Wexford 14 - The Veiled One (8 page)

   Dora had the Radio Times on her lap. ‘Nearly time for Lady Audley. I don’t want to miss it, so if you don’t like watching yourself I’ll have to send you to bed.’

   ‘Oh, Mother. Do you really imagine I haven’t seen it? I don’t mind watching it again with you, but of course I saw a preview. Look, I must rush outside though and move my car so that Pop can put his in. No, I’ll move mine, and put his in. It doesn’t matter if I miss the beginning of - ’

   ‘I’ll move the cars,’ Wexford interposed. ‘We’ve got five minutes. Keys, please, Sheila.’

   She fished them out of her jeans pocket. His car was a little wide for the garage and he had made his offer less out of altruism than for fear of getting the new Montego scraped. Dora switched on the television. The wind had dropped and the night was dark and quiet, rather misty, each streetlamp a yellow blur. Between his garden and the empty site next door that had never been built on, the fence was sagging, in places laid flat on the flowerbed where the wind had felled it. The last few leaves on the cherry tree in his front lawn had been shrivelled by early frost and still clung to the nearly bare branches. Leaves lay everywhere, dark and wet, a blackened coating on path and pavement. Someone had found a child’s Fair Isle glove on this mat of leaves and laid it on top of the low wall. The street was deserted. In a bay window opposite, between dark evergreen shrubs standing like sentries, between open curtains, he saw the blue glow of a screen suddenly flooded with colour and his daughter’s face filling it in close-up.

   Sheila hadn’t locked the Porsche. Wexford opened the door and got into the driving-seat. It was an irony that his much cheaper and less prestigious car had automatic transmission, while this one had a manual gearbox. Presumably Sheila preferred it that way. The Montego had been his for only six months and it was the first automatic car he had ever possessed, but even so he was coming as near to forgetting about letting in clutches and shifting handles. So much so that when he switched on the ignition he failed to notice she had left the car in bottom gear. It jumped - being a powerful sports car it bounded like a spirited horse - and stalled. Wexford grinned to himself. So much for his conviction that he was the more careful driver. Another two inches and the Porsche would have hit his garage doors.

   He moved the gear lever into neutral and switched on the engine once more. His foot on the clutch pedal, he was moving the lever into reverse when he became aware of a feeling of unparalleled strangeness, an unaccountable sensation of being more than usually alert and alive. It was as if he were young again, a young man with the vigour and carefree nature of youth. Some strengthening elixir seemed to surge through his veins. On this damp, dark night when he was tired at the end of a long hard day, he was visited with a renewal of youth and power, a springiness in muscle and nerves like a young athlete’s.

   All this was momentary. It came in a flash that was also a piercing ray of enlightenment. Did he hear anything? The ticking mechanism as of a clock - or was that imagination, some vibration in his brain? The thrusting gear slid into the reverse position, made contact, and without knowing why, without a pause for reasoning, he flung open the car door and precipitated himself with all his force horizontally out as the roar came behind him, the earthquake, the loudest most violent explosion he had ever known.

   It happened simultaneously, all of it - the bomb going off, the leap from the doomed car, the fierce blinding pain as he struck his head on something cold and upright and hard as iron.

After Dorothy Sanders had been driven home, Burden meant to go to the Irelands’ house at Myringford. But he would be too late now to see his son put to bed, too late to enjoy (as Wexford, quoting, had once expressed it) ‘. . .those attractions by no means unusual in children of two or three years old; an imperfect articulation, an earnest desire of having his own way, many cunning tricks and a great deal of noise.’ His wife didn’t expect him until later and the house would be full of visiting relatives.

   Instead, after a lapse of ten minutes or so and without giving any warning of his intention, he followed Dorothy Sanders. Something in her son’s appearance and manner told him this wasn’t the kind of young man who went out on Saturday nights. And indeed it was Clifford himself who opened the door to him. His was a shut-in face, mask-like and inexpressive, with a pudginess about the features. He spoke lifelessly, showing no apparent surprise at another visit from a policeman. Burden was rather curiously reminded of a dog owned by a former neighbour of his. The owner had been inordinately proud of its submission, its total obedience, the subservience with which it had responded to his severe training. And one day, without warning, without any apparent prior change in its character, it had savaged a child.

   Clifford, however, seemed to have the right idea and was leading Burden into that back room to which, on the inspector’s previous visit with Wexford, he had retreated to watch television, when his mother opened the living-room door and said in her slow harsh voice to come in, as there could be nothing the policeman had to say to her son which she couldn’t hear.

