The Veiled One

by Ruth Rendell

  “I’ve had the same sentimental rubbish at work,” he said. He would normally have said “from Reg,” but he was too angry with Wexford even to want to think of him by his Christian name. Burden had a Victorian attitude in this area, rather in the manner of those fictional heroines who called a man William while they were engaged to him and Mr. Jones after they had broken it off. “I don’t understand all this sympathy with cold-blooded killers. People should try thinking of their victims for a change.”

  “So you’ve said on numerous previous occasions,” said Jenny, not very pleasantly.

  That did it. That sent him back to the police station after his dinner and Archbold to the Forby Road to fetch Clifford again. He used the other ground-floor interview room this time, the one at the front where the window gave on to the High Street, where the tiles were shabby black and tan (like an ageing spaniel, said Wexford) and the table had a brown-checked top with a metal rim.

  For the first time Clifford didn’t wait for Burden to begin. In a resigned but not unhappy voice, he said, “I knew you’d fetch me back again today. I sensed it. That’s why I didn’t start watching TV; I knew I’d only be interrupted in the middle of the programme. My mother knew too; she’s been watching me, waiting for the doorbell to ring.”

  “Your mother’s been asking you about this too, has she, Cliff?”

  Again Burden reflected how much like an overgrown schoolboy he looked. The clothes were so much the conventional wear of a correct well-ordered teenager at a grammar school in, say, the fifties, as to seem either a mockery or a disguise. The grey flannel trousers had turn-ups and were well-pressed. He wore a grey shirt—so that it could be worn two or three days without washing?—striped tie, grey hand-knitted V-necked pullover. It was plainly hand-knitted, well but not expertly, the hand of the imperfectly skilled evident in the neck border and the sewing up. Somehow Burden knew it had to be Mrs. Sanders’ work. He already had an idea of her as a woman of many activities, but who did none of them well; she would not care enough to do things well.

  Clifford’s face was its usual blank, revealing no emotion even when he spoke those surely desperate sentences. He said, “I may as well tell you. I tell you all the truth now, I don’t hide anything. I hope you believe that. I may as well tell you that she says I wouldn’t be questioned like this day after day, on and on, if there wasn’t something in it. She says I must be that sort of person, or you wouldn’t keep getting me down here.”

  “What sort of person would that be, Cliff?”

  “Someone who would kill a woman.”

  “Your mother knows you’re guilty then, does she?”

  Clifford said with curious pedantry, “You can’t know something that isn’t true; you can only believe it or suspect it. She says that’s the sort of person I am, not that she thinks I killed anyone.” Pausing, he looked sideways at Burden in what the latter thought of as a mad way, an unbalanced way. It was a sly, crafty look. “Perhaps I am. Perhaps I am that sort of person. How would you know till you did it?”

  “You tell me, Cliff. Tell me about that sort of person.”

  “He would be unhappy. He’d feel threatened by everyone. He’d want to escape from the life he had into something better, but that better would only be fantasy because he wouldn’t be able to escape really. Like a rat in a cage. They do these psychological experiments; they put a piece of glass outside the open door of the cage and when the rat tries to get out it can’t because it bumps into the glass. Then when they take the glass away it could really get out but it won’t, because it knows it gets hurt bumping itself on the invisible thing outside.”

  “Is that yourself you’re describing?”

  Clifford nodded. “Talking to you has helped to show me what I am. It’s done more for me than Serge can.” He looked into Burden’s eyes. “You ought to be a psychotherapist yourself.” To Burden’s ears it was a slightly mad laugh that he gave. “I thought you were stupid, but now I know you’re not. You’re not stupid; you’ve opened up places in my mind for me.”

  Burden wasn’t sure he knew what this meant. Like most people, he didn’t like being called stupid even though the term was immediately revoked. But he had a feeling that Clifford would be even franker if they were alone and so he sent Archbold away, ostensibly to fetch coffee from the canteen. Clifford was smiling again, though there was nothing pleased in that smile, nothing happy.

  “Are you taping all this?” he asked.

  Burden nodded.

