Wexford 14 - The Veiled One (14 page)

   Next morning Linda Naseem, who had Wednesdays off, was back on her checkout. Burden went to talk to her him self. It was exactly a week today since Gwen Robson had come in here, having parked her car underground on the second level, and walked under the glazed covered way to the Barringdean Shopping Centre, arriving inside at about four-forty. The next three-quarters of an hour were easily accounted for a little window-gazing and the purchase of two items from Boots where an assistant remembered her.

   The toothpaste and talcum powder had been in one of the carriers with the groceries and the light-bulbs from British Home Stores. No one remembered her in there, but that was to be expected. She had probably entered Tesco at about ten-past five, taken a trolley or perhaps only a basket and begun walking round the store picking out items from her list. Clifford Sanders at that time had certainly still been with Olson. Burden saw that he was putting Gwen Robson’s visit to the store too early; it was far more likely that she had not gone into Tesco until twenty-past five. That way she wouldn’t have reached the checkout until five-thirty-five or maybe a little later.

   There were five girls on the Tesco checkouts. Burden was looking for an Indian and three of the girls appeared to be of vaguely Indian origin. He went up to one of them and she pointed down the line to where a small, slight girl of ethereal fairness, white-skinned and flaxen-haired, was changing the spool in her till. As he approached her, he noticed her wedding ring. Of course she was called Naseem because she was married to a Moslem from the East or Middle East. Burden reprimanded himself for jumping to conclusions as he knew Wexford would have admonished him. It was inexcusable in someone of his experience.

   She took him into a side room or office marked ‘Private’ on the door.

   ‘You knew Mrs Robson by sight, I think?’ he began.

   She nodded, looking slightly apprehensive.

   ‘What time did you say she passed through your checkout last Thursday?’

   She hesitated. ‘I know I did tell the other policeman five-fifteen, but I’ve thought about it since and it could have been later. I remember looking at my watch and seeing twenty to six and thinking good, only half an hour to go. We close at six, but they’re still going through after that.’

   ‘How much later?’ Burden asked.

   ‘Pardon?’

   ‘How long after you had seen Mrs Robson did you look at your watch and see five-forty?’

   ‘I don’t know. It’s ever so hard to say, isn’t it? Ten minutes?’

   Ten minutes or five minutes, thought Burden, or even two minutes. He asked her about the girl she had seen Mrs Robson talking to - was she quite sure it was a girl?

   ‘Pardon,’ she said again.

   ‘If you only saw the back of this person, who was in any case wearing a hat and presumably a coat or jacket as well, how did you know it was a girl and not a boy - a man, that is?’

   She said slowly, as if reorganizing impressions and conclusions, ‘Well, I just sort of knew - I mean I think it was. Oh, yes, of course it was. She had a hat on - a beret, I think.’

   ‘It could have been a man, couldn’t it, Mrs Naseem?’

   ‘That just wasn’t the impression I got,’ said Linda Naseem. Burden didn’t ask her any more. Looking back on the interview, he felt he had been in the role of counsel who breaks down a witness’s evidence by subtle questioning, leaving the jury to draw very firm conclusions from her uncertain replies. There had been no jury in Tesco’s, but if there had been he had no doubt its members would have been thoroughly convinced of this fact: that on the previous Thursday Gwen Robson had been seen in the store talking to a young man at twenty minutes to six. He wandered back into the wide gallery of the lower level and stood in the Mandala concourse. It was all red and white poinsettias today and some sort of dark blue flower. Why these signs of patriotism on November 26? Probably those were simply the flowers the florist had most of.

   Burden had a look in Boots, paused to examine the window of Knits ‘n’ Kits which today was full of tapestry canvases printed with dog and cat faces, glanced across at Demeter with its display of water filters and air ionizers. None of the assistants in any of these shops remembered seeing Gwen Robson. The fountain was playing, shooting up its jets of water to splash the lowest prisms of the chandelier. Burden went out through the main car-park exit, from the dry warmth and air freshener smell of the place into a cutting wind.

