Road Rage

by Ruth Rendell

  Clare Cox had been drinking since she got home. A reek of whisky came from her. If it had been drunk to save her, to anesthetize her against what she feared was coming, it was ineffective. Standing close to her, holding her hand, Masood told her, and there was no waiting for the news to sink in, for shock to pass, for this stunning to yield to grief. Her screams began at once, like a chemical reaction, as sharp and insistent as a starved baby crying for the pain of hunger to go away.

  “Go home, Reg,” the Chief Constable said on the phone. He was in bed himself. He too had had a long day. “Go home. There’s nothing more you can do. It’s ten past eleven.”

  “The press has got it, sir.”

  “Have they now? How did that happen?”

  “I wish I knew,” Wexford said.

  Dora was asleep. He was glad of it because it meant he didn’t have to explain. The thought of telling her Roxane was dead horrified him almost as much as being with Clare Cox had done. The woman’s screams still rang in his ears. Yet Hassy Masood had passed on the news of his daughter’s death to the media. In spite of what he had said to the Chief Constable, Wexford was sure of it. Masood had told the news to Roxane’s mother, had done his best no doubt to calm Roxane’s mother—and then told the media his daughter was dead. Well, Masood had other children, a second family, a new life, and to him Roxane had been the grateful recipient of his largesse and someone to take occasionally to expensive restaurants. Her death was no more than the waste of her beauty, looks that in her case meant capital. Because Dora was there beside him, he slept like the dead. It took the alarm to wake him and it woke her first.

  “I’ll go down,” he said quickly, seeing her already up and in her dressing gown.

  He had to get to the papers first. There it was, all over the front pages: HOSTAGE MODEL FOUND DEAD, ROXANE THE FIRST TO DIE, ROXANE MURDERED, A FATHER’S GRIEF … So he had been right. He went back upstairs and told Dora.

  At first she refused to believe. It was too much. There was no reason. With tears running down her face, she said, “What did they do to her?”

  “Don’t know yet. I have to go in a minute. I’m sorry but I must. I have to go to the postmortem.”

  “She was too brave,” Dora said.

  “Very likely.”

  “She said good-bye to me, she said, ‘Good-bye, Dora.’ ”

  Dora turned her face into the pillow and sobbed bitterly. He kissed her. He didn’t want to leave her, but he had to.

  Tuesday. One week since the hostages were taken. The press reminded him of that as they crowded him on his way into the mortuary.

  “Two down, three to go,” one of them said.

  “How did you get your wife out, Chief Inspector?” asked a girl from a television news program.

  Mavrikiev was already there. “Good morning, good morning. How are you today? Mr. Vine is about somewhere. Shall we get started?”

  They all got into green rubber gowns and put on gauze masks. This was Barry Vine’s first time and though not particularly squeamish when faced with a dead body, this, Wexford thought, might be different. The sound of the saw got to people, that and the smell, more often than the sight of organs being removed.

  Now that the body was exposed, Wexford saw what he hadn’t seen the night before. The right side of the head was shallowly staved in, the hair matted with dark clotted blood. It seemed to him, though, that the facial bruising was less marked, less violently colored, appearing as yellowish-green streaks and blotches on the waxen skin.

  Mavrikiev worked swiftly and always in silence. While other pathologists might extract an organ, hold it up, and comment on some peculiarity in its structure or progress of its deterioration, he proceeded coolly, speechlessly, and deadpan. If Barry Vine had turned pale it wasn’t obvious to Wexford. The mask and green cap hid so much, but after a few moments and a muffled “Excuse me,” he left the room with one gloved hand over his mouth.

  Breaking his rule, Mavrikiev gave a small tight laugh and said, “A case of the eye being stronger than the stomach.”

  He worked on, picking something out of the head wound with tweezers. Plastic containers now held the stomach, lungs, part of the brain, and whatever it was he had picked from the wound. He finished, stripped off his gloves, and came across the room to where Wexford had retreated. “I’ll stick to what I said about the time of death. Saturday afternoon.”

  “I suppose I can ask my other question now?”

