Wexford 14 - The Veiled One (17 page)

   She spoke as Clifford drew up by the kerb. ‘I can take the things in. There’s no need to come with me.’

   But he got out of the car, removed the bags from the boot and carried them up to the front door. He unlocked the door and stood back for her to pass in ahead of him. Burden understood it all. She was one of those people who say things like that but don’t mean them. She was the sort who would say, ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll be all right on my own’, or ‘Don’t bother to write me a thank-you letter’, and then create hell when she got left alone or when no letter came. His mother-in-law was a bit like that, though Mrs Sanders was a thousand times worse.

   Clifford got back into the driving-seat and Burden stayed where he was, in the back. He didn’t care whether they talked or not; they would talk at the station. The driving was done with the slow care, the superfluous signals and excessive braking habitual to Clifford. He broke the silence as they turned in to find the last remaining parking space.

   ‘What is it you suspect me of?’

   Burden felt a reluctance to answer questions of that kind. They seemed to bring him down to Clifford’s level of ingenuousness and simplicity. Simple-mindedness expressed it better, perhaps. ‘Let’s leave that until we’re inside, shall we?’ he suggested.

   He called up Diana Pettit and together they shepherded Clifford into that grey-tiled interview room. It was dark now, of course, had been dark for two hours, and the lights in this room were as grim and uncompromising as those in the Barringdean Centre car park, but much brighter. The central heating was on in here, though, just as it was all over the building. Police officers just as much as those they inter viewed, as Burden had once told someone without irony, were often obliged to sit there for hours. The immediate warmth, a much greater heat than he enjoyed in his own home, made Clifford ask to take off his hat and coat. He was one who would ask permission before he did almost anything; no doubt asking for leave had been a requirement of right conduct dinned into him from his earliest years. He sat down and looked from Diana to Burden and Burden back to Diana, like a puzzled new boy whom school rules bewilder.

   ‘I’d like you to tell me what you’re accusing me of.’

   ‘I’m not accusing you of anything yet,’ Burden said.

   ‘What you suspect me of, then.’

   ‘Don’t you know, Clifford? Haven’t you got a clue? What do you think it is - helping yourself out of the collection in church?’

   ‘I don’t go to church.’ He essayed a faint smile and it was the first Burden had ever seen him give. The smile seemed contrived with difficulty as if a mechanical process had to be set in motion, a series of button-pressing and lever-pulling only half-remembered. It irritated Burden.

   ‘Perhaps you stole a car then. Or nicked a lady’s handbag.’ 

   ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re getting at.’

   Burden said abruptly. ‘Have you any objection if I record this interview? Tape it, I mean?’

   ‘Would it make any difference if I had?’

   ‘Certainly it would. This isn’t a police state.’

   ‘Do as you like,’ Clifford said indifferently and he watched Diana begin recording. ‘You were going to tell me what I’m supposed to have done.’

   ‘Let me tell you what I think happened. I think you met Mrs Robson inside the shopping centre, in Tesco’s. You hadn’t seen her for quite a while, but you knew her and she knew you - and she knew something about you you’d like kept secret. I wonder what it was. I don’t know yet, I honestly don’t know, but you’ll tell me. I hope you’ll tell me tonight.’

   Clifford said in an uneven voice, ‘When I first saw Mrs Robson, she was dead. I never saw her before in my life.’

   ‘What you saw, Clifford, was your opportunity. You and she were alone and you very much wanted her out of the way . . .’

   He had to remind himself that this was a man, not a boy, not a teenager. And not simple-minded, not retarded. He was a teacher; he had a university degree. The blank, soft face looked even more spongy, but a spark showed in each dull eye. Clifford’s voice squeaked. Fear or guilt or God- knows-what had done something to the vocal cords, leaving him with a eunuch’s soprano.

   ‘You don’t mean you think I’d kill someone? Me? Is that what you mean?’

   Not wanting to fall in with this play-acting, this vanity - for what else would explain it? - that made a man believe he could do as he pleased without fear of discovery, Burden said drily, ‘He’s cottoned on at last.’

   Next moment he was on his feet and Diana too, stepping back from the table. Clifford had leapt up, face and lips white as if in genuine shock, his hands grasping the table edge and shaking it, vibrating it as his mother had shaken the wire gates.

