Road Rage

by Ruth Rendell

  He remembered how Audrey Barker had asked him if she could be put in touch with the other mother and form a support group. He had refused, largely to reduce to a minimum the chances of a breach of secrecy. They could do it now if they wanted to, perhaps discussion would be a comfort to them, but he had noticed that now the opportunity had come, each sat isolated, silent, giving no more than an occasional suspicious glance at the others.

  Mrs. Peabody hadn’t come, so her daughter was the only member of the group without support. Hers was a lonely figure, her head bowed, her hands folded in her lap, her face paper white. Despair seemed to enclose her, a misery that the news of her son’s safety had done nothing to dispel. By contrast, Clare Cox had a hopeful air. She looked practical, resolute, above all she looked different. A jacket and skirt, a pair of black pumps, transformed her appearance. Her hair was tied back with a black silk ribbon. Masood, in a smart dark suit with a purple sheen, had accompanied her but without his second family. Wexford noted, with as much amusement as he was capable at present of summoning up for anything, that they were holding hands.

  Whispering from time to time in Bibi’s ear, Andrew Struther looked tired and strained. The girl wore white shorts and a red tank top which left her midriff bare. But he was formally dressed in a white shirt and tie, linen jacket, and dark trousers. They too were holding hands but in a far more demonstrative way than Roxane’s parents, an almost libidinous way. Bibi’s hand enclosed his caressingly and moved it to rest on her pale golden thigh. Distress hadn’t touched her, but then why should it? It wasn’t her parents who had been kidnapped.

  Wexford got up on the impromptu platform and began talking to them. He told them how the facts of the case that had been presented to the press on the previous Wednesday would no longer be embargoed after this evening. The media would be free to use these facts with the other, more recent information, which Kingsmarkham CID would pass on to them today.

  He believed they already knew that Sacred Globe had released his wife. It was she who had been able to give them so much information about the present condition of the hostages and to tell them that on Friday when she left all were alive and well. She had also carried with her the message that Sacred Globe would begin negotiations today, Sunday, but no word had yet been received as to what negotiations they might have in mind. Nor, he said, could he say that these putative discussions were of a kind into which the police—or, come to that, the hostages’ families—would be prepared to enter.

  They listened. He asked them if they had any questions. He knew he hadn’t been entirely open with them or perhaps he hadn’t been entirely open with himself. That “alive and well” business—how true was that? Now he thought he had forborne to question Dora any more, had postponed further questioning, because there were things about Roxane Masood particularly and the Struthers to a lesser extent he hadn’t wanted to hear before he spoke to these people. Their fears were somewhat allayed. Was there any point in giving rise to more fear at this juncture?

  Audrey Barker put up her hand like a child in a classroom—or a child in a classroom in his day.

  “Mrs. Barker?”

  Her eyes, her strained stretched face, had the look of someone who has just witnessed something terrifying. Seen a ghost, perhaps, or a bloody motorway pileup.

  “Can you tell me a bit more about Ryan?” she asked. It was the voice of a woman on the edge of tears. “How he was, I mean, how he’s taking it?”

  “He was fine on Friday evening. His spirits were good.” Wexford didn’t add that from then on the boy would have been alone. “The hostages appear to be adequately fed, there is no problem there. They have washing facilities, beds and blankets.”

  Don’t ask me if they are all together, he prayed silently. Don’t ask where the girl is. No one did. Clare Cox seemed to take it for granted that Roxane was also in that room when Dora left it. Masood, having disengaged his hand from hers, had been writing something in a small leather-bound notebook. He looked up and asked, “Can you please tell us who’s looking after them?”

  “There appear to be five men or four men and a woman.”

  “And perhaps by now you have a clue as to where they are?”

  “We have clues, yes, many clues. Leads are being followed all the time. As yet we have no firm knowledge of where the hostages are being held, only that it’s somewhere within a radius of about sixty miles. Tomorrow’s publicity may be of considerable help to us there.”

  The question was bound to come. It always did. Andrew Struther asked it.

  “Yes, all right, that’s all very well, but why haven’t you done more to find them? It’s how many days now? Five? Six? What exactly have you been doing?”

  “Mr. Struther,” he said patiently, “every officer in this area is working all-out to find your parents and the other hostages. All leave has been canceled. Five officers from the Regional Crime Squad have joined them.”

  “Miracles we do at once,” said Masood, as if the aphorism was witty or new. “The impossible will take a little longer.”

  “We must hope it won’t prove impossible, sir,” Wexford said. “If there are no more questions perhaps you’d like to confer among yourselves for a while. There has been talk of forming a support group that might be helpful at the present stage.”

  But they hadn’t quite done with him. The other question he had almost believed wasn’t inevitable was suddenly put by, of all people, Bibi.

  “Bit funny, wasn’t it, I mean, a bit peculiar, that your wife was the one to be released? I mean, how do you account for that?”