   How long was he going to have to wait for a result from the lab? Several days probably. A phone call to Wexford’s daughter’s home obtained the engaged signal. Burden took his improvised garrote out of the desk drawer and practised flexing his hands round the pegs. One possibly got a better purchase by putting one’s fingers through the rings and gripping the handles that way. He needed something more closely resembling a human neck than the desk leg. Into his mind’s eye came an urn-shaped plant-pot container made of white polystyrene cunningly contrived to look like marble. DC Polly Davies had left it behind, with instructions as to the proper care of the cyclamen it contained, when she took her maternity leave and it had ended up in Wexford’s office, the cyclamen long perished. The stem of that urn would be just about the right size and with a similar flexibility.

   Still holding his garrote, Burden went up in the lift and along the corridor. The office door was slightly ajar and he pushed it open and went in. Wexford was sitting behind the desk, hunched up, wrapped in his old tweed overcoat. His head was plastered up and the bruises on his face had turned a sickly yellow-green. The small grey eyes that turned on Burden and his improvised weapon had a glassy look, atypically apprehensive, but his opening remark wasn’t uncharacteristic.

   ‘So it was you all along.’

   Burden grinned. ‘I’ve made this up and I was going to try it out on your plant-pot. Don’t look like that; it’s quite a reasonable idea.’

   ‘If you say so, Mike.’

   ‘What are you doing here, anyway? You’re supposed to be off till the end of the week.’

   ‘This is the end of the week.’ Wexford said, shifting in his seat and flexing bruised hands. ‘I’ve been reading all this stuff.’ Every report made on the case so far had been sent up and lay on the desk in front of him. Burden, who loved reporting every interview in detail and even recording his own thoughts, had typed screeds. ‘There are some quite interesting bits. I like Mrs Robson getting five quid for cutting the old boy’s toenails.’

   ‘I thought you would.’

   ‘It makes me wonder how much of that sort of thing there was. This bath business, for instance. It’s a fascinating line of enquiry.’ Burden raised an eyebrow. Not quite certain what Wexford meant and somewhat repelled by the image he picked the mock-marble urn off the windowsill and set about strangling it with his garrote Wexford watched him speculatively. ‘There are a lot of things I’d like to know which no one seems to have bothered with much,’ he said. ‘Lesley Arbel, for instance. Where was she last Thursday afternoon? We don’t seem to know, though we do know that Gwen Robson was seen talking to a girl at five-thirty.’

   ‘That was a man and it was five-forty,’ said Burden, pulling on his handles, feeling the polystyrene crack and split, the wire digging into the spongy white flesh-like substance.

   ‘I see. It would be a help to know why she was always down here and what she found so compelling about that not very exciting couple.’ Wexford had picked up the only photograph they had of Gwen Robson - the snapshot, much blown-up, which the Kingsmarkham Courier had used. ‘“One of those characteristic British faces”,’ he quoted, ‘“that once seen are never remembered”.’

   ‘Those Sanderses say they don’t remember her; both of them say they never saw her before. But I just know Clifford knew her, I feel it in my bones.’

   ‘For God’s sake give over doing that, Mike. I’m not squeamish, but it turns me up. Her home help visits are another interesting thing. You note how she never seems to have spent much time with those who had little or nothing to give. I wonder what old Mr Swallow had on offer, the one who lived opposite. Did she cut his toenails too - and did she perhaps have some particularly erotic technique with the scissors?’

   ‘It’s rather disgusting, isn’t it?’

   Wexford grinned, lifted his shoulders.

   ‘Is it important?’ Burden put the garrote into his pocket and came to sit on the edge of the rosewood desk. When Wexford made no reply to this but only sat there looking bemused, he said, ‘You don’t look well, you know. I doubt if you should be here.’

   ‘I’m going to have a quiet day,’ Wexford told him. ‘I’m going to see how many cups of tea I can drink between two and five this afternoon.’ Enlightening Burden, he added, ‘it seems to me we haven’t chatted up Robson’s neighbours nearly enough.’