   ‘Me? Kill someone? You’re mad! You’re all crazy! Why’ve you picked on me? I never knew you meant that with all your questions, I never dreamed . . . I thought I was just a witness. Me kill someone? People like me don’t kill people!’

   ‘What kind do then, Clifford?’ Burden spoke calmly as he lowered himself once more into his chair. ‘Some say every one’s capable of murder.’

   He met the other man’s round staring eyes. A dew of sweat had appeared all over the putty-like skin, the pudgy features, and a drop trickled down his upper lip between the two wings of the moustache. Burden felt for him an impatient contempt. He wasn’t even a good actor. It would be interesting to hear how all that would play back, that stuff about killing people. He’d play it to Wexford, see what he thought.

   ‘Sit down, Cliff,’ he said, his growing contempt making him accord the man less than the dignity of his unabridged Christian name. ‘We’re going to have a long talk.’

Exhausted when the car dropped him at Sylvia’s, Wexford would have liked a home of his own to recover in, the sole companionship of his own wife. He had to settle for a drink, the whisky Dr Crocker strictly forbade. Someone had brought in an evening paper; a story on the front page was about a man who had all day been ‘helping the police with their enquiries into the Kingsmarkham bomb outrage’. There was no picture and of course no name or description, nothing to make even tentatively possible the identification of this man who had wanted Sheila dead, who had conceived for her that particular brand of cold, impersonal, political hatred.

   The boys were watching television, Sylvia trying to write an essay on the psychological abuse of the elderly.

   ‘I know all about that,’ Wexford said. ‘Would you like to interview me?’

   ‘You’re not elderly, Dad.’

   ‘I feel it.’

   Dora came and sat beside him. ‘I’ve been to look at our house,’ she said. ‘The builders have been in and weather-proofed it. At least the rain can’t get in. Oh, and the Chief Constable phoned, something about a house we can have if we like. We do like, don’t we, Reg?’

   A leap of the heart before he started feeling ungrateful to Sylvia. ‘Did he say where it is?’

   ‘Up at Highlands, I think. I’m almost sure he said Highlands.’

Remorse was perhaps too strong a word; it was distaste tempered with a hint of shame that Burden felt throughout that weekend. He said to himself, and he even said it to his wife who was home again with their son, that this was what the job was about, this was police work.

   ‘The end justifies the means, Mike?’ she said.

   ‘It’s the merest idealism to deny that. Every day in every thing we do, it’s implicit even if we don’t come out and say it. When we were going through that bad patch with Mark and we decided the only way was to let him cry, that two nights of that would cure him, we were saying the end justifies the means.’

   He took the child on his lap and Jenny smiled.

   ‘Don’t teach it to him though, will you?’

   He spared himself half an hour to play with Mark and eat his lunch and then he was back at the police station in that interview room, confronting Clifford Sanders once more. But on the way the task behind him and the task ahead goaded him, made him wrinkle up his nose at the nastiness of it. How far removed from torture was it, after all? Clifford had to sit there in that comfortless room, left alone for part of the time for as much as an hour, food brought to him on trays by an indifferent police constable. And it would not have been quite so bad if Clifford had’ been tougher, less like a child. He looked like a big child, a kind of fined-down Billy Bunter. A stoicism had succeeded his bewilderment, an air of being a brave boy and sticking it out a little longer. But here Burden told himself he was being a fool. The man was a man, educated, neurotic perhaps but sane, simply lacking character and strength of mind. And look what he had done. The facts spoke for themselves. Clifford had been in the shopping centre, had been seen with Mrs Robson, had a garrote in his possession, had run away.

   Was it likely that he had found the body, covered it up because it looked like his mother and then fled? Nobody behaved like that outside the pages of popular psychiatry. All that stuff which Serge Olson no doubt dispensed - about neurotics choosing girlfriends because they were looking for a mother, or employers as father-figures, or being put off sex because you’d seen your mother in her underwear - that was strictly for the books and the couch as far as Burden was concerned. And he was a fool to let himself feel a sneaking pity for Clifford Sanders. The man had meant to kill Mrs Robson and had succeeded. Hadn’t he gone specifically to meet her armed with a garrote?