  “Good. You’ve shown me what I’m capable of. It’s frightening. I’m not a rat and I know I can’t break the invisible wall, but I can force the person who put it there to break it.” He paused and smiled, or at any rate bared his teeth. “Dodo,” he said. “Dodo, the big bird. Only she’s not, she’s a little pecking bird with claws and a beak. I’ll tell you something; I wake up in the night and think what I’m capable of, what I could do, and I want to sit up and scream and yell—only I can’t because I’d wake her up.”

  “Yes,” said Burden, “yes.” He didn’t much care for this sudden feeling he had of being in waters that were too deep for him. He had had enough too and would have liked to send Clifford home. Not very vigorously he asked, “What are you capable of?”

  But Clifford made no answer to this. Archbold came in with the coffee and at a nod from Burden left the room again. Clifford went on, “At my age I oughtn’t to need my mother. But I do. In a lot of ways, I rely on her.”

  “Go on,” said Burden.

  But Clifford sidetracked, saying, “I’d like to tell you about myself. I’d like to talk about me. Is that all right?”

  For the first time Burden felt … not fear, he would never have admitted this was fear—but apprehensiveness perhaps, a tautening of muscles, the cautionary chill of being alone with a mad person.

  However, he only said, “Go on.”

  Clifford spoke dreamily. “When I was young—I mean really young, a little boy—we lived with my father’s parents. The Sanders family had lived in our house since the late 1700s. My grandfather died and then my father’s and mother’s marriage came to an end. My father just walked out on us and they were divorced and we were left with my father’s mother. Mother put her into an old people’s home and then she moved everything out of the house that reminded her of my father and his people; she moved all the furniture and the bed linen and the china upstairs into the attics.

  “We hadn’t any furniture, only mattresses on the floor and two chairs and a table. All the carpets and the comfortable chairs were upstairs, locked away. We never saw anyone, we hadn’t any friends. My mother didn’t want to send me to school, she was going to teach me herself at home. Dodo! Imagine! She’d been a cleaner before she got married—Dodo, the maid. She hadn’t any qualifications to teach me and they caught her and at last they made her send me to school. She’d walk me into Kingsmarkham every morning and come and fetch me every afternoon. It’s nearly three miles. When I grumbled about walking, do you know what she said? She said she’d push me in my old pushchair. I was six! Of course I walked after that; I didn’t want the others to see me in a pushchair. There was a school bus, but I didn’t know I could have gone on that: she didn’t want me to, it was two years before I knew I could go on it and then I did. When she wanted to punish me she didn’t hit me or anything; she shut me up in the attic with that furniture.”

  “All right, Cliff,” said Burden, looking at his watch, “that’ll do for now.” He realized, when Clifford was silent and got up obediently, that he had spoken as a psychotherapist might: he had spoken in the manner of Serge Olson.

  A confession was what he had expected from Clifford on the previous night. That confiding manner, that unprecedented free and open way of speaking, those discomfiting references to his mother’s nickname had seemed to herald it. All the time they seemed on the brink of the final revelation, the ultimate admission, but it had not come and Clifford had digressed into that account of his early youth which was the last thing
Burden wanted to hear. But one good thing had resulted; he no longer felt guilt or much unease. Jenny had been wrong and Wexford had been wrong. Clifford might be mad, might well be the psychopath Burden had designated him, but he was not being terrorized or pushed over some edge or driven to desperation. He had been almost cheerful, talkative, in command of himself, and he had seemed—odd though this was—actually to enjoy their talk and look forward to more.

  It must only be a matter of time now. Burden would have liked to discuss all this with Wexford. Best of all he would have liked Wexford in on his next session with Clifford, sitting there at the table, listening and occasionally putting a question of his own. Burden didn’t feel like an inquisitor or torturer any more, but he did feel the responsibility, that it weighed heavily on his own shoulders.

  IN THE MORNING, SHEILA MADE AMENDS.

  “Sylvia wanted me to apologize in court,” she said. “Can you imagine? I’m to stand there and make a public retraction and say I’m sorry to a bunch of terrorists, plead guilty and promise not to do it again.”

  “She didn’t mean that,” Dora put in.

