The Veiled One

by Ruth Rendell

  Hastily, he replaced the circular needle in its packet. He had found his weapon.

  17

  CLIFFORD SANDERS CAME TO BURDEN’S HOUSE AT nine in the evening. It was no surprise to Burden; he had been expecting this from the moment he got home and thinking of various ways to handle it so as to avoid a confrontation. He considered getting his wife to answer the door or asking his elder son John, who had come to eat supper with them, to answer it; he thought of taking the whole family, including little Mark, out to eat. In a wild moment he even had an idea of going away for the night, booking a room in an hotel. But when the time came, he answered the door himself.

  It was the first time for days that he had actually faced Clifford and spoken to him. Clifford wore a raincoat, navy blue, very like a policeman’s. His face was pale, but that might have been due to the light from overhead in the porch. Behind him hung a thin greenish fog. He put out his hand.

  Burden didn’t take it but said, “I’m sorry you’ve come all this way for nothing, but I have explained I’ve no more questions to ask you at present.”

  “Please let me talk to you.”

  The foot in the door—Clifford had taken a step forward, but Burden planted himself firmly between door and architrave. “I have to insist you understand you can give us no more help with our enquiries. It’s over. Thank you for your help, but there’s nothing more you can do.” Every parent knows the expression on a child’s face just before it cries: the swelling of tissues, the seeming collapse of muscles, the trembling. Burden couldn’t bear it, but he couldn’t cope with it either. “I’ll say good night, then,” he said absurdly. “Good night.” And stepping back, he closed the door hard.

  Retreating across the hall, standing and listening, he waited for Clifford to ring the bell. He was bound to do that—or try the knocker. Nothing happened. Burden was sweating; he felt a trickle of sweat run down his forehead and one side of his nose. Mark was in bed, Jenny and John still in the dining room at the back of the house. Burden went into the living room which was in darkness, made his way stealthily to the window and looked out. The red Metro was parked at the kerb and Clifford was sitting in the driving-seat in that accustomed pose of his, the way he perhaps passed several hours of each day. Burden was still standing there watching when the phone rang. He answered it in the dark, still looking out of the window.

  It was Dorothy Sanders.

  Burden was obliged to recognize the voice, for she did not identify herself or ask if she were speaking to Inspector Burden. “Are you going to arrest my son?”

  In other circumstances Burden would have made some discreet and non-committal reply. Now he was beyond that. “No, Mrs. Sanders, I’m not. There’s no question of that.” A mean, despicable kind of hope took hold of him that he could get this woman on his side, enlist her aid even. But he only said, “I don’t want to see him, I’ve no more enquiries to make of him.”

  “Then why do you keep getting him down there? Why don’t you leave him alone? He’s never here, I never see him. His place is at home with me.”

  “I quite agree,” said Burden. “I couldn’t agree more.” As he spoke the car door opened, Clifford got out and once more came up the path towards the house. The bell ringing made a searing sound in Burden’s ears, almost pain. He found himself gripping the phone receiver in a wet palm as the doorbell rang again. “He’ll be back home with you in ten minutes,” he said, screwing up his nerve, feeling anger bring a fresh flood of sweat.

  “I can complain to the proper authorities, you know. I can complain to the Chief Constable—and I will.” Her tone changed and she said in a slow deliberate way, pausing between the words, “He didn’t do anything to that woman. He didn’t know her and he hasn’t anything to tell you.”

  “Then you’d better lock him up, Mrs. Sanders,” Burden said indiscreetly. He put the receiver back, heard John go to the door, a murmured exchange and then John, who had been primed, said firmly, “Good night.”

  In the dark there, Burden thought wildly of an injunction to restrain Clifford from persecuting him, of seeking out a judge in chambers, of arresting and imprisoning Clifford when he broke the order. He heard the Metro door close and listened, holding his breath, for the engine to start up. The silence seemed to endure a long time and the eventual sound of the motor turning and firing was a glorious relief. Burden didn’t watch the departure of the Metro but when next he looked out of the window it was gone, the street empty, the fog thick and still and opaque as muddy water.

