Road Rage

by Ruth Rendell

  Had she seen anything untoward between Saturday midnight and Sunday evening? To Lynn’s astonishment she had.

  “They don’t usually work that late,” said Lucinda Lee. “Or maybe I should say that early. I’d just got off to sleep, it was all of one in the morning, and this car came in making an unbelievable noise.”

  “What sort of noise?”

  “I don’t really approve of cars. I mean, they’re the biggest agent of pollution of all, aren’t they? I haven’t got one, I wouldn’t, and I don’t know much about them. I can’t actually drive. But this one sounded as if he’d got here in it, but he couldn’t get it to start again.”

  “You mean the engine stalled?”

  “Do I? If you say so. Anyway, I got up and looked out of the window. I was going to shout at him. I mean, midnight’s bad enough. They use the end there as a toilet, those fellows, it’s disgusting—are they allowed to do that?”

  Lynn said gently, “You were telling me you looked out of the window.”

  “Well, I didn’t shout. The car was standing there and he was doing something up the end, bending over something—well, it’s embarrassing, isn’t it? Worse than dogs, at least a dog is natural.”

  It was necessary to deflect her from pet subjects of pollution, Contemporary Cars, and lavatorial lapses. Lynn interrupted her again.

  “Could you describe him and describe the car?”

  Soon it became plain that the car used was small and red. At first Lucinda Lee had thought the man was Leslie Cousins but he was too tall to be Cousins and too thin. She described him as wearing jeans and a zipper jacket.

  Later on Sunday morning, mid-morning it had been, when she looked out again, she had seen the camouflage sleeping bag, but she was so used to seeing rubbish dumped there that she took no further notice.

  Brendan Royall had spent the night at Marrowgrave Hall. Karen left her car at its gates and made her way into the grounds, wishing there was more cover than these second-growth trees, scarcely more than saplings, and all these ubiquitous nettles. Wexford had once said to her that we were lucky in that the English countryside wasn’t dangerous as some places were, the worst to fear being adders and nettles, and whoever saw adders these days? Luckily, she didn’t react much to nettle stings.

  Rabbits were everywhere, hundreds, in her estimation. They had cropped the turf so that it looked as if someone had shaved it, but still they went on eating what was left. She had been there about fifteen minutes when Royall came out of the front door with a camera. He stood there photographing the rabbits, which must have been too far away to appear as more than dark dots on the film. This done, he began walking forward, and Karen could hear the strange high-pitched whistle he was making. If it was intended to pacify the rabbits or even attract them to him, it failed and had the opposite effect. Each animal seemed to freeze before running helter-skelter for the safety of the bushes.

  Then Freya came out, draped like a statue on a Roman frieze. She said something to him and handed him something. Royall hung the camera around his neck and got into the Winnebago. This was enough to send Karen racing back to her car. By the time the Winnebago emerged she had moved back onto the edge of the ditch and under the shelter of overhanging branches. Royall turned left toward Forby. It was a cumbersome vehicle to be driving along these narrow lanes. He took them slowly and Karen kept a long way behind.

  There was no way of bypassing Kingsmarkham from this direction, and Royall took the Winnebago right through the town, causing a severe holdup in York Street, which was already double-parked. He was heading for the bypass site, Karen thought, or at any rate for its environs. She wondered how Damon Slesar was getting on, who, by coincidence really, had the other surveillance task, that of keeping Conrad Tarling under observation. If anyone got the evening off, if there was any letup in the hunt for Sacred Globe, she was meeting Damon for a meal in Kingsmarkham at eight. It wouldn’t be the first time they had been out together, but the first time a meeting between them had happened by design and not by chance or from simple convenience.

  Brendan Royall was heading for Myfleet, she supposed, by way of Framhurst. If he was going to one of the camps he would have turned off sooner, certainly by the time they reached Framhurst Cross. The lights were against him, she could see from a long way off, and she slowed almost to a stop. He had moved off up the Myfleet road before she got to the junction and by then the lights had turned red again. Karen thought maybe she wasn’t very good at this and she wondered if Damon was making a better job of it.

