by Ruth Rendell
“If you make a phone call to their hotel, Mr. Struther, you will find that they are not there. They never went there.” Burden had been about to say that Kitty and Owen Struther had been abducted but he waited. The man’s hostility was almost tangible. “If you make that phone call you will find that your parents are missing.”
“I am not hearing this. I do not believe this.”
“It is true, Mr. Struther. May I know your first name, please?”
“Not to call me by it, I beg. I’m old-fashioned about things like that. My Christian name is Andrew. I am Andrew Owen Kinglake Struther.”
“You do know where your parents are staying, Mr. Struther?”
“Certainly I do and I consider that question impertinent. You’ve had your say, I’ve registered your absurd news, and now I’d like your space.”
Burden decided to give up. He was under no obligation to make this man believe in his parents’ abduction. He had done his best. Later in the day, no doubt, Andrew Struther would be on the phone to Kingsmarkham Police Station, having had what he had been told confirmed at Gatwick and in Florence, but instead of showing contrition and asking for more facts, demanding to know why the whole story hadn’t been imparted to him earlier.
But as they entered the hall once more and crossed the stone flags there was a sound of running footsteps from above and a girl came down the staircase, followed by a German shepherd dog. She was about Andrew Struther’s age, a white-faced red-lipped girl with a mass of untidy mahogany-colored hair, wearing jeans and what looked like the top half of baby-doll pajamas. The dog was young, black and tan, not unlike the bailiff’s dogs, with a dense glossy coat. At the bottom the girl stopped, holding on to the carved banister post.
“Cops,” said Andrew Struther.
“You’re kidding.”
“No, but don’t ask. You know how low my boredom threshold is.”
The dog sat at the foot of the stairs and stared at them. Burden and Karen let themselves out but the front door slammed behind them before they could close it. Burden made no comment to Karen and she drove in silence. The sun had gone in and a light rain splashed the windscreen, too scanty for wipers to be needed. He thought of the various places Sacred Globe might phone, the places they would know about, a group practice surgery, a hospital, a High Street shop. Once they had done that the story would be out and there would be no way to stop it, never mind high-level newspaper conferences. Somehow he knew they would phone somewhere he hadn’t thought of and couldn’t cover. British Telecom was obliging but couldn’t put a trace on every possible phone, and no one else but B.T. was permitted to do it.
Karen found a parking space almost outside Clare Cox’s cottage, just where the double yellow line ended, and tucked the car behind a black Jaguar of last year’s registration. Its owner—Burden guessed it before he was told—opened the door to them. He was a small neat man, improbably dressed in a denim suit. His skin was waxencream, his hair and mustache inky black, and Burden thought he looked like a not very good artist’s rendering of Hercule Poirot.
“I am Roxane’s father. Hassy Masood. Please come in. Her mother isn’t feeling too good.”
Though obviously Asian, or of Asian parentage, Masood spoke with the accent of West London. The background created by Clare Cox, of Indian artifacts and vaguely Central Asian rugs and hangings, suited his appearance but not his voice, manner, or, apparently, his taste. In the living room he shook his head disparagingly, cast up his eyes, and, gesturing with his hands, exclaimed, “This junk! Can you believe it?”
“We’d like to see Ms. Cox if that’s possible,” said Karen.
“I’ll fetch her. You’ve no news of my daughter, I suppose? I came down here last night. Her mother was in a rare old state.” He smiled tightly, wrinkling up his eyes. “So was I, in point of fact. Families should be together at a time like this, don’t you think?”
Burden said nothing.
“I’m not staying here, of course. One gets used to big places, large rooms, don’t you find? I should feel stifled here. I’m staying at the Kingsmarkham Posthouse. My wife and our two children and my stepdaughter will be joining me later today.”
“Ms. Cox, please, Mr. Masood.”
“Of course. Please sit down. Make yourselves at home.”
