Wexford 14 - The Veiled One (13 page)

   ‘There’s a piece in there about Sheila,’ Sylvia said, ‘and some quite nice photos from the TV series.’

   He turned to look at pictures of Sheila in a white ball-gown, in her Victorian lady’s black street dress and bonnet. The last instalment of Lady Audley’s Secret was showing that evening; it would be repeated on Saturday, but who knew where they would be on Saturday? Neil wanted to watch a programme about finance on another channel and his elder son Robin was trying to persuade his mother to let him stay up and see Auntie Sheila. Rather surprisingly, Sylvia came down on her mother’s side and in favour of watching this final episode. Had Neil forgotten they wouldn’t be able to see the repeat because they were going out to dinner on Saturday night?

   Neil lost and Robin lost. The little boy had come down for the third time in his pyjamas and was standing wistfully in the doorway. Wexford suddenly knew he wasn’t going to be able to watch; he had re-read the novel while Sheila was rehearsing for the television adaptation, and he knew very well what was to happen to Lady Audley tonight: she was to be cast into the continental insane asylum. The way he felt, he would be unable to bear seeing Sheila even acting that stuff, to see her manhandled and screaming.

   His head ached and he was tired. He got up and took the little boy’s hand and said he was going to bed, too, so he would come up with Robin. The introductory music, melancholy-sweet, followed them softly up the stairs and then someone closed the door.

It was a dangerous feeling, this excitement born of hunting down a quarry - or born, rather, of creating a quarry fit to be hunted. Burden knew he was doing this and that it would be wise to pause and take stock. He did pause, briefly, and reminded himself how important it was not to tailor facts to fit a theory. On the other hand, he was growing very sure that Clifford Sanders was guilty of this crime. All he must be careful to do was to avoid pushing witnesses. Guide them, yes, but not give them enthusiastic shoves. In a frame of mind he told himself was cool and unbiased, he went very early in the morning to Highlands. There he got a surprise; as he turned into Hastings Road, he saw Lesley Arbel come out of Robson’s house and approach his car, the silver Escort which was parked at the kerb. Burden pulled up behind the Escort.

   ‘Not back at work, Miss Arbel?’ he asked.

   She was dressed with extreme severe formality in a black suit, white tie-necked blouse, black transparent seamed stockings and very high-heeled black patent shoes. With her glistening chestnut-coloured hair and painted eggshell face, she reminded Burden of one of those ‘grown-up’ dolls little girls have for birthday presents and which come with their own fashionable wardrobe.

   ‘I’m not at work this week. I’m doing a course in word processors.’

   ‘Ah,’ said Burden. ‘That would be the one at Sundays.’

   ‘The Sundays Conference Centre, yes. The company have given me two weeks off to take the course and it happened to be very convenient to stay with Uncle.’ She put a hand in a sleek black glove on the car door, remembered something. ‘Uncle’s got a bone to pick with you. Those bags of stuff you sent over, he said the piece of beef had gone off. It smelt disgusting, he said. I never saw it - he’d wrapped it up and put it in the bin before I ever got home.’

   Taken aback, Burden had no rejoinder, but at that moment another car drew up and parked on the opposite side of the street. The woman called Mrs Jago came down to her front gate as a little girl of about three and a young woman got out of the car; there appeared to be another, bigger child sitting in the passenger seat. The visitor, though thin as a reed, was sufficiently like Mrs Jago as to leave no doubt this was a daughter. A mass of dark curly hair, rather resembling Serge Olson’s but longer and glossier, covered half her back. The child, who also had long curly hair, ran to her grand mother and was taken up in her arms, where she clung to the massive bosom like a limpet to a domed, shiny, seaweed-clothed rock.

   Ralph Robson was a long time coming to the front door. Burden could hear his stick making muffled thuds on the carpet. By the time the door opened, the two little girls and their mother had once more driven off. Robson was more owl-like than ever this morning, his nose apparently beakier, his mouth pursed, his eyes round and cross. A sports jacket of brindled brown tweed enhanced the effect and the hand on the stick gripped like a bird’s claw round a twig. Burden was prepared for an exchange of courtesies, but Robson plunged straight into the bone-picking of which Lesley Arbel had forewarned him: he wanted compensation, he wanted reimbursement to the amount of four pounds fifty-two which was the price of the piece of spoiled sirloin.

