The Veiled One

by Ruth Rendell

  “I don’t want anything to drink. I shall feel like hell in the morning. If I could justify what I did, I’d feel better. If I could tell myself the only possible way we could have nailed this man was by waiting for him to commit another murder—giving him enough rope, so to speak. You say you don’t think he wanted to confess?”

  “I don’t think he wanted to confess, Mike. Let’s go home.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Nearly two.”

  They closed the office door and walked down the corridor under the pale, steady, bleaching lights. Clifford was downstairs, at the back, in one of the cells. Kingsmarkham police station cells were more comfortable than most prisons, with a bit of rug on the floor, two blankets on the bunk and a blue slip on the pillow, a cubicle with loo and basin opening off the tiny room. Burden cast a backward glance in that direction as they came out of the lift. Sergeant Bray was on duty behind the desk with PC Savitt beside him, looking at something in a file. Wexford said good night but Burden said nothing.

  For the first time, the Christmas lights were on in the tree. Burden had noticed them as something unreal in the fog, a kind of mockery, as they returned from Ash Farm bringing Clifford with them. Either they were on a time clock which had failed to work, or someone had forgotten to switch them off. The reds and blues and whites came on for fifteen seconds, then the yellows and greens and pinks, then the lot, winking hard before the reds and blues and whites returned alone. By now the fog had almost lifted and the colours glimmered in a thin mist.

  “Wicked waste of the taxpayers’ money,” Burden growled.

  “I haven’t got my car,” Wexford said. “It seems so long ago that I’d forgotten. I suppose I meant to drive you in your car.”

  “I’ll drive you.”

  A town that slept, a town that might have been emptied of its folk that silent night—inhabitants who had fled, leaving a light on here and there.

  Burden said, climbing up to Highlands, turning into Eastbourne Road, “I still can’t see how he did it—killed Gwen Robson, I mean. He must have been in that car park by a quarter to six, met her as she came in to get her car and killed her. He would have been getting out of his mother’s car and she walking up to hers. That must have been the way of it—unpremeditated, a frenzied act on the spur of the moment. He’ll tell us now, no doubt.”

  Wexford began to say something about the grotesqueness, the incongruity, of a young man stepping out of a car and happening by chance to be holding a circular knitting needle. They passed Robson’s house—dark, all the curtains drawn—and Dita Jago’s where a light was on, a red glow behind drawn crimson curtains. A cat came out of the Whittons’, streaked across the road. Burden braked hard as it leapt clear, on to a wall, up a tree.

  “Damned things,” said Burden. “One shouldn’t brake, one shouldn’t give way to one’s reflexes like that. Suppose there’d been someone behind me? It was only a cat. Look, Reg, that woman Rosemary Whitton has to be wrong. I mean, it’s pretty hard for me to have to face that, because it means I was irresponsible in not consenting to talk to Clifford when he wanted me to. I took her word, of course I did. But we never really confirmed it.”

  Wexford sighed. “I did.”

  “What? Took her word? I know. But she was wrong. And the wine-market manager was wrong too. Rosemary Whitton must have seen Clifford ten minutes earlier and he’d gone before she hit the meter. It was a genuine mistake, but it was a mistake.”

  Up Battle Hill to stop outside his gate. The house was dark; Dora had gone to bed long ago.

  Wexford unclipped the seat belt. “Wait till the morning, shall we?”

  He said good night, dragged himself upstairs and fell exhausted into bed—then awoke immediately, energetically, into a prospect of sleepless hours. When they were past and he was back down there, preparing for Clifford’s appearance before the magistrates, he was going to have to tell Burden the facts: that he had checked and double-checked Rosemary Whitton’s statement; that he had not only checked with the wine-market manager and three occupants of flats above the wine market, but had also found the traffic warden who, arriving on the scene to examine the damaged meter, had—while talking to Rosemary Whitton—seen Clifford drive away. It had been five to six.

  19

  DOROTHY SANDERS HAD NEVER BEEN DIVORCED; Davidson’s investigation of records had established that. Nor had she needed to keep herself by the humble sewing and knitting—traditional occupations of the poor virtuous woman she had once read about in some historical romance?—which she told her son had supported them in his childhood. For during those years she had been regularly drawing on the joint bank account that was in her name and her husband’s. Now that she was dead, access to that account was no longer denied to the police.

