Wexford 14 - The Veiled One (11 page)

   On the phone Burden had given his full name, but Olson extended his hand and said, ‘Come in here, Michael - or is it Mike?’

   Burden had an old-fashioned and (his wife said) ridiculous antipathy to being called by his christian name except by friends. But he was aware too of how foolish it made him look to stand on his dignity with a contemporary, so he merely shrugged and followed Olson into . . . what? A consulting room? A therapy room? There was a couch and it was so much like the famous one in the Freud museum in London that Burden and Jenny had been to, even, to the scattered oriental rugs, that he was sure a deliberate attempt at duplication had been made. Apart from the couch the room was cluttered with cheap ugly furniture and hung with posters, including an anti-nuclear one which pictured a devastated globe and above it a quote from Einstein: ‘The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our modes of thinking and thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe’. This obscurely reminded Burden of Wexford and recalled to him with how much more of an open mind his chief would have approached this man . . . yet, how could you, at his age, conquer your prejudices?

   Olson had sat down at the head of the couch, no doubt a customary position for him. He gazed at Burden in silence, again probably a habitual pose.

   Burden began, ‘I understand Mr Clifford Sanders is a patient of yours, Dr Olson.’

   ‘A client, yes.’ There it was again, that word. Patients, customers, guests - all in his contemporary world had become clients. ‘And I’m not a doctor,’ Olson went on.

   This immediately recalled to Burden indignant articles he had read about purveyors of various forms of psychiatry being permitted to practise without medical degrees. ‘But you have some sort of qualification?’

   ‘A psychology degree.’ Olson spoke with a kind of calm economy. It was as if he would attempt to justify nothing, explain nothing; there he was, to be taken or left. Such a manner always gives an impression of transparent honesty and therefore made Burden suspicious. It was time for Olson to ask him precisely what it was that Burden wanted to see him about - they always did ask at this point - but Olson didn’t ask, he merely sat. He sat and looked at Burden with a calm, mild almost compassionate interest.

   ‘I am sure you have your own code of professional conduct,’ Burden said, ‘so I won’t - at any rate, at this stage - ask you to divulge anything you may have diagnosed in Mr Sanders’ . . . personality.’ He frankly thought he was being magnanimous and rather resented Olson’s faint smile and inclination of the head. ‘It’s a more practical matter I’m concerned with - the times of Mr Sanders’ last appointment with you, in fact. Now as I understand it, he had a five o’clock appointment for a one-hour session and left you at six?’

   ‘No,’ said Olson.

   ‘No? That isn’t so?’

   Shifting his gaze with what seemed perfect control, Olson turned his eyes on to the grey and cratered globe and the Einstein prediction. ‘Clifford,’ he said, ‘comes at five as a general rule, but sometimes I’ve had to ask him to change and I did that last Thursday. I was giving a lecture in London at seven-thirty and I wanted to allow myself more time.’

   ‘Do you mean to say Mr Sanders didn’t come to you last Thursday?’

   Olson was perhaps a man who would always smile indulgently at needless consternation. His smile was slight and a little sad. ‘He came. I asked him to come half an hour earlier and in fact he came about twenty minutes earlier. And he left me at five-thirty.’

   ‘Do you mean five-thirty, Mr Olson? Or with time for various parting remarks and fresh appointments and so on, would that be nearer twenty to six, say?’

   Olson took off his watch, laid it on the table beside him and, indicating it, said, ‘At five-thirty I pick up my watch and tell the client - in this case, Clifford - that time’s up and I’ll see him next week. There are no parting remarks.’

   Jenny, Burden’s wife, had been in analysis during her pregnancy. Had it been like this? Burden realized he had never exactly asked her. If you lay on that couch - did you? or wasn’t it for lying on? - if you talked to this man, then, and opened your heart and spoke of your inmost secrets, he would be like an enormous impersonal ear . . . Burden, with out liking or trusting him, suddenly understood that this of course was what was required.

   ‘So Clifford Sanders left here at five-thirty sharp?’

   Olson nodded indifferently; there was no question of Burden’s disbelieving him. He said, ‘You went to London? ‘Where were you . . . lecturing?’

