Wexford 14 - The Veiled One (12 page)

   Robson was not in court. There was no reason for him to have attended. Clifford Sanders and his mother were both there; Clifford due for a drubbing from the coroner, Burden thought, for his curious action in covering up the body and running away. But the first witness of all was Dorothy Sanders, who went into the box with deliberate self-assured deportment - having dressed herself, no doubt by chance, in clothes very like those found on the dead woman, even to the lacy brown stockings.

   The man who had evidently come with them and who now sat beside Clifford he recognized as the farmer he had seen in Ash Lane, and who had come out on to the doorstep with his dog to stare after Burden’s departing car.

Houses without women - Burden could always recognize them. It was not that such places were particularly dirty or uncared-for, but rather that the absence of a woman’s hand showed in an asymmetry, a placing of objects in bizarre ways, clumsy makeshifts. The kitchen of Ash Farm Lodge - a large kitchen, since the bungalow had obviously been purpose-built for a farmer - was like that: the table littered with account books and pamphlets, a pair of boots standing on a magazine on top of the oven, a dishcloth spread out to dry on the back of a Windsor chair, a twelve-bore shotgun suspended from what was originally a saucepan rack.

   The man Burden had seen in court said his name was Roy Carroll. He looked about fifty, perhaps more. His hands were particularly large, red and calloused, and the skin of his face was a darkly-veined red. The dog lay curled up not in a basket but a large drawer. Burden had the feeling that before it dared wake up it would have to indicate in some canine way a request for permission to do so.

   Carroll was brusque and uncouth. He had admitted Burden to the house in a grudging fashion and his replies to questions were hardly fulsome, a ‘Yes’ and a ‘No’ and a ‘Yes’ and other grunted monosyllables. He knew ‘Dodo’ Sanders, he knew Clifford Sanders; he had lived in this house since it was built. When was that? Twenty-one years ago.

   ‘Dodo?’ Burden queried.

   ‘That’s what they called her, her husband and that. His mum. Dodo they called her, that’s what I call her.’

   ‘You’re friends?’

   ‘What does that mean? I know her, I’ve done odd jobs for her.’

   Burden asked him if he was married.

   ‘Never you mind that,’ Carroll said. ‘I’m not now.’

   Gwen Robson? He had never heard of her until her death was on television. He had never had a home help in the house. Where was he on the previous Thursday afternoon? Carroll looked incredulous at being asked. Out shooting, he said, getting a rabbit for the pot. This time of the year he was out shooting most days at dusk. Burden noticed some thing that was interesting but surely of no importance. The magazine the boots stood on was a copy of Kim, the last kind of reading matter to associate with a man of Carroll’s sort. It brought to mind the poster in Olson’s room, the one with the boots that had five toe-nailed toes but no legs in them, and unaccountably he shuddered.

A weekday morning and Clifford very likely at work. Burden phoned Munster’s, the school which ran crash courses for A levels, and asked to speak to Mr Sanders. He wasn’t even sure Clifford worked there, but it turned out to have been an intelligent guess. Mr Sanders was teaching. Could they take a message? Wexford would have treated this more delicately, Burden knew that, but he didn’t see why he should be tender towards the feelings of someone who was probably a layabout and certainly a liar, who was very probably homosexual, who had mixed-up feelings of confusion between his mother and dead women and was a psychopath anyway. He asked the woman who answered the phone to give Clifford Sanders a message that Detective Inspector Burden had called and would like him to come to the police station and ask for him as soon as his class was finished.

   In the meantime, he made an application for a warrant to search the Sanders’ house in the expectation of finding something in the nature of a garrote somewhere. Of course he could simply have asked Mrs Sanders’ permission to search, most people don’t refuse this request, but he felt she would. While he was waiting for Clifford he suddenly remembered Robson’s shopping bags, so he summoned DC Davidson to find them, locate their contents and have the lot taken round to Highlands. The bags were red Tesco carriers and Burden had had intensive enquiries made at the Tesco store in the Barringdean Shopping Centre. Dressed in brown clothes similar to those worn by Mrs Robson, Marian Bayliss had retraced her possible steps through the centre. One of the checkout assistants remembered her passing through on the previous Thursday and put the time at about five-thirty. Burden began re-reading DC Archbold’s report.