   ‘I’ll have a word with Mr Sanders on his own for the time being, if you don’t mind,’ Burden said.

   ‘I do mind.’ She was rude in a way that wasn’t even defiant; it was uncompromising, straight rudeness, with a straight look into her interlocutor’s eye. ‘There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be there. This is my house and he’ll need me to get his facts straight.’

   Clifford neither blushed nor turned pale; he did not even wince. He simply stared ahead of him as if thinking of some thing deeply sad. Long, long ago Burden had learned that you do not let the public get the better of you. Lawyers, yes, inevitably sometimes, but not the untrained public.

   ‘In that case, I’ll ask you to accompany me to the police station, Mr Sanders.’

   ‘He won’t go. He’s not well, he’s got a cold.’

   ‘That’s unfortunate, but you leave me no choice. I’ve my car here, Mr Sanders. If you’d like to get your coat on? It’s a nasty damp night.’

   She yielded, going back into the room she had come from and slamming the door with calculation, not from temper. Burden resisted the hackneyed maxim that bullies give way if you stand up to them, but he had found nevertheless that it was usually true. Would Clifford profit by his example? Probably not. It had gone too far with him; he needed help of a more expert kind. And it was of this that Burden first asked him when they were seated in the bleak dining room, furnished only with table, hard upright chairs and television set. On one wall hung a mirror, on another a large dark and very bad painting in oils of a sailing vessel on a rough sea.

   ‘Yes, I go to Serge Olson. It’s a sort of Jungian therapy he does. Do you want his address?’

   Burden nodded, noted it down. ‘May I ask why you go to . . . Dr Olson, is it?’

   Clifford, who showed no signs of the cold his mother claimed for him, was looking at the mirror but not into it. Burden would have sworn he was not seeing his own reflection. ‘I need help,’ he said.

   Something about the rigidity of his figure, his stillness and the dullness of his eyes stopped Burden pursuing this. Instead he asked if Clifford had been to the psychotherapist on Thursday afternoon and what time he had left.

   ‘It’s an hour I go for, five till six. My mother told me you knew I was in the car park - I mean, that I put the car there.’

   ‘Yes. Why didn’t you tell us that at first?’

   He shifted his eyes, not to Burden’s face but to the middle of his chest. And when he answered Burden recognized the phraseology, the manner of speech, as that which people in therapy - no matter how inhibited, reserved, disturbed - inevitably pick up. He had heard it before. ‘I felt threatened.’

   ‘By what?’

   ‘I’d like to talk to Serge now. If I’d had some sort of warning I’d have tried to make an appointment with him and talk it through with him.’

   ‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to make do with me, Mr Sanders.’

   Burden was apprehensive for a moment that he was to be confronted with total silence against which even an experienced detective can do little. Sounds from Mrs Sanders could now be heard. She was in the kitchen, moving about, making an unnecessary noise by putting crockery down heavily and banging instead of closing cupboard doors. Whatever she was doing it seemed to be contrived to disturb. He winced at the sound of something breaking as it fell from her hands on to a stone floor. And then he heard another sound - he had got up to stand by the window - and this was far distant, the dull roar of an explosion. He stood quite still, his ear to the glass, listening to the reverberations die away. But he thought no more of it once Clifford began to speak.

   ‘I’ll try and tell you what happened. I should have told you before, but .I felt threatened. I feel threatened now, but I’d be worse if I didn’t tell you. I left Serge’s place and I drove to the car park to pick up my mother. I saw there was a dead person lying there before I parked the car. I went to look at it - when I had parked the car, I mean - because I meant to call the police. You could see the person had been killed; that was the first thing you could see.’

   ‘What time was this?’

   He shrugged. ‘Oh, evening. Early evening. My mother wanted me there at a quarter-past six. I think it was before that; it must have been, because she wasn’t there and she’s never late.’

   ‘Why didn’t you call the police, Mr Sanders?’

   He looked at the picture on the wall, then at the dark shiny window. Burden saw his reflection in it, impassive, one would have said devoid of feeling.

   ‘I thought it was my mother.’

   Burden turned his eyes from the reflected image in the dark glass. ‘You what?’

   With patience, in a heavy, almost sorrowful way, Clifford repeated what he had said. ‘I thought it was my mother.’

