Wexford 14 - The Veiled One (28 page)

   ‘Are you suggesting I simply have someone go out there and send him home?’ asked Wexford. ‘I don’t know why but it seems . . . irresponsible.’

   Olson got up. Taking no risks with the weather, he had arrived wrapped in yellow oilskins and these be fastened and zipped round himself once more, his sharp nose sticking out from under the canary-coloured hood.

   ‘He’s a very badly disturbed human being, Reg,’ he said. ‘You’re right there. But you and Mike, you have to understand I’m a professional. You, Mike, were kind enough to call me “doctor” when we first met and though I’m not that, I have to have professional ethics. I can’t go up to Clifford and tell him to come back to me. I can’t go and tell him he’s got his usual appointments at five today and mind not to be late. All I can do is go and get in that car beside him, sit there as his friend and try to persuade him to confront what he sees as his relationship with you and maybe get it into a more . . . reasonable perspective.’

   They both watched from the window. The increasing torrent of rain made it difficult to see. Olson’s figure looked like a bright yellow bird hopping and flapping its way to a dry nest. The Metro’s door shut on him and once more the rain enclosed the car in walls of water like reeded glass.

   ‘I suppose it’s sound,’ Wexford said, ‘that stuff about not letting him create his own world, about not giving away to him. I must confess to feeling a bit apprehensive.’

   ‘Of what?’ Burden asked almost rudely.

   A car driven recklessly, a fatal accident that was only partly accident, a handful of pills washed down with brandy, a rope slung over the beam of an outhouse . . . Wexford put none of this into words. He saw the Metro begin to back, sliding slowly through sheets of water and sending up jets of spray. It turned and headed for the gates, Olson still inside.

   ‘That’s fixed him for a bit,’ and Burden. ‘Thank God for it! Now perhaps we can get on with some work.’

   He shut the door rather too hard behind him. Wexford turned his back on the window and the rain and thought about the dreams he kept having of wheels spinning in space, of circles with squares inside them. Had they anything to do with the fact that the evening before and the evening before that he had been reading the manuscript of Dita Jago’s concentration camp experiences? It was with him in the office today, Donaldson having come for him that morning in the car.

   ‘Is it any good?’ Dora had asked.

   ‘I don’t think I’d answer that question if anyone else had asked it. But “as an offering to conjugal unreserve”, frankly, not much. As a writer, she makes a fine knitter.’

   ‘Reg, that’s unkind.’

   ‘Not when it isn’t heard outside these four flimsy walls. Who am I to judge, anyway? What do I know? I’m a police man, not a publisher’s reader. It’s not for its style or atmosphere that I’m reading the thing.’

   In her discreet way she hadn’t asked why he was reading it, any more than she had asked why he always had his nose in Kim magazine. She knew better than that. He turned to where he had placed a marker between the sheets. It was at a point about half-way through and the young Dita Kowiak had begun work in the Auschwitz Krankenbau - the hospital - as an orderly. Wexford should have been moved by the description of emaciated patients, the administering of intracardiac injections of toxic substances, the hurling of naked corpses into trucks. Dita had survived because for a time at any rate the hospital workers were regularly fed, even if the diet of turnip soup and mouldy bread was inadequate. She told of Russian prisoners-of-war poisoned with Cyclon-B gas, the burning of five hundred corpses in the space of one hour. But instead of being affected, he felt only that he had heard all this before. She had no gift for delineating place or bringing a character to life. Her prose was wooden and repetitious and there was no impression of her own sufferings permeating the text. She might never have been there; she might have copied all this piecemeal from the concentration camp autobiographies which, after all, were legion. And perhaps she had . . .

   Several times he had come to points in the narrative where pages were missing, but up till now those pages had always turned up later on. The lack of numbering made things difficult. Here, however, the narrative stopped abruptly in mid-sentence, in the middle of an anecdote about a doctor at the hospital called Dehring. Wexford carefully scrutinized all the remaining pages of the manuscript, but could find no further mention of Dehring’s name. There was at least one page missing, perhaps two.

   But would Dita Jago have let him take the manuscript if it contained - or conspiciously did not contain - something incriminating? It would have been easy to refuse. ‘I couldn’t bear to have anyone read it,’ would have done the trick. Or when he asked where the manuscript was, she need only have said that she had sent it away to be typed or had even, as she threatened, burned it.