   ‘I left here at six and walked to the station to get the six-seventeen train that arrives at Victoria at ten-past seven. My talk was on projection-making factors and I gave it before an audience of MAPT - that is, the Metropolitan Association of Psychotherapists - at the Association’s premises in Pimlico. I went there by taxi.’

   The man seemed to have perfect assurance. Burden looked closely at him and said, ‘Can you think of any reason, Mr Olson, why Clifford Sanders should have told us that his appointment with you was from five until six and that he left here at six?’

   He’s going to tell me he was threatened, Burden thought. He’s going to talk about threats and defensiveness and projection. Instead, Olson got up and, moving to a very untidy desk which had perhaps once been a kitchen table, slowly turned the pages of an appointment book. He seemed to be examining some particular entry with care. Then he glanced at his watch and some inner reflection made him smile. He closed the book and still standing up, turned to face Burden.

   ‘You may not know this, Michael. You may never have considered what a powerful figure time is in the human psyche. It might not be too presumptuous to suggest he could be another Jungian archetype in the collective unconscious. Certainly for some he can be an aspect of the Shadow.’

   Burden stared at him with a failure of understanding as deep as disgust.

   ‘Let’s call him Time with a capital T.’ said Olson. ‘He has been depicted as a god in a chariot with wings and even been given a personification as Old Father Time - I expect you’ve come across that. Some people seem to be enslaved by time, by this old man with a skull for a face and a scythe in his hand, by this god in the winged chariot hurrying by behind them. They are his servants and they become very worried - very anguished, indeed - if they are not there, all present and correct, to bow down to him and do his bidding. But there are others, Michael, who hate time. They fear him and because this dread is so great and so omnipresent, they have no recourse but to drive him back into the unconscious. He is too frightening and so they banish him. The result of course is a total lack of knowledge of him, a world in which he is absent. His hours and half-hours for them to pass uncounted. These are the people - and we all know them - who can never get up in the morning and at night are always astonished that it should be three or four by the time they get to bed. To be on time for a date entails for them an almost superhuman effort. Their friends get to know this and invite them to come half an hour earlier than the party begins. As for a memory of time - to ask them to have any kind of accurate record is almost an act of violence.’

   Burden blinked a little. He had seized on a point though. ‘Are you telling me that these regular five o’clock appointments with Clifford Sanders were in fact made for four- thirty?’

   Olson nodded, smiling.

   ‘But I thought you said he had the five p.m. appointment?’

   ‘I said that he comes at five; that isn’t quite the same thing.’

   ‘So last Thursday when you phoned him you must have asked him to come at four?’

   ‘And he came about ten minutes late. That is, as I said, he came at about four-forty.’ A genuinely good-humoured smile now broke across Olson’s face. ‘You’re thinking I’m dishonest with my poor clients, aren’t you, Michael? I’m pandering to their neurosis in a way perhaps that robs them of their basic human dignity - is that it? But I have to live, too, you see, and I have to recognize Time as a figure in my life. I can’t afford to waste half an hour of him any more than one of his most abject slaves.’

   Neither can I, thought Burden, getting up to take his leave. To his dismay, as he showed him out Olson laid an almost affectionate arm across his shoulder.

   ‘You won’t resent a lesson, I’m sure, Mike.’

   Burden looked at him, then at the couch, and recovered some of his aplomb. He said with an edge of sarcasm, ‘I expect it makes a change for you to talk.’

   At first Olson, frowned, then his face cleared. ‘That’s for the Freudians, the silent listening therapist. I talk quite a lot; I help them along.’ He had the happy man’s simple unclouded smile.

It looks very much as if it was intended for your daughter, the Serious Crimes Squad man from Myringham said. You say your daughter hadn’t given you any prior warning of her intention to visit you? She hadn’t given me any prior warning, Wexford said. I don’t know about my wife, I didn’t ask. You’ll have to ask my wife. We have asked her, Mr Wexford, and no your daughter’s visit was a complete surprise to her.

   What made the bomb go off?

   You were about to back the car, weren’t you? You were going to back it out of the garage drive in order to put your own car in, your wife says. We think it was activated by the reverse gear - triggered off by putting the gear into reverse. You see, your daughter says she never had the Porsche in reverse between getting into it outside her London flat and arriving at your home about an hour and a half later. And one can see, sir, that there would have been no occasion for her to use the reverse gear.

