Road Rage

by Ruth Rendell

  The first time the phone rang was at twenty past ten. Mrs. Peabody had just brought in cups of milky frothy coffee, the Rhombus Road version of cappuccino. A lace-trimmed cloth was on the tray and a paper doily on the biscuit plate, the sugar was the loaf kind, and there was an apostle spoon in each saucer. Audrey Barker looked at it with the loathing of a woman who cares very little for the appearance of domestic appurtenances but has all her life suffered under the reproofs of a house-proud mother. The phone ringing made her jump and bring her hands up to her head. Burden nodded to her and she picked up the receiver.

  It was immediately clear this wasn’t Ryan. Burden—and Wexford—had wondered about the man Ryan had told Dora his mother was engaged to. Was this another figment of his hungry imagination? Apparently not, though, as Audrey Barker explained, putting the phone down after a minute or two. “My friend,” she called him. “He phones me every day. Well, two or three times a day.”

  The time went by. To Burden it passed very slowly. Mrs. Peabody took away their coffee cups, picked up two invisible biscuit crumbs from the area of carpet between his feet. For something to do, he asked Audrey Barker to tell him about her son, his tastes, his interests, his progress at school, and she did so, manifestly becoming less tense. Ryan shone, apparently, at biology and geography, a prowess which surprised no one. He possessed a considerable library of books on natural history. She had given him a field guide to British birds for Christmas and had already bought a set of wildlife videos for his coming birthday …

  The phone rang again at midday and because it was precisely twelve noon, which somehow seemed a likely time for Sacred Globe to phone, when Audrey lifted the receiver Karen got up and stood close enough to her to hear her caller’s voice. It might have been a likely time but it wasn’t the right time. The caller was Hassy Masood.

  “He phones every day too,” Audrey said when the short conversation was over. “It’s what he calls being my support group. Very kind, I suppose, though frankly I could do without it. She’s not up to talking and I don’t wonder. He always explains she’s not up to it.”

  Next time the phone rang it was a wrong number. Watching Audrey, Karen thought she had never before quite seen the significance of the phrase “jumping out of one’s skin.”

  The forensic science laboratory naturally gave Wexford no clue to the provenance of the sleeping bag. Nicky Weaver had made tracing it her task, now that it was clear they had been wrong in supposing it to be identified with the one bought in Brixton and sold to Frenchie Collins. She had also eliminated the north London source and she and Hennessy had widened their search to the Midlands while Damon Slesar kept up his surveillance of Conrad Tarling.

  But if there was nothing in the lab report on the sleeping bag’s origin, a great deal of evidence had been gathered as to where it had been after it came into the possession of Sacred Globe.

  It was made of washable material and had been washed at least once in its lifetime. After the Collins woman brought it back from Africa, thought Wexford, only she hadn’t brought it back, it wasn’t hers. She had told Slesar it wasn’t hers and why should she lie?

  Few of the substances on Dora’s clothes had been found on the inside or outside of the sleeping bag, except for the cat hair. There was plenty of that. Small stains on the outside of the bag had been made in one case by coffee, black coffee without milk, and in the other by red wine. Three small irregular stones inside the bag were the constituents of gravel, all of them tiny flint fragments, but perhaps the most interesting find was a withered leaf. It had been in the bottom of the bag and in the opinion of the forensic scientist had very likely adhered to one of Roxane’s shoes. The leaf was not from a wild plant but from the cultivated climber Ipomoea rubro-caerulea, the morning glory.

  Wexford read that part of the report again. He had once tried growing morning glory in his own garden but the summer had been so bad that the first flowers on the sickly attenuated plant failed to come out till October, only to be immediately nipped by frost. Parts of it—Seeds? Root? Leaves?—were alleged to produce hallucinations, Sheila had told him, she knew people who chewed it, but when he looked Ipomoea up in an herbal, he had found only that it was a source of the purgative jalap.

  On Roxane’s clothes had been found stains made by her own blood, by body lotion—presumably deposited before her abduction—by nonlactic soy milk, and by tomato sauce. He turned the pages back to the beginning and looked, unseeing, out his window.