They found themselves both staring at the portrait. Roxane was the offspring of two not especially good-looking people whose genes cunningly combined to produce a rare beauty distant from either of them. Yet it was her father’s black liquid eyes that looked down from the wall and his thick smooth skin like whipped cream that covered those fine cheekbones, that rounded chin, those perfect arms.
“That photograph,” Clare Cox said, entering the room and seeing them looking. “It’s not good of her, not really. I tried painting her but couldn’t do her justice.”
“No one could,” said Masood. “Not even”—he sought for a suitable name, came up with one highly inappropriate—“Picasso could.”
Clare Cox was a pitiful sight. Perpetual crying had soaked and swollen her face and made her voice hoarse. The tears still lay on her red puffy cheeks. She collapsed into a chair that was swathed in a red and purple shawl and lay back in an attitude of absolute despair. Burden, who had begun to have doubts after the Andrew Struther experience, now felt that telling the parents must be right. Hope, even vain hope, was better than this.
Karen told them what had happened, the bare facts, that at any rate, at the moment, Roxane was safe. Roxane wasn’t dead or injured or the victim of a rapist. All Masood and Roxane’s mother could do for a moment was stare in stupefaction. Then Masood said, “Abducted?”
“It seems so. Along with four others. As soon as we know anything we’ll keep you informed. I promise you that.”
“But at the moment,” Karen said, “we don’t know any more. We’d like to have a trace put on your phone.”
“You mean you—someone will come and—an engineer?”
“No. B.T. can do it without coming here.”
“But they—these abductors—could phone here?”
“We don’t know where or when the phone call will come, but yes, we think it will be by phone.”
Quietly, Burden explained how important it was to have their silence. No one must be told. “Not your wife and children, Mr. Masood. No one. As far as they are concerned, Roxane is simply missing.”
He gave the same injunction to Audrey Barker and her mother in Rhombus Road, Stowerton. They too were asked for their permission to have Mrs. Peabody’s phone monitored. Audrey Barker’s reaction to the knowledge that her child was missing had been quite different from Clare Cox’s. There were no signs of tears, but her face was whiter than ever, her eyes seemed larger, and she looked as if she had lost even more weight off her thin stringy frame. Burden remembered that she had been ill, had recently left the hospital. She looked as if she needed to be back there.
Mrs. Peabody was simply confused. It was all too much for her. She took her daughter’s hand and held it in both of her own. Over and over she kept saying, “But he’s a big boy, he’s big for his age. He wouldn’t get into a stranger’s car.”
“He didn’t think it was a stranger, Mother.”
“He wouldn’t have got into it, he’s too big for that, he knows better, he’s big for his age, Aud, you know that.”
“Can I see the other mother?” Audrey Barker said. “Can we meet? You said there was a young girl taken too. We could form a support group, the other mother and me, and maybe the other women—have they got family?”
“That wouldn’t be wise just at present, Mrs. Barker.”
“I don’t want to do anything out of turn, but I just thought—well, it helps to talk about it, to share your experience.”
You haven’t had an experience yet, Burden thought grimly, and let’s hope to God you won’t have. Aloud, he repeated what he had already said, that it was better not at present.
“They won’t want you interfering, Aud,” said Mr
s. Peabody.
“These people who’ve got my son, what do they want?”
“We hope to know that today,” said Karen.
“And if they don’t get it what will they do to him?”
At the police station they waited for Sacred Globe to call. They waited at the Kingsmarkham Courier, Barry Vine’s vigil having been taken over by DCs Lambert and Pemberton. It was still only noon.
It was an ill-assorted group who had been taken away and imprisoned somewhere, Wexford thought. He thought in this way to distract himself from terrible ideas, from actually picturing Dora and imagining how she must feel. A twenty-two-year-old potential model who looked like an Arabian Nights princess, an overtall schoolboy of fourteen, a married couple who, if Burden wasn’t exaggerating, belonged to that county set of an anachronistic but still surprisingly powerful elite—and his wife.