   The bomber wasn’t bothered, you can see that. It didn’t bother him whether the bomb went off five minutes after she started and outside the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, for instance, or down here on Sunday afternoon when she was backing out to go off home. It was all the same to him as long as she was in the driving-seat.

   As long as she was in the driving-seat . . . Wexford lay in bed thinking about it. They got him up at four and made him have his tea with a lot of other men seated round a table in the middle of the ward. Some bomber had tried to kill Sheila and had failed - but he wouldn’t stop, would he, because he had failed once? He would try again and again. It might be because of her anti-nuclear activities, but on the other hand it might not. Freaks and oddballs, were envious of the famous the successful, the beautiful. There were even people who equated actors with the parts they played and who were capable of seeing Sheila as Lady Audley, a bigamist and murderess. For that she must be punished, for her beauty and her success and her lack of morals; for acting a treacherous wife and for being one . . .

   How was he going to live and go about his daily work with that ever-present fear of an assassin stalking Sheila? The newspapers were full of it; he had three daily papers lying on his bed, all of them speculating with a kind of merry cynicism as to what particular terrorists might have it in for Sheila. How was he going to stand all that?

   Sylvia came after she had fetched her son Robin from his choir practice and then Burden came at evening visiting, full of the Robson medical report, his theories about Clifford Sanders as perpetrator, Gwen Robson as arch-gossip and ferreter out of secrets in the home help sorority and a curious interview he had had with a psychiatrist.

   ‘This stuff about some people being unpunctual - because that’s really what it amounts to doesn’t really effect the issue. Sumner-Quist gives the latest time at which Mrs Robson could have been killed as five to six. Clifford could easily have got there before five to six. Without hurrying he could have got there by a quarter to.’

   Wexford made an effort. ‘Intending to meet Mrs Robson there? You’re saying it was premeditated? Because to keep in with your theory he certainly couldn’t have encountered her by chance. He wouldn’t have gone to that dreary car park to sit there for half an hour and wait for his mother. Or are you saying he was so lost to time that he didn’t know whether it was a quarter to or half-past?’

   ‘Not me,’ said Burden, ‘Olson the shrink. Anyway, I don’t go along with that. I think Clifford has a perfectly normal attitude to time when he wants to have. And why shouldn’t it have been premeditated? I don’t believe Clifford thought or imagined or fancied or however you like to put it that Gwen Robson was his mother. Anyone would have to be a total banana truck to do that. And if he wanted to kill his mother, he could do that at home. No, the motive is likely to be a good deal more practical than that, as motives usually are.’ He looked defiantly at Wexford, waiting for argument, and when none came went on, ‘Suppose Gwen Robson was blackmailing him? Suppose she found out some secret about him and was holding it over him?’

   ‘Like what?’ said Wexford, and even to Burden his voice sounded weary and uninterested.

   ‘He could be queer - I mean, gay - and afraid of Mum finding out. I mean, that’s just a possibility since you ask.’

   ‘But you haven’t established any sort of link between them, have you? There’s no evidence they knew each other. It’s the kind of situation in which a son would only know a woman of her age if she were a friend of his mother’s - and she wasn’t. It’s not as if Clifford has ever been in the market for a home help; he’s not a housebound octogenarian or some bedridden invalid. And while Mrs Robson may have been a blackmailer, have you any actual evidence that she was?’

   ‘I will have,’ Burden said confidently. ‘Inquest in the morning. I’ll give you a complete run-down on what’s happened tomorrow.’

   But Wexford seemed no longer to be following what he said - to be distracted by some action of his neighbour in the next bed, and then by the arrival of a nurse with a drugs trolley - and Burden, looking at him with slightly exasperated sympathy, thought how true it was that patients in hospital rapidly lose all interest in the outside world. The ward and its inmates, what they had for lunch and what sister said, these things are their microcosm.

The inquest opened and was adjourned, as Burden had expected. It could hardly have been otherwise. Evidence was taken from Dr Sumner-Quist, who was again making very free with the term ‘garrote’. And a lab expert was able to treat the coroner to some very abstruse stuff about polymers and long-chain linear polyesters and a substance called polyethylene terephthalate. It was all by way of discovering what the wire of the garrote had been coated in and Burden wasn’t much wiser when the expert had finished, though he gathered it all amounted to grey plastic.