  RETURNING THE MANUSCRIPT, HE ASKED ABOUT THE missing pages, but there were no guilty reactions and no evasions.

  “I realized as soon as you’d gone,” Dita Jago said. “I took two pages out to check something on them at the public library.” She looked at him steadily—too steadily? “You remember I told you I was at the library on the day Mrs. Robson was killed? I was checking up something about a man called Dehring.” She didn’t ask if he had enjoyed reading the manuscript or what his impression was, commenting only, “You read that far!”

  While she was out of the room fetching the pages, he examined quickly the circular needle from which the great wall hanging depended. The pins at each end of the wire were of a much finer gauge than the one he had handled in the Barringdean Centre and would not have stood up to excessive pressure. But that meant nothing. Mrs. Jago would have other circular needles, probably in every available size. He glanced at the sheets of paper she showed him, noting corrections made in red ballpoint. She made no comment on his interest, but as he walked down the path and glanced back he saw her watching him from the window, her expression one of benign mystification.

  Ralph Robson was cleaning his car, a popular Saturday afternoon pastime at Highlands. Out here he managed without his stick, holding on to the bodywork of the car for support. Wexford said good afternoon to him and suggested that the task on which he was engaged was not perhaps the wisest activity for someone in his condition.

  “Who’s going to do it if I don’t?” Robson said belligerently. “Who’s going to give me a helping hand? Oh, it’s one thing when anything like that first happens. They’re all coming round. Can I do this and can I do that? That soon cools off. Even Lesley. You wouldn’t credit it, would you, but I haven’t seen Lesley for a whole blessed week. She hasn’t so much as phoned.”

  Nor will she, Wexford thought. You’ve seen the last of her. She either got what she wanted or knows there’s nothing in it for her.

  “There’s one bright spot though.” Robson winced as he straightened up from rinsing out his cloth in the bucket of water. “I’m getting my hip done. Doctor’s transferring me to another what they call health area the week after next. Sunderland. I’ll be getting my replacement up in Sunderland.”

  The Saab passed Wexford as he began the climb up the hill, passed him and drew into the kerb ahead. His thoughts had shifted, as they mostly did these days, from the Robson case to Sheila. She was coming to stay the night; it was years since they had seen so much of her as they had in these past few weeks, and inevitably he speculated as to why this was. Because she understood and sympathized with his anxieties for her safety? Or because she was sorry for her parents having to live in this poky, uncomfortable little house? A bit of both, maybe. She got out of the passenger side of the Saab and his heart leapt with the usual old relief.

  “Pop, this is Ned.”

  The man in the driving-seat was young, dark, distinguished-looking. Wexford knew at once that he had seen him somewhere before. They shook hands over the seats and Wexford got into the back of the car.

  “Ned’s not staying, he’s on the way to Brighton. He’s just going to drop me off.”

  “That sounds like an early warning in case we start evincing our well-known lack of hospitality.”

  Ned laughed, and there was a bit of an edge to the sound. Because Wexford had said “early warning” which had another, quite separate, significance?

  “Oh, Pop,” said Sheila, “I didn’t mean th
at.”

  “At least I hope he’ll stay for a cup of tea,” Dora said when they reached the house.

  “Of course I will. I’d like to.”

  They had rather taken it for granted that with both daughters married all this sort of thing would be over. There would be no more suitors brought home, the sight of whom aroused dismay or resignation or hope. Sylvia indeed had married so young that before Neil there had been no more than a couple of casual boyfriends. But Sheila’s men had come in a constantly changing series until at last the chosen one, Andrew Thorverton, had surely put an end to this parade. Or so it had seemed to those naïve parents who, because of their age, inevitably regarded marriage—at any rate in their own family—as an institution of permanence. Was this Ned a prospective second husband? Sheila seemed to treat him in a rather cavalier fashion.

  He was gone on his way to Brighton before Wexford found out his surname. She could go back on the train; he wasn’t to trouble himself about her—that was Sheila’s airy parting shot as she and her father stood in the flowerbed sized front garden watching him go.