   But he went on sitting there after Burden had gone. If he hadn’t put out his hand to the radiator and felt it almost too hot to handle he could have sworn the central heating had gone wrong. Without the comfort of his old overcoat, he would have been freezing. Sheila was back in London; he hadn’t wanted her to go, but of course he hadn’t said a word. What he would have liked was to shut her up somewhere for ever and stand guard over the door. But she had gone back to London in a rented car, back to the flat by Coram Fields that those people - whoever they were, those bombers, terrorists, fanatics - very well knew she occupied. Sylvia had the radio on most of the day, so Wexford got to hear every news bulletin, and every time he braced himself to hear the sentence that would start, ‘An explosion . . .‘ That was why he had come back to work so soon really.

   Bomb experts from Scotland Yard had come down to talk to him and the Myringham man had been back. Wexford had wanted to know what they were doing to protect Sheila and they had given him plenty of sturdy reassurance, only he wasn’t reassured. He knew he wouldn’t have felt so frightened if Sheila had been living with her husband, though that was illogical enough. If anyone had told him he would actually be glad to hear that his daughter was living with a man while married to someone else, he wouldn’t have believed them. But that was how he felt now. It would comfort him to know that Sheila had that man Ned, whoever he might be, around night and day. What would comfort him most, of course, was what his son-in-law Neil advocated.

   ‘Get her to stop doing acts of criminal damage. Take away her wire-cutters, or better still get her to make a public statement of guilt and her intention not to do it again.’

   Surprisingly, it was Dora who countered, ‘Would you have much respect for her if she did a thing like that?’

   ‘Being alive’s more important than respect, I should say.’

   ‘Of course she won’t do that,’ Wexford had said. He was almost cross. ‘She can’t deny her principles, can she? She doesn’t think she’s guilty; she thinks the law’s wrong - the law itself is guilty, if you like.’

   Sylvia looked askance. ‘Rather a strange commentary from a policeman, surely, Dad?’

   He hadn’t said any more. Apart from finding some way out of this anxiety, of making Sheila safe, he wanted more than anything to avoid a flaming row with Sylvia and Neil. The Chief Constable had said something to him on the phone yesterday about the loan of a police house until his own was repaired - well, largely rebuilt, and at the pace at which builders worked nowadays that would be a year hence.

   At any rate it was peaceful here. It was quiet and the cold he felt wasn’t real. He had to ‘struggle against a great tendency to lowness’, as he put it to himself, and he went up to the canteen to get some lunch. Working his way through hot soup, hamburger and chips, comforting if not healthy food, he faced the prospect of getting into a car again and driving it. Neil had brought him to work and dropped him outside the gates. Donaldson, his driver, would take him up to Highlands. But sooner or later he was going to have to overcome the great barrier of inhibition that reared up between him and the driving-seat and the wheel of a car. He would have to conquer the paralysis he felt would descend upon his left hand as it tried to close over a gear shift, even in his case an automatic shift. Last night he had relived in a dream the explosion he thought he had no memory of, but had said nothing about it to anyone, not even Dora.

Patterns of life had changed subtly but radically during the years since Wexford had first become a policeman interviewing witnesses. In those early days all the men were out at work and all the women at home. Split-shift working, the advance in women’s education and freedom, self-employment and of course unemployment had changed all that. He was not much surprised, at the first house where he called after leaving the car and Donaldson, to be admitted by a young man with a baby in his arms and a child of about three clinging to the legs of his jeans.

   This was John Whitton, student and father of two, whose wife was a systems analyst in a full-time job. It was she who had spent time with Ralph Robson while he awaited the arrival of his niece. The house inside had that curious faint smell which all who have themselves been parents recognize - that of a compound of milk, infants’ digestive processes, ammonia and talcum powder. This young parent had lived next door but one to Gwen Robson for three years since his marriage when the local authority had allocated him and his wife a house at Highlands, but he assured Wexford that their acquaintance had been slight. Knowing her to be a council home help and with a reputation for philanthropy (his own word), they had once ventured to ask her if she would baby sit for them.

   ‘Our regular sitter had let us down and it was a special occasion. As a matter of fact it was our third wedding anniversary, and Rosemary was expecting this one any day. We knew it would be months before we got out in the evening again. I asked Mrs Robson and it wasn’t that she wouldn’t do it; it was the amount she wanted paying. We couldn’t run to that, living on one salary; we couldn’t give her three pounds an hour. It wasn’t as if Scott ever wakes in the evening - it would have been twelve quid for just sitting about watching telly.’