Wexford 14 - The Veiled One (32 page)

   Wexford had himself driven back to Ash Farm and he took Burden with him, insisted on it. Burden had accepted Clifford’s innocence of the first crime at first with reservations and arguments, then with a deep and bitter self- reproach. It was clear to him, and this Wexford was unable to deny, that the death of Dorothy Sanders had come about as the direct result of his refusal to continue the sessions with Clifford.

   Burden was silent for a while. Then he said, ‘I think I shall have to resign.’

   ‘For God’s sake, why?’

   ‘If it’s true that I could drive a man to murder - and it is, I did do that - I’m not fit to be a police officer. It’s part of my duty to prevent crime, not provoke it.’

   ‘So, logically, you should never have questioned Clifford in the first place. Suspecting him of the murder of Gwen Robson, you should nevertheless have ignored him because he appeared to be an unbalanced person with abnormal reactions.’

   ‘I’m not saying that. I’m saying that having once questioned him I shouldn’t have . . . well, abandoned him to his fate.’

   ‘You should have gone on talking to him day after day, for hours on end, session after session? For how long? Weeks? Months? What about your work? Your own sanity, come to that? Am I my brother’s keeper?’

   Burden took that question which Wexford had meant rhetorically - which perhaps Cain had meant rhetorically - in a literal way. ‘Well, yes, maybe I am. What was the answer to it, anyway? What did whoever it was - God, was it? - say?’

   ‘Nothing,’ said Wexford. ‘Absolutely nothing. Come on, forget about resigning. You’re not resigning, you’re coming with me to the scene of the crime.’

   In gloomy silence Burden sat beside him in the car. It was a passive sort of winter’s day, neither cold nor mild, the sky pale grey and clotted like porridge. Sometimes the sun appeared low on the horizon, a shiny disc of plate showing through where the gruel thinned. The shop windows in the High Street were full of pre-Christmas glitter and a huge imported Christmas tree, gift from some town in Germany no one had previously heard of but which was twinned with Kingsmarkham, had been set up outside the Barringdean Centre. Burden remarked in a sour way about the amount it must cost to run that electronic digital arrangement at the Tesco end which announced alternately that here were gifts for all the family and that nine shopping days remained until Christmas.

   ‘What are we coming here for, anyway?’

   He meant to Ash Farm, down long winding Ash Lane, where the grass verges were grey with splashed mud and dead elms with peeling trunks awaited the axe. But the air was clear today and in the distance the outline of the hummocky hill that hid the town could be seen. Ivy-clad Ash Farm slid into view, its many eyes peeping from amongst the evergreen growth. Two police cars were parked in front of it and a policeman in uniform was on duty at the foot of the flight of steps.

   ‘I hadn’t thought of going inside,’ Wexford said.

   ‘You said we were visiting the scene of the crime.’

   Wexford made no reply but nodded to PC Leonard who saluted him and said, ‘Good afternoon, sir.’ In spite of what he had seen on the previous evening he found it hard to realize that Dorothy Sanders, so strong and upright and confident, was dead, the metallic voice silenced for ever. And when he looked through the dark gleaming glass into the thinly furnished room where the ashes of a fire lay in the grate, he half-expected to see her there, moving across the uncarpeted floor, issuing her orders with a pointing finger. A ghost, that would have to be, and she had been afraid of ghosts, afraid of the dark and of letting fog enter the house . . .

   With Burden following him and Donaldson, he walked round the house into the back garden. It was new to him, but Burden had been out there before on the day of the search, triumphantly discovering garrotes in the shed attached to the rear wall. A curious place to put a shed, wasn’t it? In order to reach it, a considerable area of damp grass had to be crossed. Earth, whether turfed or not, is always wet in winter, even during dry spells. He felt his shoes sink into the squelchy softness.

   Dorothy’ Sanders had paid less attention to her garden than to her house, but had nevertheless achieved out here a similar kind of barren neatness. There were few plants that looked cultivated, though it was hard to tell at this time of the year, and even fewer weeds. It looked as if Mrs Sanders - or Clifford, on her instructions - had watered the flower-bed areas with the kind of toxic stuff that destroys broad-leaved plants. It looked as if at some point during her life in this house she had set about destroying the garden as it must once have existed. The few trees had been savagely lopped, so that from the stumps of amputated branches new twigs grew out at strange angles. A faint pinkness had appeared in the sky, sign of sunset. It would be dusk very soon, then deeply dark. Nine shopping days to Christmas, seven long nights and seven short days to the Solstice. One day to Sheila’s court appearance . . .

