Road Rage

by Ruth Rendell

  They were all assembled in the old gym ten minutes before time, all, that is, except Karen Malahyde, who was still off somewhere in pursuit of Frenchie Collins, and Barry Vine, who was beginning to share Burden’s view of Stanley Trotter. Wexford walked in and everyone stopped talking. It wasn’t just respect and courtesy, he knew that. They had been talking about him among themselves, they had been talking about Dora. For the first time he found himself wishing that what he had thought would happen had happened, that the Chief Constable had put someone else in charge of this business.

  Nicky Weaver, seeming a lot less tired and enervated than on the previous evening, looking brisk and energetic, had a good many leads to talk about from SPECIES and KABAL. A SPECIES officer, now apparently a reformed character, had once, quite a long time ago, been sent to prison for attempting to sabotage a nuclear power station. This man had given her a comprehensive list of names of people he said were anarchists.

  “Why did he tell you?” Wexford wanted to know.

  “I don’t know. Probably because he’s currently only in favor of peaceful resistance. Someone took him on a tour of the power station at Sizewell and he was so impressed he completely changed his tune.”

  “It looks as if we’ve done all we can at the camps,” Wexford said. “The computer can deal with all the names we’ve come up with and make cross-references, if any. With this suspension of work on the bypass we’ve bought ourselves time and that’s important. There should be, sometime today, another message from Sacred Globe.

  “They haven’t promised it. There was no undertaking in last night’s message that another would follow, but something will come. We have traces on as many Kingsmarkham, Pomfret, and Stowerton phones as B.T. can provide us with. B.T. has done us proud and there are no complaints in that area. But Sacred Globe are vain people, they’re arrogant. Such people always are. They’ll want to congratulate us on having the good sense to fall in with their demands. They’ll phone or get in touch by some means or another. It won’t have escaped their notice that the suspension is temporary. It’s a suspension, a postponement if you like, not a full stop.

  “Unless I’m much mistaken they’re going to want a full guarantee that the Kingsmarkham Bypass is canceled. And that, of course, we can’t give them. That we can never give them, come what may.”

  Nicky Weaver raised her hand.

  “Nicky?”

  “This guarantee—it’s struck me that this is something no one, no authority, would, could, ever give. For instance, such a guarantee could be given, the hostages would be released, and there follow an immediate reneging on the undertaking. Or even if their intention was sincere, even if they promised not to build this bypass, once there was a change of government it could be built, even a change of the Secretary for Transport. So how is Sacred Globe ever to get around that?”

  “I suspect they live for the moment,” said Wexford. “Get a guarantee and if it lasts five years they’ve done well. If a bypass is proposed later—well, maybe they start again. Nothing is certain in this world, is it?”

  He thought he saw a shiver run through her, but perhaps it was his imagination.

  10

  From Stowerton Dale to Pomfret Monachorum silence prevailed over the bypass route. It was rather cold for early September, windy with a touch of Siberia in the breeze, and from time to time a sharp shower of rain rattled down. Birds that had sung tweet-tweet, pu-wee, jug-jug at dawn were silent now and would make no sound until roosting time. In the camps the early euphoria had subsided, it was anticlimax time, and the tree people were discussing, thinking, planning, and, above all, wondering.

  The heavy earthmoving equipment had been returned to the meadow where it had first been assembled. The buses that carried the security guards to the site had not run that day and the guards in their dilapidated air base huts talked among themselves about the chances of being laid off.

  Stowerton children, hitherto kept away by the guards, clambered over the heaps of earth, playing at guerrilla warfare in a mountainous region. KABAL called an emergency meeting at which a decision was reached. Lady McTear and Mrs. Khoori were to draw up a petition to the Department of Transport for all members to sign (and any other supporters that could be found) that, in the light of a need for environmental assessment under an EU directive, and the unique ecological phenomena present at the site, work should never be resumed on the bypass.

