Wexford 14 - The Veiled One (22 page)

   Was it all out of the kindness of her heart? Was it that she had truly loved her aunt and now loved and pitied her uncle? A saint, an angel of mercy - that she must be to remain here for yet another weekend when London and her own home and friends were available to her, when there were three trains an hour to take her there. But Wexford didn’t think she was an angel of mercy; she hadn’t impressed him even as being particularly kind hearted. Vanity and self-absorption don’t generally go with altruism - and what was the meaning of that final impassioned cry?

   Dita Jago’s daughter had called to collect her little girls and Wexford said to Donaldson, ‘You can take the car back and knock off if you like. I’ll walk home from here.’

   A momentary surprise crossed Donaldson’s face, then he remembered where home now was. Wexford strolled across the road. The Highlands lights were not the gentle amber lamps of the street where his own house was but the harsh white kind, glass vases full of glare borne on concrete stilts. They stained the dark air with a livid fog and turned people and their clothes reptile colours, greenish and sour brown and sallow white. Melanie and Hannah - what was their name, Quincy? - looked tubercular, their lively dark eyes dulled and their red cheeks pallid. Their mother was wearing one of her own mother’s brilliant knitted creations, a sweater that probably had as many colours as a Persian carpet, a skirt of thick gathered folds on which the intricate stripes, no doubt of rich and varied shades, undulated like shadows in the wind . . . only it all looked brown and grey in that light.

   Nina was her name? As Wexford asked himself that, he heard Mrs Jago call her by it and Nina Quincy, having settled her children in the back of the car, went up to her mother, put her arms round her and kissed her. Strange, Wexford thought; they see each other every day. . . Mrs Jago waved as the car departed; a shawl wrapped her shoulders today, a tapestry-like square with a fringed border. It seemed to suit her monumental shape, the heavy-featured face with its load of bunched coils of hair, better than contemporary dress. She acknowledged Wexford calmly.

   ‘You’re living up here now, they tell me.’

   He nodded. ‘How are the memoirs?’

   ‘I haven’t been doing much writing.’ She gave him that look peculiar to people who have something to confide but don’t know if this is the right confidant. Should I? Shouldn’t I? Will I regret it once the words are out? ‘Come in a moment and have a drink.’

   A chat with a neighbour on the way home. A sherry. Why not? But it wasn’t sherry she gave him, far from it. A kind of schnapps probably, Wexford thought: icy-cold, sweetish and unbelievably strong. It made his eyebrows shoot up, it made him feel as if his hair stood on end.

   ‘I needed that,’ she said, though there had been no alteration in her pleasant friendly manner, no gasp of relief.

   The pile of manuscript was precisely where it had been when he was last in this room, a hair lying across the top of the title page. He was sure that hair had been there last time. If Mrs Jago had not been writing she had been knitting, and the jungle landscape had grown several more inches from the long curled needle, palm trees now sprouting fronds and a sky appearing. The germ of an idea pushed a shoot into his mind.

   ‘Did Gwen Robson know you were writing this book?’

   ‘Mrs Robson?’ It sounded like a measure, if not of her indifference to her dead neighbour, of the degree of acquaintance she had had with her in life. A remoteness was implied that Wexford found himself not quite believing in. ‘She was only once in this house; I don’t suppose she noticed.’ Wexford thought for a moment that she was going to sneer, to add that Gwen Robson wasn’t the kind to read books or be interested in them. But instead she said, in such sudden contrast as to be shocking, ‘My daughter and her husband have parted. “Split up” is what they say, isn’t it? I hadn’t any idea of it, I hadn’t any warning. Nina just came in this afternoon and said their marriage was over. My son-in-law left this morning.’

   ‘My daughter’s parted from her husband too,’ Wexford said.

   She said, rather sharply for her but with some justice perhaps, ‘That’s different, though. A famous actress, rich, with a wealthy husband, always in the public eye . . .’

   ‘Only to be expected, do you mean?’

   She was too old and experienced to blush; it was more a wince she gave. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. It’s only that Nina’s got the two girls and it’s terrible for the children. And women left on their own to bring up children, they lead a miserable existence. She earns so little from her job, it’s only part-time. He’s leaving her the house, he’ll have to support them, but - if only I could see why! I thought they were so happy.’

   ‘Who knows what goes on in other people’s marriages?’ said Wexford.

