Wexford 14 - The Veiled One (2 page)

   This evening was misty. It had got dark very early and by six was black as midnight, the mist very apparent where lights caught it and made a greenish shimmer. The gutters of Pomeroy Road were clogged with fallen leaves, the plane trees almost bare. Beyond the open gates lamps lit the car parks that were fast emptying and in the shopping centre building itself, where the turrets were silhouetted black like the teeth of a saw against the streaked cloudy purple of the sky, the lights were beginning to dim. Before many more minutes had passed by, they would all have gone out.

   Pedestrians had been coming out sporadically ever since Archie first went to sit there at four o’clock. His breath clouded the glass and he rubbed it with his jacket sleeve, taking his arm away in time to see someone running out of the gates. A young man it was - a boy to him - empty handed, going as if all the devils in hell were after him. Or store detectives, Archie thought doubtfully. Once he had seen a woman running with people pursuing her and he guessed she had been shoplifting. This boy he had never seen before; he was a stranger to him and he passed out of sight under the plane trees into the misty dark.

   Archie hadn’t put a light on because he could see better sitting in darkness. An old-fashioned electric fire made a glow in the room behind him. No one was pursuing the boy - perhaps he had only been in a hurry. The people who were leaving at a more leisurely pace had looked at him without much curiosity and, like Archie, expected to see retribution coming. But the darkness absorbed them as well. He saw a car come up out of the mouth of the underground park and then another. The lights that illuminated the shopping centre turrets went out. Then Archie saw David Sedgeman appear from behind the angle of the concrete wall with the padlock keys in his hand. Because of the mist and because Archie hadn’t put his light on, Sedgeman had to peer to see the pale blur of the old man’s face and then he nodded and raised his hand. Archie gave him a salute. Sedgeman closed the gates, looped the chain through the steel mesh, fastened and locked the padlock. Then he shot both bolts, one at the bottom and another a foot above his head. Before he went back, he gave Archie another wave.

   This was the signal for Archie to get moving. He got up and went to the kitchen where he made himself a mug of tea with a tea-bag and took two chocolate chip cookies out of the biscuit tin. No potatoes to peel tonight because his daughter and her husband would be out at a friend’s son’s engagement party. There would be no cooked supper for Archie, but at his age he preferred little snacks of tea and biscuits and bits of chocolate anyway. Back in the front room he put the television on, though he had missed most of the six o’clock news and the bit he got was all about the trial of terrorists and some actress damaging Ministry of Defence property. He didn’t turn it off but just turned down the sound and switched on the central light. Archie had read somewhere that watching television in the dark turns you blind eventually.

   The light was also on in the phone box now. It came on at six-thirty when the box hadn’t been vandalized and the lamp smashed as sometimes happened. Archie sat on the window once more, one eye watching the street and another the screen, hoping something more cheerful would come on soon. By now the shopping centre was in darkness, though two lamps were still alight in the open air car parks. A middle-aged man, one of the neighbours, came long with his dog which lifted its leg against the red metal door of the call box. Archie felt like banging on the window but knew it would do no good. Dog and owner went off into the mist while Archie drank his tea, ate the second biscuit and wondered whether he should get himself a third or wait an hour. Weather forecast now; he couldn’t hear it, but he could see by all those little clouds and whirly lines that it was going to be a mixture as before.

   Outside was silence, darkness, mist which moved and cleared and rolled sluggishly back, which the lights - half- obscured by plane-tree branches - turned to a watery, acid-green phosphorescence. The darkness was deep in the tarmac desert, nothing visible but two islanded spots of light and now these also went out . . . one, two . . . leaving blackness that met a dark grey but luminous sky. Only the lamps of Pomeroy Street and a ray or so from the mouth of the underground car park faintly lit the area behind the gates. And into this a little woman walked from behind the concrete wall, having perhaps come from the car-park lift, Archie thought. She walked a few yards in one direction to stare into the blackness, then she turned and gazed towards the gates and him. She seemed to be looking to see if there was anyone about, or looking for someone or something. There was anger, repressed and contained, revealed in the slow deliberate way she moved - he could tell that even in the dark.

