Wexford 14 - The Veiled One (9 page)

   After leaving them, Burden drove further down the narrow road which he now remembered - though there was nothing to show it - was called Ash Lane. The Sanders’ house therefore was very likely Ash Farm. But as this passed through his mind and as he was thinking that they seemed to have no neighbours, he came to a bungalow set a little way back from the road which proclaimed itself as Ash Farm Lodge on a rustic board attached to wrought-iron gates. This he could see in his headlights. The bungalow itself was in dark ness but as he paused, the engine running and the headlights beam undipped, a light came on in the house and a man appeared at the window.

   Burden reversed and began turning the car, a lengthy process in that narrow defile. When he was once more pointing in the direction of Kingsmarkham he glanced to his right and with a start - more a jolt than an actual shock - he saw that the man had come outside and was standing on the doorstep looking at the car, his hand clutching the collar of a cowed- looking retriever. By now the whole place - with the two barns and tall silo behind it, plainly the present farmhouse - blazed with light. Burden drove off. He wouldn’t have been surprised to hear a shotgun let off behind him, or to see the dog frenziedly pursuing the car. But nothing happened, there was only darkness and silence and an owl calling.

The news about Wexford reached Burden in a peculiarly horrible way. It was due to his own haste and keenness, he afterwards realized, behaving like some young ambitious copper instead of enjoying his day of rest. Of course, the point was that it would hardly have been a day of rest with Jenny’s demanding mother and the Ireland aunts, and Jenny running up; and down stairs. Even if he had glanced at the Sunday paper before he left Myringford, he would only have read commentaries on the latest dramatic developments in the Israeli Embassy trial; there would have been nothing in it about the car bomb. The explosion had happened too late in the evening for that. And because the house was full of guests, no one had looked at television on Saturday night.

   He phoned Ralph Robson before he left, but it was Lesley Arbel who answered, who agreed to his coming though telling him she couldn’t think why as they had absolutely nothing more to tell him. Driving up the hill to Highlands, he told himself it was a pointless interview he had ahead of him, as the obvious thing was to wait until the next day and consult the Social Services department of Kingsmarkham Council. They might keep no records of those for whom their past home helps had worked, but they were more likely to put forward ideas and suggestions than Ralph Robson was.

   The invalidism his niece fostered still kept the widower in his dressing gown. He seemed to have aged even in this short time, to hobble more painfully and be more bent. He sat by the gas fire with on his lap a little circular tray fancifully printed with wild birds in improbable colours, on which reposed a cup of tea and a plate of sugar-frosted biscuits. Burden had hardly been taken into the room by the girl - who this morning was dressed in a pink silk outfit, a kind of trouser suit with sarong top and harem pants, and very high-heeled pink shoes - when there came a ring at the doorbell and another visitor arrived. Lesley Arbel had no scruples about showing in the newcomer, though he must have been aware that Burden expected a private interview with her uncle. It was the neighbour opposite he and Wexford had seen from the window who had called, a Mrs Jago as far as Burden could gather from the mumbled introduction Robson made.

   The reason for the visit seemed to be the usual one at a time of bereavement. She had come to see if there was any thing she could do - any shopping, for instance, that she could get on the following day when Lesley Arbel had gone. Burden wasn’t much interested in her, noticing only that she was a large stout woman, puffily overweight, dark and florid, and with a strong accent that suggested Central Europe to him. At least she seemed to have the tact or the good sense to realize Burden wanted privacy, and she left again as soon as Robson had said he would take up her offer and would she mind coming in again on the following morning?

   The front door had scarcely closed and Lesley Arbel passed the hail mirror with an inevitable glance into it, when Robson said, ‘It’s time they did something for us. It’s their turn, the lot of them. When you consider what my wife did for every one in this blessed street, never spared herself, nothing was too much trouble. She’d only to hear someone was a bit under the weather and she’d be round seeing what she could do. Especially the old folks. I reckon she did more good on her own than all those so-called social services people. Isn’t that right, Lesley?’