   And she had thought it was her son. What was the matter with the pair of them that each expected to find the other dead? ‘You thought Mrs Robson was your mother?’ There was a slight resemblance between the two women, Burden thought wonderingly - that is, to a stranger there might be. Both were of an age, thin, grey-haired, dressed in the same kind of clothes of the same sort of colour . . . but to a son?

   ‘I knew it wasn’t really my mother. Well, after the first shock I knew. I can’t explain what I felt. I could tell Serge, but I don’t think you would understand. First I thought it was my mother, then I knew it wasn’t and then I thought someone was doing it to . . . to mock me. I thought they had put it there to get at me. No, not quite that. I said I couldn’t explain. I can only say it made me panic. I thought this was an awful trick they were persecuting me with, but I knew it couldn’t be. I knew both things at the same time. I was very confused - you don’t understand, do you?’

   ‘I can’t say I do, Mr Sanders. But go on.’

   ‘I said I panicked. My “shadow” had taken me over completely. I had to get out of there, but I couldn’t just leave it lying there like that. Other people would see it like I had.’ Dark colour had come into his face now and he held his hands clasped tightly. ‘I had an old curtain in the boot of the car I’d used to cover the windscreen in cold weather. I covered it up with that.’ Suddenly he shut his eyes, screwing them up as if to drive away the sight, to blind himself. ‘It wasn’t covered, you understand, when I found it, not when I found it. I covered it up and then I went away, I ran away. I left the car and ran out of the car park. Someone was in the lift, so I ran up the stairs. I went home, I ran out into the Street at the back and then home.’

   ‘It didn’t occur to you then that you’d meant to phone the police.’

   The eyes opened and he expelled his breath. Burden repeated his question and Clifford said, with a tinge of exasperation now, ‘What did it matter? Someone would phone them, I knew that. It didn’t have to be me.’

   ‘You went out by the pedestrian gates, I suppose.’ Burden remembered Archie Greaves’ evidence, the running ‘boy’ he had taken for a scared shoplifter. And he remembered what Wexford had said about the sound of feet pounding down the car park stairs. That had been Wexford in the lift. ‘Did you run all the way home? It’s getting on for three miles.’

   ‘Of course I did.’The voice held a tinge of contempt. Burden left it. ‘Did you know Mrs Robson?’

   The blank look was back, the colour returned to normal - a clay pallor. Clifford had never once smiled; it was hard to imagine what his smile would be like. ‘Who’s Mrs Robson?’ he said.

   ‘Come now, Mr Sanders. You know better than that. Mrs Robson is the woman who was killed.’

   ‘I told you I thought it was my mother.’

   ‘Yes, but when you realized it couldn’t be?’

   He looked Burden in the eyes for the first time. ‘I didn’t think any more.’ It was a devastating remark. ‘I told you, I didn’t think, I panicked.’

   ‘What did you mean just now by your “shadow”?’

   Was it a pitying look Clifford Sanders gave him? ‘It’s the negative side of personality, isn’t it? It’s the sum of the bad characteristics in us we want to hide.’

   Not at all satisfied with what he had been told, finding the whole of this man’s behaviour and much of his talk incomprehensible and even sinister, Burden resolved just the same to pursue it no further until the next day. It was at this point, though, that his determination began to take shape, a decision to get to the bottom of Clifford’s disturbed mind and whatever motives had their source there. His behaviour was immensely suspicious; and more than that - disingenuous. The man was trying to make him, Burden, look a fool; he thought himself the possessor of an intellect superior to a policeman’s. Burden was familiar with this attitude and the reaction it produced in himself - the chip on his shoulder, as Wexford called it - but he could not be persuaded that it was unjustified.

   In the living room now, he talked to a rigid and sullen Dorothy Sanders, getting nowhere in his attempts to discover if Mrs Robson had been known to the family. Clifford brought in a basket of coal, fed a fire which did little to raise the temperature in the room, went away and returned with soap-smelling hands. Both mother and son insisted Mrs Robson had been unknown to them, but Burden had the curious feeling that though Dorothy Sanders’ ignorance was genuine, her son was lying, or at least evading the truth for some obscure reason of his own. On the other hand, Clifford might have killed without motivation, or without the kind of motivation that would be understandable to a rational man. For instance, suppose he had not found a dead body and thought it was his mother’s but had seen a woman who had suggested to him his mother in her worst aspects and for this reason had himself killed her?