Wexford 14 - The Veiled One (35 page)

   ‘You didn’t say anything about her taking the letter copies from Mrs Robson’s bag,’ said Burden.

   ‘She didn’t take them.’

   ‘But someone - ’ 

   ‘Once she had made her decision, she had nothing to fear from that letter. She had already told Gwen Robson while they were in the centre that blackmail was pointless as she intended to go to her doctor and confess to her husband.’

   There was a space now where the Robson Escort had been parked, and the space where the blue Lancia had been was empty too. Burden stood in the middle holding out his arms in rather a dramatic way, a foot on either side of the dividing white line. And in a voice made shrill by exasperated bewilderment, he demanded to know why it was then that Nina Quincy had done murder.

They stood for a while on the spot where Gwen Robson had died.

   ‘You know, Mike,’ Wexford said, ‘I don’t think we’ve considered sufficiently what a horrible crime this was. We’ve accepted it, not put it into perspective. Only a very few people would be capable of committing such a crime. What - approach a woman either from behind or face-to-face and garrote her with a wire? Imagine the horror of it, the helpless thrashings of the victim, her struggles . . . who but one of those psychopaths you’re so keen on could stand it?’

   ‘I must say,’ Olson put in, ‘I wouldn’t have thought a . . . well, fairly sheltered ordinary middle-class sort of girl like Nina Quincy with a conventional lifestyle capable of it. But I’m not a policeman, I don’t know. The affectivity might be there, but it’s just that a young mother - that’s the last category you’d pick on for this kind of crime. In my game, that is.’

   ‘And in mine,’ said Wexford. ‘When I said that Nina Quincy felt satisfied because she had taken action, I meant only that the action she had taken was her defiance of Gwen Robson, her decision to get medical help at last. Of course she didn’t kill her, though I daresay she sometimes would have liked to, which is what I think you mean. But she didn’t kill her. In order to be back in the High Street and at the library by five-thirty, she must have left the Barringdean Centre by five-twenty at the latest, and we know the earliest time at which Gwen Robson could have died was five-thirty-five.’

   The acrid stench of petrol made Wexford wrinkle up his nose. ‘If we want to save our lungs, we’d better get back in the car,’ he said. ‘Before we go into the next sequence of events, perhaps we should take a look at the couple called Roy and Margaret Carroll. We already know that the writer of the other letter was Margaret Carroll - a woman with something of a social conscience, a woman who was upset when she discovered that her neighbour was in the habit of punishing her little boy by shutting him up in cold, dark attics.’

   ‘Do you know who they are?’ Burden said to Olson. ‘Neighbours of Clifford and the late Dodo Sanders? Does it mean anything to you?’

   ‘Clifford mentioned her,’ Olson said carefully. ‘He said she once threatened his mother with the cruelty-to-children’s people.’

   ‘That’s right. She was also concerned about another aspect of the Sanders’ life, though this was something she didn’t begin to suspect until last summer. Strange, isn’t it, how all these things erupted last summer around May and June? Her own life was none too easy, I suspect, with a husband of a kind usually called a brute - a Cold Comfort Farm kind of character, only grimly for real. He was going to have a go at us last night with a twelve-bore. Did Mike tell you?’

   Olson raised his brown tufty eyebrows. ‘Where is he now?’

   ‘In custody, where I hope he’ll remain for quite a while.’

   ‘And the wife? what’s happened to her?’

   ‘She left him last summer - something else that happened then, about June, I think. The wonder was that she didn’t go years ago. Well, no, I’m deceiving you and I don’t want to do that. Let’s say only that she seems to have left him; at any rate she disappeared. Clifford believes there was a man friend and Carroll gives the impression of believing that too. I don’t. I think Margaret Carroll is dead, just as Charles Sanders is dead. A year after Roy Carroll and his wife came to live at Ash Farm Lodge, Charles Sanders died. That was why he never came back to see his little boy, why he seemed to abandon his old mother, why he contributed nothing to his son’s support, why his wife was obliged to live on what she drew from their joint account - an account steadily though meagrely fed from Charles Sanders’ investments - and incidentally why Mike hasn’t been able to find him.’

   ‘Let’s go back, shall we? We’ve renewed our acquaintance with the place; we can hold what we need to in our mind’s eye.’

   Burden reversed the car and circled slowly towards the upward ramp. ‘Is that what they’re doing up there at Ash Lane, searching for Charles Sanders’ body?’