Whatever efforts Serge Olson had made, they failed to have any effect on Clifford Sanders. He made five phone calls to Kingsmarkham police station in the course of the afternoon, though none of these was actually put through to Burden. Next morning there was a letter for him, sent to his home. At the police station someone else might very likely have opened any missive that came, but here Burden naturally opened his own post. This brown envelope he had at first supposed to contain the bill for fitting a new carpet in the dining room.

   Clifford addressed him as Mike. This was probably Olson’s doing, Burden thought. The letter began ‘Dear Mike’. The writing was a child’s - or a teacher’s a round, neat, admirably legible hand, upright but with the slightest tendency to a backward slope. ‘Dear Mike, I have a lot I want to say to you and I think you would be interested to hear it. I know you want me to think of you as my friend, and that is how I do think of you. In fact, I don’t find it easy to confide in people, but you are an exception to this rule. We really get on well together, as I am sure you will agree.’ Here Burden laid down the letter for a moment and sighed. ‘I do understand that other people, those in authority over you I mean, are doing everything in their power to stop our meeting, and I expect you feel threatened with the loss of your job. Therefore I suggest we arrange to meet outside your working hours. Even employers like the police surely cannot object to their officers having their own personal friends. I will phone you tomorrow . . .’ Burden noticed that he mentioned no precise hour and recalled what Olson had said about Clifford’s attitude towards time. ‘Please tell them you expect a call from me so that if you are out they can take a message. My idea is to call on you at your house this evening perhaps or during the weekend. With best wishes. Yours ever, Cliff.’

Burden’s little boy had climbed on to his lap and he stroked his hair, held him close for a moment. Suppose his Mark should grow up into such a one? How could you tell? Clifford had looked like this once, been as endearing, inspired perhaps the same breath-catching love. Only I shan’t walk out on him when he’s five, thought Burden. But when he tried to summon up pity for Clifford, he failed and felt only exasperation.

   ‘I’m taking no calls from this man,’ he said when he got to the police station, ‘and I’d like him to be told that no message he leaves will reach me. Right?’

   After that he concentrated on the quest of the moment, finding the whereabouts of Charles Sanders. If Sanders had never paid maintenance to the wife he had deserted and she, presumably, had been too proud to ask for it, he could not be traced through the courts or social services. It wasn’t an uncommon combination of names. Telephone directories and electrol registers yielded a number for Archbold, Davidson, Marian Bayliss and Diana Pettit to call on, and Archbold had run to earth a likely-sounding Charles Sanders in Manchester. Burden had plans to go up there and see him, though he wanted to get the man on the phone first, and as yet he hadn’t even managed to hear the sound of his voice. Engage signals alternated with ringing tones as if Sanders unplugged his phone between answering calls. However, he never answered Burden’s.

   Later in the morning when he saw the red Metro come on to the forecourt, Burden had to suppress a feeling that was not too far from panic. He was being hounded, persecuted. The anxious fears which had been building up inside him had the effect which such an accumulation sometimes does, that of heightening the powers of his imagination. He found himself envisaging a future in which Clifford Sanders dogged his footsteps, in which every time he lifted a phone receiver he heard Clifford’s voice at the other end of the line, in which - worst of all - when he looked in a mirror he saw Clifford’s face over his shoulder. You are a hardened, tough police officer, he told himself fiercely. Why do you let this boy shake you? Why are you rattled by it? You can keep him off, others will keep him off. Calm yourself. Ignorant as he acknowledged himself to be of the workings of the psyche, he nevertheless recognized the evidences of paranoia in Clifford’s letter and now he saw them in himself. And then he recalled the precise moment when he had first recognized Clifford’s madness.

   A memory came to him of something he had been told by his historian wife: how going to look at the mad people in Bedlam was as popular a pastime in the late eighteenth century as safari park visiting was today. How could they? His instinct was to put himself as far from the mad as he could, to pretend they didn’t exist, to build walls between them and him. Yet Clifford wasn’t mad in a padded cell, straitjacket way; he was only disturbed, deprived, lonely, his thought processes somehow askew. Burden picked up the phone, arranged for Sergeant Martin to go out there and tell Clifford to leave, to tell him he was trespassing or something.

