Wexford 14 - The Veiled One (6 page)

   Lesley got up, said, ‘Well, if you’ll just excuse me . . .’

   While Robson told Burden about the Hastings Road neighbours, speaking in a wretched halting monotone and separating virtually every sentence from the next with a phrase to the effect that Gwen had known them all better than he did, Wexford left the room. He found Lesley Arbel standing in front of an electric stove, a printed tea-towel rather than an apron tied round her waist to protect the coffee silk skirt. Two eggs reposed in a bowl, a beater beside them, but instead of preparing her uncle’s lunch she was examining her face in a handbag mirror and painting something on to it with a small, fat brush.

   As soon as she saw Wexford she put brush and mirror away with extreme haste, as if this rapid manoeuvre would somehow render the prior activity invisible. She broke open the eggs, not very skilfully, got a piece of shell into the bowl and had to pick it out with a long red nail.

   ‘Why would anyone want to murder your aunt, Miss Arbel?’

   She didn’t answer him for a moment, but reached up into a cabinet for a plate and put a cruet on to the tray she had laid with a cloth. Her voice when it came was nervous and irritable. ‘It was some crazy person, wasn’t it? There’s never any reason for murders, not these days. The ones you read about in the papers, they’re all people who say they don’t know why they did it or they’ve forgotten or had a blackout or whatever. The one who killed her will have been like that. I mean, who would have wanted to kill her for a reason? There wasn’t any reason.’ She turned away from him and started beating the eggs.

   ‘Everybody liked her?’ he said. ‘She wouldn’t have had enemies?’

   In her left hand she held the pan in which butter was smoking too strongly, in her other the bowl with the egg mixture. But instead of pouring one into the other, she stood with the two vessels poised. ‘It’s a laugh really, hearing you talk like that. Or it would be if it wasn’t such a tragedy. She was a wonderful, lovely lady - don’t you understand that? Hasn’t anyone told you? Look at Uncle Ralph, he’s heart broken, isn’t he? He worshipped her and she worshipped him. They were just a lovely couple, like young lovers right up to when this happened. And this’ll be the death of him, I can promise you that - this’ll be the end of him. He’s aged about twenty years since yesterday.’

   She swung round, tipped the eggs into the pan and began rapidly cooking them. Wexford had the curious feeling that for all the apparent sincerity of her words what she was really trying to do was impress him with a kind of caring competent maturity - an ambition that went wrong when she seemed to realize that though the eggs were cooked she had forgotten about the bread and butter. Rather harassed by now, she cut doorsteps of bread and covered them with wedges of butter chipped from the refrigerated block. He opened doors for her, feeling something very near pity with out exactly knowing what he pitied her for. The apron improvised from a tea towel fell off as she teetered into the living room on her stilt heels. But even so, as she passed the small wall mirror which hung between kitchen and living-room doorways, she was unable to resist a glance into it. Balanced on her pointed toes, holding the tray, flustered, she nevertheless took the opportunity of a narcissistic peep at her own face . . .

   Robson was lying back in his armchair and had to be jolted out of his half-daze. This his niece did not only by propping him up with a cushion behind him and plumping the tray down on his lap, but also with the rough and some how shocking, ‘He asked me if Gwen had enemies! Can you credit it?’

   Dull, bewildered eyes were lifted. Incredibly came the mumble, ‘He’s only doing his job, dear.’

   ‘Gwen,’ she said, and sentimentally, ‘Gwen that was like a mother to me.’ Suddenly her manner sharpened. ‘Mind you, she wasn’t soft. She had principles, very high principles, didn’t she, Uncle? And she knew how to speak her mind. She didn’t like that couple living together, the ones next- door-but-one, whatever they’re called, the people that run a business from home. I said times had changed from when she got married, but it didn’t make any difference. I mean, everyone does that now, I said. But she wouldn’t have it, would she, Uncle?’

   They were all looking at her, Robson as well. She seemed to realize how animated her manner had been for one so recently bereaved and she flushed. Not much real love there, Burden thought, and said, ‘Now we’d like to take a look round the house. Is that OK?’