  “I think she did. Anyway, I’m not apologizing to anyone except you and Pop. I’m sorry I made a row in your … new home. Especially considering I’m kind of responsible for wrecking your old one.”

  She kissed them goodbye and went off to Ned and Coram Fields. Half an hour after she had gone, Sylvia rang up to apologize for what she called “that unnecessary scene.” Perhaps she should come over and explain what she really felt about the whole Sheila-wire-cutting situation?

  “All right,” Wexford said, “but only if you’ll bring me every copy of Kim magazine you’ve got in the house.”

  First of all she said she was sure she hadn’t any copies; then when her father told her she was like her mother and never threw anything away, she said that she only kept them for the knitting patterns. In the afternoon she turned up with a stack too heavy to be fetched out of the car at one go and Wexford himself had to make two trips to carry them. There were more than two hundred, covering a period of something like four years. He knew that nothing except Sylvia’s guilty feelings would have induced her to reveal to her father such a propensity for magazine-reading—and downmarket magazine reading at that. Dora said nothing when they were brought into the small living room, but her face registered a restrained dismay as Sylvia stacked them up into a kind of tower block between the bookcase and the television table.

  Her explanation and a kind of manifesto of her views on the nuclear issue and the role of public figures in civil disobedience and nonviolent direct action took a long while. Wexford listened sympathetically because he knew he would have listened to Sheila, and of course he bent over backwards to be fair to the daughter he loved less. Even thinking in those terms made him feel mean and rotten. And if she was really concerned that he might get blown up again, really worried about him and his life being in danger, he ought to go down on his knees to her in gratitude for caring that much for him. So he sat there hearing it all and nodding and agreeing or gently disagreeing, trying not to acknowledge the enormous relief, the leap of the heart when the doorbell rang and, looking out of the window, he saw Burden’s car at the kerb. The odd thing was that he forgot all about being embarrassed.

  Burden had Jenny with him and the little boy, Mark. If Sylvia’s children had been girls—a comparable pair for instance with Melanie and Hannah Quincy—they would have immediately taken the two-year-old under their wing, talked to him and played with him with a precocious maternity. But being male they merely looked at him with bored indifference and, when adjured by Sylvia to show Mark their Lego, responded with, “Do we have to?”

  “I was going to ask you to come out for a drink,” Burden said, “but Jenny says she won’t have any of that sexist stuff.”

  Sylvia said enthusiastically, “Absolutely not! I quite agree.”

  At the old house Wexford would have taken Burden into the dining room but there was no such place here, only a corner behind a strip of counter called a “meals area.” But the kitchen, though small, had a table in it and two chairs which there was just room to sit in if you weren’t overweight and were prepared to keep your elbows close to your sides. The big fridge dominated the room. Wexford took out two half-pint cans of Abbot.

  “I’m sorry, Mike …” he was beginning as Burden simultaneously started to say, “Look, I do regret saying those things yesterday …”

  Their joint laughter was shamefaced as embarrassment gripped them.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Wexford said, nearly groaned it. “Let’s get it over with. I never meant you had psychopathic tendencies—I mean, would I say anything so daft?”

  “No more than I meant that the accident had made you—well, lose your grip … or whatever it was I said. Why do we say these things? They just seem to come out before you think.”

  They looked at each other, each one holding his green can of beer, each rejecting the actual use of the glasses Wexford had fetched from the cupboard. Burden was the first to break the eye contact which anyway had been only momentary. He looked down, busied himself with the can fastener and said in an uneven, hearty voice, “Look, I want to talk to you about Clifford Sanders. I want to tell you everything he’s told me and hear what you think. And then I want something I don’t think you’ll consent to.”

  “Try me.”

  “To interview him with me—sit in at one of our sessions.”

  “Your what?” said Wexford.

  “Sorry, I mean interrogations.”

  “Tell me what he’s told you.”

  “I could play you the tapes.”

  “Not now. Just tell me.”

  “He’s been going on about his childhood, about that weird mother of his. He keeps calling her Dodo and laughing. I don’t want to have to think him unbalanced—that is, I don’t care for the idea of him getting off on the grounds of diminished responsibility—but I reckon I have to.” And then Burden told him all that had taken place at the interview of the night before, detailing what Clifford had said.