  Ryan Barker phoned his mother at the very moment when Burden was giving up hope, was thinking they were in for another of those long waits. Days of waiting once more perhaps, God forbid.

  Mrs. Peabody made them the kind of sandwiches that are called dainty, little crustless triangles of white bread with wafer-thin ham or cress between the slices. She sat and watched them eat. An hour later she made tea. She brought in a cake, the kind of confection Patsy Panick might have admired, chocolate with chocolate icing and ornamented by chocolate flake bars. To Burden’s astonishment the sight and smell of it brought a breath of nausea up into his throat, but thin, tense Karen took a small slice.

  Her eye drawn to a speck of something on the mantelpiece that shouldn’t have been there, Mrs. Peabody came back with a duster and got to work. She rubbed feverishly, polishing ornaments. It reminded Karen of a cat who suddenly senses some trace of scent or dirt on its apparently spotless paw and begins a manic licking.

  The phone gave a preparatory click. It hadn’t done that before or if it had they hadn’t noticed. The bell seemed disproportionately loud, a shrill shattering sound. Audrey gave the number as they had instructed her, in monotonous Dalek-speak.

  The fiancé again. Burden wished he had asked Audrey to tell him not to call again that day. He did it now. She nodded, but she didn’t ask. She put the phone down and it rang at once.

  Karen was immediately at Audrey Barker’s side as she grabbed the receiver. Again the number was given in that mechanical monotone.

  A boy’s voice, long broken but unsteady and perhaps pitched high through nervousness.

  “Mum? It’s me.”

  23

  Did you pass on the message, Mum?”

  “Of course I did, Ryan. I did what you said.”

  Audrey Barker was no actress. Her voice sounded flat and stilted, as if the words had been learned by heart for the dramatic society’s play.

  “They have to reroute the bypass, you got that?”

  “I got it, Ryan, and I passed it on. Like you said, Ryan.”

  That stilted voice made him suspicious. “Is there anyone there with you?”

  She almost screamed. “Of course not, of course not!”

  “It has to be announced. Officially. By the government. And if it’s not Mrs. Struther dies. Have you got that? Before nightfall tomorrow or Mrs. Struther’s dead.”

  “Oh, Ryan …”

  “I think you’ve got someone there. I’m going to ring off. I won’t call again. Remember our cause is just. It’s the only way, Mum, it’s the way to save the planet. And when it’s a matter of saving the planet one woman’s life is of no account. I’m going now. Good-bye.”

  That was the conversation Karen Malahyde heard directly. Later on Wexford was to listen to a tape of it, but before he could do so the call had been traced.

  To the Brigadier public house on the old Kingsmarkham bypass.

  * * *

  It had started to rain. The rain, which had been gloomily forecast, which had been expected for days, fell rapidly out of swiftly gathered black clouds, then in torrents, fountaining, crashing rain. It held them up. They might have been there in fifteen minutes, that was the minimum it took, but the rain was the kind that doesn’t merely slow traffic, it drives it for safety’s sake off the road.

  Pemberton, driving Burden and Karen, was forced to pull into a lay-by. It was like being under some great waterfall, he said, maybe Niagara Falls. Barry Vine and Lynn Fancourt, in the next car, caught them up and pulled in behin
d them. By the time the rain had lessened, had been reduced to a normal heavy storm, twenty minutes had passed. Half an hour had passed by the time they got to the Brigadier, roaring in over that crunchy gravel approach like cops in an L.A. car chase.

  Twenty-five minutes to six and William Dickson had opened for the evening trade thirty-five minutes before. He was serving the couple in the saloon bar with a pint of Guinness and a gin and blackcurrant when the five policemen came in. Crashed in as hard as the rain, and Vine, with Pemberton behind him, strode across to the door into the public bar. Burden snapped, “Who else is in the house?”

  “The wife. Me,” said Dickson. “What is this? What’s going on?”

  Vine came back. “There’s nobody in the public.”