  “What did she die of? That blow to the head. You don’t need any medical degrees to see that. Skull’s fractured, brain severely damaged, I won’t go into a lot of technical stuff, it’ll be in the report.”

  “You mean someone struck her a violent blow to the head? With what? Can you say?”

  Mavrikiev slowly shook his head. He handed Wexford one of the containers. It held a dozen or so small stones, some black with blood. “If someone struck her he must have hit her with a gravel path. I picked these out of the wound. I don’t think she was hit, I think she fell. I think she fell from a height onto a gravel path.”

  Barry Vine came back into the room, looking sheepish. He kept his eyes averted from the slab on which the body, now neatly covered in plastic sheeting, lay. Wexford ignored him.

  “Fell? Or was pushed or thrown?”

  “For God’s sake, you’re at it again. I’m not a magician, how many times do I have to tell you? I don’t know. If you expect a great handprint in the middle of her back, that kind of thing doesn’t happen.”

  “You could tell if she’d struggled,” said Wexford coldly.

  “Fingernails full of flesh and blood, eh? There was none of that. If someone did it he’d likely have been left-handed but there was no someone. Her right arm is broken, two of her ribs are broken, her left leg is broken in two places and her right in one. The body’s bruised down the right side. I think she fell from a height, perhaps as much as thirty feet, and she fell onto her right side.

  “And that’s it for the time being, gentlemen. I’ll thank you for your attention”—here a supercilious glance at Barry Vine—“and be off home to my brunch.”

  Vine nodded to him.

  “Feeling better?” asked Wexford breezily. “It’s just occurred to me that Brendan Royall, when we saw him, was dressed from head to foot in camouflage. Can it be coincidence?”

  19

  Stanley Trotter was still in bed in Stowerton, in the two-roomed flat in Peacock Street, when Burden called on him early on Tuesday morning. One of the Sayem brothers who kept the grocery market downstairs let him in, took him up, and pounded on Trotter’s door. Perhaps he bore a grudge against the upstairs tenant for something or other, for when Trotter came to the door in pajama bottoms and dirty vest, Ghulam Sayem smiled smugly to himself. His face had worn much the same expression when Burden announced himself as a police officer.

  It was quite a warm day, sultry and windless, but Trotter’s windows were shut tight. The room smelled unpleasant. It was exactly what Burden had expected and he analyzed the smell as compounded of sweat, urine, Malaysian take-away, and mold, the kind that forms on damp towels that are left about unwashed. Somewhat vain of his appearance and careful of his clothes, he didn’t like sitting on the greasy chair with the cigarette burns on its arms, but he hadn’t much choice. He dusted it with a tissue he had in his pocket.

  Trotter watched him. “I don’t know what you think you’ve come for,” he said.

  “Seen a paper this morning, have you? Seen the telly? Listened to the radio?”

  “No, I haven’t. Why would I? I was asleep.”

  “You’re not interested then? You don’t want to know what I’m on about?”

  Trotter didn’t say anything. He rooted about in the pockets of a garment lying across the bed, found cigarettes, and lit one. It brought on a liquid spluttering spasm of coughing.

  “You should put yourself down for a heart-lung transplant, Trotter,” said Burden. “They tell me the waiting list’s as long as your arm.” He cou
ghed himself. It was infectious. “How long were you going to leave the body there?” he snapped.

  “What body?”

  “How long were you going to leave the sleeping bag there, Trotter? Or were you going to find it yourself? Was that the idea?”

  “I’m not saying anything to you without my lawyer,” said Trotter.

  He put the cigarette down on a saucer but without stubbing it out, got into bed, and pulled the covers over his head.

  The sleeping bag had gone off to the forensic science lab at Myringham. It was made by a company called Outdoors and according to its label manufactured from a fabric that was part polyester, part cotton, and part Lycra, lined with nylon, and thinly filled with polyester fiber.

  Meanwhile, an examination of the stolen car had yielded a mass of cat hairs, pebbles from a south-coast beach, and sand, which, in the opinion of the earth and soil expert, was from the Isle of Wight. There wasn’t a fingerprint on it anywhere, inside or out.