  The kind of rage he must never show welled up inside him, the kind that made hypertension an actual physical sensation, blood pressure pounding. He drew breath, said calmly and at that moment with perfect truth, “I can’t account for it. I can only hope that the truth about that and everything else will soon emerge.” Another long deep breath and he added, “You will of course all be prepared for a good deal of media attention. As far as the police are concerned, no restriction will be placed on anything you may choose to say to the press or any interviews you give.” He raised his head and looked at them all. “Keep your spirits up. Be optimistic.” They stared back as if he had insulted them. “Thank you for your attention,” he said.

  He stepped down from the platform, feeling a strong desire, which must not be indulged, to get away from these people. They stood about, rather, he thought, as if they expected refreshments. Then a strange thing happened. The two mothers gravitated toward each other. Until then he could have sworn there had been no rapport between them, scarcely recognition of a shared plight, but now, as if the things he had said had brought home to them their common anxiety, they approached each other, eye meeting eye. And as if following a stage direction on the same script, each reached out and they closed together in an embrace, they fell into each other’s arms.

  Men would never do that, he thought. So much of awkwardness, of embarrassment, had been left out of women. He was aware of a certain degree of embarrassment even in himself, something that surprised and very nearly amused him, while Masood looked the other way and Struther said something to the girl that made her giggle.

  Wexford coughed tactfully. They would keep in touch, he told them, and to remember that all this would break in the media by the morning.

  Dora, fetched by Karen, sat in his office, a pleasanter place than the old gym. A good night’s rest had improved her appearance, taken away that tired drawn look. Some of her natural vivacity was back and she had dressed herself carefully in a skirt and top he hadn’t seen before, blue and beige, flattering colors for her.

  Burden was also in the room and the recorder had just been switched on. At first a little stiff and inhibited by the device, Dora now spoke as freely as if it hadn’t been there.

  “Chief Inspector Wexford has entered the room,” said Burden, “at ten forty-three.”

  That seemed to amuse Dora, who smiled. “Where was I? Had I got to the first morning?” />
  “The morning of Wednesday, September fourth,” Burden said.

  “Right. I’ll go on calling them the Driver, Gloves, Rubber Face, and Tattoo, if that’s all right.” Their smiling nods encouraged her. “Oh, and the fifth one, the—what’s the word?—not transvestite. Oh, yes, hermaphrodite.”

  “What?” said Burden. “You’re not serious?”

  “I don’t know if it was a man or a woman. No faces, you see, and no voices. It was wise of them not to speak, wasn’t it?”

  “Clever villains don’t speak,” Burden said. “We know all about that round here. Go on, Dora.”

  “The others wore black sneakers but the Hermaphrodite wore those big clumping shoes with heavy tops and thick soles—are they Doc Martens?—and I did wonder if that was to make the feet look bigger—if it was a woman, that is. He or she moved like a woman, a bit more graceful than the others, less deliberate, lighter—oh, I don’t know, does one know?

  “As soon as we were left alone that morning Owen Struther got hold of Ryan—well, sat beside him and started talking to him. It was this doctrine of escape of his and I think he picked on Ryan because although he wasn’t yet fifteen, he was the only other male there. And Ryan is six feet tall. I didn’t like it because, after all, he may be the size of a man but he’s only a child still in many ways.

  “Owen kept telling Ryan to be a man. It was up to them to defend us women because they were men, that was part of their role in life, and the most important thing was for Ryan never to show fear, and a lot of other rubbish like that. I left them to it, I went into the washroom and did my best to wash myself all over. I spent a good deal of time in there trying to keep clean, and apart from anything else it was a way of passing the time.

  “Roxane washed herself too and we both used my toothbrush. I told Kitty the washroom was free, but she barely took any notice of me. She’d paced about earlier, pounded her fists on the walls and all that, but then she’d collapsed onto her bed, she’d had some coffee but no breakfast, and she seemed to have simply succumbed to despair.

  “It was strange, her husband so active and determined and full of energy, so much the audacious officer in an old war film, and she as feeble as if she was actually going through a nervous breakdown. Well, there was the spitting and the bad language but that was momentary and all in the past by then. You couldn’t understand how two people who were married to each other, and presumably had been for years and years, could have such different attitudes to life.”

  “What were these escape plans?” Wexford asked.

  “I’ll come to that. I spent the morning talking to Roxane. She told me about her parents, her father is this quite rich entrepreneur, he was born in Karachi but came here as a child, and worked his way up from nothing. She’s very proud of him but more sorry for her mother than proud. Her mother would never marry Mr. Masood, though he wanted her to. Roxane could remember him still pressing her mother to marry him when she was ten years old. But Clare—she calls her Clare—put her career first and said marriage was obsolete, though apparently her career never amounted to much. Then Mr. Masood married someone else and had more children. Roxane minds a lot about that, she’s jealous, she doesn’t like her stepmother, I’m afraid she gets a tremendous kick out of her stepmother being overweight while she, of course, is slim as a reed.

  “She told me about wanting to be a model and her father helping her and then we got on to her claustrophobia. She said it came from her grandmother—that is, Clare’s mother—shutting her in a cupboard as a punishment when she was a toddler. I mean, if that’s true it’s quite terrible, one can hardly understand such a thing, but I did wonder myself if it could really be the cause. These psychological things are always more complex than that, aren’t they?

