Wexford 14 - The Veiled One (31 page)

   The gap in the hedge was found and Donaldson turned in carefully. Tires crunched on the gravel. The leafy wall of the house, a great square of dark, still, hanging foliage, reared before them. Clifford turned his head at last, gave his home an indifferent look.

   ‘She came up behind me. She was quiet enough, but I was prepared for her. Strange, isn’t it, Mike? She’s a mystery, she’s hidden behind a mask, and she’s slow and gliding like all mysterious people. But I know her and I knew what she was going to do; it was so obvious. Her hand went down to the door handle to pull out the key and I was standing there with that old lamp in my hands - ’

   ‘Come on, Clifford,’ Burden said, ‘we’re here.’

   The air felt wet; it was just as if a cold, wet hand wiped their faces as Wexford walked up to the front door. Dr Crocker was getting out of the car behind with Prentiss, the Scene-of-Crimes man, and there was a new photographer he didn’t recognize. Clifford wouldn’t separate himself from Burden but stayed close to him, nearly but not quite touching him. If he had actually touched him, Burden thought he might have cried out in horror, though he would have exerted all the control he was capable of to avoid this. It was bad enough knowing some of the blood adhered to his own clothes after that nightmare car journey. He knew he would have to burn everything it had touched.

   Wexford asked Clifford for the front-door key and Clifford’s answer was to pull out his pockets, the pockets of his jacket and trousers. They were all quite empty. He had left his ignition key in the Metro. As to the others . . .

   ‘I must have dropped them somewhere. I’ve lost them. They must be somewhere in the garden here.’

   Under the wet grass, among the blackened weeds beaded with waterdrops, or on the road in the gutter outside Burden’s house. Wexford made the decision quickly.

   ‘We’ll force the door. Not this one, it’s too heavy. A door at the back.’

   It was a slow, grim procession that made its way round the side of the house to the back regions where the rear wall and shed were just visible in the light of Archbold’s and Davidson’s torches, but nothing beyond. The beam of light played on a back door that looked solid enough, but was less weighty than the massive studded oak barrier whose key Clifford had lost. Davidson was the biggest of them after Wexford and he was also the youngest, but it was Burden who pushed forward and put his shoulder to the door. He had energy which must be released, some act of violence he needed to perform.

   Two hard runs at it and the door went down. The crash it made set Clifford laughing; he laughed merrily as they stepped over the shattered boards, the broken glass. Olson would have said, Wexford thought, that it was more than a citadel of bricks and mortar they had broken into and laid open. The flooding of the place with light brought a kind of relief, not that a really bright illumination was possible for Mrs Sanders had been mean with the electricity. It was colder here even than outside. A little of the fog seemed to have got in as Burden recalled the woman had once warned him it would, waiting ghost-like on the threshold to slip in. The damp chill seemed to penetrate clothes and prick skin with icicles.

   ‘Stop that laughing,’ he said roughly.

   His voice wiped Clifford’s face clean of all amusement. It was at once grave and rueful. ‘Sorry, Mike . . .’

   They went upstairs, Wexford leading the way. Through some lunatic quirk of meanness or indifference, it was impossible to turn upstairs lights on from downstairs, so that one walked out of light into a yawning darkness before a hand could reach out for a switch. The comparatively elegant staircase gave way to the steep attic flight. Wexford could see nothing at the top, only deep blackness. He put out his hand for Archbold’s torch and the thin beam of light showed him a half-open door at the head of the stairs.

   The light switch wasn’t even on the staircase wall but up in the passage. He deliberately averted his eyes from the open door and the room until the light was on. Then he entered the room with Burden and Clifford at his heels, the others close behind. Wexford put the attic light on and then he looked.

   Dorothy Sanders lay half on her back, half-sideways on one of the mattresses. A small, thin woman, composed of wire only in metaphor and fancy, she had had as much blood in her as anyone else and most of it seemed to have spilled from that fragile frame. Face and head were a mass of bloods and tissue, cerebral matter and even bone chips. Her hair was lost in it, drowned in it. She lay in her own blood, dark as wine and clotted to a paste, on a mattress dyed crimson-black.

