Road Rage

by Ruth Rendell

  “The home of known activists, of one terrorist,” said Burden. “Of a man who half killed himself in an animal transport protest.”

  “We’ll put through a polite phone call to the Wiltshire Constabulary, and with their consent, we’ll make our way to Queringham Hall. Now. No time like the present.”

  21

  Did they need back-up?

  The Wiltshire Constabulary had armed response vehicles patrolling their roads, as Mid-Sussex had. If Wexford was in need of that sort of assistance …? The whole country was on the alert for the Kingsmarkham Kidnappers.

  Wexford said he wasn’t in need, thanks. All he was doing was taking a look. He hadn’t even a search in mind, unless the Tarling family would agree, for he wasn’t going for a warrant at this stage. But there would be four of them, himself and Burden, Vine and Lynn Fancourt. There was even a certain amount of relief in getting away from the police station and from the incident room in the old gym. They would let him know at once if a message came from Sacred Globe, but at least he wouldn’t be there waiting.

  Seventy-two hours exactly since the last one.

  It wasn’t a bad run, not as much traffic as he had feared. They crossed into Wiltshire at six-thirty and over the river Avon a few minutes later. Queringham was between Mownton and Blick, a gentle pastoral countryside of downs and quiet meadows, surrounded by areas of beauty designated NT for National Trust.

  These old landowners, as Wexford remarked, knew how to conceal their properties from the curious eyes of the populace. You could never see them from the road.

  They built the house—whenever it was, a couple of hundred years ago—and then they planted the trees. So that now, as you approached, what you saw was apparently a forest. Entering the drive, you had the impression that you might not succeed in penetrating, that the track might come to an end up against a wall of foliage.

  Suddenly, all trees ceased and open land was displayed with the house behind it. But here were no gardens of rare plants, here was no view. This was literally a clearing, from which everything seemed to have been scraped or seared away but for a few small stunted bushes and two large stone urns in which grew withered cypresses. Wexford had been right about the outbuildings. There appeared to be a stables wing with a small central clock tower, while to the left, behind the house, was a large barn and an even larger, very ugly, cylindrical silo.

  The first thing that struck him was that their visit, the surprise visit of four police officers, two of whom were of considerable rank, was hardly a cause of astonishment to Charles and Pamela Tarling. Like the Royalls, they were used to this sort of thing. Whatever they might be, however self-effacing and law-abiding, their children constantly attracted the attention of the police. No doubt officers from other forces, possibly from all over England, had come up this path, rung this doorbell, asked these questions, and many times before.

  Not quite these questions, though.

  They were invited in, led into a large English country house drawing room. It was shabby and weary and worn as only such places can be, the great blue and yellow carpet threadbare and faded to gray and straw, the upholstery frayed, the long yellow curtains, hundreds of yards of them, transparent with age. A huge chipped bowl of dead flowers stood in the center of a table, dead flowers, not dried ones, dropping gray pollen on the white-ringed mahogany surface.

  The place suited its owners. They too looked as if they had started life in colors, in strength and trimness and with a certain polish, but time and the expense of this house and the trials of those children of theirs and of living with those children had stained and bleached and worn all that away. They even looked rather alike, thin, tall, round-shouldered people with small heads, wrinkled faces, and untidy gray hair.

  “We’re interested primarily in your son, Mr. Conrad Tarling,” Wexford said.

  The father nodded wearily. It was as if he had heard it all before. He had perhaps answered all the questions before as well, the ones about where Conrad was now, when he had last seen him, if he frequently returned to Queringham Hall. Then Burden mentioned Craig, one of the other sons, the bomber.

  Pamela Tarling reddened. A dark and painful blush suffused that faded lined face. She put her fingers to her cheeks as if to cool them. Somehow you knew those fingers would be icy cold.

  “They are our children,” she said gently. It was something she had probably said many times before. “We have always tried to be loyal to our children. And—and they are brave dedicated people with the right aims and principles, it’s just—just that they …”

  “All right, Pam,” said her husband. “Actually, I endorse that. May I ask you what you want to do now?”

