Wexford 14 - The Veiled One (21 page)

   Some of the things Mike had said he was sure were right. In his assessment of the character of Gwen Robson he was right. She would do a great deal for money, almost anything, and what she had done had led to her death. He knew that and Burden knew it too. But he had chosen the wrong person from among her possible . . . what? Clients? Perhaps that was the best word even in this context. Clifford Sanders was not Gwen Robson’s murderer.

   Wexford looked out of the window and saw him being shepherded out to one of the cars. Davidson was about to drive him home. Clifford neither trudged nor shuffled, he didn’t walk with his head bowed or his shoulders hunched, yet there was something of desperation in his bearing. He was like one caught in a recurring dream from which to awaken is to escape, but which will inexorably return the next night. Fanciful nonsense, Wexford told himself, but his thoughts persisted in dwelling on Burden’s chosen perpetrator as Davison drove out of the forecourt and on to the road, and all that could be seen of Clifford Sanders was his solid heavy-shouldered shape through the rear window, his round cropped skull. What would he go home to? That cold, dictatorial woman, that house which was big and bare and always chilly and where, according to Burden, everything that might have made it comfortable was stored away up in the attics. Useless to ask why he stayed. He was young and fit and educated; he could leave, make a life of his own. Wexford knew that so many people are their own prisoners, jailers of themselves, that the doors which to the outside world seem to stand open they have sealed with invisible bars. They have blocked off the tunnels to freedom, pulled down the blinds to keep out the light. Clifford, if asked, would no doubt say, ‘I can’t leave my mother, she’s done everything for me, brought me up single-handed, devoted her life to me. I can’t leave her, I must do my duty.’ But perhaps it was something very different he said when alone with Serge Olson.

   Wexford might not have gone to Sundays that day, might have sat on his office for a long time brooding over his quarrel with Burden, but a call came through from a man called Brook, Stephen Brook. The name meant nothing, then recall came with a recollection of the blue Lancia and a woman who had gone into labour while in the shopping centre. Brook said his wife had something to tell the police and Wexford’s thoughts went at once to Clifford Sanders. Suppose this woman wanted to tell him something that would put Clifford entirely beyond suspicion? She might know him. It could, with some exaggeration, be said that in a place like Kingsmarkham everyone knew everyone else. It would bring him considerable satisfaction to have Clifford exonerated and might also heal the breach between himself and Burden - without if possible Burden’s losing face.

The Brooks lived at the Forby Road end of town, their home a flat in the local authority housing area of the Sundays estate. From the window of their living room Sundays Park could be seen - its hornbeam avenue, its lawns and cedars, the cars of those taking the word-processor course parked at the side of the big white house. This small room was very warm and Mrs Brook’s baby lay uncovered in a wicker cradle. The Brooks’ furniture consisted of two battered chairs and a table and a great many small crates and boxes, all of them covered or draped with lengths of patterned material and shawls and coloured blankets. There were posters on the walls and dried grasses in stoneware mustard jars. It had all been done at the lowest possible cost and the effect was rather charming.

   Mrs Brook was all in black. Dusty black knitted draperies was the way Wexford would have described her clothes if he had had to do so. She wore wrinkled black and white striped stockings and black trainers, and a very curious contemporary madonna she looked when she lifted the baby and, unbuttoning black cardigan and black shirt, presented one round white breast to its mouth. Her husband - in jeans, shirt and zipper-jacket uniform - would have appeared more conventional if he had not dyed his spiky hair to resemble the bird of paradise flower, a tropical blue and, orange. Their modulated Myringham University accents came as a slight shock, though Wexford told himself he should have known better. Both of them were about the age of Clifford Sanders, but how different a life they had made for themselves!

   ‘I didn’t tell you before,’ Helen Brook said, ‘because I didn’t know who she was. I mean, I was in hospital having Ashtoreth and I didn’t really think much about all that.’

   Ashtoreth. Well, it sounded pretty and was just another goddess like Diana.

   ‘I mean, it was all a shock really. I meant to have her at home and I was all set to do that. Squatting, you know, not lying down which is so unnatural, and three of my friends were coming to perform the proper rites. The people at the hospital had been really angry at me for wanting to have her the natural way, but I knew I could prove to them my way was right. And then of course they caught me. It was almost as if they set a trap to get me into hospital, though Steve says not - they couldn’t have.’