  “Nice car,” Wexford said tactfully.

  “Well, I suppose. It’s always having to have things done to it. I mean, that last weekend you were in the old house and I came down, it was in being seen to. I offered to lend him mine as a matter of fact, but considering what happened it was just as well he hired a car instead.”

  They went back into the house. With the coming of early dusk the fog was returning. Wexford closed the front door on the dank chill outside. “I’ve seen him somewhere, him or his picture.”

  “Of course you have, Pop. His photograph was all over the papers when he was prosecuting those Arab terrorists.”

  “Do you mean to say he’s Edmund Hope? Your ‘Ned’ is Edmund Hope the barrister?”

  “Of course he is. I thought you knew.”

  “I don’t quite know how you could have thought we knew,” said Dora, “considering you never introduced him. ‘This is Ned’ doesn’t convey much information.”

  Sheila shrugged her shoulders. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail with a length of red ribbon. “He’s not ‘my’ Ned. We’re not together any more—just friends, as they say. We actually lived together for four whole days.” Her laugh had a hint of bitterness in it. “It’s all very well these brave statements: ‘I don’t agree with what you say, but I’d die for your right to say it.’ That sort of thing doesn’t amount to much when it comes to the crunch. He’s like the rest of you—well, not Dad—who don’t want to know me if I go to jail.”

  “That’s not fair, Sheila. That’s very unkind and unjust. I’ll never not want to know you.”

  “I’m sorry, Mother—not you either, then. But Ned didn’t even want other people to know he knew me. And I went along with it—can you imagine?” She came up to Wexford, who had been silent and staring. “Pop … ?” Her arms were on his shoulders, her face lifted up to his. She had always been uninhibited, demonstrative, a “touching” person. “Is this nasty house haunted? Have you seen a ghost?”

  “You actually offered to lend Edmund Hope your car for the weekend while he was in the middle of prosecuting those terrorists?”

  “Don’t be cross, Pop. Why not?” She made a face at him, lips protruding, nose wrinkled up.

  “I’m not cross. Tell me the circumstances. Tell me exactly when and how you offered to lend him the Porsche.”

  Extreme surprise made her step back and hold out actressy hands in a wide sweep. “Goodness, I’m glad I’m not one of your criminals! Well, he’d stayed the night and when he tried to start his car in the morning it wouldn’t start, so I drove him to court—the Old Bailey it was. And before I dropped him I said he could borrow my car if he wanted.”

  “Could anyone have heard you say it?”

  “Oh, yes, I expect so. He was standing on the pavement and I called it out after him; it was a sort of afterthought. I said something like, ‘You can have this car for the weekend if you like,’ because I knew he was supposed to be staying with some friends in Wales, and he called back thanks and he’d take me up on that. Only after that I remembered I’d said I’d come down here, and I was quite glad when he rang up in the evening and said his own car would be ready in the morning.” Realization came to her quite suddenly and drained the colour from her face. The white stood out round the blue irises of her eyes. “Oh, Pop, why did I never think of that? Oh God, how awful!”

  “The bomb was meant for him,” Wexford said.

  “And the letter bomb too? That was during our—er, four-day honeymoon.”

  “I think we’d better tell someone, don’t you?” He picked up the phone, feeling an unlooked-for, absurd happiness.

  THE NIGHT HAD PASSED WITHOUT DISTURBANCE OR dreams. Burden lay awake for a long time thinking about Charles Sanders One—the Manchester one, who had eventually answered his phone and turned out to be twenty-seven years old—and Charles Sanders Two, from Portsmouth, with children of Clifford’s age, a young wife and an Australian accent. But his mind was not fraught with anxieties and soon he slept heavily and uninterruptedly. The dense fog which enveloped town and countryside brought its own kind of silence, the muffled sensation less of there being no sound to hear than of deafness. Jenny was up and Mark was up on Sunday morning before he awoke to see the bedroom curtains drawn back and a fluffy whiteness pressing against the windowpanes. It was the phone ringing which had awakened him and in spite of his peaceful night, the first possible caller that occurred to him was Clifford.