  A lot of tree people were sitting at tables outside the Framhurst Teashop. She could even see, from the car, those little pots of nonlactic soy milk. The lights changed and she sprinted up after the Winnebago, but it had disappeared from her view around one, or several, of these bends in the twelve-foot-high lane. Of course she had to meet another car, it was just her luck. She had to reverse about fifty yards before she found, not exactly a lay-by but a slight widening of the lane. She pulled into it and saw the Winnebago, the unmistakable large white mobile caravan, far away on the horizon, pursuing its course over the hillside, and now disappearing into the valley.

  She hadn’t much choice but to continue in the same direction, down into the dip, up the hill, bends and windings everywhere, down into the valley, and there ahead of her was a field full of cars. Goland’s Farm. The car park for the tree people’s vans and clunkers. The Winnebago in the middle of it was like a swan in a pond of ugly ducklings. She sat in her car waiting and watching it. It couldn’t have been there for more than five minutes before she arrived.

  There were people outside the house that had once been a chapel. She looked at them through her binoculars. A woman and two men, neither of whom was Brendan Royall. He must be sitting in the cab or in the back, the living area. After all, that’s what it was, a place to live in as well as drive, to sleep in, eat in, read in, and probably watch television for all she knew. She moved the car to where she had the Winnebago well in her sights. The binoculars showed her an empty cab.

  The Winnebago had curtains but these were all fastened back. Her excellent glasses had no difficulty in revealing the entire interior to her. Unless Royall was hiding under the bed he wasn’t in there, no one was, it was empty. Suddenly she knew exactly what had happened. The something Freya had handed him outside Marrowgrave Hall was a set of car keys. He had come here in the Winnebago and left again in Freya’s car.

  The message might come by letter, as the first one had. He could think of about a hundred addresses, authorities, companies, firms, public bodies, to whom such a letter might be sent. He could only trust to it that if any of them received a letter they would pass it on. It wouldn’t be fax or E-mail, he had been through all that before. A letter or a phone call or nothing.

  Nothing until the next body …

  After all, though they had talked of negotiations, they had no need of them. Their demands were known, their demand really. The building of the bypass was not to be postponed or suspended but canceled altogether, presumably in perpetuity. It was a ridiculous condition because even if any government was prepared to promise such a thing, the guarantee couldn’t be binding on its successors—or could it? Suppose the land was set aside and preserved in its present state as he had heard certain royal forests were, or Hampstead Heath was? Suppose it was purchased, for instance, by the National Trust?

  He found himself ignorant of the law in these respects. But Sacred Globe would have made themselves conversant with it. It was well within the bounds of probability that they would ask for a promise from the National Trust as to the future of the bypass site.

  He asked the Chief Constable for permission to address Sacred Globe through the medium of television, appeal to them, ask for the return of the remaining three hostages, and require them to state their demands. Permission was refused.

  “These people may not fulfill the definition of terrorists as we know it, Reg, but terrorists they are. We can’t be seen to negotiate with t
hem. They can address us, but we can’t address them.”

  “Only they don’t address us,” said Wexford.

  “How long is it now, Reg?”

  “Forty-eight hours, sir.”

  “And in that time they’ve done what you might call their worst.”

  “Their worst so far,” said Wexford.

  Damon Slesar caught up with him as he was making his way into the old gym. Wexford, turning around, thought he looked tired. Those dark, almost emaciated people showed their tiredness in bruise marks around the eyes, and Damon’s eyes were sunk in gray hollows. He wondered how his showed—in a general aging, no doubt.

  “Tarling hasn’t been anywhere apart from the Elder Ditches camp,” he said. “He’s been back home since mid-afternoon. He went to take a look at the environmental survey, met Royall there, and they went back to the camp together. And that’s about it.”

  “Perhaps you’d like to tell Karen,” Wexford said not very pleasanty. “She’ll be interested to know where Royall was, seeing that she lost him.”

