Wexford 14 - The Veiled One (7 page)

   ‘Part-time,’ she said, and astonished them both by saying in the same level, indifferent tone, ‘He’s inadequate in some ways.’

   ‘What’s wrong with him? Is he ill?’

   Her old harshly censorious manner was back. ‘They call it ill nowadays. When I was young, they called it lacking character.’ A dark flush moved into her cheeks, mottling them. She was dressed in green today, a dark dull green, though her shoes and gloves were black. When the blush faded, the dull seaweed green seemed to show up the pallor of her skin. ‘That’s where he was, wasn’t he, when he was supposed to be coming for me in the car park? He’d been to this psychiatrist. They call them psychotherapists; they don’t have any qualifications.’

   ‘Mrs Sanders, are you telling me that your son was in the Barringdean Centre car park when you were?’

   Emotions warred behind the blush, the succeeding pallor, the muffling screen of green and black. She had not meant to let that out. Protecting her son was not as unknown to her as Wexford had at first believed: he could even see that in an intense, self-disgusted, incredulous way she loved her son, but perhaps she had not been able to resist that dig at a profession she disapproved of. She spoke with extreme care now, the pace of the voice electronically slowed to make understanding easier.

   ‘He should have been there but he was not. He had come in, the car was there, but he . . .’ she paused, breathing deeply, ‘. . .was not.’

An abrupt halting explanation followed. At first, when she saw the car and a body, she had thought it was Clifford lying there dead. She couldn’t see the body because it was covered up and believing it to be Clifford, she pulled back the brown velvet covering. It wasn’t Clifford, but it had been a great shock just the same. She had had to sit in her car and rest, recover herself. Clifford had been going to pick her up as he always did on Thursdays, always. It was an unvarying arrangement, though the school time might vary. She looked at her watch as she said this. Clifford brought her to the shopping centre, went to his session with the psychotherapist, returned to pick her up. She didn’t drive. This Thursday they had arranged for him to be in the car park on the second level by six-fifteen. On her arrival she had had her hair done at Suzanne’s on the upper floor of the centre - another inflexible arrangement - shopped, come back to the car park at twelve minutes past six.

   After the shock of finding the body, after she had recovered somewhat - Wexford found this frailty of hers rather hard to believe in - she had gone up to look for Clifford. She had walked about looking for him, a statement that was con firmed by Archie Greaves. At last she had gone to the pedestrian gates.

   ‘I broke down,’ she said, giving each word equal monotonous weight.

   ‘Where was your son, then? No, you needn’t answer that, Mrs Sanders. You tell him we’re interested and we’ll have a talk with him later. We’ll all take a break and he can do some thinking. How’s that?’

   She moved towards the door. Someone would drive her home. Her manner had in it something of the sleepwalker, or as if almost everything she thought and felt - perhaps momentous or amazing things - she kept veiled. She was so thin and wiry you would expect her to be a brisk woman, Wexford thought, but she was as languid as some slippery, rotund sea creature. Burden said as soon as she had gone, ‘Is she saying he’s potty?’

   ‘I should think that depends on how strict you are and - ’ Wexford looked up at Burden with a half-smile, ‘how out of date. Apparently he can hold down a job and drive a car and carry on a normal conversation. Is that what you mean?’

   ‘You know it isn’t. He sounds very much like a candidate for Lesley Arbel’s psychopath role to me.’

   ‘“The outstanding feature is emotional immaturity in its broadest and most comprehensive sense. These people are impulsive, feckless, unwilling to accept the results of experience and unable to profit by them . . .”’ Wexford faltered for a moment, then went on, ‘“ . . . sometimes prodigal of effort but utterly lacking in persistence, plausible but insincere, demanding but indifferent to appeals, dependable only in their constant unreliability, faithful only to infidelity, root less, unstable, rebellious and unhappy”.’

   Burden gaped a bit. ‘Did you make that up?’

   ‘Of course I didn’t. It’s David Stafford-Clark’s definition of a psychopath - or part of it. I learned it by heart because I thought it might come in useful, but I can’t say it ever has.’ Wexford grinned. ‘I liked the prose too.’

   The expression on Burden’s face rather indicated that he didn’t know what prose was. ‘I think it’s very useful. It’s good. I like that bit about dependable in their constant unreliability.’