  “Have a look outside here, Mr. Tarling, if we may. It’s up to you to refuse if you wish. I’d like to have a look in some of these outbuildings of yours.”

  “Oh, I never refuse,” Charles Tarling said. “I never say no to the police. There seems no point. They always come back with a warrant.”

  He might, of course, have been a very good actor. Wexford simply couldn’t tell. He went outside with the others, but the Tarlings stayed where they were, sitting opposite each other on a pair of decayed sofas, eyes meeting despairing eyes across a battered late Victorian table.

  To what use had that silo been put? Had the place done duty as a farm? The stable roofs were missing half their tiles and the doors of the loose boxes hung off their hinges. The clock was going but no one had altered the hands when clocks went an hour forward in March and now it would soon be time to put them back again. Wexford looked inside, Burden looked inside. Vine pushed open the door of a place that might have been a dairy or a woodshed or even a grain store. A big blind moth flew blundering out and Wexford got a good look at it. But it wasn’t a Rosy Underwing, more like one of the giant hawkmoths.

  No one had used the place for fifty years or more. That was apparent. It had a stone floor, shelves covering one wall, a window high up and under it a large stone sink. But no washroom built on, no upper floors overhead. Wexford looked out of the window and instead of giving onto greenness and grayness—and an occasionally occurring blue patch—the outlook was to a brick wall crisscrossed with half-timbering.

  “It’s a dairy,” he said. “Where they’re kept, the basement room, is a dairy.”

  “But not this one,” said Vine.

  “No, not this one.”

  The sound of wheels, rapidly trundling, made Wexford turn around. The man had come across the cluttered courtyard, propelling his wheelchair as fast as a bicycle. It might have been Conrad Tarling himself, the resemblance was so great. Were they twins? If you could imagine him brought down from his graceful eminence, reduced to what sat in the chair before them, his golden cloak discarded, his strength laid waste, this might have been the King of the Wood.

  Like Conrad’s, his head was shaved. He could have been as tall as Conrad but his body was reduced and bent, his knees drawn up under the rug that covered them. Large but stubby-fingered hands lay on those knees. The face was Conrad’s but even more the Last of the Mohicans, sharp, dark, as if made of bronze, and it was full of pain.

  “What are you looking for?”

  The voice was beautiful, low-pitched, scornful.

  Burden’s answer made Colum Tarling laugh. “Just a routine check, Mr. Tarling.”

  Colum laughed bitterly, without amusement, it wasn’t even a genuine laugh, but staged, contrived. To force laughter is much easier than to achieve real tears.

  “We get a lot of those,” he said. “Don’t let me stop you. Well, I can’t stop you, can I? I can’t do anything. Not anymore. You can’t do much when your spinal cord has been destroyed.”

  If such people as he have any compensation, Wexford thought, it must be that of a unique power of embarrassing others. If that was what you liked and wanted. Colum Tarling evidently liked it, for he said, “You love all the good things and you work for those good things, to keep them and make them endure, civilization and living crea
tures and decent behavior and mankind, and they punish you for that by cutting up your spine under the wheels of a truck. Have you got an opinion on that?”

  Wexford had. He could have talked about it for half an hour without pausing or hesitation. “You kindly said we should continue, Mr. Tarling, so if you’ll excuse us, we will.”

  Such courtesy he hadn’t expected. “Christ,” he said, “a gentleman, a real gentleman. In the wrong job, aren’t you?”

  His dad had come out and was standing behind him. Wexford had noticed a spasm of pain pass across Charles Tarling’s face when his son spoke so brutally of his destroyed spine. He laid a hand on his son’s shoulder and whispered something. More loudly he said, “Come inside, Colum, come inside now.”

  “ ‘They’re only doing their job,’ ” Colum said. “Is that what you whispered to me? I didn’t quite catch.”