She would get on better with the boy and the girl, he thought, than the two whose horizons were perhaps bounded by the hunt, paternalistic good works, and pre-Sunday lunch sherry parties. Then he reminded himself that, after all, the Struthers had been going to Florence. There must be something redeemable about a couple who would spend a holiday there instead of on a Scottish grouse moor.
Dora would be all right. “Your mother will be all right,” he had said hollowly to his daughters. And they believed him, as they always did when he spoke, as it were, ex cathedra. The doubts were all inside himself. He knew the wickedness of this world as they didn’t. But he knew Dora too. She would be sensible, practical, she had a great sense of humor, and she would make it her business to comfort those young people. If they were all together, the five of them. He hoped they were together, not each in solitary confinement.
Would they know who she was? She wasn’t the sort of woman to say, “Do you know who I am?” Or even, “Do you know whose wife I am?” Would they recognize the name? Not unless she told them, he was sure of that. Only those he had had dealings with knew his name. But if she had told them, then it might well be to his house that the call would be made. They would expect him to be there, not here. They would ask Dora and she would tell them he would be at home, waiting to hear about her.
At one o’clock he and Burden sent out for sandwiches. He tried to eat but he couldn’t. Having one’s wife abducted was a fine way of losing weight, except that he’d prefer obesity. Once the rejected sandwiches had been removed he went down to check the progress being made in setting up an incident room.
Some five years before, an annex to the police station had been fitted up as a gym. This was at the height of the great fitness craze when it was thought advisable, at least for the younger members of the force, to work out as often as possible on exercise bikes, treadmills, ski tracks, and stair-steppers. Wexford had read somewhere that most people who start exercising keep it up for a maximum of six weeks, and this proved to be the case. Recently the gym had been used entirely as a badminton court, but, as Burden had said, not really intending a pun, that would have to be shuttled out of the way.
The inevitable computers were going in, the modems, the phones. He walked about, looking at things, not seeing, aware that eyes were on him in a new and curious way.
He had become a victim.
Now her son was at school Jenny Burden had gone back to teaching history at Kingsmarkham Comprehensive. It was a pity, as far as she was concerned, that the continental system didn’t operate here and schools start at eight and finish at two. Perhaps that would eventually come about through the European Union, a body her husband had no time for but which Jenny tended to think of as a good thing. As it was, she had to find someone to look after Mark between the time he stopped at three-thirty and the time she stopped at four.
But things were different on Thursdays, not just this Thursday, the first day of term, when her last class ended at twelve-thirty and she could go home. The nicest thing about it was being there when her friend who did the afternoon school run brought Mark home at three-forty, when he ran in and jumped into her arms. In the meantime, having eaten the one lunch she got all week that didn’t have chips or pizza in it, she was curled up in an armchair reading Roy Jenkins’s Life of Gladstone.
The phone ringing slightly annoyed her. People shouldn’t phone during these lovely quiet two-and-a-half hours, her only alone time. But she answered it, she had never managed to get into the way of letting a phone ring.
“Hallo?”
A male voice. Absolutely ordinary, she said afterward, as accent-free as a voice could be, somewhat monotonous, impossible to say if young or middle-aged. Not old, she could say that. A dull voice, perhaps purposely geared to be without a regional note or a peculiarity of pronunciation.
“This is Sacred Globe. Listen carefully. We have five hostages: Ryan Barker, Roxane Masood, Kitty Struther, Owen Struther, and Dora Wexford. I will tell you our price for them in one moment. Naturally, if the price is not paid, they will die one by one. But you know that.
“Our price is that you stop the bypass. All work on the Kingsmarkham Bypass must be discontinued and not resumed. That is our price for these five people.
“We will be in contact again. Another message will be sent before nightfall. We are Sacred Globe, saving the world.”
8
Did you guess right?” Burden said.
“I’m afraid so.”
Wexford was reading the transcription Jenny had made, as accurately as she could, of Sacred Globe’s phone message. There was nothing in it to surprise him, it was in fact routine stuff, but the threat to kill the hostages if the “price” was not paid still reared up off the page at him.