  * * *

  When Mrs. Peabody was young you tidied up the bedroom and put the child into a clean nightdress before the doctor came. If anyone in authority was coming you cleaned the whole house. Going shopping “into town,” you dressed up in your best. These habits die hard and it was plain that a kidnapped grandson wasn’t enough to deflect Mrs. Peabody from her conditioning. She was the kind of woman who would put clean sheets on her own deathbed.

  He felt deeply, painfully, sorry for her in her pink sweater set and pearls, her pleated skirt and shiny shoes. She even had lipstick on. All the cushions in the living room were plumped up and magazines were set out in a fan shape on the little table. She could powder her face but not summon up a smile for him, just managed a subdued, “Good afternoon.”

  Her daughter, from a generation who saw things quite differently, from Clare Cox’s generation, looked as if she hadn’t washed herself or combed her hair since she heard. He knew all about pacing, he had done plenty of it himself these past days and nights, and he thought she paced this house for long hours. It was apparent she couldn’t keep still, though she looked ill, in need of a long convalescence.

  “I have to be here, on the spot,” she said to him. “I ought to go home, I’ve just left everything, but it would be even worse at home.” She sprang up, walked across the floor to the window, stood there clenching and unclenching her hands. “You said on the phone you had something to tell us.”

  “It isn’t bad news?” Mrs. Peabody was a marvel of self-control, he thought, and he wondered what her nights were like, when the bedroom door was shut. “You did say it wasn’t bad.”

  He told them of the condition, that work on the bypass must stop. Audrey Barker walked across the room again, silent and nodding, as if she had thought of this or as if she wasn’t surprised. But Mrs. Peabody looked as bewildered as if he had told her the hostages would be released only if the entire population of Kingsmarkham agreed to learn Swahili or pilot helicopters.

  “What’s our Ryan got to do with that? That’s the government.”

  “I quite agree with you, Mrs. Peabody,” Wexford said, “but that’s the condition.”

  “They have stopped,” Audrey Barker said, coming up close to him, her hands working once more. “It was on the TV. Is that why they’ve stopped?”

  “There’s been a suspension of work, yes.”

  Mrs. Peabody seemed overawed. He could see her digesting what had been said, interpreting it into a form she could understand.

  “And all on account of our Ryan?” she said. “Well, and the rest of them. Our Ryan and the rest of them.”

  She shook her head in wonderment. This was fame, this was to be lifted out of obscurity, get into the newspapers, have one’s name on television.

  “Our Ryan,” she said again.

  Her daughter glanced angrily at her. She said to Wexford, “If the work’s stopped, why hasn’t he come back?”

  Why hadn’t he? Why hadn’t any of them? It was now four in the afternoon, nine hours after that announcement of suspension had been made. Not another word had been heard from Sacred Globe. The message Burden had happened to receive was the last one and had been made twenty hours before.

  “I don’t know. I can’t tell you because I don’t know.”

  She had forgotten that his wife was among the hostages. “But what are you doing to find them? Why aren’t you out there now, looking for them? There must be ways.” She was tearing at her hands now, as if to pull them off the wrists. They were marked already with selfinflicted bruises. “I’d go and look myself only I
don’t know how. You know how, you must, it’s your job. What are you doing for them? They could kill Ryan, they could torture him—Oh God, oh Christ, what are you doing?”

  Aghast, Mrs. Peabody laid a small wrinkled hand on her daughter’s arm. “You mustn’t speak like that, Aud. No good can come out of being rude.”

  “There’s no question of torture, Mrs. Barker.” At least, that was something he could be sure of, especially if he didn’t let himself think too much about it. “And I don’t think any of the hostages will be killed. If Sacred Globe were to kill them they would lose their bargaining power.” Every word he uttered was a jab of the knife. He almost gasped. “I’m sure you can understand that.”

  She turned away, then rounded on him once more. “Then why haven’t they come back to you now the bypass has stopped?”

  It was the same question. Clare Cox had asked it half an hour before when he had been with her in Pomfret. Alone, the Masood family having—incredibly—“gone out for the day” to do the tour of Leeds Castle, she had been trying to paint to distract herself. At any rate, there were smears of paint on the smock she wore over one of her flowing dresses.

