Wexford 14 - The Veiled One Read Online Free

of whatever was responsible for her asphyxiation was so deep that it had more the appearance of a circular cut, as if the blade of a knife had been run round throat and nape. Blazing lights in a place usually feebly lit showed up all the horror of her and her surroundings - stained and discoloured concrete, dirty metal, litter sprawling across the floor.
       The dead woman wore a brown tweed coat with fur collar and her hat of brown fawn checked tweed with narrow brim was still on her grey curly hair. Apparently small and slight, she had stick-like legs in brown tights or stockings and on her feet brown lace-up low-heeled walking shoes. Wedding and engagement rings were on her left hand.
       ‘The Escort’s her car,’ Burden said. ‘She had the keys to it in her hand when she was killed. Or that’s the way it looks, the keys were under the body. There are two bags of groceries in the boot. It looks as if she put the bags in the boot, closed the boot-lid, came round to unlock the driver’s door and then someone attacked her from behind.’
       ‘Attacked her with what?’
       ‘A thin length of cord, maybe. Like in thuggee.’ Burden’s general knowledge as well as sharpness of intellect had been enhanced by marriage. But it was the birth of his son, twenty years after his first family, that had made him abandon the smart suits he had formerly favoured for wear even on occasions like this one. Jeans were what the inspector had on this evening, though jeans which rather oddly bore knife creases and contrasted not altogether happily with his camel-hair jacket.
       ‘More like wire than a cord,’ Wexford said.
       The remark had an electric effect on Dr Sumner-Quist who jumped up and spoke to Wexford as if they were in a drawing room, not a car park, as if there were no body on the floor and this were a social occasion, a cocktail party maybe: ‘Talking of wire, isn’t that frightfully pretty TV girl who’s all over the paper this evening your daughter?’
       Wexford didn’t like to imagine what effect the epithet ‘TV girl’ would have had on Sheila. He nodded.
       ‘I thought so. I said to my wife it was so, unlikely as it seemed. OK, I’ve done all I can here. If the man with t camera’s done his stuff, you can move her as far as concerned. Myself, I think it’s a pity these people don’t cutting the wire in Russia.’
       Wexford made no reply to this. ‘How long has she been dead?’
       ‘You want miracles, don’t you? You think I can tell you that after five minutes’ dekko? Well, she was a goner by six, I reckon. That do you?’
       And he had been there at seven minutes past . . . He lifted up the grubby brown velvet curtain that lay in a heap a few inches from the dead woman’s feet. ‘What’s this?’
       ‘It was covering the body, sir,’ Archbold said.
       ‘Covering it as might be a blanket, do you mean? Or right over the head and feet?’
       ‘One foot was sticking out and the woman who found her pulled it back a bit to see the face.’
       ‘Yes - who was it found her?’
       ‘A Mrs Dorothy Sanders. That’s her car over there, the red one. She found the body, but it was a man called Greaves in Pomeroy Street phoned us. Davidson’s talking to him now. He found Mrs Sanders screaming and shaking the gates fit to break them down. She went raving mad because the phone box is outside the gates and she couldn’t get out. Diana Pettit took a statement from her and drove her home.’
       Still holding the curtain. Wexford tried the boot-lid of the red Metro. There was shopping inside that too, food in two red Tesco carriers and a clear plastic bag full of hanks of grey knitting-wool done up with string like a parcel. He looked up at the sound of the lift, an echo from it or reverberation or something; you could always hear it. The door to the lift had opened and a man appeared. He was walking very diffidently and hesitantly towards them and when his