  But he turned the wheelchair and moved back to the house, more slowly than he had come out. The father no doubt endured more of the same daily, Wexford reflected, and more of the same when the King of the Wood came visiting, walking his sixty miles across country, sleeping under hedges, and more when he went to see his son in prison. And the mother would hear morning and evening the details of the horror under that truck’s wheels, its precise physiological results, the clinical details, the pain. That would be the conversation in this house, with genteel poverty its backdrop. It didn’t bear thinking of. And yet …

  Tarling, the father, was still there. He said to Wexford, low-voiced, “His mind is rather badly disturbed. You mustn’t think …”

  “I am not thinking anything in particular, Mr. Tarling.”

  “I mean, his spine, ‘destroyed’ isn’t the word. Not at all. His back was broken but they can mend backs these days, and of course he’s lost a lot of height. But it’s all, so much of it, in his poor mind …”

  Wexford nodded. “I’d like to take a look in those sheds,” he said, “and then we’ll go upstairs if you’ll allow us.”

  Rebuffed, Tarling said an indifferent, “Oh, certainly.”

  His son Colum seemed to think, or affected to think, they were searching for explosives. He sat in his wheelchair at the foot of the stairs, haranguing everyone, his parents and the four police officers, on vivisection, endangered species, game hunting, and, more obscurely, the destruction of the dodo.

  Since neither Charles nor Pamela Tarling objected, they investigated the two top floors. Here again, in some curious, almost supernatural way, features of Queringham Hall resembled aspects of the place Wexford had constructed for where the hostages might be held. No, “resembled” wasn’t the word. Mirrored, provided a kind of mirror image? Rather, it was as if Queringham Hall was in one dimension and the hostage house in a parallel universe where things were similar but subtly different because in some past time events and structures had developed in different ways and along different paths.

  Just as the basement room presented itself here as a disused dairy, so among the attics they found what might have been Roxane Masood’s prison, small, square, low-ceilinged. But the window was too small for even a very thin woman to squeeze out of, and six feet below the flat roof of a bathroom below protruded far enough to break a fall.

  It was only that English country houses often resembled one another, Wexford thought. It told him one thing, though. A country house was what he was looking for, not a factory or workshop or barn.

  If she had shown disapproval of this room and perhaps its occupant on her previous visit, Karen Malahyde was unaware of it. She always tried to maintain a neutral expression and demeanor, no matter how dirty or poor, or, come to that, ostentatious and luxurious, a place might be. But she must have given some hint of her true feelings all unawares, must have put something of disapprobation into her tone or distaste into her cool eye, for Frenchie Collins refused point-blank to talk to her.

  “I’m not saying a word to a right little tight-arse like you.” She appealed to Damon. “Look at her face, real sour apple, like she’s walking around with a bad smell under her crinkled-up nose.”

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Collins,” Karen said rather stiffly, “but I truly don’t have any feelings of that sort.”

  It was, of course, an outright lie, for she was even more horrified than last time by the squalor of this tiny back room, its view of a gray brick wall, and, indeed, by the smell which reminded her of something she hadn’t smelled since in the chemistry lab at school, the rotten cabbage stink of calcium carbide.

  “We simply wanted to ask you a few questions.”

  “You simply wanted that before,” said Frenchie Collins. “And you simply acted like I was something the dog brought in—no, correction, like something the dog did on the floor.”

  You could tell she was young, though it was hard to say how, yet she had all the lineaments of age, dry graying hair, coarse lined skin, two missing front teeth, wrinkled hands which shook. Her skeletal body was wrapped in a once white toweling dressing gown and her feet buried and lost in gray woolly socks.

  “Ms. Collins …”

  “I said I wouldn’t talk to you. I don’t mind talking to him. He seems a nice enough young guy.”

  Karen and Damon exchanged a glance.

  “All right,” Karen said, “if that’s what you’d like. I won’t say a word.”