   ‘Well, the remains of it, Mike. It’s eighteen years past and there won’t be much left. Frankly, I don’t know where to begin the search for Mrs Carroll, but there are ways of help open to us. You see, Mrs Carroll suspected Sanders was dead when she was in her branch of the Midland Bank and saw Dorothy Sanders drawing a cheque on a joint account. She happened to stand next to her and quite innocently saw this over her shoulder. At any rate I think so; it’s an intelligent enough guess. Did other others then begin to fall into place? The sudden and quite unexpected death of Charles Sanders’ father? This death immediately followed by the departure of Charles? The memory soon after of secret digging? Not enough for her to come to us - or perhaps she couldn’t bring herself to the enormity of such a step. It was a pity she didn’t; she might be alive today if she had.’

   When the car turned into the High Street something recalled Wexford’s mind to Sheila and the tribulations of her day. She or someone representing her would have phoned Dora by now. What had happened to her - an account of what had happened with pictures - would be in the evening paper. It would be on the streets by now; the London evening papers were always on Kingsmarkham streets by three and it was nearly four. The sun was setting, dyeing the sky a gold that would fade to pink and darken to dusky purple. He caught sight of a newsboard with something on it about missile treaty talks and felt a ridiculous relief because Sheila’s name wasn’t there. As if Sheila’s court appearance, Sheila’s fate must as a matter of course be the lead story.

   ‘Mike,’ he said, ‘put the car on one of those meters in Queen Street, will you? I have to buy a paper.’

   Her face looked at him, framed in newsprint, not smiling nor laughing, no raised hand waving at cameras. She looked frightened; her expression was grave and big-eyed. She was leaving the court and even without reading the caption it didn’t take a policeman’s knowledge to recognize where she was going and with whom. The headline he couldn’t help reading, though he forced himself to postpone further elucidation until he was at home: ‘Sheila Goes to Jail’, the picture caption said. ‘Lady Audley’s Secret star gets a week inside.’

   The man behind the counter, an obliging, nothing-is-too-much-trouble Indian, smiled patiently at this apparently stupefied customer who didn’t know you had to pay for an evening paper. He coughed discreetly. Wexford put two ten-pence pieces on the counter and crushed the paper clumsily into his pocket.

   Olson and Burden were out of the car, standing outside Pelage.

   ‘Come up to my place,’ said. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea.’

   The steep narrow staircase was a bit like the attic stairs at Ash Farm, Burden thought. But there was something cosy, something sane for all its bizarreness, about what awaited them at the top. He remembered how it had once felt threatening and now he wondered why. What had he meant? He had become a therapist himself since then - with disastrous results. His own, sometimes timid, psyche suddenly seemed less important. Wexford, who had never been up here before, saw the poster with the globe and its ruined continents, with Einstein’s ominous words, and it brought home to him Sheila’s fate so that he flinched. He wondered if the others had seen, decided they hadn’t and anyway, so what? Olson was using spoonfuls of powdered stuff called instant tea. Inwardly Wexford laughed at himself for minding, for caring about trivia in the midst of . . . all this. He said:

   ‘Thanks to your tapes, Mike, I know exactly what Clifford told you. Whether those tapes could be admitted now, whether you were strictly correct to make them, doesn’t matter. Clifford told you he hoped his mother and Roy Carroll might get together - might even possibly marry - and he told you how all the information about Margaret Carroll having a lover, another man in her life, came to Carroll from Dorothy Sanders. It was Dorothy Sanders, the neighbour, who was in a position to see who visited Ash Farm Lodge while Carroll was out in the fields and perhaps also to see whom she went out to meet. Or so Carroll could be made to believe.’

   ‘Carroll is a jealous, possessive man. She inflamed his jealousy and terribly damaged his pride, but for her own sake she had to do it. Clifford was wrong when he guessed Carroll might be attracted by his mother or enjoyed her company; all he got from her was information about his wife’s infidelity. When his wife disappeared he thought he knew why and who with, but the last thing he wanted was for the rest of the world to know. That was why he never reported her as missing when she disappeared last June. He preferred to keep her disappearance dark but if anyone suggested to him, as we did, that his wife might be some where living with another man, he went out of his mind with rage.’

   Burden drank his tea as if it were the real stuff brewed from leaves in a hot, dry pot, as if the milk in it had come yesterday from a cow. ‘So Carroll didn’t kill her.’