   ‘She did a lot more good than my agony aunt,’ Lesley said. ‘Well, she was a sort of agony aunt herself, wasn’t she? I used to call her that - joking, of course.’

   Mystified, Burden echoed her words. ‘Your agony aunt?’

   ‘People brought her their troubles, didn’t they?’ It was Robson who answered for her. ‘She works,’ he said in a rather proud way, ‘for the agony aunt on the magazine. For Kim. It’s the problem page - you know, all those letters from readers about their troubles that the agony aunt answers. Lesley’s her assistant.’

   ‘Secretary, Uncle.’

   ‘A bit more than a blessed secretary to my way of thinking. More a right hand. I thought you knew all that,’ he said to Burden.

   ‘No,’ Burden shook his head. ‘No, I didn’t know. Your aunt - I mean your real aunt, Mrs Robson - I understand she’d been a council home help. Can you remember the names of some of the people she worked for?’

   He addressed this question as much to Robson as his niece and Robson immediately took exception to it. ‘Home helps don’t work for people. They don’t have employers, they have clients. They’re more civil servants really.’

   With an effort at patience Burden accepted this. He had to listen while Robson made out a case for his wife’s having carried out her civil servant’s function in the home of (it sounded like) every elderly, sick or deprived person in greater Kingsmarkham. Individual names, though, he couldn’t recall. He enumerated the tasks his wife and performed gratuitously for the neighbours, and by association this recalled shopping to him and from here the two bags of groceries which the police still retained. With a slightly scathing edge to his voice, he said, ‘I suppose you’ll say you’ve got too much on your plates with last night’s trouble to worry about a minor matter like that.’

   ‘Last night’s trouble?’

   ‘The car bomb. One of your blokes got blown up, didn’t he?’

   Lesley Arbel said, ‘The one that was here with you - or that’s how I understood it from the TV. I’m sure it was his name they said.’

   Practice at not showing one’s feelings comes in useful. And it is true that shock stuns. Burden remembered now the dull and distant explosion he had heard on the previous evening while standing up against the french windows in the Sanders’ dining room. Some sense of dignity, some knowledge that it would be wrong and a matter for later regret to do so, stopped him enquiring any more from Robson and his niece. But he was numbed with shock too, getting up almost mechanically, making routine remarks, the replies to which he found afterwards that he had totally forgotten. He was aware too - and this he did remember - of their faces looking at him curiously and with a mild, perhaps only imagined, malice.

   Robson said something more about his groceries, some thing about wanting them before he gave his neighbour Mrs Jago a shopping list, and then Burden had made his escape, was keeping himself from running to his car until the door had closed on Lesley Arbel’s pink silk and high heels. He ran then.

   Wexford’s house was about as far from Highlands as it was possible to be, yet still be situated in Kingsmarkham. It wasn’t wasting time, it was to calm himself, to make him a safer driver, that he went first into the phone box at the foot of the hill only to find it vandalized and the lead pulled from the wall. The second phone box he tried was the kind which, along with its fellows in the railway-station entrance, could only be operated with a Telecom card. Burden got back into the car, the palms of his hands damp and sliding on the steering wheel. He turned into Wexford’s Street with the feeling that he hadn’t really breathed for five minutes; he seemed to have been holding his breath until his throat closed up. Yet all the time he was clinging to the hope that Robson and his niece might somehow be mistaken. Now he ‘found the difference’ as Wexford could have quoted him, ‘between the expectation of an unpleasant event, however certain the mind may be told to consider it, and certainty, itself.’

   The sight of Wexford’s house came as a second shock, and one not dulled by the first.

   The garage was no longer there. The room over the garage was no longer there. The whole area between what remained of Wexford’s house the basic three-bedroomed structure - and the open ground next door was a heap of rubble, bits of car body, branches and twigs, shreds of fabric, twisted metal, broken glass. The side of the house from which the garage and the room above it had been torn was open to the weather - fortunately this morning mild and dry - and no attempt had yet been made to shroud in tarpaulins the gaping rooms in one of which a bed could be seen, in the other a picture hanging crooked on blue wallpaper. Burden sat in his car with the window down and stared at it. He stared in horror at the devastation and at the garden now revealed beyond, where fruit trees held leafless boughs against a tranquil pale blue sky.

