The Veiled One

by Ruth Rendell

  Robson was lying back in his armchair and had to be jolted out of his half-doze. 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 somehow 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” perfume stood between his hairbrush and a pincushion in which were pinned three brooches. A surprising number of pictures covered the walls: more framed photographs 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 a 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: Hasting Road where the house was, Eastbourne Road leading down to the town, Battle Hill mounting to the crown of the estate, pan-tiled 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 multicoloured 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.

  4

  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 across 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 an attic, they call them attics. My son may have gone up there; he may have wanted it for something, 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 a
part 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 otherwise. “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 a 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 the 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.

  “Part-time,” she said, and astonished them both by saying in the same level, indifferent tone, “He’s inadequate in some ways.”

  “What’s wrong with him? Is he ill?”

  Her old harshly censorious manner was back. “They call it ill nowadays. When I was young, they called it lacking character.” A dark flush moved into her cheeks, mottling them. She was dressed in green today, a dark dull green, though her shoes and gloves were black. When the blush faded, the dull seaweed green seemed to show up the pallor of her skin. “That’s where he was, wasn’t he, when he was supposed to be coming for me in the car park? He’d been to this psychiatrist. They call them psychotherapists; they don’t have any qualifications.”

  “Mrs. Sanders, are you telling me that your son was in the Barringdean Centre car park when you were?”

  Emotions warred behind the blush, the succeeding pallor, the muffling screen of green and black. She had not meant to let that out. Protecting her son was not as unknown to her as Wexford had at first believed: he could even see that in an intense, self-disgusted, incredulous way she loved her son, but perhaps she had not been able to resist that dig at a profession she disapproved of. She spoke with extreme care now, the pace of the voice electronically slowed to make understanding easier.

  “He should have been there but he was not. He had come in, the car was there, but he …” she paused, breathing deeply, “… was not.”

  AN ABRUPT HALTING EXPLANATION FOLLOWED. AT first, when she saw the car and a body, she had thought it was Clifford lying there dead. She couldn’t see the body because it was covered up and believing it to be Clifford, she pulled back the brown velvet covering. It wasn’t Clifford, but it had been a great shock just the same. She had had to sit in her car and rest, recover herself. Clifford had been going to pick her up as he always did on Thursdays, always. It was an unvarying arrangement, though the school time might vary. She looked at her watch as she said this. Clifford brought her to the shopping centre, went to his session with the psychotherapist, returned to pick her up. She didn’t drive. This Thursday they had arranged for him to be in the car park on the second level by six-fifteen. On her arrival she had had her hair done at Suzanne’s on the upper floor of the centre—another inflexible arrangement—shopped, come back to the car park at twelve minutes past six.

  After the shock of finding the body, after she had recovered somewhat—Wexford found this frailty of hers rather hard to believe in—she had gone up to look for Clifford. She had walked about looking for him, a statement that was confirmed by Archie Greaves. At last she had gone to the pedestrian gates …

  “I broke down,” she said, giving each word equal monotonous weight.

  “Where was your son, then? No, you needn’t answer that, Mrs. Sanders. You tell him we’re interested and we’ll have a talk with him later. We’ll all take a break and he can do some thinking. How’s that?”

  She moved towards the door. Someone would drive her home. Her manner had in it something of the sleepwalker, or as if almost everything she thought and felt—perhaps momentous or amazing things—she kept veiled. She was so thin and wiry you would expect her to be a brisk woman, Wexford thought, but she was as languid as some slippery, rotund sea creature. Burden said as soon as she had gone, “Is she saying he’s potty?”

  “I should think that depends on how strict you are and—” Wexford looked up at Burden with a half-smile “how out of date. Apparently he can hold down a job and drive a car and carry on a normal conversation. Is that what you mean?”

  “You know it isn’t. He sounds very much like a candidate for Lesley Arbel’s psychopath role to me.”

  ” ‘The outstanding feature is emotional immaturity in its broadest and most comprehensive sense. These people are impulsive, feckless, unwilling to accept the results of experience and unable to profit by them …’ “ Wexford faltered for a moment, then went on, “ ‘… sometimes prodigal of effort but utterly lacking in persistence, plausible but insincere, demanding but indifferent to appeals, dependable only in their constant unreliability, faithful only to infidelity, rootless, unstable, rebellious and unhappy.’ “

  Burden gasped a bit. “Did you make that up?”

  “Of course I didn’t. It’s David Stafford-Clark’s definition of a psychopath—or part of it. I learned it by heart because I thought it might come in useful, but I can’t say it ever has.” Wexford grinned. “I liked the prose too.”

  The expression on Burden’s face rather indicated that he didn’t know what prose was. “I think it’s very useful. It’s good. I like that bit about dependable in their constant unreliability.”

  “Oxymoron.”

  “Is that another mental disease?” When Wexford only shook his head, Burden said, “That bit you quoted—is it in a book? Can I get it?”

  “I’ll lend you my copy. I expect it’s out of print; it must be twenty years since I read it. But you can’t apply that to Clifford Sanders, you know. You’ve hardly talked to him.”

  “That can be remedied,” said Burden grimly.

  IT WAS DARK AS WEXFORD DROVE ALONG THE STREET where he lived and approached his own house. A car was parked on his
garage drive, Sheila’s Porsche. He felt a tiny dip of the heart and immediately reproached himself. He loved his daughters dearly and Sheila was his favourite, but for once he wouldn’t be elated to see her. A quiet evening was what he had looked forward to; it might be the last for a long time, for he had no faith in Burden’s forecast of the straightforwardness of this case. And now it would be given over not only to talk, but talk on serious matters.

  Irritation of a different kind succeeded this initial flash of dismay. She had parked her car on the garage drive because she supposed him to be home already, even supposed this to be his day off as it should have been, and expected his car to be inside the garage. Now he would have to leave it out in the street. Unburdening her heart to her mother would have taken priority over everything. He could imagine her saying every ten minutes or so how she must rush out and move the car before darling Pop got home …

  Thinking like that cheered him, made him smile to himself, hearing with his mind’s ear her enchanting, slightly breathless voice. He would say nothing, he resolved, of the wire-cutting, the reports of her coming divorce; he would utter no word of reproach, certainly no intimation of disappointment or upset, would cast on her no grave looks. He touched the Porsche lightly on its long, gleaming, nearly horizontal rear window as he passed it. Did she go to demonstrations in that? Well, it was only a small Porsche and black at that … Would she come and kiss his cheek or would she hang back? There was no knowing. He went in the back way, into the hall from the kitchen, hung up his coat, hearing her voice from the living room—hearing the voice of Beatrice Cenci, Antigone, Nora Helmer and now Lady Audley—falter and fall silent. He went into the room and immediately she was rushing to him and in his arms.

  Over her shoulder he saw the small satirical smile on Dora’s face. He hugged Sheila and as she relaxed, distanced her with his arms stretched and said, “Are you OK?”