by Ruth Rendell
“Hallo?”
His mother-in-law’s voice and his wife’s intermingled as Jenny picked up the bedroom extension. He couldn’t control the little gasp of relief. Wexford said with quick intuition, “Has Clifford Sanders been hounding you?”
Burden nodded. “I think it’s stopped though. He hasn’t phoned or been here all day.”
“Been here?”
“Oh, yes. He was here last night, came to the door twice, but I do think it’s over now. Anyway,” Burden lied, “it’s not important, it’s not a problem. Your Mrs. J ago—do you see her as … ?”
Instead of answering directly, Wexford said, “Dita Jago might very well have been one of Gwen Robson’s blackmailees. She had the means to kill her. Of everyone in this case, she was the most likely to have been buying a circular knitting needle in the shopping centre that afternoon. On the other hand, she says she was in the public library, the central branch in the High Street, with her granddaughters. I jib a bit at asking those two little girls to alibi or not alibi the grandmother they’re obviously fond of; I won’t do it if I can avoid it, but …
“Anyway, the papers Lesley Arbel was looking for—and ransacked or spring-cleaned her uncle’s house in the process of so doing—weren’t sheets from Dita Jago’s manuscript. They were photocopies of letters.”
Burden said, “Do you mean letters Gwen Robson took or borrowed from the homes of her clients? Incriminating letters she then had copied?”
“Not quite, her niece got these letters for her. It was Lesley Arbel who made the copies to show to her aunt. Not because she thought they could be used for any criminal purpose, certainly not that, but to amuse her, I think—to entertain someone who loved gossip and took the same kind of pleasure in sexual irregularities as some of our Sunday newspapers do—gloating over matters that ostensibly they deplore.”
“Are you talking about letters to the agony aunt?”
“Of course. Lesley Arbel had easy access to them and a photocopier in the office where she worked. Some of the letters would appear in Kim—my God, Mike, the amount of Kim I’ve grubbed through in the past week—but most wouldn’t and some, even in these days of licence, would be considered unfit for publication. And even though there’s an unwritten law in the agony aunt’s department that staff preserve discretion—lip service to a kind of poor woman’s Official Secrets Act—it must have seemed harmless enough, what she was doing. None of it would go beyond the four walls of the house in Hastings Road … What is it, Mike? What’s wrong?”
Burden had jumped up and stood with head lifted. “Did you hear a car?”
Drily Wexford said, “I hear a car every minute of my life when I’m not asleep. How do you escape it in this world?”
The door opened and Mark came in, followed by his mother. But Burden continued to stand transfixed, only holding out an absent hand to the child. Mark wasn’t shy; he went up to Wexford, wanting the pencil he held in his hand, then the pad on which notes had been made, finally climbing on to Wexford’s knees. Burden went to the window and parted the curtains with both hands. His knuckles had whitened and his shoulders drooped a little.
“Oh, not again?” Jenny said. “He’s not back again?”
“I’m afraid he is.” Burden turned back into the room and faced Wexford. “Am I overreacting when I say I’m seriously thinking of applying for an injunction?”
Instead of answering directly, Wexford said, “Let me go.” He lifted the little boy on to the floor, sacrificed pad and pencil to him. “Don’t get it on the carpet, or your Mum’ll be after me.”
As he came out into the hall, the bell rang. Wexford let it ring again. Burden had joined him, was standing just behind him. The letter-box lid started flapping as fingers pushed at it and then the other hand pounded on the knocker. The fingers appeared under the opened letter-box lid and there was something about them and the smear marks they left on pale paintwork that made Burden draw in his breath with a rough hiss. Wexford crossed the hall and opened the door.
Clifford took a step back when he saw him. He was looking beyond Wexford’s bulk and when he saw Burden he smiled. Wexford eyed him in a kind of stricken silence, for Clifford was covered with blood. His grey shirt and knitted pullover and the zipper-jacket he wore, his grey flannel trousers, his striped tie and grey socks and lace-up shoes—all were thick with blood, matted and plastered with it, and in places the blood was damp still, glistening still. And Clifford, smiling, stepped over the threshold into the hall with no one to impede him until the little boy came out of the living room and Burden, sweeping him up in his arms, shouted, “Don’t let him see. For God’s sake, don’t let him see!”