   She would have argued but Robson, having eaten almost nothing, pushing away his plate, nodded and waved one hand in an odd gesture of assent. Wexford wouldn’t have bothered with the house; there was nothing relevant to Mrs Robson’s life or death he expected to find. He was already half-adhering to the girl’s view, that some badly disturbed person had killed Gwen Robson for no better reason than that she was there and a woman, unprepared and frail enough. However, he made his way into the bedroom she had shared with Robson and saw everywhere signs of domestic harmony. The bed was unmade. On an impulse aimed at no particular enlightening discovery, Wexford lifted up the flatter and less rumpled of the pillows and found underneath it Mrs Robson’s nightdress just as it must have been folded and tucked away by her on Thursday morning . . .

   A framed photograph showed her as she had once been, her hair dark and plentiful, mouth widely smiling, plumper than now. She was seated and her husband was looking over her shoulder, perhaps to give an illusion of the greater height he had not possessed. The books on her bedside cabinet were two novels of Catherine Cookson, on his the latest Robert Ludlum. On the dressing table a small container of Yardley ‘Chique’ perfuthe stood between his hairbrush and a pin cushion in which were pinned three brooches. A surprising number of pictures covered the walls: more framed photo graphs of the two of them, a framed collage of postcards, sentimental mementoes of their own holidays, cat and dog pictures perhaps cut from calendars, a cottage in the flowery garden embroidered by someone - perhaps Gwen Robson herself.

   The curtains in the room were as floral as this picture. In spite of her sober style of dressing, she had liked bright colours - pinks and blues and yellows. She might have worn brown, but she would not have furnished her house with it. A neatly stacked pile of Kim magazines occupied half the top of a long stool and on top of these lay last night’s evening paper. Did that mean that the night after his wife had been murdered Robson had taken the evening paper up with him for his bedtime reading? Well, why not? Life must go on. And no doubt he had been given sleeping pills, had needed something to read while waiting for the drug to take effect. Wexford just glanced at the lead story and the photograph of the barrister Edmund Hope, as handsome and striking looking as any of the Arab bombers he was prosecuting, then he turned away to study the view.

   Beyond the window the Highlands estate presented a panorama of itself she must often have seen while standing here: Hastings Road where the house was, Eastbourne Road leading down to the town, Battle Hill mounting to the crown of the estate, pantiled roofs deliberately placed at odd angles to one another to give the illusion of some little hillside town in Spain or Portugal - coniferous trees bluish, dark green and golden-green because conifers are cheap and grow swiftly, winding gravel paths and concrete paths, windows dressed in Austrian blinds, looped-up festoons and frills, one solitary resident only to be seen: an elderly, very stout woman in long skirt and multi-coloured jacket who was breaking into pieces the end of a loaf of bread and putting them on to a bird-table in a garden diagonally opposite. The house she returned to was the first of those past the row of old people’s sheltered housing. She looked back once at where Mrs Robson had lived, as anyone must look who lived here or came into this street. That was human nature. Her eyes met Wexford’s and she immediately looked away. It was rather as Lesley Arbel had quickly put away her mirror and brush, as if this would negate the past act.

   Wexford said, ‘We may as well go. We’ll give Mrs Sanders a ring and get her down to the station.’

   ‘You wouldn’t prefer to go to her?’

   ‘No, I’d prefer to give her a bit of trouble,’ said Wexford.

It was spread out on the table in the interview room - a curtain that had once been handsome, of a rich thick-piled tobacco-brown velvet, lined and weighted at the two corners of its lower hem. But splashed the centre of it was a large dark stain, a stain which might have been blood but which Wexford had already ascertained was not. Other stains had since been super-added; there was certainly an impression that the original splashings had ruined the curtain as a curtain, and that since the occurrence which had led to them any further damage to the velvet had been of no account.

   Dorothy Sanders looked at it. Her eyes flicked and as she looked back at Wexford he noticed for the first time that they were of a curious pale fawn colour.

   ‘That’s the curtain that used to hang up on my door.’ And then, after a long blank stare at Wexford had elicited no particular reaction, ‘It’s still got the hooks in it.’

   He continued to stand and watch her, his face expressing nothing, but now he gave a small reflective nod. Burden was frowning.

   'Where did you get it?’ she said. “What’s it doing here?’

   ‘It was covering Mrs Robson’s body,’ Burden said. ‘Don’t you remember?’