  “I don’t want you here,” said Frenchie Collins. “Right? Understood? I’ll talk to him on his own, though Christ knows what I can tell him, I don’t know anything about those Sacred Globe people. You,” she said to Karen, “can sit in the car. No doubt there is a car?”

  Karen went down and did just that. She had a feeling Frenchie Collins knew something that she could get out of her but that Damon couldn’t. Of course it was absurd to think like that about a person who refused to talk to her. Because she was a sensible woman and ambitious, with an eye to rising in the police force, she spent the time she waited for Damon in some honest analysis of her own behavior, examining recent attitudes toward some of the people Wexford called “our customers.” If you had very high standards of hygiene and method and order it was hard not to apply them to others, but she would try. The great thing was to be aware of your shortcomings, for that was the first step in setting things to rights.

  Am I smug, she was asking herself, am I complacent? An honest answer—yes, I am, yes, I am, and intolerant and near to bigotry—was being forced out of her when Damon came back.

  It had all been in vain. Frenchie Collins had bought the sleeping bag, as they thought, had taken it to Zaire, but had abandoned it there along with much of her other property. She had been too ill and weak by that time to carry more than the bare essentials.

  “So she says,” said Karen.

  “ ‘Africa has killed me,’ she said. Those were her words. And you have to admit she looks in a bad way. I suppose it could be AIDS.”

  “No, it couldn’t. Hasn’t been time. I don’t think she’d have thrown that sleeping bag away, abandoned it or whatever she says. People like her never have any money and they don’t abandon things like that. She’d have been more likely to have got inside it at the airport and had herself carried onto the plane.”

  “The sleeping bag could have been bought in the north of England where Outdoors’ other outlets are.”

  Karen remembered that she was supposed to be nice and tolerant, not prejudiced and not smug. Especially with this man, she wanted to be nice. It was a long time since she’d known any man she wanted to seem as nice to as she did to this one.

  “The rest of the evening is ours,” she said and she smiled. “We could spend it up here, but it would be nicer to go home, wouldn’t it?”

  It was after nine when they got back. No message from Sacred Globe. Wexford knew there wouldn’t be, or they would have called him, but he was still disappointed. More than disappointed. A feeling he seldom had these days, a feeling he hadn’t experienced much since he was young, flooded over him. It was panic and he clenched his hands, suppressing it, breathin
g deeply.

  He had been in his office ten minutes. He didn’t know why he had come up here. There was nothing to do tonight. Go home, tell Dora all those things he was beginning to have doubts about. Oh, no, they won’t kill them, of course not. We’ll find them. We’ll find Sacred Globe. We’ll find the man with the tattoo on his left forearm and the one who smells of acetone. What kind of illness could you have that made you smell of nail varnish remover? Something wrong with the kidneys? The pancreas? The body manufacturing too many ketones?

  But we’ll find them. The man who has to wear gloves because something disfigures his hands. Eczema perhaps or scars. Or because he was black. The woman who wears heavy boots to help her look like a man. The house with a black cat and a Siamese which has a dairy from whose window you can see a shifting patch of blue that’s as blue as the sky but isn’t the sky.

  He went down in the lift, walked across the foyer as Audrey Barker burst through the swing doors.

  The duty sergeant called out, “Excuse me!”

  She looked, he realized, as he had never seen her before. She looked happy. More than that—elated, almost manic with happiness. Hair is supposed to stand on end through shock or horror but hers flew out in that wild way from joy. She was smiling, laughing, as if she couldn’t stop.

  “He phoned me,” she shouted. “My son phoned me!”

  Wexford said, “Mrs. Barker, just a moment … What exactly are you saying?”

  “I didn’t want to phone you, you don’t know who you’re talking to on the phone, but my son, Ryan, he phoned me half an hour ago. I thought you’d be here, you’d still be here. At a time like this … I couldn’t keep still, I had to move, run, I came straight here, to tell you myself.”

  Wexford nodded. He said very steadily in an effort to calm her, “Yes, you tell me. Tell me all about it. Let’s go upstairs to my office.”