  “Of course there isn’t. I said. There’s this lady and gentleman and me and the wife’s upstairs. What is all this?”

  “We’ll take a look” said Burden.

  “Suit yourselves. You might ask. Politeness never did no harm. You’re lucky I’m not asking to see your warrant.”

  The couple in the bar, the woman at a table, her companion at the counter, preparing to pay for his drinks, stared with cautious pleasure. The man kept his eyes on Burden while pushing a five-pound note toward Dickson.

  Vine went into the back hallway where the pay phone was. This was the phone Ulrike Ranke had used back in April and had made the last call of her life. He looked inside various rooms, an office with another phone, a small sitting room or snug. There was no one about. Karen followed him. Pemberton and Lynn Fancourt went upstairs.

  The rain was coming down heavily again. Sheets of it, falling on the empty car park, almost obscured the outline of the dismal building Dickson called a ballroom. Burden told the man and the woman he was a police officer, showed them his warrant card, and asked them how long they had been in the pub.

  “Now you wait a minute,” said Dickson.

  Burden rounded on him. “Your wife is being fetched to take over the trade in here. I’d like you to go into that snug place of yours and wait for me. I want to talk to you.”

  “What about, for Christ’s sake?”

  “I regret having to speak to you like this in front of your patrons, Mr. Dickson, but you’ll go into that room now, or else I’ll arrest you for obstructing me in the execution of my duty.”

  Dickson went. He kicked the doorstop in a petulant way, like a cross child, but he went. Pemberton came back with Dickson’s wife, a top-heavy blond woman of about forty wearing black leggings and high-heeled sandals. Burden nodded to her and asked the couple with the drinks if they would mind his joining them at their table. Rather bemused, the man shook his head. He said his name was Roger Gardiner and his friend’s was Sandra Cole.

  Barry Vine said, “I’d like to ask you a few questions,” and repeated the one Burden had already asked.

  “We came in when it opened,” Gardiner said. “We were early and we waited outside a bit. In the car.”

  “Other people were here then. A boy of about fifteen? And others with him?”

  “He was older than that,” Sandra Cole said. “He was taller than Rodge.”

  “We were in here by then,” Gardiner said. “Been in here a couple of minutes. A man and a woman—well, a girl—they came in, they ran into the bar with the boy, and the girl asked the manager, the owner, whatever, if they could use the phone.”

  “She said the boy was in something-shock, ana-something shock, and they had to get an ambulance.”

  “Anaphylactic shock?”

  “That’s it. It was urgent, she said, and the owner, he told them where the phone was …”

  “I told them where the phone was,” Dickson said to Burden. “Not that pay one, the one in my office. It was urgent, see, she said the kid might die if he didn’t get to a hospital. So I reckoned they didn’t want to be messing about with a pay phone …”

  “Developed a conscience since the Ulrike Ranke business, have you?”

  “I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean. They went off into the office and I never saw them again.”

  “Come on, Dickson, you can do better than that. You let them use your phone, you were worried the boy might die, but once you’d seen the back of them the whole thing went out of your head?”

  “I did go in there,” said Dickson, “but they was gone. I asked the wife if she’d heard the ambulance because I hadn’t, but she didn’t know what I was on about.”

  “Show me the phone.”

  It was on the desk among the welter of papers and magazines, a brown telephone constructed of a substance that had a glossy surface.

  “Has it been touched since?”

  Dickson shook his head. A tic had started at the corner of his mouth.

  “Don’t touch it. And close the place. Most likely you can open again tomorrow.”

  “What’s all this about? I can’t close just like that!”

  “You don’t have a choice,” said Burden.

  He had heard a car arrive. You could hear anything on that gravel. A sparrow walking across it would have been clearly audible. He had heard a car and thought it was customers for the Brigadier but it was Wexford, driven up here by Donaldson. He was in the saloon bar, talking to Linda Dickson, who was now holding a diminutive Yorkshire terrier in her arms, its face pressed up against her brightly painted cheek. Gardiner and his girlfriend were doing their best to describe to Karen Malahyde the appearance of the man and the woman who had accompanied Ryan Barker.

