Wexford 14 - The Veiled One Read Free Page A

see it was useless doing that because of the bolts and the padlock, and Archie began to wonder, because of the sudden and violent change in her demeanour, if she wasn’t quite all there, if she were a bit mad . . . crazy. His reaction to anything like that would usually be to ignore it, to shut his eyes or go away. But it was the phone box she wanted; all this frenzy was on account of not being able to reach the phone box. There were always the neighbours - let someone else attend to it, someone younger and stronger. Only no one ever did. Archie some times thought a person could be murdered in Pomeroy Street in full view, in broad daylight, and no one would do any thing. The woman was shouting now - well, screaming. She was stamping her feet and shaking the gates and roaring at the top of her voice, yelling things Archie couldn’t make out but which he heard all right when he had put his cap on and his raincoat round his shoulders and was making his way out on to the pavement.
       ‘The police! The police! I’ve got to get the police! I’ve got to phone. I’ve got to get the police?’
       Archie crossed the road. He said, ‘Making all that fuss won’t help. You calm down now. What’s the matter with you?’
       ‘I’ve got to phone the police! There’s someone dead in there. I’ve got to phone the police - there’s a woman and they’ve tried to cut her head off!’
       Archie went cold all over; his throat came up and he tasted tea and chocolate. He thought, my heart, I’m too old for this. He said feebly, ‘Stop shaking those gates. Now, come on, you stop it! I can’t let you out.’
       ‘I want the police,’ she shrieked and fell to lean heavily against the gates, hanging there with her fingers pushed through the wire mesh. The final clang reverberated and died away, as she sobbed harshly against the cold metal.
       ‘I can go and phone them,’ Archie said and he went back indoors, leaving her sagged there, still, her hands hooked on the wire like someone shot while trying to escape.

Chapter 2

    The phone rang while he was in the middle of going through it all with Dora. Supper had been eaten without enthusiasm and the bag containing Dora’s birthday sweater lay unregarded on the seat of the chair. He had turned the evening paper front-page downwards but - unable to resist the horrid fascination of it - picked it up again.
       ‘Mind you, I knew things weren’t going well with her and Andrew,’ Dora said.
       ‘Knowing one’s daughter’s marriage is going through a bad patch is a far cry from reading in the paper that she’s getting a divorce.’
       ‘I think you mind about that more than about her coming up in court.’
       Wexford made himself look coolly at the newspaper. The lead story was the trial of three men who had tried to blow up the Israeli Embassy and there was something too about a by-election, but the page was Sheila’s. There were two photographs. The top picture showed a wire fence - not unlike the fence that surrounded the shopping complex he had recently left, only this one was topped with coils of razor wire. The modern world, he sometimes thought, was full of wire fences. The one in the picture had been mutilated and a flap hung loose from the centre of it, leaving a gaping hole through which a waste of mud could be seen with a hangar-like edifice in the middle of it. From the darkish background in the other photograph his daughter’s lovely face looked out, wide-eyed, apprehensive, to a father’s eye, aghast at the headlong rush of events. Wisps of pale curly hair escaped from under her woolly cap. The headlines said only ‘Sheila Cuts the Wire’; the story beneath told the rest of it, giving among all the painful details of arrest and magistrates’ court appearance the surely gratuitous information that the actress currently appearing in the television serialization of Lady Audley’s Secret was seeking a divorce from her husband,