   Linda Naseem knew Mrs Robson by sight, indeed knew her well enough to comment on the weather and ask after her husband. Gwen Robson was a regular shopper in the store and almost always came in on a Thursday afternoon, but what most interested Burden about this evidence was that Linda Naseem claimed to have seen Mrs Robson in conversation with a girl. This encounter, she said, took place immediately after Mrs Robson had paid and received her change, and when she was standing at the end of the check out counter putting the goods she had bought into a carrier.

   Describe the girl? She had been attending to her next customer and she hadn’t taken much notice. Indeed, she hadn’t seen the girl’s face at all, only her back and the back of her head. She had been wearing a beret or some sort of hat. When Mrs Robson finished packing her bag, she and this girl went off together. At least, they went off. Linda Naseem couldn’t absolutely say they went together.

   Clifford came to the police station about half an hour after Burden had made his phone call; Munster’s School was only about two hundred yards down the High Street. Burden’s own office was rather a pleasant, comfortable place where any visitor might have felt he was paying a social call, so Burden didn’t take him in there but into one of the interview rooms at the back on the ground floor. The walls were bare, painted the colour of scrambled eggs, and the floor was of grey vinyl tiles. Burden motioned Clifford into one of the grey metal chairs and himself sat down opposite him at the plastic-topped yellow table.

   Almost without preamble, he began, ‘You told me you didn’t know Mrs Robson. That wasn’t true, was it?’

   Clifford looked truculent to Burden, his dull face sullen. He wasn’t showing any obvious symptoms of fear as he spoke in his slow, monotonous voice. ‘I didn’t know her.’

   There was a point in any interrogation or enquiry when Burden simply changed from using a suspect’s surname and title to his or her first name. Wexford asked permission before he did this, but Burden never did. Using people’s surnames and titles, in his opinion, was very tied up with feeling respect for them. This was why he needed to be called ‘Mr’ himself. He would have said he reached a stage when he lost respect for the person he was questioning and therefore pushed them a few rungs down the ladder of his esteem. If we had a language - where you could tutoyer and vouvoyer, said Wexford, you’d start thouing them.

   ‘Now, Clifford, I’ll be honest with you. Frankly, I don’t yet know where you met her or how you knew her, but I know you did. Why not tell me and save me the trouble of finding out?’

   ‘But I didn’t know her.’

   ‘When you say that, you’re not helping yourself or deceiving me. All you’re doing is wasting time.’

   Clifford repeated doggedly now, ‘I did not know Mrs Robson.’ He laid his hands on the table and contemplated them. The nails were closely bitten, Burden noticed for the first time, this gave them the look of a child’s hands, pink and pudgy.

   ‘All right, I can wait. You’ll tell me in your own good time.’

   Did he really take that phrase literally or is he sending me up? Burden wondered. Not a gleam of humour showed on the round blank face when Clifford said, ‘I don’t have my own good time.’

   A change of subject and Burden said, ‘You must have been in that car park well before six. Mr Olson has told me you left him not at six but at five-thirty. You must have been there by five-forty-five at the latest. Would you like to know when Mrs Robson died? It was between five-thirty-five and five-fifty-five.’

   ‘I don’t know what time I got there,’ Clifford said, speaking very slowly. ‘It’s no use asking me about times. I don’t wear a watch, perhaps you’ve noticed.’ He raised his arms in what Burden saw as an effeminate gesture, exposing plump white wrists. ‘I don’t think I went straight to the car park. I sat in the car and thought about what I’d been saying to Serge. We’d been talking about my mother; hardly anyone calls my mother by her first name any more, not now, but when they did they called her Dodo. It’s short for Dorothy, of course.’

   Burden said nothing, perplexed as to whether he was being teased or whether Clifford generally talked to strangers like this.

   ‘Dodos are large flightless birds, now extinct. They were all killed by Portuguese sailors on Mauritius. My mother isn’t a bit like that. Serge and I talked about a man’s anima being shaped by his mother and my mother having a negative influence on me. That can express itself in the man having irritable depressed moods, and when I was sitting in the car I thought about that and went back over it all. I like to do that sometimes. The car was on a meter and there was ten minutes to run. And I got out and fed the meter some more.’

