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

showed his warrant card. How to soften this? How to ease it? He could hardly say there was nothing to be alarmed about. ‘I am afraid we have very serious news. May we come in?’
       He was a smallish, owl-face man, rather overweight; Burden noticed that he used a stick even to bring him this short distance. ‘Not my wife?’ he said.
       Burden nodded. He nodded firmly, his eyes on Robson. ‘Let’s go in.’
       But Robson, though they were in the hall now, stood his ground. He leant on his stick. ‘The car? A car accident?’
       ‘No, Mr Robson, it wasn’t a car accident.’ The bad part was that this could all be fake, all acting. He might have been rehearsing it for the past hour. ‘If we could go into your . . .’
       ‘Is she - is she gone?’
       The old euphemism. Burden repeated it. ‘Yes, she’s gone.’ and he added. ‘She’s dead, Mr Robson.’
       Burden turned and walked through the open doorway into the well-lit, warm, over-furnished living room. A fire of gas flames licking beautifully simulated smokeless fuel looked more real than the real thing. The television was on, but more indicative of Robson’s recent tension was the clock patience game laid out on a small appropriately round marquetry table in front of the armchair with its indented seat and crumpled pink silk cushions. Only a murderer who was also a genius would have dreamt up that one, Burden thought.
       Robson had turned very pale. His thin-lipped mouth trembled. Still upright but leaning heavily on the stick, he was shaking his head in a vague, uncomprehending way. ‘Dead? Gwen?’
       ‘Sit down, Mr Robson. Take it easy.’
       ‘Would you like a drink, sir?’ DC Davidson asked.
       ‘We don’t drink in this house.’
       ‘I meant water.’ Davidson went off and came back with water in a glass.
       ‘Tell me what happened.’ Robson was seated now, no longer looking at Burden, his eyes in the circle of playing cards. Absently he took a minute sip of the water.
       ‘You must prepare yourself for a shock, Mr Robson.’
       ‘I’ve had a shock.’
       ‘Yes, I know.’ Burden shifted his gaze and found himself looking at the framed photograph on the mantel-shelf of a very good-looking girl who rather resembled Sheila Wexford. A daughter? ‘Your wife was killed, Mr Robson. There is no way I can make this easier to hear. She was murdered and her body was found in the Barringdean Shopping Centre car park.’
       Burden wouldn’t have been surprised if he had screamed, if he had howled like a dog. They came upon all sorts in their job. But Robson didn’t scream; he merely stared with frozen face. A long time passed, a relatively long time, perhaps nearly a minute. He stared and passed his tongue over the thin lips, then he began mumbling very rapidly.
       ‘We were married very young; we’d been married forty years. No children, we never had chick nor child, but that brings you closer; you’re closer to each other without them. She was the most devoted wife a man ever had; she’d have done anything for me, she’d have laid down her life for me.’ Great tears welled out of his eyes and flowed down his face. He sobbed and wept without covering his face, sitting upright and holding the stick with both hands, crying as most men only cried when they were very young children.

Chapter 3

    ‘It looks as if she was garroted.’
       Sumner-Quist’s voice sounded pleasurably excited as if he had rung up to impart a piece of gossip: that the Chief Constable had run off with someone else’s wife, for instance.
       ‘Did you hear me? I said she was garroted.’
       ‘Yes, I heard,’ Wexford said. ‘Good of you to tell me.’
       ‘I thought you might go for a tasty little tidbit like that before I let you have the full report.’
       Extraordinary ideas some people have about one’s tastes, Wexford thought. He tried to assemble in his mind what he knew about garroting.