   Leaving her, he set off to walk up the hill. Wexford’s Third Law, he thought, ought to be: always live at the foot of a hill, then you’ll be fresh for climbing it in the morning. It was quite a steep haul up and all the way he could see his new home ahead of him, glowering uncompromisingly from the crown of the hill. There was no garage, so his car stood outside with Sylvia’s behind it and behind that another unidentifiable one that might be a neighbour’s. The removal van had gone. He wasn’t out of breath as he opened the gate (wooden in the wire fence) and walked up to the front door. I must be quite fit, he was thinking as he turned his key in the lock, opened the door and had his ears at once assaulted by the voice of Sylvia - shrill, cross, loud, easily penetrating these thin walls: ‘You ought to think of Dad! You ought to think how you’re putting his life in danger with your heroics!’

The other car must have been Sheila’s, rented or else a replacement for the Porsche. Both sisters were standing up, glaring at each other along the length of the room. It was a very small room and they seemed almost to be shouting into each other’s faces. There was a door into the hall and another door into the kitchen and as Wexford came in through one Dora entered by the other, accompanied by the two little boys.

   Dora said, ‘Stop it, stop shouting!’

   But the boys were indifferent. They had come in to secure a pocket calculator (Robin) and a drawing block (Ben), and they proceeded to forage for these items in diminutive school briefcases, undeterred by the slanging match going on between their mother and their aunt. Their reaction would have been different if this had been parents quarrelling, Wexford thought.

   He looked from one young woman to the other. ‘What’s going on?’

   Sylvia’s reply was to throw up her hands and cast herself into an armchair. Sheila - her face flushed and her hair looking wild and tangled, though this might have been by design - said, ‘My case comes up on Tuesday week, in the magistrates’ court. They want me to plead guilty.’

   'Who’s “they”?’

   ‘Mother and Sylvia.’

   ‘Excuse me,’ Dora said. ‘I didn’t say I wanted you to do anything. I said you ought to think about it very seriously.’

   ‘I have thought about it. I hardly think of anything else and I’ve discussed it with Ned exhaustively. I’ve discussed it with him because he’s a lawyer as much as . . . well, my boyfriend, or whatever you call it. And it isn’t doing our relationship a lot of good, to tell you the truth.’

   Robin and Ben gave up the search and carried their cases outside to the kitchen. Tactfully, Ben closed the door behind him.

   It was as if this freed Sylvia to speak openly and she said in a hard, unsympathetic way, ‘What she does is her own business. If she wants to stand up in court and say she’s not guilty, that governments are guilty for breaking international law or whatever - well, she can do that. And when she gets fined and refuses to pay the fine, she can go to prison if that’s what she likes.’

   Wexford interrupted her. ‘Is that what you’re going to do, Sheila?’

   ‘I have to,’ she said shortly. ‘There’s no point otherwise.’

   ‘But it’s not just her,’ Sylvia continued. ‘It’s all the rest of us she involves. Everyone knows who she is, everyone knows she’s your daughter and my Sister. What’s that going to do for you as a police officer, having a daughter go to prison? This is a democracy and if we want to change things we’ve each got a vote to do it with. Why can’t she use her vote and change the government like the rest of us have to?’

   Sheila said tiredly, ‘That’s the biggest cop-out of all. If you had a hundred votes all to yourself down in this neck of the woods you couldn’t change anything, not with a sitting Member with a sixteen-thousand majority.’

   ‘And that’s not the worst,’ Sylvia went on, ignoring this. ‘The worst is that when those people who tried to bomb her know what she thinks, when she gets up and says it in court, they’re going to have another go, aren’t they? They nearly got you by accident last time and maybe this time they really will. Or maybe they’ll get you on purpose - or one of my children!’

   Wexford sighed. ‘I’ve been drinking schnapps with a lady of my acquaintance.’ He glanced at Dora and gave her the ghost of a wink. ‘I rather wish I’d got the bottle with me.’ How wrong of me it is, he thought, that I love one of my children more than the other. ‘I suppose you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, as the current phrase has it,’ he said to Sheila, but as he got up and made for the kitchen door - made for the beer he trusted was in the fridge - it was Sylvia on whose shoulder he laid a caressing hand.

   ‘Not all that current, Pop,’ said Sheila.