  You could tell so much from a person’s eyes, he thought, the subtle changes to the whole face. Criticism of Lynn Fancourt or Barry Vine would scarcely have affected Slesar, but when Karen was its object he became as vulnerable as if it had been directed against himself. Still, all he said was, “I’ll tell her, sir.”

  Something in the tone of his voice told Wexford Slesar would make occasion to speak to her, but if Brendan Royall came into the conversation it would be purely incidental.

  “Okay. After the meeting you can call it a day.”

  They assembled in front of him with their news, their successes—not many of these—their ideas—even fewer.

  He saw the exchanged glance between Karen and Damon and told himself now was no time to take an interest in the involvement of human beings. In passing only would he notice and be pleased that the exacting Karen, feminist, sharp critic, perfectionist, had perhaps at last found someone to suit her.

  The day was over. An hour of peace had come and he was going to use it to listen to Dora’s hypnosis tape. At last.

  20

  The voice he expected would be a sleepwalker’s, bemused, proceeding as from a medium in a trance. He prepared himself to be unnerved by it. Instead, what he heard were Dora’s measured tones, steady, sane, almost conversational. She sounded perfectly at ease, occasionally excited by what had been dredged up out of her unconscious and what she immediately seemed to recognize as truth.

  “It was the boy,” she said now. “Ryan. He had such a thing about his father, he was always talking about his father. His father died months before he was born. In the Falklands War. Did I tell you that?”

  Silence. Dr. Rowland didn’t speak.

  “It’s rather strange, isn’t it, having so much love and admiration for someone you never knew and couldn’t have known?”

  This time the hypnotherapist said, “People idealize a lost or far-distant parent. That, after all, is the parent who doesn’t punish, who never says no, who doesn’t get exasperated or tired or cross.”

  “Yes.” Dora seemed to be considering this. “His father left him a book of drawings of—wildlife, I suppose you’d call it, that he’d made. Well, he didn’t exactly leave it to him, he left it behind, and Ryan’s mother gave it to him when he was twelve. They were drawings of pondlife, frogs and newts and caddises and all the things he’d seen when he was Ryan’s age and which now weren’t there anymore, had disappeared or were greatly endangered. He treasures that book. It’s his most precious possession.”

  The hypnotist said, “Talk about the room.”

  “Big, thirty by twenty. Feet, I mean, not meters. I can’t do meters. Whitewashed walls. Five beds. Three up one end, those were mine and Ryan’s and Roxane’s, and two up the window end for the Struthers. Owen Struther moved their beds up there himself. To be away from the rest of us, I suppose. And when Owen and Kitty were gone they didn’t take the beds away.

  “The floor was concrete, cold underfoot. It was always cold to touch. The door was very heavy, made of oak, I think. When they opened the door I could see green and gray outside and some red brick. The green was grass. The gray was stone.”

  The other voice said very gently, “What could you see out of the window?”

  “Green and gray, a stone step, I think. Oh, and there was blue too. Patches of blue.”

  “Blue sky?”

  There was a silence. Then Dora said, “It wasn’t the sky. It was something else blue. Opposite the window. Sometimes it was high up and sometimes lower down. I don’t mean it moved while I watched it. I mean that one day, the Wednesday, I think, it was a small blue patch high up, about eight feet up, and on the Thursday it was a smaller blue patch about three feet up.”

  Silence again, a silence so protracted that Wexford knew it was the end. Disappointment had succeeded earlier euphoria. Was that all? Dora had been put through an involuntary—she couldn’t have refused and remained a responsible member of society—changing of her consciousness and therefore a loss of her dignity, for that?

  He felt like kicking the recorder but he switched it off instead and went home. She was asleep and that didn’t surprise him. A message was on the answering machine from Sheila to the effect that she would come back to Kingsmarkham whenever they liked, but wouldn’t Mother like to come and stay with them?

  “Look what happened last time she tried,” Wexford said aloud.

