Free Wexford 14 - The Veiled One by Ruth Rendell Page B

of having his own way, many cunning tricks and a great deal of noise.’ His wife didn’t expect him until later and the house would be full of visiting relatives.
       Instead, after a lapse of ten minutes or so and without giving any warning of his intention, he followed Dorothy Sanders. Something in her son’s appearance and manner told him this wasn’t the kind of young man who went out on Saturday nights. And indeed it was Clifford himself who opened the door to him. His was a shut-in face, mask-like and inexpressive, with a pudginess about the features. He spoke lifelessly, showing no apparent surprise at another visit from a policeman. Burden was rather curiously reminded of a dog owned by a former neighbour of his. The owner had been inordinately proud of its submission, its total obedience, the subservience with which it had responded to his severe training. And one day, without warning, without any apparent prior change in its character, it had savaged a child.
       Clifford, however, seemed to have the right idea and was leading Burden into that back room to which, on the inspector’s previous visit with Wexford, he had retreated to watch television, when his mother opened the living-room door and said in her slow harsh voice to come in, as there could be nothing the policeman had to say to her son which she couldn’t hear.
       ‘I’ll have a word with Mr Sanders on his own for the time being, if you don’t mind,’ Burden said.
       ‘I do mind.’ She was rude in a way that wasn’t even defiant; it was uncompromising, straight rudeness, with a straight look into her interlocutor’s eye. ‘There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be there. This is my house and he’ll need me to get his facts straight.’
       Clifford neither blushed nor turned pale; he did not even wince. He simply stared ahead of him as if thinking of some thing deeply sad. Long, long ago Burden had learned that you do not let the public get the better of you. Lawyers, yes, inevitably sometimes, but not the untrained public.
       ‘In that case, I’ll ask you to accompany me to the police station, Mr Sanders.’
       ‘He won’t go. He’s not well, he’s got a cold.’
       ‘That’s unfortunate, but you leave me no choice. I’ve my car here, Mr Sanders. If you’d like to get your coat on? It’s a nasty damp night.’
       She yielded, going back into the room she had come from and slamming the door with calculation, not from temper. Burden resisted the hackneyed maxim that bullies give way if you stand up to them, but he had found nevertheless that it was usually true. Would Clifford profit by his example? Probably not. It had gone too far with him; he needed help of a more expert kind. And it was of this that Burden first asked him when they were seated in the bleak dining room, furnished only with table, hard upright chairs and television set. On one wall hung a mirror, on another a large dark and very bad painting in oils of a sailing vessel on a rough sea.
       ‘Yes, I go to Serge Olson. It’s a sort of Jungian therapy he does. Do you want his address?’
       Burden nodded, noted it down. ‘May I ask why you go to . . . Dr Olson, is it?’
       Clifford, who showed no signs of the cold his mother claimed for him, was looking at the mirror but not into it. Burden would have sworn he was not seeing his own reflection. ‘I need help,’ he said.
       Something about the rigidity of his figure, his stillness and the dullness of his eyes stopped Burden pursuing this. Instead he asked if Clifford had been to the psychotherapist on Thursday afternoon and what time he had left.
       ‘It’s an hour I go for, five till six. My mother told me you knew I was in the car park - I mean, that I put the car there.’
       ‘Yes. Why didn’t you tell us that at first?’
       He shifted his eyes, not to Burden’s face but to the middle of his chest. And when he answered Burden recognized the phraseology, the