Road Rage

by Ruth Rendell

  She made a strange contrast with her hosts, for she was as thin as they were fat and dressed as unconventionally as they were formal. Face and hands were an unhealthy waxen white, but what the rest of her was like it was impossible to tell. She was swathed from head to foot in something like a very old faded sari, frayed and tattered, which, bundled around her though it was, still provided no illusion of adding bulk to her emaciated shape. But she was eating as heartily as the Panicks. In front of her was a plateful of bacon, scrambled eggs, fried bread, fried sausages, fried mushrooms, tomatoes, and potato crisps, identical to those set before Bob and Patsy.

  She showed no sign of alarm at their entry, unless giving Damon Slesar a long assessing glance was the result of fear. More likely she fancied him, as Nicky said to him afterward. Patsy said she was sure they wouldn’t mind if she went back to her meal and wasn’t it funny the police always seemed to call while they were eating?

  “Hungry, I daresay,” said Bob with his mouth full. “Give them something to keep the pangs away. There’s a nice bit of ham from last night and if they don’t mind carving it themselves, so as not to interfere with your meal again, Patsy, that would go down a treat with some of that granary loaf and Branston pickle.”

  “Nothing for us, thank you,” said Nicky.

  Damon said, in a way she thought uncalled-for, that it was very kind of them, and then he redeemed himself by asking Freya if she was a friend of the Panicks. Patsy, helping herself to more from a saucepan, answered for her.

  “She is now. I hope anyone who comes here and enjoys our hospitality can be termed a friend, don’t you, Bob?”

  “You’re right there, Patsy. Is there another sausage going?”

  “Of course there is. And give Freya one. As a matter of fact, Freya is Brendan’s friend. A special friend, is that right, Freya?” The woman’s tiny eyes twinkled deep in the piled flesh, like lights at the ends of tunnels. “Brendan brought her here last evening, just had a quick bite and then had to be on his way.”

  Nicky remembered Mrs. Panick’s undertaking to let her know if and when Brendan Royall turned up. She had been surprised by that promise and wasn’t surprised it hadn’t been honored.

  “On his way where?” she said.

  The woman called Freya reacted as if her patience, sorely tried for the past ten minutes, had come to breaking point. She threw down knife and fork, sending a splatter of fat to strike the center of the napkin that was tucked inside Bob Panick’s shirt collar.

  “Why can’t you leave him alone? What’s he done? Nothing. Do you know what a visitor from outer space would think if she came to this planet? She’d think you were all psychotic. Not only do you fuck up the whole planet but you punish people who try to stop it being fucked.”

  Bob Panick shook his head almost sorrowfully and helped himself to bread. His wife said conversationally to no one in particular, “That’s what they mean on the TV when they say the next program contains strong language. Have you noticed that?” She smiled, eyes twinkling, at Damon Slesar. “I always take it as a sign to come out here and get us a cup of tea and a packet of bikkies. Brendan,” she said to Nicky, “had just popped over to the bypass site, dear.”

  “Why do you have to tell them that?” shouted Freya. “What’s your motive, that’s what I’d like to know? You don’t have to talk to them, you know. You’ve done nothing. Brendan’s done nothing. Brendan never talks to them, he doesn’t speak, he just stays silent, you want to take a leaf out of his book. Why d’you let them fuck you over? Brendan wouldn’t say a word to them, he wouldn’t utter.”

  “So where is Brendan now?” This was Nicky, being patient.

  “Something about going to have a look at a—what was it, Bob?”

  Bob Panick considered, rubbed his forehead. “Folks from Europe, that Common Market, some environment they’re making. He’s gone in the Winnebago.”

  The environmental assessment. Yes, Brendan Royall would want to take a firsthand view of that, would probably photograph the proceedings, having parked at Goland’s Farm.

  The meadows here were steep hillsides on which sheep grazed, the hedges tight and dark green and the woods clustering, and the sudden sight of a field packed with cars, vans, and trailers, few of them in pristine condition and most downright shabby, jarred the imagination. The farmhouse that they expected to be a picturesque half-timbered building looked instead like a converted chapel.

