Wexford 14 - The Veiled One (3 page)

   The dead woman wore a brown tweed coat with fur collar and her hat of brown fawn checked tweed with narrow brim was still on her grey curly hair. Apparently small and slight, she had stick-like legs in brown tights or stockings and on her feet brown lace-up low-heeled walking shoes. Wedding and engagement rings were on her left hand.

   ‘The Escort’s her car,’ Burden said. ‘She had the keys to it in her hand when she was killed. Or that’s the way it looks, the keys were under the body. There are two bags of groceries in the boot. It looks as if she put the bags in the boot, closed the boot-lid, came round to unlock the driver’s door and then someone attacked her from behind.’

   ‘Attacked her with what?’

   ‘A thin length of cord, maybe. Like in thuggee.’ Burden’s general knowledge as well as sharpness of intellect had been enhanced by marriage. But it was the birth of his son, twenty years after his first family, that had made him abandon the smart suits he had formerly favoured for wear even on occasions like this one. Jeans were what the inspector had on this evening, though jeans which rather oddly bore knife creases and contrasted not altogether happily with his camel-hair jacket.

   ‘More like wire than a cord,’ Wexford said.

   The remark had an electric effect on Dr Sumner-Quist who jumped up and spoke to Wexford as if they were in a drawing room, not a car park, as if there were no body on the floor and this were a social occasion, a cocktail party maybe: ‘Talking of wire, isn’t that frightfully pretty TV girl who’s all over the paper this evening your daughter?’

   Wexford didn’t like to imagine what effect the epithet ‘TV girl’ would have had on Sheila. He nodded.

   ‘I thought so. I said to my wife it was so, unlikely as it seemed. OK, I’ve done all I can here. If the man with t camera’s done his stuff, you can move her as far as concerned. Myself, I think it’s a pity these people don’t cutting the wire in Russia.’

   Wexford made no reply to this. ‘How long has she been dead?’

   ‘You want miracles, don’t you? You think I can tell you that after five minutes’ dekko? Well, she was a goner by six, I reckon. That do you?’

   And he had been there at seven minutes past . . . He lifted up the grubby brown velvet curtain that lay in a heap a few inches from the dead woman’s feet. ‘What’s this?’

   ‘It was covering the body, sir,’ Archbold said.

   ‘Covering it as might be a blanket, do you mean? Or right over the head and feet?’

   ‘One foot was sticking out and the woman who found her pulled it back a bit to see the face.’

   ‘Yes - who was it found her?’

   ‘A Mrs Dorothy Sanders. That’s her car over there, the red one. She found the body, but it was a man called Greaves in Pomeroy Street phoned us. Davidson’s talking to him now. He found Mrs Sanders screaming and shaking the gates fit to break them down. She went raving mad because the phone box is outside the gates and she couldn’t get out. Diana Pettit took a statement from her and drove her home.’

   Still holding the curtain. Wexford tried the boot-lid of the red Metro. There was shopping inside that too, food in two red Tesco carriers and a clear plastic bag full of hanks of grey knitting-wool done up with string like a parcel. He looked up at the sound of the lift, an echo from it or reverberation or something; you could always hear it. The door to the lift had opened and a man appeared. He was walking very diffidently and hesitantly towards them and when his eyes met Wexford’s he stopped altogether. Archbold went up to him and said something. He was a young man with a pale heavy face and dark moustache and he was dressed in a way which while quite suitable for a man of Wexford’s own age, looked incongruous on someone of - what? Twenty-one? Twenty-two? The V-necked grey pullover, striped tie and grey flannel trousers reminded Wexford of a school uniform.

   ‘I’ve come for the car,’ he said.

   ‘One of these cars is yours?’

   ‘The red one, the Metro. It’s my mother’s. My mother said to come over and bring it back.’

   His eyes went fearfully to where the body lay, the body that was now entirely covered by a sheet. It lay unattended - pathologist, photographer and policeman having all moved away towards the central aisle or the exits. Wexford noted that awe-stricken glance, the quick withdrawing of the eyes and jerk of the head. He said, ‘Can I have your name, sir?’

   ‘Sanders, Clifford Sanders.’

   Burden asked, ‘Are you some relation of Mrs Dorothy Sanders?’

   ‘Her son.’