18
THE DRIVING-SEAT OF HIS MOTHER’S CAR WHICH HAD always been a curious place of refuge for Clifford, a sanctuary and scene of unimaginable cogitations, was bloodied from his clothes. Easy to make an analogy here with wombs, but Wexford shied away from that one. Though it was dark and foggy, he had the seat of the car and the blood-encrusted steering wheel covered up before it was towed away. Now they sat in the first of a convoy of police vehicles, Clifford between him and Burden, crawling through the fog. Donaldson’s headlights made two green bars of radiance that petered out into the wool-like greyness after a few feet. Behind them another driver clung to Donaldson’s rear lights and a third followed, all moving at about fifteen miles an hour.
Clifford had Burden to himself now, a captive therapist, and his face wore an expression that was at the same time serene and insane. At appalling cost he had got what he wanted. He talked. He spoke uninterruptedly, sometimes lifting up his bloody hands which had smeared Burden’s door with stains, the bitten nails blackened with blood, turning them over and looking at them with wondering pleasure. Already he had told Burden what he had done and—insofar as his conscious mind understood this—why he had done it. But he repeated himself as if he enjoyed the sound of his own monotonous, now measured and almost complacent voice.
“She sent me up into the attic, Mike. She thought she could shut me in like she did when I was little. I was to go up there and fetch her down a lamp. The one in the dining room had got broken, there was a fault in the connection, and she said to fetch her one of the lamps that had belonged to my grandparents. But I’m cunning, Mike, I’m cleverer than she is basically, I’ve got a better brain. I knew she would rather sit in the dark than use anything from up there. She wouldn’t use a lamp my father’s mother had used.”
Burden was returning his gaze with what looked like blankness unless you knew Burden as Wexford did and then you understood it was controlled desperation.
“The truth was she wanted to keep me from seeing you. When she told me she’d phoned you to complain about our seeing each other—when she told me that, I saw red. But I didn’t show my feelings, I kept everything suppressed, I didn’t even answer her. I went upstairs like an obedient little boy. Of course I couldn’t be sure what she was up to then; I wondered what she was at. I knew she was following me up, though, and I said to myself, why is she following me when she’s asked me to fetch her something? If she’s going to come up too, why couldn’t she have fetched it herself?”
Forcing the words out in a voice that sounded unlike his own, Burden said, “So what … what did you do, Clifford?” He had already cautioned him. It had been a bizarre ritual taking place in the hall of Burden’s own house, Clifford pleasurably pointing out individual blood-stains on his jacket, his shirt, his trousers, beginning on a confession whose utterance held a childlike innocence, while Burden mouthed in that same strangled tone the words of the caution: “You are not obliged to say anything in answer to the charge but anything you do say …”
Now Clifford continued in the same blithe, confiding way, “It wasn’t the attic where Mr. Carroll had to break the door down. We’d never had that door mended. The photographs were in there. It was the one with the bedroom furniture.” He brought his face closer to Burden’s—said in an intimate way, as to one familiar with the secret
s of all hearts, “You know what I mean.”
Donaldson braked hard as they came suddenly up against the headlights of a huge truck. It was carrying earth-moving equipment, cranes and scoops that loomed dinosaur-like out of the rolling mist. Slowly the convoy edged past it; they were beyond Sundays now, in the narrow lane that led nowhere but to the Sanders’ house and the farmer’s bungalow. Fog filled the channel between high hedges, hung overhead like dark fallen cloud. They weren’t far from the entrance now. Donaldson crept along, stopped the car once or twice—like a dog sniffing, scenting its way to the familiar ground. And it seemed that down here in the least likely place, a low place still in the river valley, the fog had lifted a little, for a high wall of hedge was visible and a tree like a great figure with arms upraised.