   ‘Yeah, that’s paranoia, love,’ said Stephen Brook.

   ‘Yes, I just started these labour pains - how about that? I was in Demeter and these pains just started.’

   ‘In what?’ Wexford said before he remembered this was the Barringdean Centre’s health food shop. Briefly, it had sounded like some obstetrical condition.

   ‘In Demeter,’ she said again, ‘getting my calendula capsules. And I sort of looked up and through the window and I saw her outside talking to this girl. And I thought I’ll go out and show myself to her and I wonder what she’ll think - the way she used to go on saying she hoped I’d never have children, that was all.’

   ‘He doesn’t know what you’re on about, love.’

   Wexford nodded his assent to this as Helen Brook shifted the child to her other breast, cupping the soft downy head in her hand. ‘Saw whom?’ he asked.

   ‘That woman who got killed. Only I didn’t know; I mean, I didn’t know what her name was. I just knew I knew her, then when we read in the paper that she’d been a home help and where she lived I said to Steve, that’s the woman who used to look after the lady next door to Mum. I was in Demeter and I recognized her, I hadn’t seen her for yonks. You see, she’d heard about the way Steve and I got married and she was all peculiar about it.’

   ‘The way you got married?’

   ‘Well, Steve and I didn’t go to a register office or a church or anything on account of our beliefs. We had a very beautiful ceremony at Stonehenge at dawn, with all our friends there. I mean, they won’t let you go up into the stones like Mummy said you used to, but it was very beautiful just being able to see Stonehenge. Steve had a ring made of bone and I had a ring made of yew wood and we exchanged them, and our friend who’s a musician played the sitar and every one sang. Anyway, the council let you have a flat even if you don’t get married the official way. Mum told the lady - what was she called, Gwen? - Mummy told her that, but she was still really sniffy and when she saw me that’s what she said. She said I hope you don’t have children, that’s all. Well, that was two years ago and I hadn’t seen her since and then I did see her talking to this girl outside Demeter. They went off into Tesco’s together and I was going to follow them and kind of say, look, how about that? And then I had this terrific pain . . .’

   She sat there, smiling blandly, the baby Ashtoreth now recumbent in her lap and subsiding into sleep. Wexford asked her to describe the girl.

   ‘I’m not very good at describing people. I mean it’s the way they are inside that counts, isn’t it? She was older than me but not all that much, and she had dark hair that was quite long and she was wearing the most amazing clothes; that’s what stuck in my memory, her amazing clothes.’

   ‘Are you saying she was smartly dressed?’ Wexford understood at once that he was using very outdated terms and Helen Brook looked puzzled. She leaned forward as if she had misheard. ‘Her clothes were particularly elegant?’ he corrected himself, and added, ‘New? Beautiful? Fashionable?’

   ‘Well, not specially new. Elegant - that might be the word. You know what I mean.’

   ‘Was she wearing a hat?’

   ‘A hat? No, she wasn’t wearing a hat. She had lovely hair; she looked lovely.’

   A young woman ought to be able to judge the style of a contemporary. What she had told him had confirmed Linda Naseem’s evidence - or had it? Hats, after all, can be temporarily taken off. If this were the same girl both she and Helen Brook had seen, it meant that Gwen Robson had met her in one of the aisles of the shopping centre and presumably walked through the Tesco supermarket with her, the two of them then leaving together for the underground car park. If it was the same girl . . .

It is rare to recognize someone at the wheel of a car. Generally, it is the car we recognize, then look quickly to identify the driver. Silver Escorts attracted Wexford’s attention at present, as did red Metros, and a closer look at the one approaching showed him Ralph Robson in the driving-seat. So Lesley Arbel was without transport today.

   ‘Turn round,’ he said to Donaldson. ‘Take me to Sundays.’ When they arrived people were coming down the steps of the Regency mansion; the course had come to an end. There were as many men as women and most of them were young. Lesley Arbel, emerging from the open double entrance doors, stood out conspicuously from the rest by her looks and her clothes. Wexford, who when he first met her had been reminded by her sleek dressing of actresses in the early days of the talking cinema, now again recollected those thirties’ films. Only in them was it possible to capture such a scene, where there was no room for doubting who were extras and who the star. But because this was not a film and Lesley Arbel no confident movie queen swanning on celluloid, her appearance was a little ridiculous by contrast with all those tweed coats and anoraks and jackets over tracksuits. She even came rather awkwardly down those steps, her heels so high as to throw her off-balance.