   Beside the body, not flung down but set up precisely on a small round-topped beside table, was a lamp in the art nouveau style, a sculptured lily growing from its heavy metal base, its shade composed of frayed and split pleated silk. It was a forensic scientist’s ideal, this lamp, from the clots of blood and bloody hair which encrusted its base to the stain ; which transformed its now bent silk shade from green to an almost total dark brown.

   Of them all only Clifford was unused to sights such as this, but he alone among them was smiling.

It was very late. They had done everything - what Sergeant Martin insisted on calling ‘the formalities’. But the idea of going to their respective homes had scarcely entered Wexford’s head, still less Burden’s. Burden’s face had that look of a man who has seen indelible horrors. They are stamped there, those sights, but showing themselves in the staring eyes and taut skin as the skull inside the flesh reveals itself, a symbol of what has been seen and a foreshadowing of a future.

   Burden couldn’t rest. He stood in Wexford’s office. He just stood, keeping his eyes averted from Wexford’s, then bending his head and pressing his fingers to his temples.

   ‘You had better sit down, Mike.’

   ‘You’ll be saying it wasn’t my fault in a minute.’

   ‘I’m not a psychiatrist or a philosopher. How would I know?’

   Burden moved. He held his hands behind his back, came over to a chair and stood in front of it. ‘If I had left him alone . . .’ He didn’t finish the sentence.

   ‘Strictly speaking, it was he who wouldn’t leave you alone. You had to question him in the first place; you couldn’t be expected to foresee the turn things would take.’

   ‘Well, if I hadn’t . . . rejected him then, when he wanted to talk to me. It’s ironical, isn’t it? First he didn’t want me and then I didn’t want him. Reg, could I have averted this by letting him come and talk to me?’

   ‘I wish you’d sit down. I don’t know what it is you want, Mike. Do you want the hard truth or something to comfort you?’

   ‘Of course I want the truth.’

   ‘Then the truth probably is - and I realize it’s hard to take - that when you in your own words rejected Clifford, he felt he had to do something to draw your attention to him. And the best way to draw a policeman’s attention to someone is to become a murderer. Clifford, after all, isn’t sane; he doesn’t have sane reactions. Of course he attacked his mother to prevent her locking him in that room, but he could have achieved that without killing her. He could have over powered her and locked her in there himself. He killed her to attract your attention.’

   ‘I know, I see that. I realized it when we were there . . . in that room. But he was a murderer already. Why couldn’t he have admitted killing Mrs Robson? That would have attracted my attention all right. Do you think - ’ Burden drew in his breath, expelled it with a sigh. He was sitting down now, leaning forward and holding on to the edge of Wexford’s desk with both hands. ‘Do you think that’s what he wanted to talk to me about when he kept on trying to see me? Do you think he wanted to confess?’

   ‘No,’ Wexford said shortly. ‘No, I don’t.’

   He was anxious now to bring this conversation to a close. The question he was sure Burden was going to ask would be far better postponed till the morning. Burden was in a bad enough state as it was without this further addition to his guilty feelings. For this would be the ultimate guilt. Of course he would have to know tomorrow, he would have to know as soon as possible in the morning . . . before the special court sat. ‘Mike, would you like a drink? I’ve got some whisky in the cupboard. Don’t look like that, I don’t tipple the stuff secretly - or even un-secretly, come to that. One of our . . . clients offered it to me as a bribe and because , I thought it would be handy to have, I took it and gave him the current Tesco price for it. Six pounds forty-eight, I think it was.’ He was talking for the sake of talking as, burbling on. ‘I won’t have one, though. Let me have the Clifford tapes, will you, and then I’m going to drive you home. I’ll give you a stiff one and then take you home.’

   ‘I don’t want anything to drink. I shall feel like hell in the morning. If I could justify what I did, I’d feel better. If I could tell myself the only possible way we could have nailed this man was by waiting for him to commit another murder - giving him enough rope, so to speak. You say you don’t think he wanted to confess?’

   ‘I don’t think he wanted to confess, Mike. Let’s go home.’

   ‘What  time is it?’

   ‘Nearly two.’

   They closed the office door and walked down the corridor under the pale, steady, bleaching lights. Clifford was downstairs, at the back, in one of the cells. Kingsmarkham police station cells were more comfortable than most prisons, with a bit of rug on the floor, two blankets on the bunk and a blue slip on the pillow, a cubicle with loo and basin opening off the tiny room. Burden cast a backward glance in that direction as they came out of the lift. Sergeant Bray was on duty behind the desk with PC Savitt beside him, looking at something in a file. Wexford said good night but Burden said nothing.

