Wexford 14 - The Veiled One Read Online Free Page B

Metro.
       But now Clifford Sanders’ left-hand indicator was winking. Plainly, he was a kind of driver who would signal his intention to turn a hundred yards before the turning. A few seconds elapsed. There were no lights ahead, only a break in the hedge. Then the Metro turned in and Archbold followed, guided by the red tail-lights. With a kind of amused impatience Wexford thought how they might be in some Hitchcock movie, for he could just make out the house - a house which probably looked a lot less disagreeable by day light but was now almost ridiculously grim and forbidding. Behind two windows only a pallid light showed. There was no other light either by the front door or about the garden. Wexford’s eyes grew accustomed to the darkness and he saw that the house was biggish, on three floors, with eight windows here in the front and a slab of a front door. A low light of steps without rails led up to it and there was neither porch nor canopy. But the whole façade was hung, covered, clothed in ivy. As far as he could see it was ivy, at any rate it was evergreen leaves, a dense blanket of them, through which the two pale windows peered like eyes in an animal’s shaggy face.
       A garden surrounded the house - grass and wilted foliage at any rate, extending at the back to a wooden fence. Beyond that only darkness, fields and woods, and over the low hill the invisible town which might as well have been a hundred miles away.
       Clifford Sanders went up to the front door. The bell was a very old-fashioned kind which you rang by turning the handle back and forth, but he had a key and unlocked this door, though when Wexford started to follow him he said in his flat chilly tone, ‘Just a minute, please.’
       Mother, evidently, had to be warned; he disappeared and after a moment or two she came out to them. Wexford’s first thought was how small she was, tiny and thin; his second that this was the woman he had seen entering the under ground car park as he had left it. Within moments then she had found the body that he had missed. Her face was very pale, as near a white face as you could find, very lined and powdered even whiter, a young girl’s scarlet lipstick unbecomingly coating her mouth. She was dressed in a brown tweed skirt, beige jumper, bedroom slippers. Did her recent discovery account for the curious smell of her? She smelt of disinfectant, the apparent combination of lime and thymol which hospitals reek of.
       ‘You can come in,’ she said, ‘I’ve been expecting you.’
       Inside, the place was bleak and cavernous; carpets and central heating were not luxuries that Mrs Sanders went in for. The hall floor was quarry-tiled, in the living room they walked on wood-grain linoleum and a couple of sparse rugs. There was scarcely an ornament to be seen - no pictures, only a large mirror in a heavy mahogany frame. Clifford Sanders had seated himself on a very old, shabby horsehair sofa in front of the fire of logs. He now wore on his feet only grey socks; his shoes were set in the hearth on a folded sheet of newspaper. Mrs Sanders pointed out - actually pointed with an extended finger - precisely where they were to Sit: the armchair for Wexford, the other section of the sofa for Archbold. She seemed to have some notion of rank and what was due to it.
       ‘I’d like you to tell me about your experience in the Barringdean Centre car park this evening, Mrs Sanders,’ Wexford began. He forced himself to shift his eyes from the newspaper on which his daughter’s face looked out at him from between the pair of black lace-up brogues. ‘Tell me what happened from the time you came into the car park.’
       Her voice was slow and flat like her son’s, but there was something metallic about it too, almost as if throat and palate were composed of some inorganic hard material. ‘There isn’t anything to tell. I came up with my shopping to get my car. I saw something lying on the ground and went