   ‘So you do take note of time sometimes, Clifford?’ He looked up and turned on Burden a troubled gaze. ‘Why are you asking me questions? What do you suspect me of?’

   ‘Suppose I said you went straight to the shopping centre, Clifford. Isn’t that what you did? You parked the car in the car park and then you went in to the shopping centre and ran into Mrs Robson, didn’t you?’

   ‘I’ve told you the truth. I sat in the car in Queen Street. You ought to tell me what you suspect me of doing.’

   ‘Perhaps you’d better go and sit in your car and think about that one,’ said Burden, and he let him go.

   Such mock naivety angered him. Dodos, indeed, flightless birds! What was an anima anyway, or come to that a negative influence? Grown men didn’t naturally behave and talk like children, not men who were teachers and had been to universities. He was suspicious of the childlike stare, the puzzled ingenuousness. If Clifford was sending him up, he would be made to regret it. In the morning they would search that house. Burden couldn’t help thinking how satisfying it would be to have the case all wrapped up before Wexford was back at work.

Sheila, Wexford discovered on being driven from hospital to his other daughter’s house, was staying at the Olive and Dove, Kingsmarkham’s principal hostelry. There was no room for her as well at Sylvia’s, where her parents now occupied the only spare room.

   ‘Anyway, I expect she feels it’s easier to have her boyfriend there.’

   There was rivalry between the two sisters of a never-quite-expressed kind. Sylvia cloaked her envy under the complacency of a happily married mother of sons. If she would have liked what her sister had - success, fame, the adoration of a good many people, lovers past and in the future - her covetousness was never explicit. But comments were made; a virtue was made of necessity. There was a tendency to talk about fame and money not bringing happiness and show-business people seldom having stable relationships. Married at eighteen, Sylvia would perhaps have liked at least a memory of lovers and the consciousness of something attempted, something done. Sheila, more open about her views, frankly said how nice it must be to have no worries, no fear of the future, reading in a leisurely way for an Open University degree, to be dependent on a loving husband. She meant she would have liked children, Wexford sometimes thought. Sylvia was waiting for him to ask for enlightenment, but he kept his enquiry to himself until she had gone to fetch the boys from school.

   ‘I know there’s someone,’ Dora said. ‘She was phoning someone she called Ned just before you went out and set that bomb off.’

   ‘Thanks very much,’ said Wexford. ‘You make it sound as if I put a match to a fuse.’

   ‘You know what I mean. When she comes over this evening, we can ask about him.’

   ‘I wouldn’t ask her,’ said Wexford.

   But Sheila phoned to say she wasn’t coming, that she was postponing her visit to her father until the following morning. Something had come up.

   ‘Come down, I should say,’ Sylvia said. ‘Come down on the London train. I suppose he’s an actor or a Friend of the Earth or both.’

   ‘“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things”,’ said her father austerely, ‘“are corrupt without being charming.”’ He returned to the copy of Kim magazine he had found lying about.

   Sylvia had told him she took it occasionally and had supplied the little defensive explanation people in Jane Austen’s day thought they had to give for reading novels. It was something to pass the time; you could pick it up and put it down; some of the stories were of a really high standard. Wexford liked the name of the magazine which seemed to him very avant-garde and appealing, for he confessed to himself that a part of him still lived in a world of Home Knits and Modern Mother. He turned to the page of enquiries from worried readers.

   The ‘agony aunt’ Lesley worked for was a woman of the name, or alias, of Sandra Dale. At the head of the page was a photograph of her, a plump, middle-aged woman with fair curly hair and a sympathetic expression. Two of the letters were featured in bold-face type. One didn’t appear at all, only the answer to it: ‘T.M., Basingstoke: Practices like this may seem fun and I can understand they please your boyfriend, but is it worth risking your whole future sexual happiness? One day when you are married or in a permanent relationship, you may bitterly regret habits you can’t break but which are keeping you from true fulfilment.’

   Wexford wondered if the purpose of this sort of thing was simply the titillation of readers. It would be a very strong-minded or deeply inhibited Kim reader who didn’t speculate as to the nature of T.M.’s unbreakable habits. Very likely it was Robson’s niece who had typed all these replies, having taken them down at Sandra Dale’s dictation.