Wexford 14 - The Veiled One (20 page)

   What had happened? Why was it all up here? He asked himself this as they descended. It wasn’t as if the furnishings downstairs were superior to this or newer; nor that there was so much furniture downstairs that the surplus had found its way up here. Indeed, it was inadequate and Burden had come to the conclusion that mother and son must eat their meals from plates on their laps. He could imagine them with TV dinners or dehydrated messes, bought to save trouble. What he couldn’t picture was this woman cooking the sort of food anyone would want to eat.

   ‘Those are my grandparents and my father,’ Clifford said, putting out his hand for the photograph.

   Dorothy Sanders issued an order to him as if he were a schoolboy like the one in the picture. ‘Take it upstairs, Clifford; put it back where it’s kept.’ Burden would have been more astonished to witness a protest on Clifford’s part, a hesitation even, than to see what in fact happened - automatic obedience as he went immediately up to the attics.

   ‘I’d like you to tell me a bit about your relationship with Mrs Robson, Cliff,’ Burden said when they were all down stairs once more.

   ‘His name’s Clifford. It was my name . . . and he doesn’t have relationships,’ his mother said.

   ‘I’ll rephrase that. Tell me about when you first met her and what you talked about. It was at Miss McPhail’s, wasn’t it?’

   Dorothy Sanders had withdrawn down the passage towards the kitchen regions. Clifford looked rather blankly at Burden and said he had once done gardening for Miss McPhail. He too seemed to have forgotten who Mrs Robson was; Burden reminded him and asked him if he ever went inside the Forest Park house - to have a cup of tea or coffee for instance, or to bring flowers in.

   ‘There was a cleaning lady used to give me tea, yes.’

   ‘That was Mrs Robson, wasn’t it?’

   ‘No, it wasn’t. I don’t remember her name; I never heard her name. It wasn’t Mrs Robson,’

   His mother came back and Clifford looked at her, child like, as if for help. She had been washing her hands and reeked of disinfectant. To rid herself of contamination from all that furniture, or from that of the two policemen?

   She said, ‘I’ve already told you she was in the house and he was in the garden. I’ve told you he didn’t know her. You people don’t seem to understand plain English.’

   ‘All right, Mrs Sanders, you’ve made your point,’ Burden said. He wasted no more time on her and looked away. ‘I’d like you to come back to the police station with me, Clifford. We can get a clearer picture of things there.’

   Clifford went with them in his docile way and they drove back to town. He sat at the table in the interview room and looked across it first at Burden and then at DC Marian Bayliss. His eyes went back to Burden, then were lowered towards the tiny geometric pattern on the tabletop. In a low voice, not much more than a mumble, he said, ‘You’re accusing me of murdering someone. It’s incredible, I still can’t accept what’s happening to me.’

   Much of the skill of a policeman in interrogation lies in knowing what to ignore as well as what to seize on. Burden said quietly, ‘Tell me what happened when you first got to the shopping centre and met Mrs Robson.’

   ‘I’ve already told you,’ Clifford said. ‘I didn’t meet her, I saw her dead body. I’ve told you over and over. I drove down into the car park on to the second level and I was going to park the car when I saw this person lying there, this dead person.’

   ‘How did you know she was dead?’ Marian asked.

   Clifford leaned forward on his elbows, holding on to his temples. ‘Her face was blue, she wasn’t breathing. You’re beginning to make me feel what happened isn’t true, that it wasn’t that way. You’re changing the truth with all this until I don’t know any more what happened and what didn’t. Maybe I did know her and I forgot. Maybe I’m mad and I killed her and forgot. Is that what you want me to say?’

   ‘I want you to tell me the truth, Clifford.’

   ‘I’ve told you the truth,’ he said and then, looking away for a moment, twisting in his chair, he directed a curiously appealing gaze on Burden. His voice was the same, a fairly resonant adult male voice, but the tone was that of a child of seven. ‘You used to call me Cliff. What stopped you? Was it Dodo stopped you?’

   Afterwards, when he looked back, Burden thought it was at this point that he abandoned his theory of Clifford’s being as sane as he and understood that he was mad.