  He went to bed and dreamed. It was the first dream he had had since she came back. He was in a place of vast buildings, warehouses, factories, mills, old railway stations, some of which were recognizable. The Mulino Stucky in Venice, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. He wandered among them, awestruck by their size, by John Martin’s Pandemonium and Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons. It was as if he had strayed miraculously into a book of old illustrations and at the same time, more prosaically, into the Stowerton industrial estate. That it was a dream he knew from the first, there was never a moment of illusion. He passed along a street of Blake’s dark satanic mills and turning a corner, came upon Westminster Abbey. Then he knew. He was looking for the place where the hostages were.

  Without finding them or their prison he woke up and it was morning, inquest day. His newspaper, on an inside page, carried an article by a well-known feature writer suggesting that any more concessions made to Sacred Globe would constitute a “Terrormentalists’ Charter.”

  Dora, making coffee, getting breakfast, said, “I didn’t sleep very well. I kept thinking about them all. That poor Roxane, when she was locked in the washroom. I don’t think I’ll ever get her cries and her panic out of my head. And the Struthers, they were both so pathetic, really. She simply collapsed, she hadn’t any inner resources at all. Well, I wasn’t very enterprising, but at least I didn’t cry all the time.”

  “Or at all.”

  “I was pretty near it sometimes, Reg.”

  “I heard your tape,” he said. “You must be unique.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You must be the only person on earth without an unconscious. It’s all in your consciousness. You told us everything, didn’t you? Kept nothing back. Well, except that blue thing.”

  She looked sideways at him, smiling warily.

  “What kind of blue was it?”

  “Sky blue,” she said. “A perfect true sky blue. The blue of the sky at noon on a fine summer day.”

  “Then it was the sky you saw.”

  “No.” She was adamant. She hooked two pieces of toast out of the toaster on the tines of a fork, flipped them onto a plate, reached into the cupboard for the marmalade jar. “No. It wasn’t the sky. You want some coffee? Oh, sit down, Reg. You can take half an hour off for your breakfast.”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “It wasn’t the sky, it was just sky color. Anyway, was there any cloudless blue sky while I was in there?”

  “I don’t believe there was.”

  “No. This was more like somet
hing hung out of a window or painted on but the difficulty with that is that it moved. It was high up on the Wednesday and low down on the Thursday. And on Friday at lunchtime Gloves boarded up the window a bit more. Did he do that so that I wouldn’t be able to see the blue thing?”

  “You didn’t come up with any reason for why they let you go?”

  “If they knew I’d seen things they’d have been more likely to keep me, wouldn’t they? Or killed me. Oh, don’t look like that. I was telling you about the Struthers. Owen Struther was too young to have been in any war, yet he behaved like an old soldier, all that ‘courage in the face of the enemy’ stuff, the obligation to escape, it was ridiculous.”

  “Perhaps he was an old soldier. You can be a soldier without a war to fight.”

  “He wasn’t. I asked him. He didn’t like being asked, he seemed quite affronted. Ryan admired him. I think he’d have followed wherever Owen led. I suppose the poor boy is always looking for a father figure—or is that too psychological?”

  “The trouble with psychology,” said Wexford epigrammatically, “is that it doesn’t take human nature into account.”

  Mavrikiev gave his evidence as an expert witness to the Coroner’s Court, most of it technical and obscure, an analysis of the nature of certain wounds and fractures. When he was asked if in his opinion Roxane Masood had been pushed from or thrown off a height, he replied that he had no opinion, he was unable to say. The inquest was adjourned, as Wexford had known it would be.

  Sacred Globe’s silence hung over Kingsmarkham like a fog. Or so it seemed to him. Not to the rest of the world, the country, perhaps. The kidnapping, someone had told him, had even got into the American papers. There was a tiny paragraph on the foreign pages of the New York Times. To Wexford it was as if the hostages had been removed as far away as that, thousands of miles. The sun was shining, it was a bright day, but all the time he was conscious of this enveloping mist.

  “Sixty-eight hours,” he said to Burden. “That’s how long it’s been.”