Wexford 14 - The Veiled One by Ruth Rendell Page A

understand, when I found it, not when I found it. I covered it up and then I went away, I ran away. I left the car and ran out of the car park. Someone was in the lift, so I ran up the stairs. I went home, I ran out into the Street at the back and then home.’
       ‘It didn’t occur to you then that you’d meant to phone the police.’
       The eyes opened and he expelled his breath. Burden repeated his question and Clifford said, with a tinge of exasperation now, ‘What did it matter? Someone would phone them, I knew that. It didn’t have to be me.’
       ‘You went out by the pedestrian gates, I suppose.’ Burden remembered Archie Greaves’ evidence, the running ‘boy’ he had taken for a scared shoplifter. And he remembered what Wexford had said about the sound of feet pounding down the car park stairs. That had been Wexford in the lift. ‘Did you run all the way home? It’s getting on for three miles.’
       ‘Of course I did.’The voice held a tinge of contempt. Burden left it. ‘Did you know Mrs Robson?’
       The blank look was back, the colour returned to normal - a clay pallor. Clifford had never once smiled; it was hard to imagine what his smile would be like. ‘Who’s Mrs Robson?’ he said.
       ‘Come now, Mr Sanders. You know better than that. Mrs Robson is the woman who was killed.’
       ‘I told you I thought it was my mother.’
       ‘Yes, but when you realized it couldn’t be?’
       He looked Burden in the eyes for the first time. ‘I didn’t think any more.’ It was a devastating remark. ‘I told you, I didn’t think, I panicked.’
       ‘What did you mean just now by your “shadow”?’
       Was it a pitying look Clifford Sanders gave him? ‘It’s the negative side of personality, isn’t it? It’s the sum of the bad characteristics in us we want to hide.’
       Not at all satisfied with what he had been told, finding the whole of this man’s behaviour and much of his talk incomprehensible and even sinister, Burden resolved just the same to pursue it no further until the next day. It was at this point, though, that his determination began to take shape, a decision to get to the bottom of Clifford’s disturbed mind and whatever motives had their source there. His behaviour was immensely suspicious; and more than that - disingenuous. The man was trying to make him, Burden, look a fool; he thought himself the possessor of an intellect superior to a policeman’s. Burden was familiar with this attitude and the reaction it produced in himself - the chip on his shoulder, as Wexford called it - but he could not be persuaded that it was unjustified.
       In the living room now, he talked to a rigid and sullen Dorothy Sanders, getting nowhere in his attempts to discover if Mrs Robson had been known to the family. Clifford brought in a basket of coal, fed a fire which did little to raise the temperature in the room, went away and returned with soap-smelling hands. Both mother and son insisted Mrs Robson had been unknown to them, but Burden had the curious feeling that though Dorothy Sanders’ ignorance was genuine, her son was lying, or at least evading the truth for some obscure reason of his own. On the other hand, Clifford might have killed without motivation, or without the kind of motivation that would be understandable to a rational man. For instance, suppose he had not found a dead body and thought it was his mother’s but had seen a woman who had suggested to him his mother in her worst aspects and for this reason had himself killed her?
       After leaving them, Burden drove further down the narrow road which he now remembered - though there was nothing to show it - was called Ash Lane. The Sanders’ house therefore was very likely Ash Farm. But as this passed through his mind and as he was thinking that they seemed to have no neighbours, he came to a bungalow set a little way back from the road which proclaimed itself as Ash Farm Lodge on a