   For the first time, the Christmas lights were on in the tree.

   Burden had noticed them as something unreal in the fog, a kind of mockery, as they returned from Ash Farm bringing Clifford with them. Either they were on a time clock which had failed to work, or someone had forgotten to switch them off. The reds and blues and whites came on for fifteen seconds, then the yellows and greens and pinks, then the lot, winking hard before the reds and blues and whites returned alone. By now the fog had almost lifted and the colours glimmered in a thin mist.

   ‘Wicked waste of the taxpayers’ money,’ Burden growled. 

   ‘I haven’t got my car,’ Wexford said. ‘It seems so long ago that I’d forgotten. I suppose I meant to drive you in your car.’

   ‘I’ll drive you.’

   A town that slept, a town that might have been emptied of its folk that silent night - inhabitants who had fled, leaving a light on here and there.

   Burden said, climbing up to Highlands, turning into Eastbourne Road, ‘I still can’t see how he did it - killed Gwen Robson, I mean. He must have been in that car park by a quarter to six, met her as she came in to get her car and killed her. He would have been getting out of his mother’s car and she walking up to hers. That must have been the way of it - unpremeditated, a frenzied act on the spur of the moment. He’ll tell us now, no doubt.’

   Wexford began to say something about the grotesqueness, the incongruity, of a young man stepping out of a car and happening by chance to be holding a circular knitting needle. They passed Robson’s house - dark, all the curtains drawn - and Dita Jago’s where a light was on, a red glow behind drawn crimson curtains. A cat came out of the Whittons’, streaked across the road. Burden braked hard as it leapt clear, on to a wall, up a tree.

   ‘Damned things,’ said Burden. ‘One shouldn’t brake, one shouldn’t give way to one’s reflexes like that. Suppose there’d been someone behind me? It was only a cat. Look, Reg, that woman Rosemary Whitton has to be wrong. I mean, it’s pretty hard for me to have to face that, because it means I was irresponsible in not consenting to talk to Clifford when he wanted me to. I took her word, of course I did. But we never really confirmed it.’

   Wexford sighed. ‘I did.’

   ‘What? Took her word? I know. But she was wrong. And the wine-market manager was wrong too. Rosemary must have seen Clifford ten minutes earlier and he’d gone before she hit the meter. It was a genuine mistake, but it was a mistake.’

   Up Battle Hill to stop outside his gate. The house dark; Dora had gone to bed long ago.

   Wexford unclipped the seat belt. ‘Wait till the morning, shall we?’

   He said good night, dragged himself upstairs and fell’ exhausted into bed - then awoke immediately, energetically, into a prospect of sleepless hours. When they were past and he was back down there, preparing for Clifford’s appearance before the magistrates, he was going to have to tell Burden the facts: that he had checked and double-checked Rosemary Whitton’s statement; that he had not only checked with the wine-market manager and three occupants of flats above the wine market, but had also found the traffic warden who, arriving on the scene to examine the damaged meter, had - while talking to Rosemary Whitton - seen Clifford drive away. It had been five to six.

Dorothy Sanders had never been divorced; Davidson’s investigation of records had established that. Nor had she needed to keep herself by the humble sewing and knitting - traditional occupations of the poor virtuous woman she had once read about in some historical romance? - which she told her son had supported them in his childhood. For during those years she had been regularly drawing on the joint bank account that was in her name and her husband’s. Now that she was dead, access to that account was no longer denied to the police.

   It had been fed by the interest on Charles Sanders’ investments, mostly unit trusts. Over a period of eighteen years since their separation, only she had drawn on it. From the bank manager’s slightly defensive manner, Wexford gathered that this perhaps curious fact had never been noticed. He was a man opposed to new technology and blamed the fault, if fault it was, on the fact that in recent years the administration of the account had been by computer. Wexford marvelled at Mrs Sanders’ capacity for lying and sustained secretiveness. It made him wonder if she had ever been married to Sanders, even if Clifford was her own child, but these facts were soon established. Dorothy Clifford and Charles Sanders had been married at St Peter’s, Kingsmarkham in October 1963 and Clifford born to her in February 1966.