  The car had been stolen from Ventnor, Isle of Wight. But the hostages couldn’t be there, Wexford thought. Dora would have known if she had crossed water. Her captors would never have taken the risk of using the ferry and that was the only way to reach the island.

  William Pugh, of Gwent Road, Swansea, was the owner. Wexford put through a phone call to him and asked if he had a cat. Two cats, in fact, for the hairs were from a Siamese and a black. Pugh said he hadn’t but he had a Labrador, which had been in a kennel while he and his wife were away, as if Wexford were conducting a survey into pet statistics.

  “I suppose you went on the beach, Mr. Pugh?”

  “We did not. I am seventy-six and my wife is seventy-four.”

  “So you couldn’t have transferred sand from your shoes to the inside of the car?”

  “The car was stolen within three hours of our getting there,” said Pugh.

  Another fax had come from Gwenlian Dean in Neath. Gary and Quilla had been interviewed by one of her officers. At first they claimed to know nothing of any meeting with Wexford in Framhurst, but when their memories were jogged Quilla realized whom was meant and they both talked with apparent frankness about that encounter. Chief Inspector Dean wrote that her officer had no reason to doubt the truth of what they said, that if they had even heard Wexford’s name when he gave it to them it had scarcely registered and they had soon forgotten it.

  They didn’t intend to return to Kingsmarkham for the time being but were going on to north Yorkshire, where a protest was being mounted over the proposal to build a housing estate. Only one factor in all this had surprised Inspector Dean and this, contrary to what she had been led to suspect, was Gary and Quilla’s ownership of a car. They had arrived by car and were going to Yorkshire by car, a respectable-looking four-year-old Ford Escort. Had Wexford any further interest in them?

  The inquest on Roxane Masood was fixed for the following day and still there had been no message from Sacred Globe. It was as if Sacred Globe had died or disappeared, taking its hostages with it. Wexford found himself constantly looking at his watch, counting up the hours since Sacred Globe had last been in touch, forty, forty-one … He phoned Gwenlian Dean, thanked her for her trouble, and said he would see Gary and Quilla on their return. By then he hoped, he said stoutly, that he wouldn’t need to see them.

  Meanwhile he had Karen Malahyde keep Brendan Royall under surveillance and Damon Slesar tail the King of the Wood.

  Tanya Paine told Vine she had never looked in the direction where the sleeping bag was found. She never did, she never had cause to. They were in the trailer and her phones kept ringing. In the lulls between calls she craned and twisted her neck, leaned forward, shifted her chair, in an effort to prove to him that no matter what contortions she had put her body through she couldn’t have seen that corner where the sleeping bag was, an area now cordoned off with blue and white crime tape.

  Vine had never before seen fingernails like hers. He couldn’t imagine how they were done. Each one had a design on it like a piece of blue, green, and violet paisley-patterned satin. Was it printed or had some artist done it with a very fine brush? Or did you buy transfers, stick them on, and lacquer over the top? It was as much as he could do to keep his eyes off those fingernails while Tanya stretched and craned.

  “I’m not talking about when you were in here, Ms. Paine,” he said. “But when you arrived and when you left,” and remembering her tastes, “and when you went out for your chocolate bar and your cappuccino.”

  “I could have seen it then, I suppose, but I didn’t.” She gave him a sideways glance, resentful, cagey. “And I don’t eat things like that anymore. I’m trying to lose weight. It was an apple and a diet Coke.”

  No distress over the other girl’s violent and shocking death was apparent in her manner. She had seen about it on breakfast television and bought a newspaper on her way to work, the kind of newspaper—it lay between her phones—that carries the maximum of black seventy-two—point headline and the minimum of text. This one’s front page said only MY LOVELY GIRL, framing a model agency’s photograph of Roxane in a bikini.

  “You were a friend of Roxane’s. You were at school with her.”

  “I was at school with a lot of girls.”