Leaning over the garden gate, the new resident of Highlands surveyed the estate that would be his home for at least the next six months. It was one of those days that sometimes occur even in December, a clear sunny day of cloudless skies and a gradually falling temperature. The frost to come that night would silver all the little grass verges and turn every one’s miniature conifers into Christmas trees. On the hill behind Wexford’s new home Barringdean Ring sat like a black velvet hat on a green cushion. The sky blazed silvery azure. At the bottom of Battle Lane he could see where Hastings Road turned off and make out the roof of Robson’s house and the Whittons’ and Dita Jago’s. It was high up here, the highest point of Highlands, so that he could even see the cluster of latter-day almshouses that made up Berry Close.

   The removal van, newly arrived with half the furniture from the bombed house, blocked any view he might have had of the town. Sylvia had taken the boys to school, then come with the van driver to help her mother move in. Wexford thought he would walk to work and then if he couldn’t face walking home Donaldson could bring him. Dora would need their car. He went back in and said goodbye to her, looking round the bare, bleak little house, trying not to prejudice what living in these cramped quarters would be like, the neighbours and their noisy children separated from these rooms only by thin dividing walls, the strips of gardens partitioned by wire fences. More wire fences! Never mind, they were lucky to have somewhere, lucky not to have to go on living with Sylvia . . . and he reproached himself for the ungrateful thought as his kind busy daughter came in carrying a crate of his favourite books.

   The air was nippy and the sunshine warm, but sun hung low on the horizon and the shadows were long. His route down into the town took him along Hastings Road and into Eastbourne Drive. There was no one about, the streets empty of people and nearly empty of cars. This was the last day of Lesley Arbel’s word-processor course, but no doubt she would spend the weekend with her uncle. It was more than two weeks since Gwen Robson’s death, nearly as long since someone had tried to kill Sheila. His cuts and bruises were nearly healed, his strength returning. He had several times driven his car, felt quite calm and assured at the wheel. The bomb experts kept on coming to him or getting him to go to them, pursuing their interminable questions. Try to remember. What exactly happened after you got into the car? Who are your enemies? Who are your daughter’s enemies? Why did you jump out of the car? What warned you? He could recall none of it and believed those lost five minutes lost for ever. It was only in the night-time, in dreams, that he relived the explosion - or rather, instead of reliving what he couldn’t remember, conjured up new versions for himself in some of which he died or Sheila died or the world itself disappeared and he hung suspended in a dark void. But last night, instead of the roar of the bomb he had heard thin reedy music and instead of Sheila’s body, he had seen wheels spinning in the darkness, circles that shone and glittered and were filled with geometric patterns . . .

   Striving to dispel these ideas and look at things rationally occupied his thoughts until he reached the police station. Once there, he somehow knew before he enquired that Burden had Clifford Sanders with him and Archbold in one of their interview rooms. Late in the morning Burden came out but kept Clifford there alone, sending in coffee and biscuits. Wexford couldn’t tell what Clifford looked like after this continuous ordeal but Burden was haggard, his face pale and tense and his eyes exhausted.

   ‘You were talking about the inquisition,’ Wexford said. ‘About executioners taking payment to garrote the condemned before they were burned at the stake.’

   Burden nodded, slumped in his chair, his strained face rather ghastly in the pale, bright light from the sun.

   ‘You said you’d read about it. Well, I’ve read of Inquisitors suffering as much as their victims, of the strain wearing them out and brainwashing them till they get like you. It’s watching the torture that does it; you have to be a very special sort of person to be able to watch torture and not be affected by it.’

   ‘Clifford Sanders isn’t being tortured. I had doubts about that earlier on, but I don’t any more. He’s being put through a fairly heavy interrogation but not tortured.’

   ‘Not physically perhaps, but I don’t think you can separate mind and body like that.’

   ‘He isn’t kept awake artificially; he isn’t under bright lights or kept on his feet or starved or denied a drink. He isn’t even here all the time; he goes home to sleep. I’m going to send him home today, now; I’ve had enough for today.’

   ‘You’re wasting your time, Mike,’ Wexford said mildly. ‘You’re wasting your time and his because he didn’t do it.’

