Wexford 14 - The Veiled One (26 page)

   ‘Go on,’ encouraged Burden.

   ‘When my mother was a little girl they lived in Forbydean, her and her mother and father. She used to go to school past Ash Farm on her bicycle and she got to know my father, who was a bit younger. Well, they played together; they got to play together whenever they could, which was mostly in the holidays because my father was away at his prep school. When she was thirteen and my father was twelve, his parents found out about the friendship and put a stop to it. You see, they thought their son was a lot too good for my mother even to play with: they said a farm labourer’s daughter wasn’t good enough for their son. And my father didn’t put up any sort of resistance; he agreed with them, he hadn’t understood before, and when my mother came round next time he wouldn’t speak to her, wouldn’t even look at her. And then my grandmother came out and told my mother she must go home and not come any more.’

   Burden nodded abstractedly, wondering how long all this was going to take. It wasn’t an unusual story for this part of the world at that period. Similar things had happened to his own contemporaries, forbidden for reasons of social snobbery to ‘play in the Street’.

   Clifford went on, ‘I’m really telling you this to show you the good side of my mother. I said it was romantic. Later on, you see, she went to work for them and they didn’t recognize the little girl they’d prevented from playing with their Charles. And he didn’t until she told him after he’d married her. I wonder what they all thought then?’

   Burden was not sufficiently interested to hazard guesses. ‘Did your grandmother Clifford come to see you when you were a child? Did you visit her with your mother?’

   Clifford sighed. Perhaps he would have preferred to continue his speculations about the romantic story. ‘I sometimes think I spent my childhood walking. I walked through my childhood, if you know what I mean. It was the only way to get anywhere. I must have walked hundreds of miles, thousands. My mother doesn’t walk that fast but I was always breathless, trying to keep up with her.’

   ‘You walked to your grandmother’s, then?’

   Clifford sighed again. ‘When we went, we walked. There was the bus, but my mother wouldn’t pay bus fares. We didn’t go to my grandmother’s very much. You have to understand that my mother doesn’t like people and she didn’t particularly like her mother. You see, my grandfather died very suddenly, then when my father walked out and my grandmother Sanders went into a home we were left alone with the house to ourselves. I think she liked that.’ He hesitated, looked down at his bitten nails, said half-slyly, ‘And she likes me, so long as I’m obedient. She moulded me into a slave and a protector. She made me like Frankenstein made the monster, to go wrong.’ A small shrill laugh, which might have moderated those words, somehow made them the more terrible.

   Burden looked at him with a kind of uneasy impatience. He was framing a question about Mrs Sanders’ mother, a wild idea coming to him of Gwen Robson possibly having once been to her as a home help, when Clifford went on:

   ‘Once when I wouldn’t do what she wanted, she locked me in the attic with the photographs and she lost the key to the room. I don’t know how she lost it - she never told me, she wouldn’t - but I expect she dropped it down the plughole or it fell down a crack in the floor or something. She’s accident-prone, you see, because she doesn’t think about what she’s doing; her mind’s always on something else. So I expect that’s how she lost the key. She’s very strong even though she’s small and she tried to break down the door by putting her shoulder to it, but she couldn’t. I was inside, listening to her crashing at the door. It was winter and starting to get dark and she was frightened; I know she was frightened, I could feel her fear through the door. Maybe the ghosts were creeping up the stairs after her.’

   He smiled, then laughed on a high shrill note, wrinkling up his nose as if in a mixture of pleasure and pain at the memory. ‘She had to go and get help. I was scared when I heard her go away, because I thought I was going to be left there for ever. It was cold and I was only a little kid, in there in the half-dark with that old furniture and all those faces. She took the bulbs out of the sockets, you see, so that I couldn’t put the light on. But that meant she couldn’t put the light on either . . .’ Another smile and rueful shake of the head. ‘She went to get Mr Carroll and he came back with her and put his shoulder to the door and burst it open. I never got put in there again, because the door wouldn’t lock after that. Mrs Carroll came with him and I remember what she said; she turned on my mother and said she’d a good mind to tell the prevention of cruelty to children people, but if she did they never did anything.’

