Wexford 14 - The Veiled One (30 page)

   Jenny must have answered it on the other phone, for the ringing stopped. Burden picked up the receiver at his bedside and to his enormous relief heard Wexford’s voice. It was Wexford wanting to tell him the solution to the bomb puzzle; wanting also to come round later in the day with another solution, the answer to the mystery of the weapon Gwen Robson’s killer had used. Burden said nothing about Clifford or Clifford’s mother’s phone call. That could wait till later, till he saw Wexford - or perhaps might never need to be told.

   The morning passed with no more phone calls and no more visits. There was usually considerable traffic in Tabard Road, which was a through road, but today it was quiet, the fog keeping people at home. Was it also keeping Clifford at home, or was there another reason for his absence? Burden wondered how much his mother’s power and influence over him would enable her, at her level of necessarily far less physical strength, to be his jailer.

   The fog did not dissipate as it had on the preceding days, but seemed to thicken as afternoon came on. His sister-in-law Grace and her husband came to lunch, also Jenny’s brother. Burden thought how awkward it would have been if the red Metro had arrived and Clifford presented himself once more at the front door, but nothing like that happened. His guests went at about four, when the fog darkened and the yellow gleams of streetlights faintly penetrated it. None of them lived far away and they had all come on foot. Watching the departure from the front window, he saw Amyas encounter Wexford just outside the gate. This was about as far as it was possible to see, and even so the figures of the two men seemed as if swathed in lightly swaying pennants of gauze.

   ‘It was a huge relief,’ Wexford said, taking off his coat in the hall. ‘Yet when you come to think of it, what does that I amount to? Aren’t I really saying I’m glad it’s someone else’s child and not mine that’s threatened? There but for the grace of God, in fact - which is only another way of saying, “I’m all right, Jack”. ’

   ‘Edmund Hope may be all right too. It’s likely they’ve found another target by this time. After all, it’s more than three weeks ago.’

   ‘Yes, and more than three weeks since Gwen Robson’s death. How’s this for a garrote, Mike?’ Wexford drew from his pocket the circular needle he had bought at the Barringdean Centre; the pins at each end were a quarter of an inch in diameter, forming tough, strong handles to hold on to. ‘You’re the plastics expert,’ he said. ‘Would this be the right sort of stuff?’

   ‘It’s the right colour. I should say it’s pretty obvious a thing like this was used. Does that necessarily make it a woman who used it?’

   They went into Burden’s living room, where a fire had been lighted; the blaze from it lit the room with flickering yellow. Burden put up the fireguard in case Mark came in.

   ‘This was a premeditated crime,’ Wexford said, ‘only in the sense, I believe, that the perpetrator had had an idea of killing for some time and was waiting only for opportunity. But I don’t think he or she went into that car park with the weapon at the ready. It’s more likely it had just been brought in the shop where I got this one, and that means the prospective user might have bought it or someone else purchased it for the prospective user. In other words, it was on a shopping list, so the purchaser could have been a man or a woman.’

   ‘And he or she,’ Burden went on, ‘came up into the car park looking at it perhaps? I mean, perhaps it came loose from its packaging and the purchaser was curling it up and replacing it?’

   ‘Or the purchaser, who wasn’t the prospective user and maybe had never seen such a thing before, was fascinated by such a peculiar thing. It is a peculiar-looking thing, Mike. The purchaser might have just been standing there unwinding it and looking at it when Mrs Robson came along.’

   A car drew up outside. Its progress sounded slow, as it would necessarily have had to be in the dense fog. Burden jumped up a bit too quickly and went to the window - not Clifford, but Burden’s next-door neighbour whom he could see, getting out to open his garage drive gates.

   ‘It’s not too early to draw the curtains, is it?’

   ‘I didn’t know there was any prescribed time for it,’ Wexford said, eyeing him speculatively.

   ‘It seems a pity to lose the last of the light.’

   The impenetrable greyness outside made nonsense of this remark. It was now impossible to see across the street, in fact to see much beyond the pavement and kerb on this side. Burden pulled the curtains across the window and was switching on a table lamp when the phone rang. He gave a nervous start which he knew Wexford had seen.

   ‘Hallo?’