   ‘There was only one person in this case capable of committing these crimes, and that person is beyond our reach now. Retribution, if you like, or chance or misfortune has caught up with her. Only Dorothy Sanders could have killed a husband, depriving a child of its father and a mother of her son. Only Dorothy Sanders could have gone up to her victim and garroted her with a length of wire.’

   ‘Here’s the letter Margaret Carroll wrote to Kim last spring,’ Wexford went on, holding out the photocopy to Burden. ‘I went back to Ash Farm last night and found it slipped into the back of a photograph frame in one of those attic rooms. The picture, incidentally, was of a family group I take to be Charles and his parents. I wonder why she didn’t burn the letter? Because something she had done murder for must be precious? Or one day to have it to show to Clifford or Carroll if a defence was needed? We shall never know. The original would have been kept by Kim for two years, except that Lesley Arbel saw to that when she couldn’t find the copy. She destroyed both those letters as soon as she got back after her Sundays course.’

   Burden read it aloud: ‘“Dear Sandra Dale, I am in a terrible dilemma and cannot decide what to do. I am so worried it is stopping me from sleeping. I have good reason to believe that a neighbour of mine killed a person close to her nearly twenty years ago. The person was her husband. I won’t go into what made me think this after so long, but the new evidence I got made me remember certain suspicious things happening all that time ago. Her father-in-law died too and he was a healthy strong man, not old. My husband does not like the police and would be very upset I think if I had to explain all this to them, if we had police here questioning me etc. I cannot mention names here. It has taken months to screw myself up to write this. I would appreciate your advice . . . ”’ He looked at Wexford. ‘Did this Sandra Dale reply?’

   ‘Oh, yes. She didn’t print the letter, of course, or the reply. She wrote back very properly advising Margaret Carroll to come to us and lose no time in doing so. But Margaret Carroll didn’t - too frightened of the husband, no doubt. And by then Gwen Robson had got hold of the letter through Lesley.’

   Olson put in, ‘But how did she know who Margaret Carroll meant by her “neighbour”?’

   ‘She was a Kingsmarkham woman: she knew the area and knew Mrs Carroll only had one neighbour. I daresay she remembered Clifford from the Miss McPhail days. Anyway, she took herself down to Ash Farm and asked Dorothy Sanders for money - weekly payments if she liked, she didn’t mind instalments - not to tell the police about the contents of the letter. By that time she was already successfully extracting payment from Nina Quincy, stashing it away for her husband’s expensive op.’

   ‘She wasn’t concerned with Margaret Carroll. It wouldn’t have excited her interest if she had known that Margaret Carroll had disappeared soon after Dorothy Sanders made the first payment. Besides, it was in her interest to steer clear of Mrs Carroll who, had she dreamed of what was going on, probably would have been stirred into coming to us, would have saved her own life and killed one of the geese that laid golden eggs. Dorothy Sanders made no second payment. A second payment was asked for when Gwen Robson encountered her by chance in the Barringdean Centre that Thursday afternoon, but Dodo saw to it that it was never paid.’

   Burden objected. ‘But look, didn’t you say you saw her come into the car park as you were leaving it at ten-past six? Gwen Robson was dead by five-to.’

   ‘I saw her come back a second time, Mike. She had been there before.’

   ‘She went back?’ Olson said. ‘When she’d committed murder? Why didn’t she just leave, go home, anything?’

   ‘She’s not like other people, is she? We’ve already agreed on that. She didn’t have their responses, their reactions, their emotions. This is what I think happened, all we’ll ever know now of what did happen. First of all, it was she that Linda Naseem saw from the back talking to Gwen Robson. She had a girl’s figure, we’ve commented on that: she looked like a girl from the back, or when you couldn’t see her face and hair. Either she went with Gwen Robson into the car park - arguing perhaps, threatening even, trying to make change her mind - or else she followed her. I lean rather towards the alternative and think she followed. You see, by then - it wasn’t yet five-thirty - she hadn’t finished her shopping.’

   ‘So they entered the car park more or less together. While Gwen Robson was unlocking her car Dodo went up to her and garroted her with the circular knitting needle she had bought in the centre after she had had her hair done. Remember, we know she had been in there because she had bought the grey knitting wool she placed in the boot of her car. The job done, she returned to the centre.’