  Jenny must have answered it on the other phone, for the ringing stopped. Burden picked up the receiver at his bedside and to his enormous relief heard Wexford’s voice. It was Wexford wanting to tell him the solution to the bomb puzzle; wanting also to come round later in the day with another solution, the answer to the mystery of the weapon Gwen Robson’s killer had used. Burden said nothing about Clifford or Clifford’s mother’s phone call. That could wait till later, till he saw Wexford—or perhaps might never need to be told.

  The morning passed with no more phone calls and no more visits. There was usually considerable traffic in Tabard Road, which was a through road, but today it was quiet, the fog keeping people at home. Was it also keeping Clifford at home, or was there another reason for his absence? Burden wondered how much his mother’s power and influence over him would enable her, at her level of necessarily far less physical strength, to be his jailer.

  The fog did not dissipate as it had on the preceding days, but seemed to thicken as afternoon came on. His sister-in-law Grace and her husband came to lunch, also Jenny’s brother. Burden thought how awkward it would have been if the red Metro had arrived and Clifford presented himself once more at the front door, but nothing like that happened. His guests went at about four, when the fog darkened and the yellow gleams of streetlights faintly penetrated it. None of them lived far away and they had all come on foot. Watching the departure from the front window, he saw Amyas encounter Wexford just outside the gate. This was about as far as it was possible to see, and even so the figures of the two men seemed as if swathed in lightly swaying pennants of gauze.

  “It was a huge relief,” Wexford said, taking off his coat in the hall. “Yet when you come to think of it, what does that amount to? Aren’t I really saying I’m glad it’s someone else’s child and not mine that’s threatened? There but for the grace of God, in fact—which is only another way of saying, ‘I’m all right, Jack.’ “

  “Edmund Hope may be all right too. It’s likely they’ve found another target by this time. After all, it’s more than three weeks ago.”

  “Yes, and more than three weeks since Gwen Robson’s death. How’s this for a garrote, Mike?” Wexford drew from his pocket the circular needle he had bought at the Barringdean Centre; the pins at each end were a quarter of an inch in diameter, forming tough, strong handles to hold on to. “You’re the plastics expert,” he said. “Would this be the right sort of stuff?”

  “It’s the
right colour. I should say it’s pretty obvious a thing like this was used. Does that necessarily make it a woman who used it?”

  They went into Burden’s living room, where a fire had been lighted; the blaze from it lit the room with flickering yellow. Burden put up the fireguard in case Mark came in.

  “This was a premeditated crime,” Wexford said, “only in the sense, I believe, that the perpetrator had had an idea of killing for some time and was waiting only for opportunity. But I don’t think he or she went into that car park with the weapon at the ready. It’s more likely it had just been bought in the shop where I got this one, and that means the prospective user might have bought it or someone else purchased it for the prospective user. In other words, it was on a shopping list, so the purchaser could have been a man or a woman.”

  “And he or she,” Burden went on, “came up into the car park looking at it perhaps? I mean, perhaps it came loose from its packaging and the purchaser was curling it up and replacing it?”

  “Or the purchaser, who wasn’t the prospective user and maybe had never seen such a thing before, was fascinated by such a peculiar thing. It is a peculiar-looking thing, Mike. The purchaser might have just been standing there unwinding it and looking at it when Mrs. Robson came along.”

  A car drew up outside. Its progress sounded slow, as it would necessarily have had to be in the dense fog. Burden jumped up a bit too quickly and went to the window—not Clifford, but Burden’s next-door neighbour whom he could see getting out to open his garage drive gates.

  “It’s not too early to draw the curtains, is it?”

  “I didn’t know there was any prescribed time for it,” Wexford said, eyeing him speculatively.

  “It seems a pity to lose the last of the light.”

  The impenetrable greyness outside made nonsense of this remark. It was now impossible to see across the street, in fact to see much beyond the pavement and kerb on this side. Burden pulled the curtains across the window and was switching on a table lamp when the phone rang. He gave a nervous start which he knew Wexford had seen.