Wexford 14 - The Veiled One by Ruth Rendell Page A

Burden remembered the pop festival which had been held there back in the seventies and the murder of a girl during that festival. A huge sum had been spent on the purchase, causing anger among local ratepayers. But Sundays had been bought and these ugly single-storey buildings soon put up in the environs of the house. The mansion itself, though in part offices, was also available as a conference centre and for courses. Burden noted that a course in word processing was due to begin that day. His appointment was with the Home Help Supervisor, but it was her deputy who met him and began by telling him pessimistically that they could give him very little help. Their records went back only three years and Mrs Robson had been gone for two. The Deputy Supervisor could remember her, but the Supervisor herself had been in her present post less than two years. She produced for Burden a list of names, with addresses, of those men and women who had been Gwen Robson’s ‘clients’.
       ‘What does a cross after a name indicate?’
       ‘It means they’ve died,’ she said.
       Burden saw that there were more crosses than otherwise. On an initial glance no name or address leaped out significantly.
       ‘What did you think of Mrs Robson?’ he asked. This was Wexford’s technique and although Burden did not altogether approve of it, he thought he might as well give it a go.
       The reply came slowly, as if a good deal of thought and calculation was going into it. ‘She was efficient and very reliable. A great one for phoning in, if you know what I mean. She’d warn you by phone if she was going to be even ten minutes late.’
       Burden, irrepressibly, saw again the resemblance between the dead woman and Dorothy Sanders. Here was a new point of similarity - a shared obsession with time - but what he wanted was a meeting point, a location at which she and Clifford Sanders might have come into collision.
       ‘I don’t want to speak ill of her. That was a dreadful way to die.’
       ‘It won’t go any further,’ said Burden, hope springing. ‘What you say to me will be treated in confidence.’
       ‘Well, then, she was a terrible gossip. Of course I didn’t have that much to do with her, and to tell you the truth I used to avoid haying much contact with her, but it seemed to me sometimes that she liked nothing better than finding out some poor old dear’s private trouble or secret or what ever and spreading it round this place. Starting off always of course with that old one about it being within these four walls and she wouldn’t say it to anyone else and so forth. I don’t say there was any harm in it, mind, I don’t say there was malice. As a matter of fact it was all done quite sympathetically, though she was a bit moralistic. You know the kind of thing - how wicked it was to have a baby without being married, how unfair on the child, and people living together not knowing the rewards of a happy marriage.’
       ‘There doesn’t seem much in that,’ Burden said.
       ‘Probably not. She was a great talker, she never stopped talking, and I don’t suppose there’s much in that either. I’ll give her one thing, she was devoted to her husband. She was one of those women who are married to perfectly ordinary men and go about saying how wonderful they are - one in a million - and how lucky they are to have got a man like that. I don’t know whether it’s sincere, or if they’re trying to make out they’ve got an exceptional marriage or what. I remember her going on in here one day about someone she knew who’d had a Premium Bond come up. If that happened to her, she said, the first thing she’d do would be to buy her husband some special kind of car - I don’t know what, a Jaguar maybe- and then she’d take him on holiday to the Caribbean. Anyway, you’ve got your list; it’s the best I can do, and I hope it’s of some help.’
       Burden was disappointed. He wasn’t sure what he