   His mother-in-law’s voice and his wife’s intermingled as Jenny picked up the bedroom extension. He couldn’t control the little gasp of relief. Wexford said with quick intuition, ‘Has Clifford Sanders been hounding you?’

   Burden nodded. ‘I think it’s stopped though. He hasn’t phoned or been here all day.’

   ‘Been here?’

   ‘Oh, yes. He was here last night, came to the door twice, but I do think it’s over now. Anyway,’ Burden lied, ‘it’s not important, it’s not a problem. Your Mrs Jago - do you see her as . . . ?’

   Instead of answering directly, Wexford said, ‘Dita Jago might very well have been one of Gwen Robson’s blackmailees. She had the means to kill her. Of everyone in this case, she was the most likely to have been buying a circular knitting needle in the shopping centre that afternoon. On the other hand, she says she was in the public library, the central branch in the High Street, with her grand-daughters. I jib a bit at asking those two little girls to alibi or not alibi the grandmother they’re obviously fond of; I won’t do it if I can avoid it, but . . .’

   ‘Anyway, the papers Lesley Arbel was looking for - and ransacked or spring-cleaned her uncle’s house in the, process of so doing - weren’t sheets from Dita Jago’s manuscript, They were photocopies of letters.’

   Burden said, ‘Do you mean letters Gwen Robson took or borrowed from the homes of her clients? Incriminating letters she then had copied?’

   ‘Not quite, her niece got these letters for her. It was Lesley Arbel who made the copies to show to her aunt. Not because she thought they could be used for any criminal purpose, certainly not that, but to amuse her, I think - to entertain someone who loved gossip and took the same kind of pleasure in sexual irregularities as some of our Sunday newspapers do - gloating over matters that ostensibly they deplore.’

   ‘Are you talking about letters to the agony aunt?’

   ‘Of course. Lesley Arbel had easy access to them and a photocopier in the office where she worked. Some of the letters would appear in Kim - my God, Mike, the amount of Kim I’ve grubbed through in the past week - but most wouldn’t and some, even in these days of licence, would be considered unfit for publication. And even though there’s an unwritten law in the agony aunt’s department that staff preserve discretion - lip service to a kind of poor woman’s Official Secrets Act - it must have seemed harmless enough, what she was doing. None of it would go beyond the four walls of the house in Hastings Road . . . What is it, Mike? What’s wrong?’

   Burden had jumped up and stood with head lifted. ‘Did you hear a car?’

   Drily Wexford said, ‘I hear a car every minute of my life when I’m not asleep. How do you escape it in this world?’

   The door opened and Mark came in, followed by his mother. But Burden continued to stand transfixed, only holding out an absent hand to the child. Mark wasn’t shy; he went up to Wexford, wanting the pencil he held in his hand, then the pad on which notes had been made, finally climbing on to Wexford’s knees. Burden went to the window and parted the curtains with both hands. His knuckles had whitened and his shoulders drooped a little.

   ‘Oh, not again?’ Jenny said. ‘He’s not back again?’

   ‘I’m afraid he is.’ Burden turned back into the room and faced Wexford. ‘Am I overreacting when I say I’m seriously thinking of applying for an injunction?’

   Instead of answering directly, Wexford said, ‘Let me go.’ He lifted the little boy on to the floor, sacrificed pad and pencil to him. ‘Don’t get it on the carpet, or your Mum’ll be after me.’

   As he came out into the hall, the bell rang. Wexford let it ring again. Burden had joined him, was standing just behind him. The letter-box lid started flapping as fingers pushed at it and then the other hand pounded on the knocker. The fingers appeared under the opened letter-box lid and there was something about them and the smear marks they left on pale paintwork that made Burden draw in his breath with a rough hiss. Wexford crossed the hall and opened the door.

   Clifford took a step back when he saw him. He was looking beyond Wexford’s bulk and when he saw Burden he smiled. Wexford eyed him in a kind of stricken silence, for Clifford was covered with blood. His grey shirt and knitted pullover and the zipper-jacket he wore, his grey flannel trousers, his striped tie and grey socks and lace-up shoes - all were thick with blood, matted and plastered with it, and in places the blood was damp still, glistening still. And Clifford, smiling, stepped over the threshold into the hall with no one to impede him until the little boy came out of the living room, and Burden, sweeping him up in his arms, shouted, ‘Don’t let him see. For God’s sake, don’t let him see!’