  “You don’t want me there,” said Wexford. “He’ll clam up if I’m there.”

  “You’ve changed your mind, though, haven’t you? You agree with me he’s guilty?”

  “No, I don’t, Mike. Not at all. I just see that your believing it is more reasonable than I thought it was. You’ve no weapon that you can trace to his hand. However you may be deceiving yourself, you’ve no motive, and frankly I don’t think you’ve even got opportunity. You’ll never prove it; you haven’t a hope unless you get him to confess.”

  “That’s just what I do hope for. I’m going to have another go at him on Monday.”

  WHEN THEY HAD ALL GONE PEACE DESCENDED ON the little house on Battle Hill, a peace however that was not entirely silent for through the thin dividing walls could be heard neighbours’ noise: light-switches clicking, inane cackles of televised laughter, children’s running feet, unidentifiable crashes. Wexford sat down with the new A.N. Wilson and was absorbed in it when the phone rang.

  Dora went to answer it, “If that’s anyone else wanting to come and apologize, tell them I’m quite at leisure.”

  But it was Sheila. He heard Dora speak her name and heard the deep concern and shock in her voice, then he was out of that chair at a bound.

  She turned to him from the receiver. “She’s all right. She didn’t want us to hear it on TV first. A letter-bomb …”

  Wexford took the phone from her.

  “It was there with the rest of my post. I don’t know why, but I didn’t like the look of it. The police came like a shot and they took it away and did I don’t know what to it and it blew up … !”

  She started sobbing, her words no longer comprehensible, and Wexford heard a man’s voice murmuring comforting things.

  14

  “MY GRANDMOTHER SANDERS HAD SOME MONEY, but she left it all to my father,” said Clifford. “I never saw my father again. He went away when I w
as five, he didn’t even say goodbye to me. I can remember it all quite well. He was there when I went to bed and in the morning when I woke up he was gone. My mother just said to me that my father had left us, but that I should see him quite often—that he would come to see me and take me out. But he never did come and I never saw him again. It’s no wonder my mother didn’t want anything about the place to remind her of him; it’s no wonder she put all his family things up there in the attics.”

  Involuntarily, Burden followed his glance upwards to the cracked and rather discoloured dining-room ceiling. Beyond the French windows a thin mist hung over the wintry garden, and the hill that hid the prospect of Kingsmarkham was a grey, treeless hump. It was Sunday afternoon and at a quarter-past three already growing dark. Burden had not intended to come here—had meant, as he told Wexford, to postpone any further interrogation of Clifford until the following day. But as he was finishing his lunch Clifford had phoned.

  There was no reason why he shouldn’t have found Burden’s home number, it was there in the telephone directory for anyone to see, but Burden was astonished to get the call, astonished and encouraged. A confession was surely imminent, an intuition he had which was very much substantiated by the low, wary tone in which Clifford spoke—as if he feared being overheard—and the sudden haste with which he rang off as soon as Burden said he would come. The suspicion was inescapable that Dodo Sanders had come into the room; another word and she would have guessed what Clifford was up to and surely tried to stop him.

  It was Clifford who had admitted him to the house. His mother put her head round the door of what was perhaps some kind of washroom and stared, saying nothing. Her head was swathed in a towel, obviously because she had just washed her hair in spite of visiting the hairdresser three days before. But this brought to Burden’s mind what Olson had said about the fallacy of “the veiled one.” Of course he had not meant anything of this sort, that particular veiling surely referring to hidden aspects of personality or nature. The turbanned head ducked back and the door closed. Burden looked at Clifford, whose appearance was much as usual. He wore his school uniform clothes, no concession to the casual having been made for Sunday. Yet there was a subtle change in his manner, something indefinable that Burden couldn’t put his finger on. Up until yesterday, he had come into Burden’s presence grudgingly or with injured outrage or even straight fear. This afternoon Clifford had admitted him to the house not as one might a friend, not that, but at least as some visitor whose call was a necessary and inevitable evil, a tax inspector perhaps. Of course it must be remembered that he had come at Clifford’s personal invitation.