   Things calmed down. At any rate, Sylvia soon left to take her sons home and cook her husband’s supper. Then Sheila and her parents went out to eat, no one yet feeling comfort able in what Dora called ‘this horrid little house’. Sheila talked moodily about Ned not wanting it known that some one in his position was consorting with someone in hers, though she didn’t explain what his position was and We ford, true to his principles, wouldn’t ask.

   ‘When peace is so beautiful,’ Sheila said, ‘and what every one wants, why do they treat workers for peace like criminals?’

   Passing the police station on their way back from the restaurant in Pomfret, Wexford saw a light on in one of the interview rooms. Of course there was no real reason to suppose that Burden was in there with Clifford Sanders, yet he did suppose it with a chilling sense of unease. Forgetting Sheila and her troubles for a moment, he thought: I shall be embarrassed when I next see Mike, I shall feel awkward and therefore shall postpone that meeting. What am I going to do?

Burden had not meant to recall Clifford to the police station. His intention had been to call off his dogs for the duration of the weekend and let his baited creature make a partial recovery. The metaphor was his wife’s, not his, and he reacted with some anger to it. He now regretted discussing the case with Jenny and wished he had stuck to the principle (never much honoured in the observance) of not taking his work home.

   ‘I’ve had the same sentimental rubbish at work,’ he said. He would normally have said ‘from Reg’, but he was too angry with Wexford even to want to think of him by his Christian name. Burden had a Victorian attitude in this area, rather in the manner of those fictional heroines who called a man William while they were engaged to him and Mr Jones after they had broken it off. ‘I don’t understand all this sympathy with cold-blooded killers. People should try thinking of their victims for a change.’

   ‘So you’ve said on numerous previous occasions,’ said Jenny, not very pleasantly.

   That did it. That sent him back to the police station after his dinner and Archbold to the Forby Road to fetch Clifford again. He used the other ground floor interview room this time, the one at the front where the window gave on to the High Street, where the tiles were shabby black and tan (like an ageing spaniel, said Wexford) and the table had a brown-checked top with a metal rim.

   For the first time Clifford didn’t wait for Burden to begin. In a resigned but not unhappy voice, he said, ‘I knew you’d fetch me back again today. I sensed it. That’s why I didn’t start watching TV; I knew I’d only be interrupted in the middle of a programme. My mother knew too; she’s been watching me, waiting for the doorbell to ring.’

   ‘Your mother’s been asking you about this too, has she, Cliff?’

   Again Burden reflected how much like an overgrown schoolboy he looked. The clothes were so much the conventional wear of a correct well-ordered teenager at a grammar school in, say, the fifties, as to seem either a mockery or a disguise. The grey flannel trousers had turn-ups and were well-pressed. He wore a grey shirt - so that it could be worn two or three days without washing? - striped tie, grey hand-knitted V-necked pullover. It was plainly hand-knitted, well but not expertly, the hand of the imperfectly skilled evident in the neck border and the sewing up. Somehow Burden knew it had to be Mrs Sanders’ work. He already had an idea of her as a woman of many activities, but who did none of them well; she would not care enough to do things well.

   Clifford’s face was its usual blank, revealing no emotion even when he spoke those surely desperate sentences. He said, ‘I may as well tell you. I tell you all the truth now, I don’t hide anything, I hope you believe that. I may as well tell you that she says I wouldn’t be questioned like this day after day, on and on, if there wasn’t something in it. She says I must be that sort of person, or you wouldn’t keep getting me down here.’

   ‘What sort of person would that be, Cliff?’

   ‘Someone who would kill a woman.’

   ‘Your mother knows you’re guilty then, does she?’

   Clifford said with curious pedantry, ‘You can’t know something that isn’t true; you can only believe it or suspect it. She says that’s the sort of person I am, not that she thinks I killed anyone.’ Pausing, he looked sideways at Burden in what the latter thought of as a mad way, an unbalanced way. It was a sly, crafty look. ‘Perhaps I am. Perhaps I am that sort of person. How would you know till you did it?’

   ‘You tell me, Cliff. Tell me about that sort of person.’

   ‘He would be unhappy. He’d feel threatened by everyone. He’d want to escape from the life he had into something better, but that better would only be fantasy because he wouldn’t be able to escape really. Like a rat in a cage. They do these psychological experiments; they put a piece of glass outside the open door of the cage and when the rat tries to get out it can’t because it bumps into the glass. Then when they take the glass away it could really get out but it won’t, because it knows it gets hurt bumping itself on the invisible thing outside.’