  “Why haven’t they done what they said they would?” she had asked him.

  It wasn’t then but now that he repeated to himself the words delivered to Tanya Paine that Burden had remembered: Stop the work for the time being while we negotiate. But a public assurance via the media we must have by nine tomorrow morning. If not, the first of the hostages will die and the body be returned to you before nightfall …

  “While we negotiate …” But no overture of negotiation had come, no request for any kind of talk. And the message said nothing about returning the hostages, only about killing them if work on the bypass wasn’t suspended. There had been nothing at all about what must be done before the hostages could come back.

  “We’ll keep you informed as soon as anything happens,” he said to Audrey Barker.

  The phone rang as he was speaking. She picked up the receiver and was instantly calmed by the voice at the other end. A little color came into her face. She spoke in monosyllables but gently, almost sweetly. It occurred to him as he left and set out for Framhurst that he knew less about her and her son than about any of the hostages. There was something about her and her mother that inhibited asking, and this was increased by their plight.

  Who and where, for instance, was Ryan’s father? Was there anyone else at home in Croydon? Probably Mrs. Peabody was a widow but he didn’t know that. Audrey Barker had been in a hospital for an operation, but he didn’t know what for or how serious it was or even if she was fully recovered now. Who was the caller that she had talked to on the phone? Perhaps it didn’t matter, any of it, perhaps these things were simply their private business that in the circumstances no one should inquire into.

  Hadn’t he told his team himself that the backgrounds of the hostages should be of no particular interest to them or their operation?

  Rain had begun to fall more heavily as he entered that part of the country now inevitably associated with the bypass. Here, the apocryphal visitor from Mars would have suspected nothing, have received no hint of destruction, pollution, environmental damage. The deep lanes wound between overgrown banks and high hedges, the wind sighed in the high branches of beech trees, the woods slept quietly under the soft patter of rain, and a few still-green leaves fluttered down.

  In Framhurst a dozen or so tree people sat on the pavement under the tea shop’s striped awning, drinking Coke and one of them a cup of tea. Robin Hood’s Merry Men probably looked rather like that, Wexford thought, not in the orange knee breeches and fringed green tunics of cartoon film but a medieval version of denim with brown cagoollike garments on top, bearded, dirty, but strangely the representatives now of those who cared about preserving England. But why did they always look like this? Why weren’t they ever men in gray suits? He slowed as he passed them, then quickly drove on to Markinch Lane.

  Savesbury House was impressive. Burden had described it as half barrack, half architectural hotch-potch, but Wexford saw the mixture of styles as charming, as essentially English. The drive ran deep between groves of tall trees, their branches reaching for the sky. Then the lawns opened out and the flower beds were displayed with their rare unnameable herbaceous plants. If you stood on the edges of those lawns and parted the foliage with your hands you could doubtless see the whole great panorama of Savesbury and Stringfield and the river winding below you.

  A dog padded from the side of the house as he left his car. The animal approached him with stealthy silent menace, a shaggy black German shepherd, behaving in the intimidating way such dogs sometimes do, curling its upper and lower lips back about an inch to show a trim double row of bright white teeth.

  Wexford’s father had been one of those people of whom it is said that they can “do anything with dogs.” He hadn’t quite acquired that art himself but some of his father’s talent had come to him, by association or by genes, perhaps he just wasn’t afraid, and he put out his hand to this creature and said a casual hallo. He didn’t like dogs, he had never liked the various dogs Sheila had foisted on him and Dora to “mind” while she was away, but they liked him. They fawned on him, as this one did, stuffing its nose into his coat pocket when he bent down to it.

  The white-faced girl called Bibi, a cigarette hanging from her mouth, opened the door. He had seen her before but in the distance, just as he had seen Andrew Struther, when the two of them came to see Burden at the police station. Her face, that Burden and Karen Malahyde had simply found good-looking, reminded him of a cartoon character the artist wants to look beautiful and evil, the Snow Queen perhaps or Cruella De Vil. That red hair was a most peculiar color, nearer crimson than mahogany, and he didn’t think it was dyed.