  “Anyway, I mustn’t go on about her. She was claustrophobic, but she could just about manage in that room, only it did make me wonder how she’d manage if this modeling got off the ground and she had to stay in small hotel rooms. But maybe she’ll be another Naomi Campbell and only stay in suites.

  “They didn’t bring us any lunch. They didn’t come near us for hours. Owen Struther examined the whole room, taking Ryan around with him, paying particular attention to the window and the door. The window was still open, but it was still impossible to see much, only the greenness and that gray something that was a sort of concrete step, and it was virtually impossible to reach out of it either. Owen’s arm was too thick to get between the bars, but Ryan could squeeze his out. Not that there was any point in it. He put his arm through the bars as far as he could and managed to touch the wood of the rabbit hutch. He said he felt rain on his hand, but we could already see it was raining …”

  “Could you hear the rain?” asked Slesar.

  “You mean, drumming on the roof? No, nothing like that. I had the impression there was at least one and probably two stories above the basement room. It wasn’t a barn or a freestanding garage.

  “I’ll come back to Owen Struther. His idea was that the only possible method of escape would be while they were inside feeding us or fetching our tray and the door was unlocked. Closed but unlocked. He and Ryan would do it with Roxane to help them. I don’t think he thought much of any potential strength I might have and, of course, his poor wife was hopeless.

  “Roxane was to distract the attention of one of them. I don’t know what he had in mind at that point, maybe make another attack and we all knew what that resulted in. But I don’t think he’d have cared. He was obsessed. They would pick a time when the Hermaphrodite was one of the pair because he or she would be easier to handle. Incidentally, that would have been all very well if they’d been in and out every few minutes, but as I’ve said we hadn’t seen them for hours. Still, the whole escape plan wasn’t very practical. While Roxane was busy with one of them—being beaten up, I suppose—he would handle the other and Ryan would make his escape by way of the door.

  “I intervened then and asked him if he realized Ryan was only fourteen. For one thing, he couldn’t drive a car. What did he think he was going to do out there in the middle of God knows where? So the plan was changed and he was to go out through the door while Ryan and I handled the other one.

  “In the event, it didn’t work. It was disastrous. But I’ll come to that later, shall I?”

  There are about twenty-five different varieties of wild blackberry growing in the British Isles. Most people think only one kind is to be found, but you have only to look at the difference in leaf shapes, not to mention the size, shape, and color of the berries, to understand how they vary. The frail-looking young woman in a faded tracksuit who was picking blackberries, filling a wicker basket, and eating as many as she picked informed Martin Cook of these facts unasked.

  “Interesting,” said Cook. “What are you going to do with those?”

  “Cook them with elderberries and crab apples. Make an autumn compote.” She gave Burton Lowry an appraising look. Cook was used to that. His DC attracted black and white women alike. “I don’t suppose you’ve come here for a lesson in Elves’ cuisine, have you?”

  “I’m looking for Gary Wilson and Quilla Rice.”

  “You won’t find them here, they’ve gone. Had a bit of harassment in mind, did you? I’m afraid you’ll have to make do with me.”

  Cook ignored that. He wouldn’t go on ignoring such provocation, but he would for a while.

  “And what might your name be?”

  The young woman shrugged. “It might be any number of things. My mother wanted to call me Tracy and my father liked Rosamund but in fact what they actually called me is Christine. Christine Colville. What’s yours?” When she got no answer she said to Lowry, “Would you like a blackberry?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Cook turned away and looked into the depths of the wood. The first tree houses at Elder Ditches were just visible in the distance. He could see someone sitting in a clearing, apparently holding a musical instrument, but all was silent.

  “Is th
ere someone”—he hardly knew how to put it—“well, in charge here?”

  “You want me to take you to our leader?”

  “If you’ve got one, yes.”

  “Oh, we have one,” she said. “The King of the Wood. Haven’t you heard of him?”

  The name came back to Cook. He remembered the statement to the Kingsmarkham Courier. “He’s called Conrad Tarling?”

  She nodded. She picked up her basket, turned to them and beckoned. “Follow me.” As she walked along she plucked bunches of elderberries from the bushes which filled about an acre before the tall trees were reached. Cook and Lowry walked along behind her.

  “I’ll come back for the crab apples,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of the King in the Wood, have you?”

  “You just said it was Tarling.”

  “Not that one,” she said scornfully. “In Italy, by the lake of Nemi, in ancient times. This man was called the King in the Wood. He walked round and round this tree, nervous and afraid, armed with a sword, ever watchful, because he knew men would come and fight him, would try to kill him, so that the killer could be the next King.”

  “Oh, yes?” said Cook, but Lowry said, “He was a priest and a murderer and sooner or later he would be murdered and the man who killed him would be priest in his stead. Such was the rule of the sacred grove.”

  Christine Colville smiled, but Cook said, “The what?”

  It sounded a lot like Sacred Globe to him. She eyed his puzzled face and began to laugh. Cook hadn’t the faintest idea what she and Lowry had been talking about, but he was pretty sure she at least was sending him up. When they reached the trees, when they were among them, Christine Colville set down her basket, lifted her head, and whistled. It was a whistle like a bird calling—pu-wee, pu-wee.