Veiled One (Paperback)

Concealed by a shroud of dirty brown velvet, the woman’s body lay between a silver Escort and a dark-blue Lancia. In the desolate shopping centre parking lot, Wexford had been too preoccupied to notice. Burden calls him at home later that evening with grim news: the woman had been attacked from behind, perhaps with a thin length of wire. But before Wexford can delve any deeper into this curious homicide, he, too, faces death.

The Veiled One
Chapter One
The woman was lying dead on the floor when he came in. She was already dead and covered up from head to toe but Wexford only knew that afterwards, not at the time. He looked back and realised the chances he had missed but it was useless doing that – he hadn’t known and that was all. He had been preoccupied, thinking of an assortment of things: his wife’s birthday present that was in the bag he carried, modern architecture, yesterday’s gale which had blown down his garden fence, this car park that he was entering from the descending lift.

Even the lift was not as other lifts elsewhere, being of rattling grey metal undecorated except by graffiti. Irregular printing from whose letters the red paint had dripped like trails of blood, informed him that someone called Steph was a “diesel dyke”. He wondered what that meant, wondered too where he could look it up. The lift was going down. Into the bowels of the earth, he thought, and there was something intestine-like about this place with its winding passages and its strictly one-way direction. Perhaps, though, it was better to excavate for this purpose than to erect above the ground, especially as any extraneous building would inevitably have been in the style of the shopping centre itself – ramparts, perhaps, or the walls of a city, some quaint attempt at a reconstruction of the Middle Ages.

He had just come from the Barringdean Centre, the new shopping complex built to look like a castle. That was the style modern planners thought suitable on the outskirts of an ancient Sussex town where nothing genuinely medieval remained. Perhaps that was why. Anyway the centre looked less like a real castle than a toy one, the kind you have to assemble from a thousand plastic bits and pieces. Shaped like a capital “I”, it had four towers on the ends and a row of little turrets along its length. Looking back at it, he half-expected bowmen to appear at the Gothic windows and arrows to fly.

But inside all was of the late twentieth century, only to be expressed in eighties words – amenities, facilities, enclaves and approaches. A great fountain played in the central concourse, its waterspouts almost reaching but not quite touching the pendent chandelier of shards of frosted glass. Wexford had entered at this point by the automatic doors and approach from the glass covered way. He had gone up the escalator where a breath of spray stung his fingers on the handrail, realised at the top that the shop he sought must be downstairs after all – was not Suzanne the hairdresser who also sold wigs and leotards, or Linen That Shows or Laceworks – and went down again by the escalator to the Mandala. This was a set-piece in the area at the other end with potted plants in concentric circles – brown chrysanthemums, yellow chrysanthemums, white poinsettias and those plants with cherry-like orange fruit that are really a kind of potato. The crowds were thinning out; it was getting on for six when the centre closed up. Shop assistants were weary and growing impatient and event he flowers looked tired.

A Tesco superstore filled the whole crosspiece of the “I” on both floors at this end, British Home Stores the other. Between them was Boots the Chemist with W.H Smith facing it, the Mandala in between. Down a side passage that led from the main above ground car park, children still played o a fat zebra made of black and white leather, a high-tech climbing frame, a dragon on wheels. Wexford found the shop where Dora, a week ago, had pointed out to him in the window a sweater she liked. Addresses it was called, with the chocolate shop next to it and a wool and crafts place Knits’n’Kits on the other side. Wexford was not a man to hesitate or deliberate over a matter like this. Besides, Demeter the health-food shop opposite was already closing and the jewellers next to it were lowering the fancy gilt latticework bars inside the window. He went into Addresses and bought the sweater, the transaction taking four minutes.

By now shoppers were being hustled out, even Grub’n’Grains the café having someone suspiciously like a bouncer on its door. And the lights were dimming, the leaping spouts of the fountain slowing… subsiding, until the ruffled surface of the pool into which it played became glasslike. Wexford sat down on one of the wrought-iron benches that were ranged along the aisle. He let the crowd make its way out through the various arteries that led from this central column and then he too left by the automatic doors into the covered way.

A great exodus of cars from the aboveground car parks was under way. At the far end he looked back. Flags flew from all the turrets along the centre’s spine, red and yellow triangular pennants which had fluttered all day in the tail-end of the gale but dropped now in the stillness of a dark, misty evening. Slits of light still showed in the narrow pointed-topped Gothic windows. Wexford found himself alone here at the entrance to the underground car park, the only evidence of those hordes of shoppers being their abandoned trolleys. Hundreds of these jostled each other in higgledy-piggledy fashion, and would no doubt remain here till morning. A notice informed their users that the police took a serious view of those who allowed a shopping trolley to obstruct the roadway. Not for the first time, Wexford reflected that the police had more important things to do – though how much more important he was only to realise later.