tell.”

  “It makes a change,” he said, “someone wanting to tell me things.”

  “I like you,” she said, and it wasn’t naive or disingenuous; it sounded simply sincere. “I like you, but I don’t really know you and you don’t know me, and I doubt if we shall ever know each other much better.” A glance levelled at him seemed to ask for confirmation and he nodded. “Maybe that’s an ideal set-up for confiding.” She was silent, but her hands were still and they no longer held the needle.

  “My daughter told me that she had an affair with a man—no, not an affair, not so much as that, a one-night stand, I think it’s called—and she was silly enough to tell her husband about it. Not at once; she waited a long while. She should have forgotten it, put it behind her. He confessed something of his own to her, some peccadillo, and she came out with this thing of hers and instead of being as forgiving as she was, he said that changed everything—it changed all his feelings about her.”

  “Like Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” Wexford murmured, “and we think times have changed. She didn’t say anything of all this to you till yesterday?”

  “That’s right. I’d asked her if there was any hope of a reconciliation. Well, I went so far as to ask her what was the basic trouble between them. You’re a parent, so you know what I mean by ‘went so far.’ They don’t like questioning even when it … well, springs from one’s real concern.”

  “No,” said Wexford, “they don’t.” He considered. “May I … ?” He was unusually tentative. “Would it be possible for me … to read your manuscript?”

  She had picked up her knitting, but now she let it fall into her lap once more. “Why on earth … ?” A sudden eagerness in her voice nearly told him he was on the wrong tack, pursuing the wrong course altogether. “You don’t know any publishers, do you?”

  He did, of course. Burden’s brother-in-law Amyas Ireland had become a friend over the years, but he wasn’t going to encourage false hopes there. Nor to tell the whole truth at this stage. “I’m simply curious to read it.” He observed how her attitude towards the manuscript had changed since she had taken heart from confiding in him. “Will you let me?”

  Thus it was that he found himself making his way up a hill which seemed steeper than it had the evening before, carrying what felt like ten pounds’ weight of paper in one of Tesco’s red plastic bags. He had planned on finishing the A.N. Wilson that evening and longed to know how it ended—but this, this was important.

  IT WAS TOO EARLY YET TO SWITCH ON THE CHRISTMAS lights in the tree, Burden thought, only December 8. However, no one showed any signs of wanting to switch them on and to passers-by they must be invisible. The evening was dark and misty. How long was it since they had seen the sun by day or, come to that, the moon by night?

  There were the usual cars on the forecourt where the lamps made everything look like an out-of-focus sepia photograph. Someone had just driven up in a Metro which could have been of any colour. It meant nothing to Burden and he took his raincoat off the hook and went down in the lift. Home early for once! His little boy would still be up, bathed and powdered, running around in pyjamas; the radio on because Jenny preferred it to television; a smell of something exotic but not too exotic, one of the few examples of foreign cuisine he liked—pesto sauce, for instance, or five spices in a stir-fry being prepared for his dinner; Jenny harassed but happy in a blue tracksuit. Burden took a yearning, sensuous delight in these things. The clutter, the pretty paraphernalia of domestic life which are the aspects of marriage many married men dislike gave him intense pleasure. He never got enough of them.

  He crossed the black and white checkerboard floor of the foyer and someone got up from a chair and came over to him. It was Clifford Sanders.

  Clifford said, “I’ve been trying to get hold of you all the afternoon. They kept saying you were busy.”

  Burden’s initial reaction was to turn on Sergeant Camb who stood behind the reception counter, but as he took a step towards him he remembered he had said nothing to the sergeant, or indeed to anyone, about not admitting Clifford to the police station. It hadn’t occurred to him that Clifford would actually come here. Had he the right, come to that, to exclude him? He didn’t know. He didn’t know if he could legally keep innocent, law-abiding members of the public out. Anger against Clifford must be kept under control.

  He said stiffly, “I was busy. I’m busy now. You must excuse me, I’m in a hurry.”

  The otherwise blank, childlike, pasty face seemed to have only one expression—puzzlement. A deep bewilderment left the eyes unclouded, puckered the skin of Clifford’s forehead into a concentrated frown. “But I’ve got a lot more to say. I’ve only just started; I have to talk to you.”

  Not for the first time, Burden thought that if he had seen this man in the street and not known who he was, he would have thought him retarded. These were deep waters, muddied and with strange things in the depths—but was it possible to be retarded not in the body or the brain but somewhere else? In the soul, the psyche? A horribly uncomfortable feeling took hold of Burden and he seemed to shrink away from the touch of his own clothes on his skin. He could no longer look into those infant’s eyes, watch the working of thick, uncontrolled lips.


  “I’ve told you, we’ve nothing more to say to one another.” God, he sounded like someone ending a love affair! “You’ve helped us with our enquiries, thank you very much. I assure you we shan’t want you again.”

  With that he escaped. He would have liked to run, but dignity forbade it, that and self-respect. He was aware as he walked with deliberately measured tread towards the swing doors that Camb was watching him curiously, that Marian Bayliss who had just come in had paused to stare and that Clifford still stood in the centre of the floor, his lips moving silently and his hands held up in front of him.

  Burden opened the door and, once outside, ran to his car. The red Metro he had seen come in but whose colour the yellow lamps had altered was parked beside it. Impossible to draw any conclusion but that Clifford had done this purposely.

  And as Burden switched on the ignition, he saw Clifford come out. He ran up, calling, “Mike, Mike … !”

  Burden didn’t have to back. He drove straight out through the gates.

  16

  “HE’S MADE A TRANSFERENCE,” SERGE OLSON SAID. “It’s a very clearly defined example of transference.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” Burden said. They were in Wexford’s office, the three of them. The psychotherapist’s face amid surrounding and intervening bushes of hair was like that of an extremely intelligent vole peering out from a frondy sanctuary. And the bright beady eyes had their fierce animal look. Burden had expected to go to him, but Olson had said he would come to the police station as he had no clients on a Thursday morning. Throughout the previous day Clifford Sanders had pursued his course of trying to speak to Burden. None of his phone calls had been put through but Burden was told, to his considerable dismay, that fifteen had been made. And Clifford had returned to the police station in time to repeat his intercepting tactic as Burden left for home.