  “Yes,” said Vine, “but this is the one that was abducted and is now dead. It’s a bit strange, isn’t it? Let me put it like this. First of all the people who abducted her, this Sacred Globe, first of all they choose a car-hire firm where you work, and when one of the hostages is dead they return the body to where you work. The body of your friend. Bit of a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”

  One of her phones rang. She answered it, wrote down a time and a place on her pad. It seemed an inefficient and old-fashioned way of doing things. The design on the ballpoint pen matched her fingernails.

  “Bit of a coincidence?” Vine said again.

  “I don’t know what you mean. You keep saying ‘my friend.’ She wasn’t my friend. I just knew her.”

  “She made a point of booking taxis from here because you were here. She liked a chat on the phone to you.”

  “Look,” said Tanya, “I can tell you why she liked talking to me. It was so as I knew she’d got a rich dad and how she was going to be a model—fat chance, I thought—and that she could afford taxis when others have to get the bus. I thought, For two pins I’d say to you, at least my mum and dad was married and still together.”

  So that was a point of advantage in today’s youth meritocracy? Wexford would be interested. No one got married anymore, but if your parents were married and still married, status was conferred on you.

  “You didn’t like her?”

  Tanya seemed slowly to have realized that it might be unwise to tell a policeman that a victim of violence was personally antipathetic to you.

  “I’m not saying that. You’re putting words into my mouth.”

  “Why do you think her body was put here?”

  “How should I know?” Now evidently seemed to her the time to tell an essential truth. “I’m not a murderer.”

  “Have you a boyfriend, Miss Paine?”

  He had astonished her. “What do you want to know that for?”

  “If you’d rather not answer …”

  She watched him write something down, said, “No, I haven’t, since you ask. Not right now.” It was an admission she would infinitely have preferred not to make and she fidgeted uncomfortably, twisting her body and showing him that she did indeed need to lose weight. “Temporarily, right now, I don’t, no.”

  Her phone rang.

  Neither Leslie Cousins nor Robert Barrett could give Lynn Fancourt any idea of when the sleeping bag containing Roxane Masood’s body was brought to the parking area. But while Barrett would only repeat monotonously that he hadn’t seen any strange cars about, Cousins was able to state firmly that it hadn’t been there at midnight on Saturday when he returned from taking a fare from Kingsmarkham Station to Forby.

  “How can you be so sure?”


  “I went down there. To the back fence.”

  “Why? Because you saw something?”

  Lynn could tell he didn’t want to say. His face had reddened. She remembered the occasional behavior of her father and her brothers and marveled at the curious ways of men who often, even when they have bathrooms or public conveniences not far away …

  “You went down there for a natural purpose, did you, Mr. Cousins? To relieve yourself against the hedge?”

  “Yeah, well, you know …”

  “It was easier in the days when police officers were always male, wasn’t it? Less embarrassing.” Lynn gave the rather hard bright smile she had seen on Karen Malahyde’s face. “You went down to the back fence to relieve yourself and at that time, midnight, there was nothing lying among the nettles under those trees—right?”

  “Right,” said Cousins with a sigh of relief.

  The bus station might have been a mile away instead of next door for all anyone working there could have seen. The high blank brick wall blocked off everything. On the other side the shoe repairer had closed up and gone home at five on Saturday afternoon, the hairdresser at five-thirty, and the photocopiers at the same time. Only the aromatherapist lived on the premises.

  The windows of her first-floor flat looked toward the Engine Driver at the front—she had had those double-glazed—and at the back over the comparative peace of the waste ground. She invited Lynn into a strongly scented living room that obviously also did duty for client consultations. The walls were covered with photographs and highly stylized drawings of flowers and grasses. A much larger photograph was of the aromatherapist herself, apparently thrown into a state of ecstasy by the scent emanating from a flacon she held to her nose.

  She told Lynn her name was Lucinda Lee, which sounded unlikely, but the truth was that people did have unlikely names.

  “Half the time I get no sleep here at all,” she complained. “What with the pub at the front and those cars going in and out at the back. They’re threatening to put my rent up and when they do I’m going.”