   ‘Excuse me if I differ from you there. I differ from you most strongly.’ Burden sat up revived, indignant. ‘He had the motive and the means. He has strong psychopathic tendencies. Remember that book you lent me with that piece in it about psychopaths? The Stafford-Clark? “The outstanding feature is emotional instability in its broadest and most comprehensive sense . . .” Let me see, how does it go on? I haven’t got your memory . . . “prodigal of effort but utterly lacking in persistence, plausible but insincere, demanding but indifferent to appeals, dependent only in their constant unreliability . . .”’

   ‘Mike,’ Wexford interrupted him. ‘You haven’t got any evidence. You’ve trumped up what you’ve got to suit yourself. The single piece of evidence you do have is that he saw the body and instead of reporting it, ran away. That is absolutely all you’ve got. He didn’t know Gwen Robson. He was a gardener in a place where she popped in sometimes in her home-help role, and he may once or twice have said hello to her. He wasn’t seen talking to her in the shopping centre. He doesn’t and didn’t possess a garrote or anything that could be made into a garrote.’

   ‘On the contrary, he has a hard and fast motive. I can’t yet prove it, but I’m convinced he committed a crime in the past which Gwen Robson discovered and started blackmailing him over. Blackmailers don’t succeed for long with psychopaths.’

   ‘What crime?’

   ‘Murder, obviously,’ Burden said on a note of triumph. ‘You suggested that yourself. You said no one would care about some sex thing, it had to be murder.’ His voice grew tired again as he suppressed a yawn. ‘Who, I don’t know, but I’m working on it. I’m probing into his past. A grandmother maybe? Even Miss McPhail herself. I’m having Clifford’s past looked into for signs of any remotely possible unexplained deaths.’

   ‘You’re wasting your time. Well, not your time - ours, the public’s.’

   This was an accusation to which Burden was particularly sensitive. He was beginning to look angry as well as tired and his face grew pinched as it always did when he was cross. He spoke coldly. ‘He met her by chance in the shop ping centre, she asked for more money and after he had followed her down into the car park, he killed her by strangling her with a length of electric lead he was carrying in the boot of the car along with that curtain. This he took with him and threw away on his way home.’

   ‘Why cover the body and run away?’

   ‘You can’t account for inconsistencies of that sort in a psychopath, though probably he thought that if he covered the body it might not be found for a rather longer time than if he left it exposed. Linda Naseem saw him talking to Mrs Robson. Archie Greaves saw him running away.’

   ‘Mike, we know he ran away, he admits that himself. And it was a girl with a hat on that Linda Naseem saw.’

   Burden got up and walked the length of the room, then came back to lean on the edge of Wexford’s desk. He had the air of someone who is bracing himself to say something unpleasant in the nicest possible way. ‘Look, you’ve had a bad shock and you’re still not well. You saw what happened when you came back to work too soon. And for God’s sake, I know you’re worried about Sheila.’

   Wexford said dryly but as pleasantly as he could, ‘OK, but my mind’s not affected.’

   ‘Well, isn’t it? It would be only natural to think it was - temporarily, that is. All the evidence in this case points to Clifford and, moreover, not a shred to anyone else. Only for some reason you refuse to see that, and in my opinion the reason is that you’re not right yet, you’re not over the shock of that bomb. Frankly, you should have stayed at home longer.’

   And left it all to you, Wexford thought, saying nothing but aware of a cold anger spreading through him rather like a draught of icy water trickling down his gullet.

   ‘I shall break Clifford on my own. It’s only a matter of time. Leave it to me, I’m not asking for help - or advice, come to that. I know what I’m doing. And as for torture, that’s a laugh. I haven’t even approached anything the Judges’ Rules would object to.’

   ‘Maybe not,’ Wexford said. ‘Perhaps you should remember the last lines of that passage you like so much defining a psychopath, the bit about the ruthless and determined pursuit of gratification.’

   Burden looked hard at him, looked in near-disbelief, then walked out, slamming the door resoundingly.

A quarrel with Mike was something that had never happened before. Disagreements, yes, and tough arguments. There had been the time, for instance, when Mike had lost his first wife and gone to pieces and later had that peculiar love affair - Wexford had been angry with him then and perhaps paternalistic. But they had never come to hurling abuse at each other. Of course he hadn’t meant to infer that Mike was a psychopath, or had psychopathic tendencies or anything of that sort, but he had to admit it must have sounded like that. What had he meant then? As with most people in most quarrels, he had said the first hurtful, moderately clever thing that came into his head.