   ‘I’ll come back with you,’ Wexford said. ‘I’ll follow you; I’d like to talk to your mother.’ He let Clifford Sanders, walking edgily, pass out of earshot and then said to Burden, ‘Mrs Robson’s next-of-kin . . . ?’

   ‘There’s a husband, but he hasn’t been told. He’ll have to make a formal indentification. I thought of going over there now.’

   ‘Do we know who that blue Lancia belongs to?’

   Burden shook his head. ‘It’s a bit odd, that. Only shoppers use the car park - I mean, who else would want to? And the centre’s been closed over two hours. If it belongs to the killer, why didn’t he or she drive it away? When I first saw it I thought maybe it wouldn’t start, but we had to move it and it started first time.’

   ‘Better have the owner traced,’ said Wexford. ‘My God, Mike, I was in here, I saw the three cars, I drove past her.’

   ‘Did you see anyone else?’

   ‘I don’t know, I’ll have to think.’

   Going down in the lift, he thought. He remembered pounding footsteps descending, the girl in the red Vauxhall following him, the half-dozen people in the above-ground parking areas, the mist that was visible and obscuring but really hid nothing. He remembered the woman carrying the two bags coming from the covered way, strolling, languidly kicking the trolley aside. But that was at ten-past six and the murder had already taken place by then . . . He got into the car beside Archbold. Clifford Sanders in the red Metro was waiting a few yards along the roadway while a uniformed officer - someone new that Wexford didn’t recognize - trundled the scattered trolleys out of their path.

   The little red car led them along the High Street in the Stowerton direction and turned into the Forby Road. Arch- bold seemed to know where Sanders lived, in a remote spot down a lane that turned off about half a mile beyond the house and parkland called ‘Sundays’. In fact it was less then three miles outside Kingsmarkham, but the lane was narrow and very dark and Clifford Sanders drove even more slowly than the winding obscurity warranted. Thick, dark, leafless hedges rose high on either side. Occasionally a pulling-in place revealed itself, showing at least that passing would be possible if they met another vehicle. Wexford couldn’t remember even having been down there before, he doubted if it led anywhere except perhaps finally to the gates of a farm.

   The sky was quite black, moonless, starless. The lane seemed to wind in a series of unneccessary loops. There were no hills for it to circumvent and the river to flow in the opposite direction. No longer were any pinpoints of light visible in the surrounding countryside. All was darkness but for the area immediately ahead, illuminated by their own headlights, and the twin bright points glowing red on the rear of the Metro.

   But now Clifford Sanders’ left-hand indicator was winking. Plainly, he was a kind of driver who would signal his intention to turn a hundred yards before the turning. A few seconds elapsed. There were no lights ahead, only a break in the hedge. Then the Metro turned in and Archbold followed, guided by the red tail-lights. With a kind of amused impatience Wexford thought how they might be in some Hitchcock movie, for he could just make out the house - a house which probably looked a lot less disagreeable by day light but was now almost ridiculously grim and forbidding. Behind two windows only a pallid light showed. There was no other light either by the front door or about the garden. Wexford’s eyes grew accustomed to the darkness and he saw that the house was biggish, on three floors, with eight windows here in the front and a slab of a front door. A low light of steps without rails led up to it and there was neither porch nor canopy. But the whole façade was hung, covered, clothed in ivy. As far as he could see it was ivy, at any rate it was evergreen leaves, a dense blanket of them, through which the two pale windows peered like eyes in an animal’s shaggy face.

   A garden surrounded the house - grass and wilted foliage at any rate, extending at the back to a wooden fence. Beyond that only darkness, fields and woods, and over the low hill the invisible town which might as well have been a hundred miles away.

   Clifford Sanders went up to the front door. The bell was a very old-fashioned kind which you rang by turning the handle back and forth, but he had a key and unlocked this door, though when Wexford started to follow him he said in his flat chilly tone, ‘Just a minute, please.’

   Mother, evidently, had to be warned; he disappeared and after a moment or two she came out to them. Wexford’s first thought was how small she was, tiny and thin; his second that this was the woman he had seen entering the under ground car park as he had left it. Within moments then she had found the body that he had missed. Her face was very pale, as near a white face as you could find, very lined and powdered even whiter, a young girl’s scarlet lipstick unbecomingly coating her mouth. She was dressed in a brown tweed skirt, beige jumper, bedroom slippers. Did her recent discovery account for the curious smell of her? She smelt of disinfectant, the apparent combination of lime and thymol which hospitals reek of.