   She might have a car in there and be unable to get it started. There was nothing he could do and now she had gone again, the wall cutting her off from his view. Archie switched off the television, for he could stand no more of what had appeared silently on the screen - starving Africans with pot-bellied dying babies, more of those people that he in his impotence and penury could not aid. He looked back at the empty stillness outside. Fetching the third biscuit might be postponed for an hour or so. He had to find ways to fill up his evening, for he couldn’t very well go to bed until nine which was more than two hours away. The chances were that nothing more would happen out there until eight next morning when the shopping centre opened, nothing at all except cars passing and maybe a couple of people coming to use the phone box. He was thinking this, reflecting on it, when the woman appeared again, walking now in the stalking single-minded fashion of a cat homing on it pray.

   When she came up to the gates, she got hold of them as if expecting they would open, as if the padlock would fall apart and the bolts slide back. Archie got to his feet and leaned forward on the window sill. The woman was much too short to reach the top bolt; she seemed now to have realized that the padlock was fastened and the key gone, and she began to rattle the gates. Her eyes were not on him but on the phone box, which was only a few yards from her but tantalizingly outside those gates.

   She shook the gates more and more violently and they clanged and rattled. Anyone could see it was useless doing that because of the bolts and the padlock, and Archie began to wonder, because of the sudden and violent change in her demeanour, if she wasn’t quite all there, if she were a bit mad . . . crazy. His reaction to anything like that would usually be to ignore it, to shut his eyes or go away. But it was the phone box she wanted; all this frenzy was on account of not being able to reach the phone box. There were always the neighbours - let someone else attend to it, someone younger and stronger. Only no one ever did. Archie some times thought a person could be murdered in Pomeroy Street in full view, in broad daylight, and no one would do any thing. The woman was shouting now - well, screaming. She was stamping her feet and shaking the gates and roaring at the top of her voice, yelling things Archie couldn’t make out but which he heard all right when he had put his cap on and his raincoat round his shoulders and was making his way out on to the pavement.

   ‘The police! The police! I’ve got to get the police! I’ve got to phone. I’ve got to get the police?’

   Archie crossed the road. He said, ‘Making all that fuss won’t help. You calm down now. What’s the matter with you?’

   ‘I’ve got to phone the police! There’s someone dead in there. I’ve got to phone the police - there’s a woman and they’ve tried to cut her head off!’

   Archie went cold all over; his throat came up and he tasted tea and chocolate. He thought, my heart, I’m too old for this. He said feebly, ‘Stop shaking those gates. Now, come on, you stop it! I can’t let you out.’

   ‘I want the police,’ she shrieked and fell to lean heavily against the gates, hanging there with her fingers pushed through the wire mesh. The final clang reverberated and died away, as she sobbed harshly against the cold metal.

   ‘I can go and phone them,’ Archie said and he went back indoors, leaving her sagged there, still, her hands hooked on the wire like someone shot while trying to escape.

The phone rang while he was in the middle of going through it all with Dora. Supper had been eaten without enthusiasm and the bag containing Dora’s birthday sweater lay unregarded on the seat of the chair. He had turned the evening paper front-page downwards but - unable to resist the horrid fascination of it - picked it up again.

   ‘Mind you, I knew things weren’t going well with her and Andrew,’ Dora said.

   ‘Knowing one’s daughter’s marriage is going through a bad patch is a far cry from reading in the paper that she’s getting a divorce.’

   ‘I think you mind about that more than about her coming up in court.’

   Wexford made himself look coolly at the newspaper. The lead story was the trial of three men who had tried to blow up the Israeli Embassy and there was something too about a by-election, but the page was Sheila’s. There were two photographs. The top picture showed a wire fence - not unlike the fence that surrounded the shopping complex he had recently left, only this one was topped with coils of razor wire. The modern world, he sometimes thought, was full of wire fences. The one in the picture had been mutilated and a flap hung loose from the centre of it, leaving a gaping hole through which a waste of mud could be seen with a hangar-like edifice in the middle of it. From the darkish background in the other photograph his daughter’s lovely face looked out, wide-eyed, apprehensive, to a father’s eye, aghast at the headlong rush of events. Wisps of pale curly hair escaped from under her woolly cap. The headlines said only ‘Sheila Cuts the Wire’; the story beneath told the rest of it, giving among all the painful details of arrest and magistrates’ court appearance the surely gratuitous information that the actress currently appearing in the television serialization of Lady Audley’s Secret was seeking a divorce from her husband, businessman Andrew Thorverton.