  Such conversions had become quite common in the south of England as congregations grew smaller. They provided large comfortable dwelling houses, if you didn’t mind church windows and what Wexford called an “odor of sanctity.” This one, called Goland’s Farm, was of red brick with a gray slate roof and a lot of unsuitable window boxes. Any of its shabby outbuildings might have been the original farmhouse, wedged now between tall uncompromising silos.

  Damon parked by the gate, they walked in among the tree people’s cars, and there they found Barry Vine contemplating an empty Winnebago.

  A fax had arrived from the Neath police, a Chief Inspector Gwenlian Dean. Crowds were gathering for the SPECIES conference but so far everything was proceeding in orderly fashion. The rally was to be conducted in the open, a good many delegates had arrived in vans or with tents, but the hierarchy were staying in a hotel where the AGM would take place on the following morning. Gary and Quilla had not yet arrived or had not been located. Gwenlian Dean would be in touch again as soon as she had anything to report.

  Wexford went into the old gym to assist the Chief Constable at the press conference. They photographed him as he walked in and he wasn’t sorry. Anything to replace that beer tankard picture that constantly reared up to haunt him.

  Montague Ryder gave a reasonable, measured, and civilized explanation of what had happened and what was being done.

  “You must have some idea where they are.” This was a stiletto-eyed young woman with long blond hair. “After all this time you must have some clue.”

  “We have a good many ideas.” Wexford tried to speak calmly, to follow the Chief Constable’s example. “It must be obvious that we can’t disclose any of these ideas at present.”

  “Are they in the London area or somewhere in the south of England?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  And the inevitable question that maddened him, asked this time by a fat reporter, male, in a gray suit and with shoulder-length shaggy gray hair. “How come it was your wife they let go?”

  Ryder answered for him, simply, “We don’t know.”

  “Yeah, well, they must have had a reason. Was it they found out she was your wife? D’you reckon they were scared to hold on to her? She wasn’t ill, was she? I mean, not a diabetic, not someone takes regular medication?”

  “Oh, no,” said Wexford, calm again. “Nothing like that. Nothing at all.”

  Burden had Christine Colville in his office, believing correctly that if she saw the inside of an interview room she would send at once for a lawyer. She was less aggressive and superior with him than she had been with DS Cook and seemed more than willing to give him Conrad Tarling’s history.

  “You an anthropologist, are you, Miss Colville?”

  She gave him a long look, the kind usually called withering.

  “I’m an actress. That doesn’t mean I have to be ignorant about everything but dramatic art.”

  He nodded. “Resting, I presume?”

  “You do presume. I’m not resting, as a matter of fact. Apart from taking part in this protest with my friends, I’m acting in Jeffrey Godwin’s play at the Weir Theatre.”

  It came back to him. Wexford had mentioned it. A play about the bypass, the environment, the activists. What was it called? He wasn’t going to ask her. Ah, yes, Extinction.

  “Have a big part, do you?”

  “The female lead.”

  The only love affair of his life—it had happened between the death of his first wife and his second marriage—had been with an actress. But she had been beautif
ul, a white-bodied, redheaded woman with a strawberry mouth and grape-green eyes. Not at all like this small, compact creature, short and sturdy with a round brown face and dark wiry hair cut to within an inch of her scalp.

  “You were telling me about the King of the Wood.”

  “From which you distracted me,” she said, quick as a flash. “Conrad’s family lives in Wiltshire. Sometimes when he goes to see them he walks. It’s eighty miles from here, but he walks. People used to do that a hundred years ago, they used to walk huge distances, but no one does now. Only Conrad.”

  “He’s got a car,” said Burden skeptically.

  “He hardly ever uses it. Mostly he lends it to others. Conrad’s a sort of saint, you know.”

  King, god, leader, and now saint. “Right. Go on.”

