Wexford 14 - The Veiled One (36 page)

   ‘But why? If she was going to report the death to us, why not do it then? Why not pretend, as she later did, that she’d discovered the body?’

   ‘She had her shopping to finish, Mike. She only came to the centre once a week and she wasn’t going to upset her routine. There was still her fish to buy and her groceries to get. Didn’t I say we aren’t dealing with an ordinary normal woman here? Dodo was special, Dodo was different. She had probably killed her father-in-law, she had already killed a husband, very likely with a knitting needle garrote, and a neighbour also by the same means. Maybe she even used the garrote afterwards to knit Clifford’s sweaters. Waste not, want not! She went back to get the rest of her shopping done. It was not yet a quarter to six. Possibly she thought some other car driver would see the body, for the car park at that time would still have been half-full. However, no one did. Only Clifford did, coming in at six o’clock. He thought it was his mother, he thought the body was Mother Dodo. And he did a mad thing, a typically Clifford thing. He covered it up with a curtain from the boot of the car and then he ran away, pounding down the stairs as I was coming up in the lift, bursting out through the pedestrian gates for Archie Greaves to see.’

   ‘Dodo came back at ten-past-six, so that I was permitted a sight of her emerging from the covered way, and she entered the car park as she truthfully told us at precisely twelve minutes past. One useful thing only came out of my being here, my seeing her. She was carrying two bags of shopping but not the grey knitting wool, which is how I know she had been in the car park earlier. Did she expect to find a crowd there, even the police there? By the time I saw her, she must have realized that wasn’t happening. Only one thing had happened - someone had covered it up. Who? A policeman? A car driver who had gone off to get help? What? One thing was clear; it wouldn’t do for her just to do nothing. Her car was there but no Clifford. If he had been there perhaps they could just have driven off, taking no action. But he wasn’t and she couldn’t drive. Margaret Carroll wrote about her particular dilemma. Dodo’s was worse. What was she to do?’

   ‘Wait. Think. What if the driver of the only other car on the second level turned up, the blue Lancia? Where was Clifford? Where was the man or woman who had covered up the body? At least she didn’t realize at that time that it was her curtain which had been used - or rather a curtain from up in her attics. She went down by the stairs or in the lift, looking for Clifford, and that was the first time Archie Greaves saw her. The second time she was screaming and raving and shaking those gates. Her nerve had broken; it was all too much, the waiting and the knowing and . . . the silence.’

   Olson nodded. He offered more tea, not seeming to notice the haste with which it was refused, then pushed his hands through the dense bush of curly hair. ‘I suppose there was no real motive for those early murders? She was a true psychopath? Because if we’re looking for self-interest, it was surely in her interest to keep her husband alive?’

   ‘Oh, there was a motive,’ said Wexford. ‘Revenge.’

   ‘Revenge for what?’

   ‘Mike can tell you the story. He knows it, Clifford told him. Clifford thought it romantic; he couldn’t see through the veil his mother wore. Her life had been dedicated to an act of revenge against the people who said she wasn’t good enough for their son, and against the son who agreed with them. She was a multi-murderer who killed dispassionately but who was afraid of her victims after they were dead. She disinfected herself to be rid of their contamination and was frightened of their ghosts.’

   Burden and Olson had begun a discussion on paranoia, on infantilism and transference, and Wexford listened to them for a moment or two, smiling to himself as Burden said, ‘We live and learn.’

   ‘We live at any rate,’ said Wexford and he left them, walking the few hundred yards back to the police station when he got into his own car under the Christmas lights which were already winking away on the ash tree. There he sat and read about Sheila, read the statement she had made, her refusal to pay the fine demanded on conviction - her brave, foolhardy, defiant declaration that she would do it all again as soon as she came out.

   ‘The Chief Constable rang,’ Dora said as he came into the house. ‘Darling, he wants to see you as soon as possible; he couldn’t get you at the office. I suppose it’s about this place.’

   I don’t suppose so for a moment, said Wexford but to himself, not aloud. He knew exactly what it would be about and felt the crackle of the evening paper in his raincoat pocket. For some reason, for no reason, he gave Dora a kiss and she looked a little surprised.

   ‘I don’t suppose I’ll be long,’ he said, knowing he would be.

   Dusk, nearly dark, a little before five. His route to Middleton where the Chief Constable lived took him along his old road. It would be the first time he had been there since the bomb and he knew he had consciously avoided it, but he didn’t now. The sky was jewel-blue and windows along the street were full of Christmas lights. Bracing himself for the shock of devastation, he slowed as he came to the strip of open ground, the empty site. He braked, pulled in and looked.

   Three men were coming out of the gate, up to a van with ladders on its roof. He saw the contractors’ board, the stack of bricks, the concrete-mixer covered up against the frost. He got out and stood looking, smiled to himself.

   They had begun to rebuild his house.