   ‘Oxymoron.’

   ‘Is that another mental disease?’ When Wexford only shook his head, Burden said, ‘That bit you quoted - is it in a book? Can I get it?’

   ‘I’ll lend you my copy. I expect it’s out of print; it must be twenty years since I read it. But you can’t apply that to Clifford Sanders, you know. You’ve hardly talked to him.’

   ‘That can be remedied,’ said Burden grimly.

It was dark as Wexford drove along the street where he lived and approached his own house. A car was parked on his garage drive, Sheila’s Porsche. He felt a tiny dip of the heart and immediately reproached himself. He loved his daughters dearly and Sheila was his favourite, but for once he wouldn’t be elated to see her. A quiet evening was what he had looked forward to; it might be the last for a long time, for he had no faith in Burden’s forecast of the straightforwardness of this case. And now it would be given over not only to talk, but talk on serious matters.

   Irritation of a different kind succeeded this initial flash of dismay. She had parked her car on the garage drive because she supposed him to be home already, even supposed this to be his day off as it should have been, and expected his car to be inside the garage. Now he would have to leave it out in the street. Unburdening her heart to her mother would have taken priority over everything. He could imagine her saying every ten minutes or so how she must rush out and move the car before darling Pop got home . . .

   Thinking like that cheered him, made him smile to himself, hearing with his mind’s ear her enchanting, slightly breathless voice. He would say nothing, he resolved, of the wire-cutting, the reports of her coming divorce; he would utter no word of reproach, certainly no intimation of disappointment or upset, would cast on her no grave looks. He touched the Porsche lightly on its long, gleaming, nearly horizontal rear window as he passed it. Did she go to demonstrations in that? Well, it was only a small Porsche and black at that.

   Would she come and kiss his cheek or would she hang back? There was no knowing. He went in the back way, into the hail from the kitchen, hung up his coat, hearing her voice from the living room - hearing the voice of Beatrice Cenci, Antigone, Nora Helmer and now Lady Audley - falter and fall silent. He went into the room and immediately she was rushing to him and in his arms.

   Over her shoulder he saw the small satirical smile on Dora’s face. He hugged Sheila and as she relaxed, distanced her with his arms stretched and said, ‘Are you OK?’

   ‘Well, I don’t know,’ she giggled. ‘Not really. I’m not really OK. I’m in an awful mess. And Mother’s being very sniffy. Mother’s being horrible, actually.’

   Her rueful smile showed him this was only half-meant. Foolish this was, he knew it every time, but when he looked at her like this he could never help admiring afresh the beautiful, fair, sensitive face that would with luck defy time, the long, pale, soft hair, the eyes as clear as a child’s and as blue, but not a child’s. There was no wedding ring on her left hand, but often she wore no rings, just as she nearly always kept her fancy clothes for public or publicity appearances. The jeans she wore were shabby compared with Burden’s. She had on a blue sweater of a similar shade and a string of wooden beads.

   ‘Now you’re home, darling,’ said Dora, ‘we can all have a drink. I’m sure I need it. In fact . . .’ she looked from one to the other with a certain tact, with a knowledge that they might care for two minutes alone together, ‘. . . I’ll get it.’

   Sheila fell back into the chair she had jumped out of.

   ‘Aren’t you going to ask me why? Why, why, why everything?’

   ‘No.’

   ‘You have a blind faith in the rightness of everything I do?’

   ‘You know I don’t.’ He was tempted to say of the husband she had left, ‘I liked Andrew,’ but he didn’t say it. “What are we talking about, anyway? Which of your sensational acts?’

   ‘Oh, Pop, I had to cut the wire. It wasn’t done hysterically or without thinking or for publicity or in defiance or any thing. I had to do it. I’ve been psyching myself up to it for ever so long. People take notice of what I do, you see. I don’t just mean me, I mean anyone in my position. They kind of say, “If Sheila Wexford does it there must be some meaning to it, there must be a point if a famous person like her does it”.

   ‘What happened?’ He was genuinely curious.

   ‘I bought a pair of wire-cutters in a DIY place in Covent Garden. There were ten of us, all members of PANDA - Players Anti-Nuclear Direct Action - only I was the only well-known one. We went to a place in Northamptonshire called Lossington and we went in three cars, mine and two others. It’s an RAF station where they have obsolete bombers. The importance of the place doesn’t matter, you see, it’s the gesture . . .’