   Burden told him to put it all in writing and where to send his complaint. As soon as Robson had switched off that particular diatribe, he got on to the subject of his hip. The pain had intensified since his wife’s death, it was ten times as bad as it had been a week ago and he could hear the joint grinding when he so much as shifted his position in a chair. Of course he was having to move about a lot more now that his wife was gone, she had saved him all that. There were areas in this country, he said, where you could get a hip replacement on the National Health Service in a matter of weeks. And he had heard that if you lived elsewhere they could transfer you to one of those places, but his doctor wouldn’t have that - his doctor had said it couldn’t be done. He had got himself to the surgery the day before, and that was what the doctor had said. It would have been different, he was sure, if he had had his wife to speak up for him.

   ‘Gwen would have got things moving. Gwen would have told him what’s what. If she’d known they could get me into some hospital on the other side of the country, she’d never have rested until she got some sense out of him. What’s the use of talking now she’s gone? I’m stuck with this for years maybe, until I can’t stick another blessed day of it and take an overdose.’

   It crossed Burden’s mind that Robson was rather more than naturally obsessive about his arthritic hip. On the other hand, if you had a thing like that perhaps it would tend to exclude everything else from your existence. That physical pain might even distract you from the mental pain of losing your wife. Intent on not leading Robson (as the judges say), he asked him, once they were seated in front of the realistic blue flames, if he could remember any comments his wife might have made about her past ‘clients’. Robson, as expected, immediately said it was a long time ago. Burden pressed him, which only had the effect of making him return to the subject of his hip and Gwen’s remarks on what had brought it about and why he should have had arthritis when she didn’t. This time Burden said he thought Robson was being obstructive and presumably he did not want his wife’s killer found.

   ‘You’ve no business talking to me like that,’ Robson said, thumping his stick on the floor and wincing.

   ‘Then cast your mind back and try to remember what your wife said to you about these people. She was a talkative woman, I’m told; she was interested in people. You’re not going to tell me she’d come home at lunchtime or in the evening and not say a word to you about the old people she’d been working for? What, she never came back and said old Mrs So-and-So kept all her money in a stocking under the bed, or old Mr Whatever had a lady-friend? Nothing like that, ever?’

   Burden need not have worried about leading Robson. These examples, far from stimulating him to invention or recall, seemed to provoke a truculent bewilderment. ‘She never said about any old lady keeping money under the bed.’

   ‘All right, Mr Robson,’ Burden said, keeping his temper with difficulty, ‘what did she talk about?’

   An effort was made, as of a disused engine sparking into life with rusty wheels turning. ‘There was that old boy over the road - Gwen was very good to him. She went on popping in there day after day long after she stopped working for the council. A daughter couldn’t have done more.’

   Eric Swallow of 12, Berry Close, Highlands, Burden thought, nodding encouragingly at Robson.

   ‘Mrs Goodrich - that was the name. She wasn’t so old, but she was crippled with one of those things they just give letters to, MS or MT or something. She’d been a lovely woman, a concert pianist Gwen said. She said she’d got some beautiful furniture in her place - valuable pieces, Gwen thought, worth a fair bit.’

   Julia Goodrich of Paston Avenue, since moved from the district.

   ‘I can’t remember the rest of them; there was dozens and I can’t remember them by name. I mean, there was one as told Gwen she’d had three kids by three different fathers and not married to any of them. That really upset Gwen. And there was an old boy as hadn’t nothing but his pension, and used to give Gwen five-pound notes just for cutting his blessed toenails. She gave him a lot of her time, she’d be a good hour with him . . .’

   ‘Someone gave your wife five pounds to cut his toenails?’ Burden was intrigued and imagined Wexford’s reaction to this bizarre picture. Was some sexual titillation or even satisfaction involved? Surely there must have been.

   ‘There was nothing wrong in it,’ Robson said, on the defensive at once. ‘He just took his socks off and sat there and she did his nails with clippers. He never touched her, she wasn’t that sort. His feet were spotless, she said, clean as a baby’s. And there was someone else - I can’t remember names - as she gave a regular bath to. He was getting over some illness; he wasn’t old, but he couldn’t stand the district nurses bathing him and he said Gwen was a gentle as his own nanny when he was a little kid.’