   These short days, cut off in mid-afternoon, hindered his progress. Nature still had the upper hand . . . just. Or, rather, he couldn’t be absolutely sure the expense of using powerful lights was warranted. He padded through the wet grass to the furthermost corner of the garden and there, up against the back fence, he could just make out in the distance the low roof of what must be Ash Farm Lodge, rising above screens of Leyland cypress.

   ‘Would you like to introduce me to Mr Carroll?’

   They drove down the lane in the sunset light, the last of the light. With a rattling cry, a cock pheasant rose out of the hedge on seldom-used cumbersome wings. There was the sound of a shot and then another.

   ‘It’s only Carroll,’ said Burden. ‘The way Kingsmarkham’s become urbanized, we forget we live in the country some times.’

   Carroll’s dog came timidly to meet them. Perhaps, though, it wasn’t timid - perhaps it was shyly creeping up preparatory to an attack. Wexford put out his hand to the dog and a harsh voice shouted, ‘Don’t touch him!’

   The farmer appeared with a dead hare slung round his neck, in his left hand a pair of redleg partridges he was holding by their tail feathers.

   Wexford said mildly, ‘Mr Carroll? Chief Inspector Wexford, Kingsmarkham CID. I believe you’ve met my colleague, Inspector Burden.’

   ‘He was this way before, yes.’

   ‘Can we go inside?’

   ‘What for?’ Carroll asked.

   ‘I want to talk to you. If you’d rather we didn’t go into your house, you can come back to the police station with us. That will suit us just as well. It’s up to you, one or the other.’

   ‘You can come in if you want,’ Carroll said.

   The dog preceded them in, head down and tail between its legs. Carroll made a growling noise at it, a remarkable animal noise which might have been expected to come from the dog, not it master. This was apparently the signal for it to go into its basket which it did like a hypnotic subject, curling itself into a circle and putting its head on its paws. Carroll hung up the twelve-bore, took off his boots and put them on the now stained and corrugated magazine on the oven top which was still just recognizable as a copy of Kim. The hare and the birds trailed bloody heads into the sink. The table was a mass of papers, chequebook and paying-in book from the Midland Bank, a VAT ledger, crumpled invoices. Wexford knew the chances of his being asked to sit down were around a hundred to one, so he had seated himself and motioned to Burden to do the same before Carroll had got his slippers on.

   ‘Where’s your wife, Mr Carroll?’ Wexford began.

   ‘What’s that to you?’ He didn’t sit down, he stood over them. ‘It’s her up the road that’s dead, and her boy that’s potty did it. You stick to that, you see he’s put away for life; that’ll keep you lot busy, not coming poking into my business.’

   ‘Rumour has it that your wife has left you,’ Wexford observed.

   For a moment he thought the farmer was going to strike him. Unpleasant as that would be, it would at least provide a reason for arresting him. But Carroll, having clenched his fists and put them up, stepped back, setting his teeth. Wexford decided just the same that he might feel more at an advantage on his feet. He was a bigger man than Carroll, though older.

   The kitchen was rapidly growing dark. He reached for the only switch in the room and unexpectedly bright light poured from the central blumb in its incongruous shade: pink frilled cotton in the shape of a mob-cap. There were other such touches in that grim place: a battery-operated wall clock, its face a sunflower, a calendar that pictured a kitten in a basket, the day May of this year. In the bright light Carroll blinked.

   ‘It was about six months ago that she left, wasn’t it? End of June?’ If Carroll wouldn’t answer, there wasn’t much he could do. He changed tack a little. ‘Tell me about your neighbour, Charles Sanders? Did you know him? Were you here when he was living here?’

   Carroll growled. It was the same language he used when issuing commands to his dog, but succeeded by reasonably comprehensible English. ‘His dad died. Day after the funeral he upped and left. What do you want to know that for?’

   ‘You don’t ask the police questions, Carroll,’ said Burden. ‘We ask you. Right?’

   Another growl. It was almost funny.

   Wexford said, ‘He never came back. He never came back to see his son, he never contributed to his wife’s support or his son’s. He left his old mother in his wife’s care and she dumped her in an old people’s home. I’m being very frank with you, Mr Carroll, and I’d like you to do the same by us. It’s eighteen years since Sanders left. You were newly married, newly arrived here. I don’t think he left, I think he’s dead. What do you think?’