   ‘Mrs Carroll went away six months ago. She ran away from her husband - with another man, my mother said. It was Dodo who had to tell Mr Carroll. She sort of hinted to him that there was this other man and then she told him straight out. I thought he was going to attack her but people don’t attack her, or they never have yet. He broke down and sobbed and cried. Do you know what I thought? What I hoped? I thought, my father left my mother and now Mrs Carroll’s left her husband. Suppose Mr Carroll was to marry Dodo? That would be the best escape, wouldn’t it, the cleanest way to get free? I wonder if I’d be jealous, though, I wonder if I’d mind . ..  ?’

   He was interrupted by a tap at the door, followed by the appearance of Archbold to tell Burden that Wexford would like to see him.

   ‘Now, do you mean?’

   ‘He said it was urgent.’

   Burden left Clifford with Diana. Perhaps it was no bad thing to take a break here. He wasn’t interested in Clifford’s boyhood, but he valued the mood these reminiscences seemed to bring him to, a mood of open revelation and frankness. All these stories of his youth (which was precisely how Burden saw them) would lead Clifford, though by a crazy path, to the final incriminating outburst.

   Instead of taking the lift, he walked upstairs. The door to Wexford’s office stood a little ajar. Wexford was nearly always to be found either behind his desk or standing at the window thinking, while apparently contemplating the High Street. But this morning he stood abstractedly looking at the plan of greater Kingsmarkham which hung on the left-hand wall. He turned his eyes as Burden came in.

   ‘Oh, Mike . . .’

   ‘You wanted to see me?’

   ‘Yes. I apologize for the interruption, but perhaps you’ll see it wasn’t exactly an interruption, more a breaking-off. Clifford Sanders - he didn’t do it, he couldn’t have done. You may as well let him go.’

   Hard-faced, immediate anger starting, Burden said, ‘We’ve been through all this before.’

   ‘No, Mike, listen. He was seen sitting in his mother’s car in Queen Street at five-forty-five on November the nineteenth. A woman called Rosemary Whitton saw him; she spoke to him and he spoke to her.’

‘She was trying to move her car,’ Wexford said, ‘and she hadn’t much room, only a few inches each end to play with - ’

   With the sexism of the stand-up comic, but straight-faced and deadly serious, Burden interrupted him: ‘Women drivers!’

   ‘Oh, Mike, come on! Clifford was sitting in the car behind her and he had a couple of yards behind him. She asked him if he’d move and he told her to go away. “Leave me alone, go away”, was what he said.’

   ‘How does she know it was Clifford?’

   ‘She gave me a good description. It was a red Metro. She’s no fool, Mike; she’s something rather high-powered, a systems analyst, though I confess I’m not sure what that is.’

   ‘And she says it was at a quarter to six?’

   ‘She was late, she was in a hurry. Women like her are always in a hurry - inevitably. She says she wanted to get home before the kids were put to bed at six. When she first got back into the car she looked at the clock - I always do that myself, I know what she means - and it was exactly five-forty-five. Which means it was a good few minutes after that by the time she’d had her slanging match with Clifford and crunched the headlight on a meter.’

   ‘Is that what she did?’ asked Burden ruminatively, his frown threatening a further attack on women at the wheel. ‘Why didn’t he tell me that?’

   ‘Didn’t notice, I daresay. She says he moved as soon as it was too late to matter.’

   The woman’s statement would now have to be checked, thoroughly investigated, and until that had been done Burden’s interrogation of Clifford must be suspended. He didn’t go back to the interview room. The anger and frustration which might more naturally have been vented on Wexford he wanted to splash furiously over the man downstairs. He could have put through a phone call to his own office but couldn’t face explaining to Clifford, so he sent Archbold back with the message to let him go, to tell him he wouldn’t be needed again.

   ‘Where would you hide something, Mike, if you were Gwen Robson?’

   Smarting from his defeat, not yet fully grasping what the result of exonerating Clifford would be, Burden said sullenly, ‘What sort of something?’

   ‘Papers. A few sheets of paper.’

   ‘Letters, do you mean?’

   ‘I don’t know.’ Wexford said. ‘Lesley Arbel was looking for papers, but I don’t think she found them. They’re not in the bank and they’re not with Kingsmarkham Safe Depository Limited - I’ve just tried there.’

   ‘How do you know Lesley Arbel didn’t find them?’

