Read Wexford 14 - The Veiled One for Free Online Page B

health-food shop in the shopping centre at about five on the previous evening. An ambulance had been called and she had been taken to the maternity wing of Stowerton Royal Infirmary.
       None of the obviously genuine and well-intentioned callers was able to describe anyone else they had seen while parking or fetching their cars, though plenty of fantastic descriptions came in from those jokers who enjoy teasing the police. Two assistants from the Barringdean Centre shops phoned in to say they had served Gwen Robson, one just before five and the other, Linda Naseem - a checkout assistant at the Tesco supermarket - half an hour later. But by that time two of Wexford’s officers were at the shopping centre questioning all the shop-workers, and Archbold had interviewed the man in charge of the fish counter in the Tesco superstore who confirmed he had had a row with a woman answering Dorothy Sanders’ description ‘at around six when they were closing up’. All that did was confirm her time of coming into the car park which Wexford could confirm himself.
       That same morning Ralph Robson made a formal identification of his wife’s body; the neck had been discreetly covered during this ordeal. He hobbled in on his stick, looked at the horror-stricken face from which some of the blue colour had faded, nodded, said, ‘Yes,’ but didn’t cry this time. Wexford had not seen him on that occasion, hadn’t yet seen him. He had interviewed David Sedgeman, the car park supervisor, himself. The man should have been a valuable witness, yet he seemed to have seen nothing or to have registered nothing he had seen. He could recall waving to Archie Greaves because he did this every evening, and for the same reason could recall locking the gates. But his memory offered him no worried woman or running man, no fast-driven car or suspicious escaper. Everything had been normal, he said in his dull way. He had locked the gates and gone home just as he always did, collecting his own car from where he always left it in a bay in one of the open-air parking areas.
       The November air felt raw and the sky was a leaden grey.
       A reddish sun hung over the roof-tops, not very high in the sky but as high as it would get. Burden had on a padded jacket, a pale grey Killy, warm as toast and turning him from a thin man into a stout one. His wife was away, staying with her mother who was convalescent after an operation, and that disturbed Burden, making him jumpy and insecure. He would spend tonight with her and their little son in his mother-in-law’s house outside Myringham, but what he really wanted was his own family back home with him in his own house. His face took on a look both irritable and cynical as Wexford spoke.
       ‘Did Robson strike you,’ Wexford said in the car, ‘as the sort of man who would sit himself down and with deliberation fashion a wire implement with a handle at each end for the express purpose of garroting his wife?’
       ‘Now you’re asking. I don’t know what sort of a man that would be. He had no car, remember, his wife had the car. The centre’s a mile away from Highlands. .
       ‘I know. Is the arthritic hip genuine?’
       ‘Even if it isn’t, he had no car. He could have walked, or there’s the bus. But if he wanted to murder his wife, why not do it at home like most of them do?’
       Wexford couldn’t keep from laughing at this insouciant acceptance of domestic homicide. ‘Maybe he did, we don’t know yet. We don’t know if she died in that car park or the body was only dumped there. We don’t even know if she drove the car.’
       ‘You mean Robson himself may have?’
       ‘Let’s see,’ said Wexford.
       They arrived at Highlands and Lesley Arbel opened the front door to them. She didn’t remind Wexford of his own daughter; to him she bore no resemblence to Sheila. He saw only a pretty girl who struck him at once as being exceptionally well-dressed, indeed almost