   ‘I would have liked to be told, I suppose,’ Wexford said. ‘About the divorce, I mean. I wouldn’t expect her to tell us she was going to chop up the fence around a nuclear bomber base. We’d have tried to stop her.’

   ‘We’d have tried to stop her getting a divorce.’

   It was then that the phone rang. Since Sheila had been released on bail, pending a later court appearance, Wexford thought it must be her at the other end. He was already hearing her voice in his head, the breathy self-reproach as she tried to persuade her parents she didn’t know how the paper had got that report about her divorce . . . she was overcome . . . she was flabbergasted . . . it was all beyond her. And as for the wire-cutting . . .

   Not Sheila though. Inspector Michael Burden.

   ‘Mike?’

   The voice was cool and a bit curt, anxiety underlying it, but he nearly always sounded like that. ‘There’s a dead women in the shopping centre car park, the underground one. I haven’t seen her yet, but there’s no chance it’s anything but murder.’

   ‘I was there myself,’ Wexford said wonderingly. ‘I only left a couple of hours ago.’

   ‘That’s OK. Nobody thinks you did it.’

   Burden had got a lot sharper since his second marriage. Time was when such a rejoinder would never have entered his head.

   ‘I’ll come over. ‘Who’s there now?’

   ‘Me - or I will be in five minutes. Archbold. Prentiss.’ Prentiss was the Scene-of-Crimes man, Archbold a young DC. ‘Sumner-Quist. Sir Hilary’s away on his hols.’

   In November? Well, people went away at any old time these days. Wexford rather liked the eminent and occasion ally outrageous pathologist, Sir Hilary Tremlett, finding Dr Basil Sumner-Quist less congenial.

   ‘There’s, no identification problem,’ said Burden. ‘We know who she is. Her name’s Gwen Robson, Mrs. Late fifties. Address up at Highlands. A woman called Sanders found her and got hold of someone in Pomeroy Street who phoned us.’

   It was five-past eight. ‘I may be a long time,’ Wexford said to Dora. ‘At any rate I won’t be back soon.’ 

   ‘I’m wondering if I ought to phone Sheila.’

   ‘Let her phone us,’ said Sheila’s father, hardening his heart. He picked up the bag with Dora’s present in it and hid it at the back of the hail cupboard. The birthday wasn’t until tomorrow anyway.

   The car-park entrance was blocked with police cars. Lights had appeared from somewhere, the place blazed with light. Someone had shot the linked shopping trolleys across the parking area to clear a space and trolleys stood about every where but at a distance, like a watching crowd of robots. The gates in the fence at the pedestrian entrance in Pomeroy Street stood wide open. Wexford pushed trolleys aside, spinning them out of his way, squeezed between the cars, opened the lift door and tried to summon the lift. It didn’t come, so he walked down the two levels. The three cars were still there - the red Metro, silver Escort and dark blue Lancia - but the blue one had been backed out of its parking slot up against the wall and reversed into the middle of the aisle, no doubt to allow room for pathologist, Scene-of-Crimes officer and photographer to scrutinize the body that lay close up against the offside of the silver Escort. Wexford hesitated a moment, then walked towards the group of people and the thing on the concrete floor.

   Burden got to his feet as Wexford approached and Archbold, who had old-fashioned manners, nodded and said, ‘Sir!’ Sumner-Quist didn’t bother to look round. The fact that he happened at that moment to move his shoulder so that the dead woman’s face and neck were revealed was, Wexford thought, purely fortuitous. The face bore the unmistakable signs of someone who has met her death by strangulation. It was bluish, bloated, horrified, and the mark on her neck of whatever was responsible for her asphyxiation was so deep that it had more the appearance of a circular cut, as if the blade of a knife had been run round throat and nape. Blazing lights in a place usually feebly lit showed up all the horror of her and her surroundings - stained and discoloured concrete, dirty metal, litter sprawling across the floor.