Clifford hadn’t once looked out of the window; Burden’s face seemed the only view he required. He said conversationally, “All those mattresses were in there, and blankets and things. I expect you remember that time I showed you. And there was a lamp there too, like she said there was. She’s clever, she knows about getting her details right. But there was something she forgot. It was the wrong sort of plug, the old-fashioned sort with no earth, an old ten-amp plug with no earth. It was so absurd I could have laughed out loud, only I didn’t feel like laughing then, Mike …”
The gap in the hedge was found and Donaldson turned in carefully. Tyres crunched on the gravel. The leafy wall of the house, a great square of dark, still, hanging foliage, reared before them. Clifford turned his head at last, gave his home an indifferent look.
“She came up behind me. She was quiet enough, but I was prepared for her. Strange, isn’t it, Mike? She’s a mystery, she’s hidden behind a mask, and she’s slow and gliding like all mysterious people. But I know her and I knew what she was going to do; it was so obvious. Her hand went down to the door handle to pull out the key and I was standing there with that old lamp in my hands—”
“Come on, Clifford,” Burden said, “we’re here.”
The air felt wet; it was just as if a cold, wet hand wiped their faces as Wexford walked up to the front door. Dr. Crocker was getting out of the car behind with Prentiss, the Scene-of-Crimes man, and there was a new photographer he didn’t recognize. Clifford wouldn’t separate himself from Burden but stayed close to him, nearly but not quite touching him. If he had actually touched him, Burden thought he might have cried out in horror, though he would have exerted all the control he was capable of to avoid this. It was bad enough knowing some of the blood adhered to his own clothes after that nightmare car journey. He knew he would have to burn everything it had touched.
Wexford asked Clifford for the front-door key and Clifford’s answer was to pull out his pockets, the pockets of his jacket and trousers. They were all quite empty. He had left his ignition key in the Metro. As to the others …
“I must have dropped them somewhere. I’ve lost them. They may be somewhere in the garden here.”
Under the wet grass, among the blackened weeds beaded with waterdrops, or on the road in the gutter outside Burden’s house. Wexford made the decision quickly.
“We’ll force the door. Not this one, it’s too heavy. A door at the back.”
It was a slow, grim procession that made its way round the side of the house to the back regions where the rear wall and shed were just visible in the light of Archbold’s and Davidson’s torches, but nothing beyond. The beam of light played on a back door that looked solid enough, but was less weighty than the massive studded oak barrier whose key Clifford had lost. Davidson was the biggest of them after Wexford and he was also the youngest, but it was Burden who pushed forward and put his shoulder to the door. He had energy which must be released, some act of violence he needed to perform.
Two hard runs at it and the door went down. The crash it made set Clifford laughing; he laughed merrily as they stepped over the shattered boards, the broken glass. Olson would have said, Wexford thought, that it was more than a citadel of bricks and mortar they had broken into and laid open. The flooding of the place with light brought a kind of relief, not that a really bright illumination was possible, for Mrs. Sanders had been mean with the electricity. It was colder in here even than outside. A little of the fog seemed to have got in as Burden recalled the woman had once warned him it would, waiting ghost-like on the threshold to slip in. The damp chill seemed to penetrate clothes and prick skin with icicles.
“Stop that laughing,” he said roughly.
His voice wiped Clifford’s face clean of all amusement. It was at once grave and rueful. “Sorry, Mike …”
They went upstairs, Wexford leading the way. Through some lunatic quirk of meanness or indifference, it was impossible to turn upstairs lights on from downstairs, so that one walked out of light into a yawning darkness before a hand could reach out for a switch. The comparatively elegant staircase gave way to the steep attic flight. Wexford could see nothing at the top, only deep blackness. He put out his hand for Archbold’s torch and the thin beam of light showed him a half-open door at the head of the stairs.
The light switch wasn’t even on the staircase wall but up in the passage. He deliberately averted his eyes from the open door and the room until the light was on. Then he entered the room with Burden and Clifford at his heels, the others close behind. Wexford put the attic light on and then he looked.