   ‘When I spoke to her on Friday she was worried and unhappy. If she’d found what she turned the house out for, she’d have been over the moon.’

   ‘I’m wondering if Clifford could have killed his other grandmother, his mother’s mother. He’s a very strange character altogether. He has all the salient features of the psychopath . . . What are you laughing at?’

   ‘Leave it, Mike,’ Wexford said. ‘Just leave it. And leave the psychiatry to Serge Olson.’

Burden was to remember that last remark when Olson phoned him on the following morning. He had thought of very little apart from Clifford Sanders during the intervening time and everything he had done had been concerned with this new alibi. He had even interviewed Rosemary Whitton himself and, unable to shake her conviction of the relevant time, had questioned the Queen Street greengrocer. If no one in Queen Street remembered Clifford in the Metro, a good many shopkeepers recalled Mrs Whitton hitting the meter post. The manager of the wine market remembered the time: it was before he closed at six, but not much before. He had turned the door sign to ‘Closed’ immediately he returned from inspecting the damage. Unconvinced but obliged at any rate temporarily to yield, Burden turned his attention from Clifford Sanders to Clifford Sanders’ father . . . As a temporary measure at any rate. He wouldn’t speak to Clifford Sanders again for a week, and in the meantime he would root out Charles Sanders and begin a new line of enquiry there. But before he could begin, Serge Olson phoned him.

   ‘Mike, I think you should know that I’ve just had a call from Clifford cancelling his Thursday appointment and, incidentally, all further appointments with me. I asked him why and he said he had no further need of my particular kind of treatment. So there you are.’

   Burden said rather cautiously, “Why are you telling me, Mr Olson - Serge?’

   ‘Well, you’re subjecting him to some fairly heavy interrogation, aren’t you? Look, this is delicate ground - for me, at any rate. He’s my client. I am anxious not to, let’s say, betray his confidence. But it’s a serious matter when someone like Clifford abandons his therapy. Mike, Clifford needs his therapy. I’m not saying he necessarily needs what I can give him, but he needs help from someone.’

   ‘Maybe,’ said Burden, ‘he’s found another psychiatrist. You needn’t worry about the possible effects of what you call heavy interrogation anyway. That’s over, at any rate for the time being.’

   ‘I’m glad to hear it, Mike, I’m very glad.’

   Putting it into words, that he had given up questioning Clifford, put things into perspective. Burden suddenly realized how much he hated being closeted with Clifford and hearing all these revelations. He would have no more of it - not until, that is, he had another positive lead. His mind made up, he looked out of the window to where they were putting lights in the branches of the tree that grew on the edge of the police station forecourt. It wasn’t a Christmas tree or even a conifer, come to that, but an ash whose only distinction was in its size. Burden watched the two men at work. Putting coloured lights in tree was his idea, later backed up by the Chief Constable, in the interest of promoting jollier relations with the public. Wexford’s comment had been a derisive laugh. But surely you couldn’t go on feeling antagonistic towards or afraid of or suspicious about a friendly body that hung fairylights in a tree in its front garden? This morning he felt neither jolly nor friendly, in the mood rather to snap at anyone who made jokes about the tree. Diana Pettit had already had the rough side of his tongue for suggesting that all the little lamps should be blue. When the phone rang again he picked up the receiver and said, ‘Yes?’ testily.

   It was Clifford Sanders. ‘Can I come and see you?’

   ‘What about?’ asked Burden.

   ‘To talk.’ No time was mentioned and Burden knew what Clifford was like about time. ‘You made me finish early yesterday and I’d a lot more to say. I just wondered when we could start again.’

   In my own good time, my lad, Burden thought. Next week maybe, next month. But what he said was, ‘No, that’s it. That’s all. You can get back to work, get on with your life - OK?’ He didn’t wait for an answer, but put the phone down.

   It rang again ten minutes later. By that time the younger and more intrepid of the two men had climbed to the top of the ladder and threaded the lead with bulbs on it through some of the highest branches. Burden thought how disastrous it would be, and what the media would make of it, if the man fell and got hurt. He spoke a milder ‘Yes?’ into the phone and got Clifford’s voice suggesting in an eager, urgent tone that previously they had been cut off. Burden said that as far as he knew they hadn’t been cut off. All that needed to be said had been said, hadn’t it?