   The Kingsmarkham bus passed along the Forby Road, stopping opposite the gates and Sundays Lodge, and it was no doubt this bus she meant to catch. But her heels and the long tight black skirt restricted her steps and she was making very slow progress towards the avenue when Wexford put his head out of the car window and asked if they might give her a lift home. It was more than a surprise, it seemed a shock, and she jumped. He had a feeling that if more comfortably shod, she would have made a run for it. However she came cautiously up to the car. Wexford got out, opened the rear door for her and she got awkwardly in ahead of him, ducking her head and holding on to her small black grosgrain hat.

   ‘I thought we might have a talk in private,’ he said. ‘With out your uncle, I mean.’

   She was too nervous to speak and sat with her hands in her lap, staring at Donaldson’s broad back. Wexford noticed that her nails - which had protruded a good half-inch from her fingertips - had been filed down and were unpainted. Donaldson began to drive slowly down the avenue, between the lines of leafless hornbeams. The sun had just set and all the trees made a black tracery against a spectacular crimson sky.

   Wexford said quietly, ‘You didn’t tell me you were in Kingsmarkham on the day your aunt was killed.’

   She responded quite quickly and it was as if the question had been of no great significance. So might she have replied if a friend had reproached her for failing to make a promised phone call.

   ‘No, I was upset and I forgot.’

   ‘Come now, Miss Arbel. You told me you left Orangetree House early because you weren’t feeling well.’

   She muttered, ‘I wasn’t feeling well.’

   ‘Your illness didn’t prevent your coming to Kingsmarkham.’

   ‘I mean I forgot it might be important where I was.’ She had been frightened, but she wasn’t frightened now; this must mean he had not asked the question she feared to hear. ‘It’s very important where you were. I understand you came here to check that you were on this course that was to start the following Monday?’ She nodded, relaxing a little, her body less rigid under the stiffly padded shoulders of her pink and black striped jacket. ‘That can be verified, you know, Miss Arbel.’

   ‘I did check up on the course.’

   ‘You could have done that by phone, couldn’t you?’

   ‘I did try but their phones were out of order.’

   ‘And then you went to meet your aunt in the Barringdean Centre.’

   ‘No!’ He couldn’t tell if it was a cry of denial through fear of discovery or simple astonishment that such a meeting could have been suspected. ‘I never saw her, I never did! Why would I go there?’

   ‘You must tell me that. Suppose I told you that you were seen by at least one witness?’

   ‘I’d say they were lying.’

   ‘As you were lying when you told me you were ill on November 19 and went home early from work?’

   ‘I wasn’t lying. I thought it wasn’t important just coming down here to look at a form and check up and then go back again. That’s all I did. I never went near the Barringdean Centre.’

   ‘You came and went by train?’

   She gave an anxious nod, falling into his trap.

   ‘You were very near the centre then, considering the pedestrian entrance is in the next street to Station Road. Wouldn’t it be right to say you returned to the station from Sundays and, remembering your aunt would be in the Barringdean Centre at that time because she always was, you went in and met her in the central aisle?’

   It was a vehement, tearful denial she made, but again Wexford had the feeling that whatever she was afraid of it was not this; it was not fear of having been seen with her aunt half an hour before her death that frightened her. And to his astonishment she suddenly exclaimed miserably, ‘I’ll lose my job!’

   This seemed almost an irrelevancy, at least a minor matter compared with the enormity of Gwen Robson’s death. He let her go, opening the door for her when the car stopped in Highlands outside her uncle’s house. For a few moments he stood there, watching the house. Behind drawn curtains the lights were already on. She had gone up the path at a hobbling run and was fumbling with her key when Robson opened the door to let her in. It was closed very rapidly. Now for the long evening, Wexford thought; the making of tea and perhaps scrambled eggs, the chat about the day she had passed and he had passed, complaints about his arthritis and sympathy from her, the relief of television. What had people in that situation done before television? It was unthinkable.