   In the middle of the front lawn the stout cherry tree still retained its branches - even, incredibly, some of its frost bitten leaves. And the lavender hedge which Wexford had so frequently in the past weeks promised to trim back as soon as he had the time was mostly still there, while looking as if the passage through it of a heavy missile had crushed some of it to the ground. The front wall was still there and undamaged, a child’s woollen glove lying on one of the piers; Burden couldn’t imagine how it came to be there. He looked back again at the wreck of the house, at what seemed to him only half or less of a house remaining. Then, slowly, he got out of the car and walked towards the front door, though he knew there could be no one living there now. If either of them survived, there could be no one there now . . .

   He found himself numbed where he stood, paralysed and quite unable to think how next to act, when a man came out of the house next door, the house Wexford called next door though it was separated from his by a narrow open space that no one had ever been able to decide was large enough for a building site.

   He said to Burden, ‘How is he? Is he . . .?’

   ‘I know nothing. I didn’t even know . . .’

   It was as if the street had been watching for him, took him necessarily for the bringer of news. A woman came out from opposite, a couple with a small child from further down on the same side.

   The man next door said, ‘He was in the car, his daughter’s car. Sheila, you know. It was a hell of a bang, like the bombs in the war. I can just remember the war. My wife and I, we came out and there was smoke and you couldn’t see a thing. I said to phone the police first thing and I did, but someone else had done it already. The ambulance got here like a shot. I must hand it to them, they didn’t waste time. But we couldn’t see what happened, only that they took someone away on a stretcher and then it was on the late-night news on telly about Mr Wexford and a car bomb, but they didn’t know much, they couldn’t tell you much.’

   ‘He was lying on the lawn there,’ said the woman with the child. ‘He was lying there unconscious.’

   ‘He was blown out of the car,’ said her husband. ‘It was the most amazing thing. We were watching Sheila in her serial and we heard this terrific bang and it was here, it was her car . . .’

   ‘Where are they now, Sheila and her mother?’ Burden asked.

   ‘Someone said they went to the other daughter, wherever she lives.’

   Burden said no more. Shaking his head, aware that he held one hand pressed against it as if it ached, he went back to his car and started the engine.

His dream was of cherry trees, notably the one George Washington was said to have chopped down and then been unable to tell a lie about when questioned by his father. A white cherry though, presumably that was, like the ones he had seen in a picture somewhere that were planted along the shores of the Potomac. Because of Washington’s particular affinity with cherry trees? It must be. Probably those pink double cherries whose flowers looked as if made from crêpe paper weren’t invented then. The one in his garden had been given him a year after he moved into the house by his father-in-law and he had never liked its papery blossoms and unnatural weeping branches, though he had liked his father-in-law very much. The tree was pretty for one week of the year, around the end of April . . .

   He wasn’t dreaming any more; this was more in the nature of a reverie. In some cherry-growing areas they put scare-crows in the trees, and in others sewed together sheets of netting large enough to protect the fruit from birds. Not that his tree was the kind that ever bore fruit but was sterile, those bright fluffy blossoms falling and leaving not a trace behind. He was aware now of a dull ache in his head above the forehead, a pain unaccountably associated with cherry trees. And yet not unaccountably . . . no. He opened his eyes, said to anyone who might be there, though for all he knew no one was, ‘Did I hit my head on the cherry tree?’

   ‘Yes, darling.’

   Dora was sitting at his bedside and round the two of them the curtains were drawn. He tried to sit up but she shook her head, putting out her hand.

   ‘What  time is it?’

   ‘About eleven. About eleven on Sunday morning.’ She read what was passing through his mind. ‘You haven’t been unconscious all this time; you came round in the ambulance on the way here. You’ve been asleep.’

   ‘I don’t seem to remember anything except hitting my head on the cherry tree. Oh, and taking a sort of flying leap for some unknown reason . . . maybe from the front doorstep? I can’t think why.’