   ‘Of course I see,’ he said a little impatiently.

   ‘There was this bleak plain with a couple of concrete huts and some hangars and grass all round and mud and a wire fence gone rusty - miles of it, and high enough not to lose tennis balls if you were playing inside. Well, we all stood up against the wire and each of us cut a bit and a great flap of wire came down, then we went to the nearest town and the police station and walked in and told them what we’d done and . . .’

   Dora came in with their drinks on a tray - beer for Wexford, wine for herself and her daughter. Having heard the last words, she said, ‘You might have given a little more thought to your father.’

   ‘Oh, Pop, the first idea was for us to cut the wire at RAF Myringford, but I stood out against that because of you, because it was on your patch. I did think of you. But I had to do it, I had to — can’t you understand?’

   His temper for an instant got the better of him. ‘You’re not Antigone, however much you may have played her. You’re not Bunyan. Don’t keep saying you had to do it. Do you really believe your cutting the wire round an obsolete bomber station or whatever is going to lead to a total ban on nuclear arms? I don’t like them, you know, I don’t believe anyone likes them; I’m afraid of them. When you and Sylvia were little I used to be - oppressed with fear for you. And if they’ve kept the peace for forty-five years, that doesn’t mean a thing; it certainly doesn’t mean they’ll keep it for ninety. But I know better than to suppose this kind of thing is going to affect government.’

   ‘What else can we do?’ she said simply. ‘I often think I don’t believe that either, but what else can we do? They all think that banning Cruise missiles solves everything, but they’re getting rid of less than ten percent of the world’s arsenal. The alternative is apathy, is pretending everything’s solved.’

   ‘You mean that “for evil to triumph”,’ Wexford said, ‘“it is only necessary for good men to do nothing”?’

   But Dora followed sharply with, ‘Or do you mean that between the early warning and the bomb going off you’ll have ten minutes in which to congratulate yourself on not being an ostrich?’

   Sheila sat up, was silent for a while. It was as if what her mother said had not touched her, had gone unheard. Then she said very quietly, ‘If you’re a human being, you have to be against nuclear weapons. It’s a . . . a sort of definition. Like . . . like mammals suckle their young and insects have six legs. The definition of a human being is one who hates and fears and wants to be rid of nuclear weapons. Because they’re the evil, they’re the modern equivalent of the devil, of Antichrist - they are all we’ll ever know of hell.’

   After that, as he remarked to Dora while Sheila made a mysterious secret phone call, there didn’t seem any more to be said. Or not for the present. Dora sighed. ‘She says Andrew’s right wing and only interested in capitalism and he doesn’t have an inner life.’

   ‘Presumably she knew that before she married him,’ Wexford said.

   ‘She isn’t in love any more and that always makes a difference.’

   ‘It’s not so much a depraved society that we live in as an idealistic one. People expect to remain in love with their partners all their lives or else break up and start again. Are you still in love with me?’

   ‘Oh, darling, you know I love you very much, I’m devoted to you, I’d be lost without you, I - ’

   ‘Exactly,’ said her husband, laughing, and he went outside to get himself another beer.

Nothing had been said about Sheila staying the night. She had arrived at four and in the usual course of things would have started back for London at about nine. It was less than an hour’s drive. But the phone call she had made changed her mind, or so it seemed. She came back into the room looking pleased, looking happier than she had since Wexford arrived home, and announced that if they didn’t mind - this with the self-confidence of the always-beloved child to whom parents’ ‘minding’ was unknown - she would stay until tomorrow, she might even stay until after lunch tomorrow.

   ‘Mother’s the only person I know who still cooks roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for Sunday lunch.’

   Wexford thought that asking her where she was living now could hardly be construed as interference, but he resisted saying how much he had liked the house in Hampstead.

   ‘I had to move out, didn’t I? I couldn’t go on living in Downshire Hill, in Andrew’s house that he’d paid for, and turn him out. Someone told him it was worth two million.’ She sat down on the floor, hugging her knees. ‘I can’t cope with that kind of money. I’ve got this flat in Bloomsbury, Coram Fields, and it’s OK, it’s really quite grand.’ She flashed a smile at her father. ‘You’ll like it.’