   Don’t lead him, Burden said to himself. You must take your chance.

   ‘Wait a minute, I’ve thought of a name: an old spinster called Miss Mac-something.’

   ‘Miss McPhail,’ said Burden, thinking this justified. Robson didn’t seem interested in how he knew; like a lot of people, he took a degree of omniscience in the police for granted. They only asked questions to catch you out or for their own amusement. ‘Miss McPhail of Forest Park.’

   ‘That’s her. She was wealthy, had a big house that was going to rack and ruin for want of looking after, and a blessed great garden. This young boy used to come in and do a bit to the garden in his college holidays. She wanted Gwen to come and work full-time for her. No thanks, Gwen said, I’ve got a husband to see to. I’ll give you a hundred pounds a week, she said, and this was four years ago. You’re joking, Gwen said, but she said no, that’s what she’d give her to be her full-time cook and companion . . . and I reckon Gwen was tempted, only I put my foot down.’

   Robson shifted his weight in the armchair and this time Burden thought he heard the hip joint grind. He heard something and saw Robson’s face contort. Then Robson said, ‘Is that all, then? Got enough, have you?’

   Burden didn’t answer but got up to go. Miss McPhail was dead now, he reflected as he was leaving, hers was one of the names on the list with cross after it. Passing his own home, he went in to use the phone and check up on Wexford’s recovery, then continued to Ash Farm where a search had been in progress for the past two hours. Clifford wasn’t there. Burden hadn’t expected him to be, but Dorothy Sanders was waiting for him, her face tragic with woe, her eyes staring.

   ‘They said two hours was the maximum. They said two hours at the outside, and they started at nine.’

   ‘It’s only ten-past eleven, Mrs Sanders,’ said Burden, who should have known better.

   ‘Why do people say these things and not stick to them?’

   ‘They won’t be long now. They’ll put everything back as they found it; we do make a point of that.’

   He made his way upstairs to Davidson and Archbold on the first floor. Archbold pointed up the narrow flight of stairs which led to the top storey and said the rooms up there were stuffed with old furniture - rubbish, junk, the accumulation of years. Going through all that had delayed them. Burden decided to investigate outside, where Diana Pettit had gone to search the garage and a kind of toolshed attached to the rear fence. He made his way along the passage that must lead to a kitchen and a back way out. Dorothy Sanders had her face pressed against the window, watching the search. Her back was rigid and her arms flexed and she was perfectly still, reacting to his arrival with not the faintest twitch of her body. Burden went out by the back door.

   Beyond the Ash Farm ground you could hardly call it a garden - farmland, drowned in rain, stretched away in all directions. There was no other house in sight. A hill shaped like a camels’ hump cut off the view of Kingsmarkham and heavy clouds rested on the ridge of it.

   Diana looked round when Burden came in and said, ‘There’s nothing here, sir.’

   ‘That depends on what you’re looking for, Diana. I suppose you’ve been told what you’re looking for?’

   ‘A garrote, though I’m not very sure what that is.’

   Burden put his hands into the box of tools. It was one of those metal boxes divided into sections on two levels, in which the upper drawers can be drawn outwards by a kind of concertina motion. He picked out two objects, saying, ‘These could answer the purpose very well.’

Diana Pettit and DS Martin both told Burden these were the kinds of things to be found in every toolbox in every garden shed. You might as well find a hammer or screwdriver in such a place and call it an offensive weapon. Everybody had a spool of plastic-covered wire and a great many people a garden line for making straight edges. Burden said he didn’t; he had never even seen a garden line before. Was DC Pettit sure that’s what it was?

   Two metal pegs, ring-headed, were linked buy a length of twine. The twine was merely knotted on to the pegs and a piece of the plastic wire might well have temporarily replaced it, thus making a serviceable garrote. He took the things away, getting Diana to give Dorothy Sanders a receipt for them. The wire went to the lab for analysis and comparison with the particles of plastic found in Gwen Robson’s neck wound. With a similar length of plastic wire which he had been out to buy tied to the iron pegs, Burden shut himself up in his office and practised garroting first the angled lamp and then one of the legs of his desk. Neither was the right size for a human neck.