  She grabbed the dog by its collar, cooing at it, “Come here, Manfred, come to Mother, sweetheart,” as if he had been sticking pins into it.

  Burden had said the interior of Savesbury House was beautifully furnished and squeaky clean. Two days in the care of Andrew Struther and Bibi had changed all that. A plate of Chum or some such stood almost in the middle of the hall floor with a bowl of water alongside it. Manfred had been chewing bones between meals and Wexford nearly tripped over half a femur that lay on the drawing room threshold. In there cups and glasses stood about on shelves and tabletops, a plate with a half-eaten sandwich sat on the seat of an armchair, and the contents overflowed from several large ashtrays. The place was stuffy and there was an unpleasant smell compounded of cigarette smoke and old marrowbones.

  Andrew Struther, entering the room, also nearly fell over the femur. Before uttering a word to Wexford he said crossly to the girl, “Can’t you put that bloody Manfred in the kennel? You said you would. You absolutely promised when I agreed to have him here for no more than two days. Right? Remember?”

  The face he turned to Wexford was sullen and aggrieved, a very handsome marble-hewn face though, lightly tanned, a shade darker than the butter-colored hair. He and the girl were today both dressed like tree people in elegant green and brown—Elves who shop at Ralph Lauren. His parents, Wexford thought, were by far the richest of the hostages. They made Dora look poor and the others on the breadline.

  “Chief Inspector Wexford, I think you said?”

  “That’s right. I think you already know the condition these people have imposed.” He remembered the elucidation that had come to him while he was at Mrs. Peabody’s. “Sacred Globe, as they call themselves, has not undertaken to release the hostages on suspension of work on the bypass, only to negotiate. However, there has so far been no move made by them toward negotiation.”

  “Why do you say that?” the girl asked in a petulant voice, “ ‘as they call themselves’—why do you say that?”

  Wexford said stoutly, “People who commit acts of this kind aren’t deserving of respect or dignity, do you think?”

  Bibi didn’t answer, but Struther rounded on her. “I just hope to Christ you
aren’t starting to feel sympathy with a bunch of shits who have kidnapped my mother and father.”

  His pale brown face had become bright red. Wexford had seldom seen calmness so swiftly transformed into violent rage. Struther took a step toward the girl and for a moment he thought he would have to intervene, but Bibi stood her ground, put her hands on her hips, and stared insolently up into his face.

  “Oh, what’s the use!” Andrew Struther shouted. “But I want that dog out of the house first thing tomorrow. Is that understood? And this place cleared up. My mother will be coming back—do you realize that? My mother will soon be back. Isn’t that right, Chief Inspector?”

  “I very much hope so.” Wexford remembered his caution about the private lives of the hostage families being of no interest, but he disobeyed it again. “What is your father’s occupation, Mr. Struther?”

  “Stock market.” Andrew Struther spoke shortly. “Same as me,” he added.

  Manfred, in the hall, was chewing a chair leg. Whether it had mistaken the leg for a bone or just liked reproduction Chippendale Wexford didn’t know and wasn’t staying to find out. He drove slowly down the drive between the trees. The rain had stopped while he was inside Savesbury House and a pale misty sun appeared in the blue triangle among the clouds. His car thermometer told him the outside temperature in Celsius and Fahrenheit: 13 and 56, not brilliant for the time of year.

  Five minutes later he was in Framhurst village street. Most of the tree people had gone from outside the tea shop but two remained. The tea shop owner had rolled up the awning, perhaps when the rain had stopped, and optimistically placed more tables and chairs out on the pavement. On two of these, with a single teacup between them on the table, sat a man with the longest beard Wexford had ever seen, a golden beard like a skein of embroidery silk, and beside him a bedraggled young woman in the kind of clothes Clare Cox favored, a dirty cotton gown with a spotted scarf tied around the waist.