by Ruth Rendell
‘Let’s go back, shall we? We’ve renewed our acquaintance with the place; we can hold what we need to in our mind’s eye.’
Burden reversed the car and circled slowly towards the upward ramp. ‘Is that what they’re doing up there at Ash Lane, searching for Charles Sanders’ body?’
‘Well, the remains of it, Mike. It’s eighteen years past and there won’t be much left. Frankly, I don’t know where to begin the search for Mrs Carroll, but there are ways of help open to us. You see, Mrs Carroll suspected Sanders was dead when she was in her branch of the Midland Bank and saw Dorothy Sanders drawing a cheque on a joint account. She happened to stand next to her and quite innocently saw this over her shoulder. At any rate I think so; it’s an intelligent enough guess. Did other others then begin to fall into place? The sudden and quite unexpected death of Charles Sanders’ father? This death immediately followed by the departure of Charles? The memory soon after of secret digging? Not enough for her to come to us - or perhaps she couldn’t bring herself to the enormity of such a step. It was a pity she didn’t; she might be alive today if she had.’
When the car turned into the High Street something recalled Wexford’s mind to Sheila and the tribulations of her day. She or someone representing her would have phoned Dora by now. What had happened to her - an account of what had happened with pictures - would be in the evening paper. It would be on the streets by now; the London evening papers were always on Kingsmarkham streets by three and it was nearly four. The sun was setting, dyeing the sky a gold that would fade to pink and darken to dusky purple. He caught sight of a newsboard with something on it about missile treaty talks and felt a ridiculous relief because Sheila’s name wasn’t there. As if Sheila’s court appearance, Sheila’s fate must as a matter of course be the lead story.
‘Mike,’ he said, ‘put the car on one of those meters in Queen Street, will you? I have to buy a paper.’
Her face looked at him, framed in newsprint, not smiling nor laughing, no raised hand waving at cameras. She looked frightened; her expression was grave and big-eyed. She was leaving the court and even without reading the caption it didn’t take a policeman’s knowledge to recognize where she was going and with whom. The headline he couldn’t help reading, though he forced himself to postpone further elucidation until he was at home: ‘Sheila Goes to Jail’, the picture caption said. ‘Lady Audley’s Secret star gets a week inside.’
The man behind the counter, an obliging, nothing-is-too-much-trouble Indian, smiled patiently at this apparently stupefied customer who didn’t know you had to pay for an evening paper. He coughed discreetly. Wexford put two ten-pence pieces on the counter and crushed the paper clumsily into his pocket.
Olson and Burden were out of the car, standing outside Pelage.
‘Come up to my place,’ said. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea.’
The steep narrow staircase was a bit like the attic stairs at Ash Farm, Burden thought. But there was something cosy, something sane for all its bizarreness, about what awaited them at the top. He remembered how it had once felt threatening and now he wondered why. What had he meant? He had become a therapist himself since then - with disastrous results. His own, sometimes timid, psyche suddenly seemed less important. Wexford, who had never been up here before, saw the poster with the globe and its ruined continents, with Einstein’s ominous words, and it brought home to him Sheila’s fate so that he flinched. He wondered if the others had seen, decided they hadn’t and anyway, so what? Olson was using spoonfuls of powdered stuff called instant tea. Inwardly Wexford laughed at himself for minding, for caring about trivia in the midst of . . . all this. He said:
‘Thanks to your tapes, Mike, I know exactly what Clifford told you. Whether those tapes could be admitted now, whether you were strictly correct to make them, doesn’t matter. Clifford told you he hoped his mother and Roy Carroll might get together - might even possibly marry - and he told you how all the information about Margaret Carroll having a lover, another man in her life, came to Carroll from Dorothy Sanders. It was Dorothy Sanders, the neighbour, who was in a position to see who visited Ash Farm Lodge while Carroll was out in the fields and perhaps also to see whom she went out to meet. Or so Carroll could be made to believe.’
‘Carroll is a jealous, possessive man. She inflamed his jealousy and terribly damaged his pride, but for her own sake she had to do it. Clifford was wrong when he guessed Carroll might be attracted by his mother or enjoyed her company; all he got from her was information about his wife’s infidelity. When his wife disappeared he thought he knew why and who with, but the last thing he wanted was for the rest of the world to know. That was why he never reported her as missing when she disappeared last June. He preferred to keep her disappearance dark but if anyone suggested to him, as we did, that his wife might be some where living with another man, he went out of his mind with rage.’