   He wondered if Wexford had seen him and felt a sudden need to talk to Wexford about it, to be franker on the subject of his feelings in respect of Clifford than he had been up to now. But as he was going down, had got so far as entering the lift, he remembered that Wexford - for some mysterious reason of his own - had gone to the Barringdean Shopping Centre. Burden thought he would like a drink or even a Valium, though he hated the things and feared them. Instead he sat at his desk and briefly put his head in his hands.

The sandwich, according to the claims of Grub ‘n’ Grains, was ‘American style’, pastrami and cream cheese on rye. If he hadn’t been told that it was pastrami, which he had never tasted before, Wexford would have sworn he was eating corned beef of the well-known Fray Bentos type. He had been doing a bit of crime reconstruction, mostly in his head, but the true scene of the crime seemed the right place in which to do it.

   The fountain played in the left-hand concourse, its jets of spray concealing the ascending and descending escalators and the entrance to British Home Stores. But opposite him Wexford could see the several clothes shops and between them and Boots the Chemist the wools and crafts shop called Knits ‘n’ Kits. Next door to the café was December with its bakery adjacent, then a travel agent, then W. H. Smith. Wexford drank his tropical fruit cocktail, paid for his lunch and made his way up to Demeter.

   The health foods store kept its herbal remedies on shelves immediately to the left of the window and Wexford soon found the calendula capsules. It was these which Helen Brook had been looking for when she saw Gwen Robson outside in the aisle between the shops in conversation with a very well-dressed girl. And here she had been taken with the first of those early labour pains which prevented her from going up to Mrs Robson and speaking to her, Wexford bent down, took a jar of capsules from the shelf and dropped it into his wire basket. Then he straightened up and looked out of the window. Boots the Chemist could be seen and, this side of it, the wools and crafts shop, with the Mandala - circles of chrysanthemums and cherry-fruited solanum today - cutting off sight of the entrances to Tesco. Gwen Robson had shopped in Boots, bought her toothpaste and talcum powder, paused to look at the Mandala flowers perhaps, and there encountered the girl Helen Brook had seen her speaking to. It must have been Lesley Arbel, Wexford thought, who - perhaps having time to spare before the departure of the London train - had come in here specifically to meet her aunt. He imagined a conversation, surprise expressed by Mrs Robson, a brief explanation from Lesley about the word- processing course, a promise perhaps that she would see her aunt on the following night. Or had it all been more sinister?

   It must have been on this side of the Mandala that they had stood, for Helen Brook to have seen them. And somehow Wexford knew that if the girl were Lesley she would not have been looking at flowers but, even while talking to her aunt, would have had her eyes fixed on those shop windows to the left of her with their window displays of clothes and shoes. He looked at them himself, at the space Dora’s sweater had occupied which was now filled by an extraordinary red and black frilled corselette; on to the next window which was a medley of red and black and green and white shoes and boots, to the window of Knits ‘n’ Kits. Here a loom with a half-completed piece of work on it — a wall-hanging or rug — predominated. He thought inescapably of Dita Jago. Did she use this shop? Making his way to the door with the basket over his arm, his thoughts miles away from herbal remedies and packets of nuts, he was jolted to attention by an indignant voice.

   ‘Excuse me, but you haven’t paid for your tablets!’

   Wexford grinned. That would be a fine thing, a turn-up for the book, a detective chief inspector getting done for shoplifting. As bad as, or worse than, his daughter going to prison. But he didn’t want to think about that, he wouldn’t think of it. Under the resentful gaze of the shop assistant, he replaced the calendula capsules on the shelf, leaving the wire basket on the floor.

   It had been there in his mind, lying under a level of consciousness, for days now . . . well weeks. Gwen Robson had been dead three weeks. It drew him to that window. Of course he had already dimly glimpsed it, half-noticing it as he came into Demeter. The pairs of knitting needles were hung in a sort of zig-zag pattern all down the right-hand side of the window, banks of wool on the left and the loom with its half-completed achievement in between. But they weren’t, strictly speaking, all pairs. Wexford went in. Better not attack the window display, he thought, not yet.