   ‘How should I know? It’s no business of mine.’

   ‘What did your wife think, Mr Carroll? She knew, didn’t she? Somehow or other she found out about Sanders. Did she tell you what she knew, or did she keep it to herself? Maybe she told only one person?’

   ‘What person?’

   By that remark Wexford had meant to infer nothing that could in fact be of momentous significance to Carroll, but the farmer, read into it more than was implied and his face I grew red and seemed to swell. Although he made no immediate move, a change had come over him - a kind of concentration, a gathering and intensifying of power, enough to make Burden spring to his feet and push back the chair, It was that which did it. Carroll reached behind him for the gun on the wall, unhooked it and, stepping back, levelled it at them from a distance of about four feet.

   ‘Put that down,’ Wexford said. ‘Don’t be a fool.’

   ‘I’m giving you one minute to get out of here.’

   At least now they would be able to arrest him, Wexford thought. The farmer could look at them and keep his eye on the sunflower clock at the same time. One eye open, the dog watched from his basket. This was something it understood - a gun aimed, a helpless quarry. When I double up full of shot, Wexford thought ridiculously, maybe it will come and retrieve me.

   Burden said, his head cocked towards the door, ‘There’s Donaldson coming now,’ as if he heard footsteps.

   It was a trick and it worked. Carroll turned his head and Wexford’s fist shot out to catch him on the jaw. The gun went off as he fell, and in that low-ceilinged bungalow room it made an enormous noise, a noise like a bomb, a noise like the bomb in his front garden which Wexford couldn’t remember hearing. The farmer rolled over and the gun dropped from his hands to clatter away across the tiles. Bits of plaster dropped from the ceiling where shot had peppered it. Smoke and a stench of gunpowder and the bewildered dog looking from side to side, beginning a helpless, forbidden barking. And then Donaldson did come, pounding up the path and throwing open the back door.

   ‘Are you OK, sir? What happened?’

   ‘I don’t know my own strength,’ said Wexford. He considered poking at Carroll with his toe, but thought better of it and heaved the man up by the shoulders. Carroll groaned, his head sagging. ‘I don’t suppose we’ve got any handcuffs in the car, have we?’

   ‘I don’t think so, sir.’

   ‘Then we must do without, but I don’t think he’ll give much trouble.’

   Carroll was a big man and it took the three of them to get him into the car. They shut up the dog in the kitchen and Donaldson, who was fond of dogs, gave him a bowl of water and the hare.

   ‘That’s the way to undo years of training in half an hour,’ he said cheerfully.

The artifacts that lay all over the surfaces in Wexford’s office - in court they would have been called ‘exhibits’ - included Carroll’s twelve-bore, a muddied copy of Kim magazine, a circular knitting needle, size six, and some of the contents of the dead woman’s coat pockets. There was something distressing, though scarcely pathetic, about that lipstick in its shiny gilt case, the red of a fire engine The almost white face powder with its faint iridescence had been marketed f someone young and fair, someone like Lesley Arbel. The chequebook for the joint account was in the names of C. L. Sanders and D. K. Sanders and - at least during the lifetime of this particular book it had been used only to draw sums of cash. A hundred pounds a month was what Dorothy Sanders had drawn during the past two years. It wasn’t much, it was modest, but for the past two years her income had been supplemented by Clifford’s earnings.

   That morning Kingsmarkham magistrates had committed him for trial on a charge of murder and remanded him in custody until the trial was due. Even Burden could see now that there could be no other murder charge for him to face, that it was impossible for him to have been guilty of the death of Gwen Robson. He had seen Clifford driven away to the remand prison at Myringham before he and Wexford left for Ash Farm and had not mentioned him since. But now he came into Wexford’s office and spoke abruptly.

   ‘I felt I should have stood up before the magistrates and said I wanted to make a statement. I should have admitted my responsibility - well, my share in what that poor little guy did.’

   ‘“Poor little guy”, is it now? What’s become of your much-vaunted principle of reserving pity for the victim?’ Wexford was reading a letter, nodding from time to time as if what he read brought him a long-awaited satisfaction. He winced at the sounds that were coming from the depths of the building, a steady crash-crash-crash, and looked up at Burden irritably.