Read Wexford 14 - The Veiled One for Free Online

‘What was it done with?’
       ‘A garrote,’ Sumner-Quist chuckled cheerfully. ‘Search me what kind. Home-made, no doubt. That’s your problem.’ Still laughing, he told Wexford that Mrs Robson had met her death after five-thirty and before six and had not been sexually assaulted. ‘Merely garroted,’ he said.
       ‘It used to be a method of execution,’ Wexford said when Burden came into the office. ‘An iron collar was attached to a post and the victim’s neck placed inside. The mind boggles a bit when you start thinking how they got the victim’s neck inside. Then the collar was tightened until asphyxiation occurred. Did you know this method of capital punishment was still in use in Spain as late as the 1960s?’
       ‘And we thought it was only bull-fighting they went in for.’
       ‘There was also a more primitive implement consisting of a length of wire with wooden handles.’
       Burden sat on the edge of Wexford’s rosewood desk. ‘Haven’t I read somewhere that if you were up for burning  by the Inquisition the executioner would garrote you for a small fee before the flames got under way?’
       ‘I expect that was where the wire-with-wooden-handles type came into its own.’
       He wondered digressively if Burden’s jeans were the kind called ‘designer’. They were rather narrow at the ankle and matched the inspector’s socks that were probably of a ‘denim blue’ shade. Unconscious of this rather puzzled scrutiny, Burden said, ‘Is Sumner-Quist saying that’s what was used on Gwen Robson?’
       ‘He doesn’t know, he just says “a garrote”. But it had to have been something of that kind. And the murderer has to have had it with him or her, ready-made; all prepared - which when you come to think of it, Mike, is pretty strange. It argues unquestionably premeditated murder, yet in a situation where no one could have forecast the prevailing conditions. The car park might have been full of people, for instance. Unless our perpetrator carries a garrote about with him as you or I might carry a pen . . . I don’t think we can say much more about that until we get the full forensic report. In the meantime, what’s the sum total of our knowledge of Gwen Robson?’
       She was fifty-eight years old, childless, a former home help in the employment of Kingsmarkham Borough Council but now retired. Her husband was Ralph Robson, also a former Borough Council employee, retired two years before from the Housing Department. Mrs Robson had been married at eighteen and she and her husband had lived first with his parents at their home in Stowerton, later on in a rented flat and then a rented cottage. Their names high on the borough housing list, they had been allocated one of the new houses at Highlands as soon as they were built. Neither was yet eligible for the state retirement pension, but Robson derived a pension from the local authority on which they had contrived to live in reasonable comfort. For instance, they had managed to run the two-year-old Escort. As a general rule they took an annual holiday in Spain and had been prevented from doing so this year only by Ralph Robson’s arthritis, which was seriously affecting his right hip.
       All this had been learned both from Ralph Robson himself and from his niece Lesley Arbel, the original of the photo graph that had so much reminded Burden of Sheila Wexford.
       ‘This niece - she doesn’t live with them, does she?’
       ‘She lives in London, Burden said, ‘but she spent a lot of time down here with them. More like a daughter than a niece, I gather, and an unusually devoted daughter at that. Or that’s how it appears. She’s staying with Robson now - came as soon as he told her what had happened to his wife.’
       According to Robson, his wife had been in the habit of doing their weekly shopping every Thursday afternoon. Up until six months ago he had always gone with her, but his arthritis had made this