  It had been fed by the interest on Charles Sanders’ investments, mostly unit trusts. Over a period of eighteen years since their separation, only she had drawn on it. From the bank manager’s slightly defensive manner, Wexford gathered that this perhaps curious fact had never been noticed. He was a man opposed to new technology and blamed the fault, if fault it was, on the fact that in recent years the administration of the account had been by computer. Wexford marvelled at Mrs. Sanders’ capacity for lying and sustained secretiveness. It made him wonder if she had ever been married to Sanders, even if Clifford was her own child, but these facts were soon established. Dorothy Clifford and Charles Sanders had been married at St. Peter’s, Kingsmarkham in October 1963 and Clifford born to her in February 1966.

  Wexford had himself driven back to Ash Farm and he took Burden with him, insisted on it. Burden had accepted Clifford’s innocence of the first crime at first with reservations and arguments, then with a deep and bitter self-reproach. It was clear to him, and this Wexford was unable to deny, that the death of Dorothy Sanders had come about as the direct result of his refusal to continue the sessions with Clifford.

  Burden was silent for a while. Then he said, “I think I shall have to resign.”

  “For God’s sake, why?”

  “If it’s true that I could drive a man to murder—and it is, I did do that—I’m not fit to be a police officer. It’s part of my duty to prevent crime, not provoke it.”

  “So, logically, you should never have questioned Clifford in the first place. Suspecting him of the murder of Gwen Robson, you should nevertheless have ignored him because he appeared to be an unbalanced person with abnormal reactions.”

  “I’m not saying that. I’m saying that having once questioned him I shouldn’t have … well, abandoned him to his fate.”

  “You should have gone on talking to him day after day, for hours on end, session after session? For how long? Weeks? Months? What about your work? Your own sanity, come to that? Am I my brother’s keeper?”

  Burden took that question which Wexford had meant rhetorically—which perhaps Cain had meant rhetorically—in a literal way. “Well, yes, maybe I am. What was the answer to it, anyway? What did whoever it was—God, was it?—say?”

  “Nothing,” said Wexford. “Absolutely nothing. Come on, forget about resigning. You’re not resigning, you’re coming with me to the scene of the crime.”

  In gloomy silence Burden sat beside him in the car. It was a passive sort of winter’s day, neither cold nor mild, the sky pale grey and clotted like porridge. Sometimes the sun appeared low on the horizon, a shiny disc of plate showing through where the gruel thinned. The shop windows in the High Street were full of pre-Christmas glitter and a huge imported Christmas tree, gift from some town in Germany no one had previously heard of but which was twinned with Kingsmarkham, had been set up outside the Barringdean Centre. Burden remarked in a sour way about the amount it must cost to run that electronic digital arrangement at the Tesco end which announced alternately that here were gifts for all the family and that nine shopping days remained until Christmas.

  “What are we coming here for, anyway?”

  He meant to Ash Farm, down long winding Ash La
ne, where the grass verges were grey with splashed mud and dead elms with peeling trunks awaited the axe. But the air was clear today and in the distance the outline of the hummocky hill that hid the town could be seen. Ivyclad Ash Farm slid into view, its many eyes peeping from amongst the evergreen growth. Two police cars were parked in front of it and a policeman in uniform was on duty at the foot of the flight of steps.

  “I hadn’t thought of going inside,” Wexford said.

  “You said we were visiting the scene of the crime.”

  Wexford made no reply but nodded to PC Leonard who saluted him and said, “Good afternoon, sir.” In spite of what he had seen on the previous evening he found it hard to realize that Dorothy Sanders, so strong and upright and confident, was dead, the metallic voice silenced for ever. And when he looked through the dark gleaming glass into the thinly furnished room where the ashes of a fire lay in the grate, he half-expected to see her there, moving across the uncarpeted floor, issuing her orders with a pointing finger. A ghost, that would have to be, and she had been afraid of ghosts, afraid of the dark and of letting fog enter the house …

  With Burden following him and Donaldson, he walked round the house into the back garden. It was new to him, but Burden had been out there before on the day of the search, triumphantly discovering garrotes in the shed attached to the rear wall. A curious place to put a shed, wasn’t it? In order to reach it, a considerable area of damp grass had to be crossed. Earth, whether turfed or not, is always wet in winter, even during dry spells. He felt his shoes sink into the squelchy softness.