His new team had come into the room and it would shortly be time to address them. As well as Burden from Kingsmarkham, there were Detective Sergeants Barry Vine and Karen Malahyde with the four DCs, Lynn Fancourt, James Pemberton, Kenneth Archbold, and Stephen Lambert. The Regional Crime Squad had sent him five officers from their complement of fourteen: DI Nicola Weaver, DS Damon Slesar paired with DC Edward Hennessy, and DS Martin Cook paired with DC Burton Lowry.
Wexford had met Nicola Weaver for the first time ten minutes before. A woman had still to be very good to have risen to where she was at her age. She couldn’t have been more than thirty. Hers was a sturdy figure, not very tall, she had strong features, black hair severely cut, the fringe at right angles to the sides, and she wore a wedding ring. Her eyes were a clear turquoise blue and though she seldom smiled, when she did she showed perfect white teeth. She had shaken hands with him, a firm handshake, and said as if she meant it, “I’m very glad to be here.”
Slesar was dark, handsome in a strained bony way, one of those tall skinny people who can eat anything without putting on weight. His very short hair was a dull lampblack, his skin the olive of the Welsh- or Cornishman. Wexford had a feeling he had seen him somewhere before, met him, but for the moment he had no recollection of where. DC Hennessy was his opposite, thickset, of medium height, with a pudgy face, reddish hair, and light hazel eyes like a ginger cat’s. The other sergeant was thickset and heavyish with bright sharp eyes. DC Lowry was black, skinny, and elegant like a cop in a television serial.
Karen Malahyde greeted DS Slesar like an old friend—or something more? At any rate she didn’t favor him with the short cool look and tight nod she gave most male newcomers, but smiled, whispered something, and sat down next to him. Could he have encountered Slesar in her company? Was that the solution? Somehow he didn’t think so. It was something of a mild joke among them all that Karen never seemed to have a boyfriend.
He began by telling them what some but not all of them knew already, that his wife was among the hostages. Nicola Weaver, who evidently didn’t know, said something to her neighbor, Barry Vine, and raised her eyebrows at his answer.
Wexford told them about the two messages, beginning with the one to the Courier, which had resulted in the Chief Constable’s press conference and an undertaking secured from all national newspapers that they would print nothing until he lif
ted the embargo. The second message, he said, had been received by Inspector Burden’s wife at their home, and he had a copy of Jenny’s transcript shown on the screen.
“I think and hope this may be an instance of someone being too clever—and in his opinion amusing—for his own good. We might have expected the message to come to my house, since my wife may well have told her captors who she is and who I am. To choose Inspector Burden’s home took us by surprise, as was the aim. We must try to avoid being taken by surprise again.
“But in being clever he may also have been unwise. How did he know about Mike Burden? How did he know of his existence? Perhaps because Mike had had dealings with him and it’s unlikely these were of a—how shall I put it?—a social nature.” A ripple of laughter made him pause. “That is something we have to go into,” he went on. “No doubt Sacred Globe found his phone number in the book, but we have to investigate how he knew whom to look up.
“The hostages were taken at random. We know that. Therefore there’s little point in much investigation of their backgrounds. That isn’t going to help us find where they are or who has them. We have to begin from the other end, with Sacred Globe itself. That’s our starting point and getting on with it is imperative. This means contact with all the pressure groups protesting currently at the building of the bypass.
“Most of them—a couple of days ago I’d have said all of them—are legitimate groups of sincere people protesting against what they see as an outrage in a peaceable way. But in these instances there are always the others, those in it for the pleasure of causing disruption, for example, the rioters who invaded Kingsmarkham one Saturday night a month ago and many of whom, perhaps like our hostage-takers, were masked and seemingly unidentifiable.
“Someone in these groups, in SPECIES or KABAL, is going to be able to help us. Even someone with Sussex Wildlife or Friends of the Earth, both legitimate, concerned societies, may well have come in contact with very different elements while on other protests. These people have to be talked to and any clues they may give us quickly followed up. The tree people and those in the camps have to be talked to. They may be our most valuable sources of information.