Dorothy Sanders lay half on her back, half-sideways on one of the mattresses. A small, thin woman, composed of wire only in metaphor and fancy, she had had as much blood in her as anyone else and most of it seemed to have spilled from that fragile frame. Face and head were a mass of blood and tissue, cerebral matter and even bone chips. Her hair was lost in it, drowned in it. She lay in her own blood, dark as wine and clotted to a paste, on a mattress dyed crimson-black.
Beside the body, not flung down but set up precisely on a small round-topped bedside table, was a lamp in the art nouveau style, a sculptured lily growing from its heavy metal base, its shade composed of frayed and split pleated silk. It was a forensic scientist’s ideal, this lamp, from the clots of blood and bloody hair which encrusted its base to the stain which transformed its now bent silk shade from green to an almost total dark brown.
Of them all only Clifford was unused to sights such as this, but he alone among them was smiling.
IT WAS VERY LATE. THEY HAD DONE EVERYTHING—what Sergeant Martin insisted on calling “the formalities.” But the idea of going to their respective homes had scarcely entered Wexford’s head, still less Burden’s. Burden’s face had that look of a man who has seen indelible horrors. They are stamped there, those sights, but showing themselves in the staring eyes and taut skin as the skull inside the flesh reveals itself, a symbol of what has been seen and a foreshadowing of a future.
Burden couldn’t rest. He stood in Wexford’s office. He just stood, keeping his eyes averted from Wexford’s, then bending his head and pressing his fingers to his temples.
“You had better sit down, Mike.”
“You’ll be saying it wasn’t my fault in a minute.”
“I’m not a psychiatrist or a philosopher. How would I know?”
Burden moved. He held his hands behind his back, came over to a chair and stood in front of it. “If I had left him alone …” He didn’t finish the sentence.
“Strictly speaking, it was he who wouldn’t leave you alone. You had to question him in the first place; you couldn’t be expected to foresee the turn things would take.”
“Well, if I hadn’t … rejected him then, when he wanted to talk to me. It’s ironical, isn’t it? First he didn’t want me and then I didn’t want him. Reg, could I have averted this by letting him come and talk to me?”
“I wish you’d sit down. I don’t know what it is you want, Mike. Do you want the hard truth or something to comfort you?”
“Of course I want the truth.”
“Then the truth probably is—and I realize it’s hard to take—that when you in your own words rejected Cliff
ord, he felt he had to do something to draw your attention to him. And the best way to draw a policeman’s attention to someone is to become a murderer. Clifford, after all, isn’t sane; he doesn’t have sane reactions. Of course he attacked his mother to prevent her locking him in that room, but he could have achieved that without killing her. He could have overpowered her and locked her in there himself. He killed her to attract your attention.”
“I know, I see that. I realized it when we were there … in that room. But he was a murderer already. Why couldn’t he have admitted killing Mrs. Robson? That would have attracted my attention all right. Do you think—” Burden drew in his breath, expelled it with a sigh. He was sitting down now, leaning forward and holding on to the edge of Wexford’s desk with both hands. “Do you think that’s what he wanted to talk to me about when he kept on trying to see me? Do you think he wanted to confess?”
“No,” Wexford said shortly. “No, I don’t.”
He was anxious now to bring this conversation to a close. The question he was sure Burden was going to ask would be far better postponed till the morning. Burden was in a bad enough state as it was without this further addition to his guilty feelings. For this would be the ultimate guilt. Of course he would have to know tomorrow, he would have to know as soon as possible in the morning … before the special court sat. “Mike, would you like a drink? I’ve got some whisky in the cupboard. Don’t look like that, I don’t tipple the stuff secretly—or even unsecretly, come to that. One of our … clients offered it to me as a bribe and because I thought it would be handy to have, I took it and gave him the current Tesco price for it. Six pounds forty-eight, I think it was.” He was talking for the sake of talking as, burbling on. “I won’t have one, though. Let me have the Clifford tapes, will you, and then I’m going to drive you home. I’ll give you a stiff one and then take you home.”