The driving-seat of his mother’s car which had always been a curious place of refuge for Clifford, a sanctuary and scene of unimaginable cogitations, was bloodied from his clothes. Easy to make an analogy here with wombs, but Wexford shied away from that one. Though it was dark and foggy, he had the seat of the car and the blood-encrusted steering wheel covered up before it was towed away. Now they sat in the first of a convoy of police vehicles, Clifford between him and Burden, crawling through the fog. Donaldson’s headlights made two green bars of radiance that petered out into the wool-like greyness after a few feet. Behind them another driver clung to Donaldson’s rear lights and a third followed, all moving at about fifteen miles an hour.

   Clifford had Burden to himself now, a captive therapist, and his face wore an expression that was at the same time , serene and insane. At appalling cost he had got what he wanted. He talked. He spoke uninterruptedly, sometimes lifting up his bloody hands which had smeared Burden’s door with stains, the bitten nails blackened with blood, turning them over and looking at them with wondering pleasure. Already he had told Burden what he had done and - insofar as his conscious mind understood this - why he had done it. But he repeated himself as if he enjoyed the sound of his own monotonous, now measured and almost complacent voice.

   ‘She sent me up into the attic, Mike. She thought she could shut me in like she did when I was little. I was to go up there and fetch her down a lamp. The one in the dining room had got broken, there was a fault in the connection, and she said to fetch her one of the lamps that had belonged to my grandparents. But I’m cunning, Mike, I’m cleverer than she is basically, I’ve got a better brain. I knew she would rather sit in the dark than use anything from up there. She wouldn’t use a lamp my father’s mother had used.’

   Burden was returning his gaze with what looked like blankness unless you knew Burden as Wexford did and then you understood it was controlled desperation.

   ‘The truth was she wanted to keep me from seeing you. When she told me she’d phoned you to complain about our seeing each other - when she told me that, I saw red. But I didn’t show my feelings, I kept everything suppressed, I didn’t even answer her. I went upstairs like an obedient little boy. Of course I couldn’t be sure what she was up to then; I wondered what she was at. I knew she was following me up, though, and I said to myself, why is she following me when she’s asked me to fetch her something? If she’s going to come up too, why couldn’t she have fetched it herself?’

   Forcing the words out in a voice that sounded unlike his own, Burden said, ‘So what . . . what did you do, Clifford?’ He had already cautioned him. It had been a bizarre ritual taking place in the hall of Burden’s own house, Clifford pleasurably pointing out individual blood-stains on his jacket, his shirt, his trousers, beginning on a confession whose utterance held a childlike innocence, while Burden mouthed in that same strangled tone the words of the caution: ‘You are not obliged to say anything in answer to the charge but anything you do say . . .’

   Now Clifford continued in the same blithe, confiding way, ‘It wasn’t the attic where Mr Carroll had to break the door down. We’d never had that door mended. The photographs were in there. It was the one with the bedroom furniture.’ He brought his face closer to Burden’s - said in an intimate way, as to one familiar with the secrets of all hearts, ‘You know what I mean.’

   Donaldson braked hard as they came suddenly up against the headlights of a huge truck. It was carrying earth-moving equipment, cranes and scoops that loomed dinosaur-like out of the rolling mist. Slowly the convoy edged past it, they were beyond Sundays now, in the narrow lane that led nowhere but to the Sanders’ house and the farmer’s bungalow. Fog filled the channel between high hedges, hung overhead like dark fallen cloud. They weren’t far from the entrance now. Donaldson crept along, stopped the car once or twice - like a dog sniffing, scenting its way to the familiar ground. And it seemed that down here in the least likely place, a low place still in the river valley, the fog had lifted a little, for a high wall of hedge was visible and a tree like a great figure with arms upraised.

   Clifford hadn’t once looked out of the window; Burden’s face seemed the only view he required. He said conversationally, ‘All those mattresses were in there, and blankets and things. I expect you remember that time I showed you. And there was a lamp there too, like she said there was. She’s clever, she knows about getting her details right. But there was something she forgot. It was the wrong sort of plug, they old-fashioned sort with no earth, an old ten-amp plug with no earth. It was so absurd I could have laughed out loud, only I didn’t feel like laughing then, Mike . . .’