  “His brother Colum’s in a wheelchair. He’ll never walk again. He gave his strength and his mobility for the cause of animals. And the other brother Craig’s in prison for his own part in the struggle.”

  “Sure,” said Burden. “He was going to blow up a couple of hundred innocent people.”

  “People are never innocent.” In her words and her look he recognized the authentic voice of fanaticism. “Only animals are innocent. Guilt is exclusively the attribute of mankind.” She tapped her fist on his desk. “Conrad has never had a job,” she said, as if speaking of some spectacular achievement, and slightly amending what she had said, “He has never been gainfully employed. But he survives by his own efforts.”

  “Like Gary Wilson and Quilla Rice.”

  “No, not like them. He isn’t in the least like them.” Christine Colville used an expression he thought long dead and gone. “They are very small fry. Conrad is above the sort of odd jobs they do. His family is very poor, they are aristocratic but poor. His followers keep him.”

  “What, the other tree people? What money do they have?”

  “Not much,” she said. “It mounts up if everyone contributes.”

  “I’ll bet.” Burden repressed what he had been going to say, that Tarling had a nice little earner going. “Does he have contacts around here?”

  She misunderstood him or affected to do so. “Everyone in the woods knows the King.”

  “Maybe I’ll come and see your play,” he said and escorted her out.

  A throng of reporters and photographers rushed her. Burden went back into the old gym, where Wexford had sent out for lunch from the new Thai take-away. He drank from the can that had come with the green curry and coconut and made a face. Pushing it away he said, “What is this stuff?”

  “It would seem to be alcoholic lemonade.”

  “God.” Burden read the label. “Whose idea was that? There’s probably some law or rule about not bringing alcohol onto these premises.”

  “It tastes disgusting anyway. If I drink alcohol I want it to taste like alcohol, I want to feel the kick, not lemonade with a mystery sting in its tail. It’ll be alcoholic milk next.”

  Wexford glanced out of the window. He wouldn’t have put it past some wily cameraman to be lurking out there, hoping for a potshot of him holding a drinks can, any sort of drinks can. But there was no one in the car park.

  “Mike,” he said, looking at his watch, “it’s past two. We haven’t heard a word from Sacred Globe since five yesterday. I don’t understand it, it doesn’t add up. It must appear to them, much as I regret it, as if we’re simply yielding to their demands. Firstly by calling a halt to work on the bypass, secondly by releasing the story to the press when they asked us to. The fact that we were going to release it at that particular time anyway is neither here nor there. They don’t know that. So, why, if it seems as if everything is going the way they want it, don’t they take advantage of their apparently strong position and come right back with their final demand?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t understand it either.”

  “I’m going to see how Dora got on under hypnosis.”

  17

  As soon as he saw him Burden recognized Brendan Royall. He didn’t know he knew him, but when he was brought into the police station, into Interview Room One, Burden remembered him from six or seven years back. It had been one afternoon when he had gone to meet Jenny from Kingsmarkham Comprehensive. Royall was standing on the school steps, on the top just outside the entrance, holding forth to a group of his contemporaries who surrounded him.

  He had been only sixteen then, a tallish weedy boy with a light aureole of Harpo Marx hair. It was the eyes that Burden remembered. They were astonishingly dark, as if the hair must be dyed, and burning bright, the eyes of the fanatic, under thick sprouting eyebrows like animal fur. And the voice was memorable too, harsh, haranguing, with an ugly flat accent, the vowels hollow, the ends of words gabbled.

  The years between had brought about little change in his appearance. The hair was rather darker and longer than Burden recalled, but the eyes were still fierce and with that crazy brightness, the eyebrows still like a strip of rabbit skin. How he had been dressed in those days Burden had forgotten but on this Monday afternoon Royall was dressed from head to foot in green and brown camouflage. In woodland he might have melted into the background, which perhaps was the idea. As to the voice, Burden couldn’t tell if it had changed or not, for Royall declined to open his mouth.