  “I never saw them,” Linda Dickson said. She looked around for her husband, but he was locking and bolting the front doors. “I thought I heard a car, but it must have been that lady and gentleman.”

  “Why ‘must have been’?”

  “You can hear everything on that gravel. If this was a free house I’d have that concreted, but the brewery won’t spend the money.”

  “There’s no need to go over the gravel if you drive straight into the car park at the back, is there?”

  “That’s what they must have done.”

  “I’m not much of a hand at describing what people look like,” said her husband. “See too many of them, I reckon. The boy was tall, he was a very tall lad, tall as me …”

  “We know what the boy looks like, Mr. Dickson,” said Wexford, his eye on the tattoo on the man’s left forearm. Butterfly? Bird? Abstract design? “The boy is Ryan Barker, one of the hostages. You keep asking what this is about—well, it’s about Sacred Globe. Do you think that will jog your memory when it comes to describing these people?”

  Dickson’s mouth fell open. “You have to be kidding.”

  “No, I don’t have to be. If I was in the mood for it I could think up a better joke than that.”

  “Sacred Globe. Bloody hell. You do mean those lunatics that kidnapped those people and killed the girl?”

  “Try describing those lunatics, will you?”

  His description, when it finally came, tallied with those of Roger Gardiner and Sandra Cole. None of the three was particularly observant, none apparently much interested in his or her fellow human beings. The plausible tale of anaphylactic shock which, it now appeared, had been told solely by the woman, and which might have been expected to attract their interest, had registered only as an account of something alien and unpronounceable. They considered. Roger Gardiner had actually scratched his head. After a massive shrug of his heavy shoulders, William Dickson came up with the best he could do.

  The woman was small but wiry and fit-looking. She wore no makeup and her hair was hidden under a baseball cap. She was young but no one could suggest her age more precisely than to describe her as between twenty and thirty. Her companion was a tall thin man, also wearing a baseball cap and a pair of dark glasses. Their clothes were so unremarkable that no one could specify what they wore. Jeans, perhaps, jackets of dark or neutral colors. No one had noticed eye color or a single peculiarity. The man had spoken. The woman’s voice was—just an ordinary voice.

  “Like E
astenders,” said Roger Gardiner.

  Wexford knew what he meant, or thought he did. London working class, only it wasn’t politically correct to use expressions like that these days. Cockney—did anyone use the word anymore? Or did he mean like an actor in a television sitcom? Asked, Gardiner didn’t know, couldn’t answer, could only repeat what he had said. Like Eastenders.

  “I’d like to have a look outside,” Wexford said to Dickson.

  “Be my guest, guv’nor. I hope I’m a reasonable man, I hope I know how to cooperate. Only there are some not a million miles from where I’m standing who don’t know the meaning of the word ‘manners.’ ”

  The car park was awash. Puddles were more like shallow lakes and rain dripped off the eaves of the barracklike building, which loomed over the sheets of water. By now the rain had stopped but the dark gray sky was heavy with more to come. A wind had got up, tearing at the branches of the chestnuts in the meadow beyond the fence.

  Wexford hadn’t much hope. The truth was that now he had no hope, but he was going to look inside that building just the same. A dance hall—well, if you stuck a few bits of neon on the outside, flung open those double asbestos doors, had some cheerful people selling tickets … No, it would always be a dreary dump, a cavernous barn of a place, and the best thing for it would be to pull it down.

  “Cavernous” was right. The whole area must have been sixty feet by forty and the ceiling—or roof of girders and plasterboard—a good thirty feet high. There were metal framed windows all along both sides, a stage of sorts at one end. Vine opened the door that seemed to lead behind the stage and they trooped through. But nothing was to be seen apart from two lavatories, one with a picture of a peacock with fanned tail on the door, the other of a drab peahen—the most sexist thing she’d seen in years, Karen said angrily—a passage, and a large unfurnished room that might once have been used for making tea and even preparing food. The place was dusty and untended, and when Dickson said it hadn’t been used for years no one had any difficulty believing him.