   Probably his self-doubt was due solely to his failure so far to find the link between Clifford and Gwen Robson. He knew there must be a link and once he had found it, he would no longer be a prey to this unprofessional and certainly unfamiliar guilt. Facing Clifford again, with Archbold there to assist in this renewed interrogation and the tape recorder on, Burden reminded himself that the police had interviewed Sutcliffe the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ nine times before he was arrested. And in the intervening time Sutcliffe had murdered his final victim. It would be a fine thing if Clifford Sanders were to kill again because he, Burden, had been squeamish.

   He lowered himself slowly into the chair. Clifford, who had been gnawing at a fingernail, snatched his hand from his mouth as if he suddenly recalled nail-biting was something he must not do.

   Burden began, ‘Has your mother ever been ill, Clifford?’

   An uncomprehending look. ‘What do you mean?’

   ‘Was she ever ill so that she had to stay in bed? When she needed someone to look after her?’

   ‘She had what-do-you-call-it once. Like a kind of rash, but it aches.’

   ‘He means shingles,’ Archbold said.

   ‘That’s right, shingles. She had that once.’

   ‘Did a home help come in to look after her, Clifford?’

   But this approach led nowhere. Dodo Sanders had been confined to bed for no more than a few hours throughout the whole of Clifford’s life. Burden abandoned this line of enquiry and carefully took Clifford through the sequence of events from the time he left Olson until he ran from the car park out of the pedestrian gates. Clifford got in a hopeless muddle with the times, saying he had got to the centre at five-thirty, later changing it to ten-past six. Burden knew he was lying. Everything was going according to his expectations and the only surprising thing which happened was when Clifford corrected him over the use of his name.

   ‘Why have you stopped calling me Cliff? You can call me that if you like, I don’t mind. I like it.’

Awaiting him in his office was a lab report on that spool of plastic-covered wire. There was a great deal of technical detail - Burden found himself back among the polymers - but the plain fact easily sorted out was that the shreds of substance found in Mrs Robson’s neck wound were quite different from the stuff coating the wire in Clifford Sanders’ tool-box. Well, he had been wrong. That might only mean, of course, that Clifford had disposed of the wire he used for his garrote - thrown it in the river or, more safely, stuck it in his own or someone else’s dustbin. In the meantime Clifford could sweat for a day or two. Wexford was his immediate concern, Dr Crocker had strictly forbidden the Chief Inspector to return to work at the office and to see him Burden had to drive up to Sylvia’s house.

   ‘At any rate I shall be on the spot,’ Wexford said. ‘I’m going to be living up at Highlands. How about that?’

   Burden grinned. ‘That’s right. There are two or three police houses. When are you moving in?’

   ‘Don’t know yet,’ Wexford said, glancing through the paperwork Burden had brought him. ‘I don’t think the person - a useful genderless word - that the checkout girl saw talking to Mrs Robson was Clifford Sanders at all. I think maybe it was Lesley Arbel. But I’ll tell you where I agree with you - when you say Mrs Robson was a black mailer. I think so too.’

   Burden nodded eagerly. He was always disproportionately pleased when Wexford approved some suggestion of his.

   ‘She liked money,’ he said. ‘She was near enough prepared to do anything for money. Look at all that stuff you told me about the old man’s will. She was running up and down the street searching for witnesses to a will under which she was to be the sole beneficiary. We may laugh about her bathing someone and cutting some other old man’s toenails, but weren’t those normally distasteful tasks undertaken for a very inflated payment? There’s probably more of that sort of thing we haven’t yet uncovered.’

   ‘Mrs Jago says she did what she did all for her husband. There’s an implication that this makes it all right, exonerates her. I imagine that was precisely the way Gwen Robson saw it herself.’

   ‘Why did Ralph Robson specifically need money anyway?’ Burden asked. ‘Has anyone queried that one? I mean, if I said I needed money I’d really mean Jenny and Mark and me, my family. And you’d mean you and Dora, surely?’

   Wexford shrugged. ‘We’ve looked at her bank account at the TSB. She had rather a lot in it; I mean more than one would have expected. Robson has his own personal account and they’ve no joint savings. But Gwen Robson had some thing over sixteen hundred pounds and that could be the fruits of blackmail. Your idea is that Gwen Robson had evidence Clifford had done something reprehensible and was blackmailing him?’