  He had brought his lawyer with him. Or this solicitor, not a local man, summoned on the Winnebago’s phone, had appeared on the police station steps coincidentally with Royall’s own arrival. He had very little to do and could have given his client no better code of conduct than that adopted by Royall without his advice.

  The man, who looked as if about to take part in some jungle assault course, sat silent and grave on one side of the table, his solicitor next to him. Even while he was starting the recorder, announcing that the interviewee and his lawyer were present along with DI Burden and DC Fancourt, Burden knew it was a farce. The solicitor could barely conceal his smiles.

  Next door, in Interview Room Two, Nicky Weaver with Ted Hennessy confronted Conrad Tarling, the King of the Wood. His solicitor had taken longer in arriving and Tarling had waited there for nearly an hour before the young woman called India Walton turned up.

  Tarling sat in his chair in his robes, the long full sleeves of his outer garment ostentatiously turned back to show his bare smooth arms, heavily laden with silver and copper bracelets chased in Celtic patterns. He too at first was silent, still as stone, his eyes fixed on the small high window as if a fascinating scene could be discerned through it instead of the brick wall of the magistrates’ court.

  Wexford was tempted to put his head around the door but the Codes of Practice for the Police and Criminal Evidence Act prohibit the interruption of interviews in all but exceptional circumstances. A senior officer’s curiosity would hardly fall into this category so he had to content himself with a glance through the tiny interior window. The sight he saw reminded him of a story he had heard in his school days in the Latin lesson of those old Roman statesmen who went into the Senate when they heard the Goths were coming and sat marblelike and unmoving on their thrones. Taking them for statues, the Goths prodded and poked them until one rose up and struck back, whereupon all were slain. Wexford, tired and frustrated, would have liked to prod Tarling into life, into some reaction, but knew how untenable such a course must be.

  DC Lowry had just told him that the white Mercedes whose number Nicky Weaver had taken had been found abandoned on the Stowerton industrial estate. A stolen car, of course, dumped outside a disused factory building where there were no witnesses, its windscreen smashed and its tires deflated.

  Lowry came up to him again and said, “Can I have a word, sir?”

  The man looked like a black Marlon Brando, Wexford thought, but Brando in his Streetcar Named Desire days. “Yes, what is it?”

  “Your wife mentions a man who always wore gloves. It occurred to me he might have done that because his hands were like mine.” Lowry held up his long-fingered narrow hands, the color of a plum on
which the bloom still lingers. “I mean because he was black.”

  “Good thinking,” Wexford said and he went back to Dora, who was in the old gym listening to her own voice speaking as if she had never heard it before.

  Tarling became as vociferous as Royall was silent. In spite of India Walton’s discreet suggestions that he had no need to answer this or that, that he was not obliged to respond to that question and that this one was in the circumstances outrageous, Tarling talked. He held forth. Not that he answered any questions or even appeared to have heard them. He simply talked as if he was making an inflammatory political speech, even as if there was no interrogator present but only a silent receptive audience.

  He talked about his brother Craig, his high principles, his love of animals, and his equating of all animals from the humblest to the greatest with mankind. Therefore, if animals could be used in vivisection, human beings could, with equal justification, be blown up. In his eyes, the only difference was that the human beings died a quicker death. He talked of the injustice of Craig Tarling’s fate, his courage and undaunted demeanor in prison. When he had finished with his older brother’s biography he talked about his younger brother, who had been seriously injured under the wheels of a truck transporting live sheep to Brightlingsea. He paused quite courteously for Nicky to question him and responded by talking about himself, his history, his devotion to the English countryside and what he called the “restoration of Nature.”

  “It’s particularly interesting,” he said, “that all three of us children of bourgeois conservative parents, all the products of distinguished public schools and the two great universities, have each committed his life to a different branch of the protection of created things: my brother Craig to ill-used small mammals, my brother Colum to the beasts of the field, and myself to the whole of the natural world. You may well ask yourselves why this has happened …”