Wexford 14 - The Veiled One Read Online Free PDF Page A

over to look and it was . . . I expect you know what it was.’
       ‘Did you touch it?’
       ‘I pulled back the bit of rag that was over it, yes.’
       Clifford Sanders was watching his mother, his eyes still and blank. He seemed not so much relaxed as sagging from despair, his hands hanging down between his parted legs.
       ‘What time was this, Mrs Sanders?’ Wexford had noted the digital watch she wore.
       ‘Exactly twelve minutes past six.’ To account for her leaving the shopping precinct so late, she gave an account of a contretemps with a fishmonger, speaking in the measured level way - too measured. Wexford, who had been wondering what her tone reminded him of, now recalled electronic voices issuing from machines. ‘I came up there at twelve minutes past six - and if you want to know how I can be sure of the time, the answer is I’m always sure of the time.’
       He nodded. Digital watches were designed for people like her who, prior to their arrival on the scene, had to make approximate guesses as to what time was doing between ten- past six and six-fifteen. Yet most of them were speedy people, always in a hurry, restless, unrelaxed. This woman seemed one of those rare creatures who are constantly aware of time without being tempted to race against it.
       She spoke softly to her son. ‘Did you lock the garage doors?’
       He nodded. ‘I always do.’
       ‘Nobody always does anything. Anybody can forget.’
       ‘I didn’t forget.’ He got up. ‘I’m going into the other room to watch TV.’
       She was a pointer, Wexford saw, a finger-post. Now the finger pointed into the hearth. ‘Don’t forget your shoes.’
       Clifford Sanders padded away with his shoes in his hand and Wexford said to Dorothy Sanders, ‘What were you doing between twelve minutes past six and six forty-five when you managed to attract the attention of Mr Greaves in Queen Street?’ He had registered very precisely the time of the phone call Greaves made to Kingsmarkham police station: fourteen minutes to seven, ‘That’s half an hour between the time you found the body and the time you got down to the gate and . . . called out.’
       She wasn’t disconcerted. ‘It was a shock. I had my shock to get over and then when I got down there I couldn’t make anyone hear.’
       He recalled Archbold’s account, albeit at third hand. She had been screaming and raving inside those gates, shaking them ‘fit to break them down’ because the phone box was on the other side. Now the woman looked at him coldly and calmly. One would have said no emotion ever disturbed her equilibrium or altered the tone of the mechanical voice.
       ‘How many cars did you see parked at that time on the second level?’
       Without hesitation she said, ‘Three, including mine.’
       She wasn’t lying; perhaps she hadn’t been lying at all. He recalled how when he had passed through the second level there had been four cars parked there. One had pulled out, the one driven by the impatient young girl, and followed him fretfully. That had been at eight or nine minutes past six. . .
       ‘Did you see anyone? Anyone at all?’
       ‘Not a soul.’
       She would be a widow, Wexford thought, nearly pensionable, without any sort of job, dependent in many ways and certainly financially dependent on this son who no doubt lived not far away. Later on, he reflected that he couldn’t have been more wrong.
       A wave of disinfectant smell hit him and she must have seen him sniffing.
       ‘Coming in contact with that corpse,’ she said, looking at him with steady, unblinking eyes, ‘I had to scrub my hands with antiseptic.’
       It was years since he had heard anyone use the word corpse. As he got up to go, she crossed the window and began to draw the curtains. The place smelt like an operating theatre. The better to observe Clifford’s arrival with the car, Wexford supposed, the curtains - of brown