  Dorothy Sanders had paid less attention to her garden than to her house, but had nevertheless achieved out here a similar kind of barren neatness. There were few plants that looked cultivated, though it was hard to tell at this time of the year, and even fewer weeds. It looked as if Mrs. Sanders—or Clifford, on her instructions—had watered the flowerbed areas with the kind of toxic stuff that destroys broad-leaved plants. It looked as if at some point during her life in this house she had set about destroying the garden as it must once have existed. The few trees had been savagely lopped, so that from the stumps of amputated branches new twigs grew out at strange angles. A faint pinkness had appeared in the sky, sign of sunset. It would be dusk very soon, then deeply dark. Nine shopping days to Christmas, seven long nights and seven short days to the Solstice. One day to Sheila’s court appearance …

  These short days, cut off in mid-afternoon, hindered his progress. Nature still had the upper hand … just. Or, rather, he couldn’t be absolutely sure the expense of using powerful lights was warranted. He padded through the wet grass to the furthermost corner of the garden and there, up against the back fence, he could just make out in the distance the low roof of what must be Ash Farm Lodge, rising above screens of Leyland cypress.

  “Would you like to introduce me to Mr. Carroll?”

  They drove down the lane in the sunset light, the last of the light. With a rattling cry, a cock pheasant rose out of the hedge on seldom-used cumbersome wings. There was the sound of a shot and then another.

  “It’s only Carroll,” said Burden. “The way Kingsmarkham’s become urbanized, we forget we live in the country sometimes.”

  Carroll’s dog came timidly to meet them. Perhaps, though, it wasn’t timid—perhaps it was slyly creeping up preparatory to an attack. Wexford put out his hand to the dog and a harsh voice shouted, “Don’t touch him!”

  The farmer appeared with a dead hare slung round his neck, in his left hand a pair of redleg partridges he was holding by their tail feathers.

  Wexford said mildly, “Mr. Carroll? Chief Inspector Wexford, Kingsmarkham CID, I believe you’ve met my colleague, Inspector Burden.”

  “He was this way before, yes.”

  “Can we go inside?”

  “What for?” Carroll asked.

  “I want to talk to you. If you’d rather we didn’t go into your house, you can come back to the police station with us. That will suit us just as well. It’s up to you, one or the other.”

  “You can come in if you want,” Carroll said.

  The dog preceded them in, head down and tail between its legs. Carroll made a growling noise at it, a remarkable animal noise which might have been expected to come from the dog, not its master. This was apparently the signal for it to go into its basket which it did like a hypnotic subject, curling itself into a circle and putting its head on its paws. Carroll hung up the twelve-bore, took off his boots and put them on the now stained and corrugated magazine on the oven top which was still just recognizable as a copy of Kim. The hare and the birds trailed bloody heads into the sink. The table was a mass of papers, chequebook and paying-in book from the Midland Bank, a VAT ledger, crumpled invoices. Wexford knew the chances of his being asked to sit down were around a hundred to one, so he had seated himself and motioned to Burden to do the same before Carroll had got his slippers on.

  “Where’s your wife, Mr. Carroll?” Wexford began.

  “What’s that to you?” He didn’t sit down, he stood over them. “It’s her up the road that’s dead, and her boy that’s potty did it. You stick to that, you see he’s put away for life; that’ll keep you lot busy, not coming poking into my business.”

  “Rumour has it that your wife has left you,” Wexford observed.

  For a moment he thought the farmer was going to strike him. Unpleasant as that would be, it would at least provide a reason for arresting him. But Carroll, having clenched his fists and put them up, stepped back, setting his teeth. Wexford decided just the same that he might feel more at an advantage on his feet. He was a bigger man than Carroll, though older.

  The kitchen was rapidly growing dark. He reached for the only switch in the room and unexpectedly bright light poured from the central bulb in its incongruous shade: pink frilled cotton in the shape of a mobcap. There were other such touches in that grim place: a battery-operated wall clock, its face a sunflower, a calendar that pictured a kitten in a basket, the date May of this year. In the bright light Carroll blinked.