   The change in her was electric. She jumped back, retracting arms and hands as if it were offal or slime her fingers had touched. Her face flushed darkly, her lips sucked in. She put a hand to her mouth - a characteristic gesture, he thought - and then flung the hand away, aware of what it had been in contact with. He had a glimpse then of how this slow, deliberate woman could become a screaming demented creature, and for the first time he understood that the old man called Archie Greaves might not have been exaggerating.

   ‘You’ve touched it before, Mrs Sanders,’ he said. ‘You pulled it back to look at her face.’

   She shuddered, her arms stretched out and shaking as if she could shake off her hands and so get rid of them.

   ‘Come and sit down, Mrs Sanders.’

   ‘I want to wash my hands. Where can I go and wash my hands?’

   Wexford didn’t want her to run away, but as he picked up the phone DC Marian Bayliss tapped on the door and came in. She began on a routine question and he nodded assent and said, ‘Would you take Mrs Sanders to the ladies’ loo, please?’

   Dorothy Sanders was brought back after about five minutes, calm again, stony-faced and with more red lipstick on her mouth. He could smell the police station liquid soap ten feet away.

   ‘Have you any suggestions, Mrs Sanders, as to how your curtain came to be covering Mrs Robson’s body?’

   ‘I didn’t put it there. The last time I saw it was in a . . .’ she hesitated, went on more carefully, ‘. . . a room in my house. Folded up. In the attic, they call them attics. My son may have gone up there; he may have wanted it for some thing, though he’d no business . . . without me saying he could.’ A grim look cramped her features.

   This hadn’t occurred to Wexford as a possibility before, but it did now. ‘Does your son live with you, Mrs Sanders?’

   ‘Of course he lives with me.’ She spoke as if, though it were possible there were some very few grown-up children who through general viciousness or perhaps being orphans lived apart from their parents, such situations were rare enough to provoke incredulity and even disgust. She spoke as if Wexford were a depraved ignoramus to suppose other wise. ‘Of course he lives with me. Where did you think he lived?’

   ‘Are you sure this curtain was in a room in your house? It couldn’t have been in the boot of your car?’

   She was no fool. At least, she was sharp enough.

   ‘Not unless he put it there.’ The identity of ‘he’ was evident enough. She thought, reasoned, nodded her head. This was not one of those women, Wexford thought with a kind of grim amusement, who even at the cost of their own lives would protect a child, criminal or otherwise - the kind who hid a wanted son or lied when questioned as to his whereabouts, who regarded a son not so much as an extension of herself, but as a precious superior. ‘I expect he did put it there,’ she now said. ‘I’d sent through my catalogue for a proper nylon cover for the car. Nylon or fibreglass or one of those things.’ Mail order she meant, Wexford decided. ‘I’d sent for it a good two months ago, but they take their time, these people. I expect he couldn’t wait.’

   She looked up at him, making him perform one of those about-turns in his assessment of human nature. For moment he felt he knew nothing; people and their ways were as much a mystery as ever they had been. She looked human at least, she spoke in a human way. ‘He’s not like me he hasn’t got much patience. He can’t help it. I expect he thought he’d just take that curtain and use it when we had a cold spell. You can’t be kept waiting about for ever, can you?’ She looked down at her watch, drawn to this recorder of time’s passage by her references to its delays. Her wrist was like a bundle of wires, thinly insulated.

   Burden had been pacing up and down. He said, ‘It’s your car but your son uses it?’

   ‘It’s my car,’ she said. ‘I bought it and paid for it and I’m the registered owner. But he has to go to work, doesn’t he? I let him use it to go to work and then if I want to go shopping, he can take me and pick me up. He’s got to have transport.’

   ‘What does your son do, Mrs Sanders?’

   She was one of those who expect their private arrangements to be intimately known by others, to need no elucidation, yet who show affront when those others reveal a knowledge gained by sensitivity or intuition. ‘He’s a teacher, isn’t he?’

   ‘You tell me,’ Burden said.

   She curled her nostrils in disgust. ‘He teaches in a school for children who can’t pass their exams without extra coaching.’

   A crammer’s, Wexford thought. Probably Munster’s in Kingsmarkham High Street. It surprised him a little and yet - why not? Clifford Sanders, he thought in the light of his new knowledge, would be one of those who lived at home while they attended university, going to and fro by bus. It would be interesting to find out if he was right there.