   ‘You can come in,’ she said, ‘I’ve been expecting you.’

   Inside, the place was bleak and cavernous; carpets and central heating were not luxuries that Mrs Sanders went in for. The hall floor was quarry-tiled, in the living room they walked on wood-grain linoleum and a couple of sparse rugs. There was scarcely an ornament to be seen - no pictures, only a large mirror in a heavy mahogany frame. Clifford Sanders had seated himself on a very old, shabby horsehair sofa in front of the fire of logs. He now wore on his feet only grey socks; his shoes were set in the hearth on a folded sheet of newspaper. Mrs Sanders pointed out - actually pointed with an extended finger - precisely where they were to Sit: the armchair for Wexford, the other section of the sofa for Archbold. She seemed to have some notion of rank and what was due to it.

   ‘I’d like you to tell me about your experience in the Barringdean Centre car park this evening, Mrs Sanders,’ Wexford began. He forced himself to shift his eyes from the newspaper on which his daughter’s face looked out at him from between the pair of black lace-up brogues. ‘Tell me what happened from the time you came into the car park.’

   Her voice was slow and flat like her son’s, but there was something metallic about it too, almost as if throat and palate were composed of some inorganic hard material. ‘There isn’t anything to tell. I came up with my shopping to get my car. I saw something lying on the ground and went over to look and it was . . . I expect you know what it was.’

   ‘Did you touch it?’

   ‘I pulled back the bit of rag that was over it, yes.’

   Clifford Sanders was watching his mother, his eyes still and blank. He seemed not so much relaxed as sagging from despair, his hands hanging down between his parted legs.

   ‘What time was this, Mrs Sanders?’ Wexford had noted the digital watch she wore.

   ‘Exactly twelve minutes past six.’ To account for her leaving the shopping precinct so late, she gave an account of a contretemps with a fishmonger, speaking in the measured level way - too measured. Wexford, who had been wondering what her tone reminded him of, now recalled electronic voices issuing from machines. ‘I came up there at twelve minutes past six - and if you want to know how I can be sure of the time, the answer is I’m always sure of the time.’

   He nodded. Digital watches were designed for people like her who, prior to their arrival on the scene, had to make approximate guesses as to what time was doing between ten- past six and six-fifteen. Yet most of them were speedy people, always in a hurry, restless, unrelaxed. This woman seemed one of those rare creatures who are constantly aware of time without being tempted to race against it.

   She spoke softly to her son. ‘Did you lock the garage doors?’

   He nodded. ‘I always do.’

   ‘Nobody always does anything. Anybody can forget.’

   ‘I didn’t forget.’ He got up. ‘I’m going into the other room to watch TV.’

   She was a pointer, Wexford saw, a finger-post. Now the finger pointed into the hearth. ‘Don’t forget your shoes.’

   Clifford Sanders padded away with his shoes in his hand and Wexford said to Dorothy Sanders, ‘What were you doing between twelve minutes past six and six forty-five when you managed to attract the attention of Mr Greaves in Queen Street?’ He had registered very precisely the time of the phone call Greaves made to Kingsmarkham police station: fourteen minutes to seven, ‘That’s half an hour between the time you found the body and the time you got down to the gate and . . . called out.’

   She wasn’t disconcerted. ‘It was a shock. I had my shock to get over and then when I got down there I couldn’t make anyone hear.’

   He recalled Archbold’s account, albeit at third hand. She had been screaming and raving inside those gates, shaking them ‘fit to break them down’ because the phone box was on the other side. Now the woman looked at him coldly and calmly. One would have said no emotion ever disturbed her equilibrium or altered the tone of the mechanical voice.

   ‘How many cars did you see parked at that time on the second level?’

   Without hesitation she said, ‘Three, including mine.’

   She wasn’t lying; perhaps she hadn’t been lying at all. He recalled how when he had passed through the second level there had been four cars parked there. One had pulled out, the one driven by the impatient young girl, and followed him fretfully. That had been at eight or nine minutes past six. . .

   ‘Did you see anyone? Anyone at all?’

   ‘Not a soul.’

   She would be a widow, Wexford thought, nearly pensionable, without any sort of job, dependent in many ways and certainly financially dependent on this son who no doubt lived not far away. Later on, he reflected that he couldn’t have been more wrong.