  “It was about six months ago that she left, wasn’t it? End of June?” If Carroll wouldn’t answer, there wasn’t much he could do. He changed tack a little. “Tell me about your neighbor, Charles Sanders? Did you know him? Were you here when he was living here?”

  Carroll growled. It was the same language he used when issuing commands to his dog, but succeeded by reasonably comprehensible English. “His dad died. Day after the funeral he upped and left. What do you want to know that for?”

  “You don’t ask the police questions, Carroll,” said Burden. “We ask you. Right?”

  Another growl. It was almost funny.

  Wexford said, “He never came back. He never came back to see his son, he never contributed to his wife’s support or his son’s. He left his old mother in his wife’s care and she dumped her in an old people’s home. I’m being very frank with you, Mr. Carroll, and I’d like you to do the same by us. It’s eighteen years since Sanders left. You were newly married, newly arrived here. I don’t think he left, I think he’s dead. What do you think?”

  “How should I know? It’s no business of mine.”

  “What did your wife think, Mr. Carroll? She knew, didn’t she? Somehow or other she found out about Sanders. Did she tell you what she knew, or did she keep it to herself? Maybe she told only one person?”

  “What person?”

  By that remark Wexford had meant to infer nothing that could in fact be of momentous significance to Carroll, but the farmer read into it more than was implied and his face grew red and seemed to swell. Although he made no immediate move, a change had come over him—a kind of concentration, a gathering and intensifying of power, enough to make Burden spring to his feet and push back the chair. It was that which did it. Carroll reached behind him for the gun on the wall, unhooked it and, stepping back, levelled it at them from a distance of about four feet.

  “Put that down,” Wexford said. “Don’t be a fool.”

>   “I’m giving you one minute to get out of here.”

  At least now they would be able to arrest him, Wexford thought. The farmer could look at them and keep his eye on the sunflower clock at the same time. One eye open, the dog watched from his basket. This was something it understood—a gun aimed, a helpless quarry. When I double up full of shot, Wexford thought ridiculously, maybe it will come and retrieve me.

  Burden said, his head cocked towards the door, “There’s Donaldson coming now,” as if he heard footsteps.

  It was a trick and it worked. Carroll turned his head and Wexford’s fist shot out to catch him on the jaw. The gun went off as he fell, and in that low-ceilinged bungalow room it made an enormous noise, a noise like a bomb, a noise like the bomb in his front garden which Wexford couldn’t remember hearing. The farmer rolled over and the gun dropped from his hands to clatter away across the tiles. Bits of plaster dropped from the ceiling where shot had peppered it. Smoke and a stench of gunpowder and the bewildered dog looking from side to side, beginning a helpless, forbidden barking. And then Donaldson did come, pounding up the path and throwing open the back door.

  “Are you OK, sir? What happened?”

  “I don’t know my own strength,” said Wexford. He considered poking at Carroll with his toe, but thought better of it and heaved the man up by the shoulders. Carroll groaned, his head sagging. “I don’t suppose we’ve got any handcuffs in the car, have we?”

  “I don’t think so, sir.”

  “Then we must do without, but I don’t think he’ll give much trouble.”

  Carroll was a big man and it took the three of them to get him into the car. They shut up the dog in the kitchen and Donaldson, who was fond of dogs, gave him a bowl of water and the hare.

  “That’s the way to undo years of training in half an hour,” he said cheerfully.

  THE ARTIFACTS THAT LAY ALL OVER THE SURFACES in Wexford’s office—in court they would have been called “exhibits” —included Carroll’s twelve-bore, a muddied copy of Kim magazine, a circular knitting needle, size six, and some of the contents of the dead woman’s coat pockets. There was something distressing, though scarcely pathetic, about that lipstick in its shiny gilt case, the red of a fire engine. The almost white face powder with its faint iridescence had been marketed for someone young and fair, someone like Lesley Arbel. The chequebook for the joint account was in the names of C. L. Sanders and D. K. Sanders and—at least during the lifetime of this particular book it had been used only to draw sums of cash. A hundred pounds a month was what Dorothy Sanders had drawn during the past two years. It wasn’t much, it was modest, but for the past two years her income had been supplemented by Clifford’s earnings.