Burden drank his tea as if it were the real stuff brewed from leaves in a hot, dry pot, as if the milk in it had come yesterday from a cow. ‘So Carroll didn’t kill her.’
‘There was only one person in this case capable of committing these crimes, and that person is beyond our reach now. Retribution, if you like, or chance or misfortune has caught up with her. Only Dorothy Sanders could have killed a husband, depriving a child of its father and a mother of her son. Only Dorothy Sanders could have gone up to her victim and garroted her with a length of wire.’
‘Here’s the letter Margaret Carroll wrote to Kim last spring,’ Wexford went on, holding out the photocopy to Burden. ‘I went back to Ash Farm last night and found it slipped into the back of a photograph frame in one of those attic rooms. The picture, incidentally, was of a family group I take to be Charles and his parents. I wonder why she didn’t burn the letter? Because something she had done murder for must be precious? Or one day to have it to show to Clifford or Carroll if a defence was needed? We shall never know. The original would have been kept by Kim for two years, except that Lesley Arbel saw to that when she couldn’t find the copy. She destroyed both those letters as soon as she got back after her Sundays course.’
Burden read it aloud: ‘“Dear Sandra Dale, I am in a terrible dilemma and cannot decide what to do. I am so worried it is stopping me from sleeping. I have good reason to believe that a neighbour of mine killed a person close to her nearly twenty years ago. The person was her husband. I won’t go into what made me think this after so long, but the new evidence I got made me remember certain suspicious things happening all that time ago. Her father-in-law died too and he was a healthy strong man, not old. My husband does not like the police and would be very upset I think if I had to explain all this to them, if we had police here questioning me etc. I cannot mention names here. It has taken months to screw myself up to write this. I would appreciate your advice . . . ”’ He looked at Wexford. ‘Did this Sandra Dale reply?’
‘Oh, yes. She didn’t print the letter, of course, or the reply. She wrote back very properly advising Margaret Carroll to come to us and lose no time in doing so. But Margaret Carroll didn’t - too frightened of the husband, no doubt. And by then Gwen Robson had got hold of the letter through Lesley.’
Olson put in, ‘But how did she know who Margaret Carroll meant by her “neighbour”?’
‘She was a Kingsmarkham woman: she knew the area and knew Mrs Carroll only had one neighbour. I daresay she remembered Clifford from the Miss McPhail days. Anyway, she took herself down to Ash Farm and asked Dorothy Sanders for money - weekly payments if she liked, she didn’t mind instalments - not to tell the police about the contents of the letter. By that time she was already successfully extracting payment from Nina Quincy, stashing it away for her husband’s expensive op.’
‘She wasn’t concerned with Margaret Carroll. It wouldn’t have excited her interest if she had known that Margaret Carroll had disappeared soon after Dorothy Sanders made the first payment. Besides, it was in her interest to steer clear of Mrs Carroll who, had she dreamed of what was go
ing on, probably would have been stirred into coming to us, would have saved her own life and killed one of the geese that laid golden eggs. Dorothy Sanders made no second payment. A second payment was asked for when Gwen Robson encountered her by chance in the Barringdean Centre that Thursday afternoon, but Dodo saw to it that it was never paid.’
Burden objected. ‘But look, didn’t you say you saw her come into the car park as you were leaving it at ten-past six? Gwen Robson was dead by five-to.’
‘I saw her come back a second time, Mike. She had been there before.’
‘She went back?’ Olson said. ‘When she’d committed murder? Why didn’t she just leave, go home, anything?’
‘She’s not like other people, is she? We’ve already agreed on that. She didn’t have their responses, their reactions, their emotions. This is what I think happened, all we’ll ever know now of what did happen. First of all, it was she that Linda Naseem saw from the back talking to Gwen Robson. She had a girl’s figure, we’ve commented on that: she looked like a girl from the back, or when you couldn’t see her face and hair. Either she went with Gwen Robson into the car park - arguing perhaps, threatening even, trying to make change her mind - or else she followed her. I lean rather towards the alternative and think she followed. You see, by then - it wasn’t yet five-thirty - she hadn’t finished her shopping.’
‘So they entered the car park more or less together. While Gwen Robson was unlocking her car Dodo went up to her and garroted her with the circular knitting needle she had bought in the centre after she had had her hair done. Remember, we know she had been in there because she had bought the grey knitting wool she placed in the boot of her car. The job done, she returned to the centre.’
‘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.