Road Rage

by Ruth Rendell

  “You mean, were they driving round in circles? Sort of onto the old bypass and round the roundabout and back again and out to Myringham and turn back and up the old bypass again?”

  He smiled at her. “Sort of, yes.”

  “It never occurred to me,” she said. “But I don’t see why not. I really don’t see why not. I wouldn’t have known. I couldn’t see a thing. We did go around corners and I think we went around roundabouts. Now you mention it, I think we went all the way around one round-about. It didn’t seem important when I was talking to you the first time but now—I think we did go all the way around.”

  A satisfied expression on his face, Burden came back from the court after less than an hour. The proceedings had been swift, Stanley Trotter having been committed for trial and remanded in custody. He found Wexford in the old gym, talking to Nicky Weaver.

  “What do we do then, bring her in? It’s the Met’s ground, Brixton, but I doubt if they’ll have any objection. I wonder if she’d ever lived around here, if she has any connection with this neighborhood.”

  Burden said, “Who are you talking about?”

  “This woman called Frenchie Collins. I’m wondering if she knows any of these tree people. If, for instance, she’s acquainted with the King of the Wood.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  Wexford said slowly, “Because we’ve been talking about the hostages being within a radius of sixty miles, but that was much too wide, that was too generous. They’re not in London or Kent or down on the South Coast. They’re here, very near here, and the radius is going to be more like five miles.”

  “That’s just guesswork.”

  “Is it, Mike? The nonlactic soy milk isn’t proof of anything, but it’s evidence. It may not have come from the Framhurst Teashop, but it very likely did. Ryan Barker made his second phone call from the Brigadier, and though that again proves nothing, it does give a strong indication.”

  Wexford sat down. He hesitated, then said, “Who would be most likely to want this bypass stopped? Environmental activists, yes, professional protesters, maybe. Any green group opposed to destroying England, that’s for sure. But more than that would be someone, or more than one, who would be personally affected by the building of the bypass.”

  “You mean, people whose livelihood might be endangered by it?” Nicky asked.

  “That, of course. But what I meant was simpler. People whose outlook, view, of the countryside would be spoiled. Those who’d see the bypass when they looked out of their windows or hear it when they walked in their garden. Wouldn’t they have a deeper, more emotional interest than a professional protester who doesn’t care where whatever is happening is happening, whether it’s a power station in Cumbria or an overpass in Dorset?

  “Imagine a group of people—amateurs, mostly—getting together in—well, in despair, deciding that desperate situations call for desperate measures, all or some of them householders whose views, whose domestic peace and quiet really, will be wrecked by this bypass. Maybe one of them meets someone in the know, someone who’s used to this sort of thing, who’s not an amateur, and then they start getting things organized.”

  “Meets them how?”

  “Well, through KABAL, or going to that actor-manager’s theater, that Weir Theatre—where, incidentally, our wives are going together tomorrow night—or maybe on a demonstration. Even on the big march of July.

  “One of the group is already in possession of a large suitable house, probably a beautiful country house. After all, that’s the point, isn’t it? Once the bypass is built, it won’t be beautiful anymore or its surroundings won’t be. In the outbuildings is an old dairy, not exactly underground but half-subterranean, for coolness’s sake when it was a dairy. They have a washroom built on and a guard to half cover the window. Say there are half a dozen of them, an ample supply of guards. They haven’t much else to organize, have they, except to do it?”

  Builders are hard to find. The regular, steady, orthodox firms are a different matter. They advertise, they are in the phone book. As for the others, the money-in-the-back-pocket brigade and the moonlighters, the cowboys here today and gone tomorrow, recommendation of their skills, or more likely their low prices, is passed on by word of mouth or begins with an unsolicited knock at the door.

  One of these had built the washroom onto the basement room for the specific purpose of answering the needs of a group of hostages. More likely the cowboys than a limited company with premises in the High Street. At some point a phone call had been made to them and an estimate asked for. Or not an estimate. Simply a request to do it. Do it as soon as you can and never mind the cost.

  In a way, Wexford thought, it was interesting that the washroom had been built on at all. So much was implied by it, so much could be inferred from it.

  “They’re terrorists, Mike,” he said to Burden. “However we may shy away from that word, that’s what they are. My dictionary defines terrorism as an organized system of violence and intimidation for political ends. But look at what we know of these particular examples of the breed. In most parts of the world terrorists wouldn’t worry about their hostages’ hygiene arrangements. A bucket in the corner would do for them. But these people went to the trouble of having a washroom with basin and running water and flush lavatory built onto their prison. Not so much civilized as essentially middle-class, wouldn’t you say?”

  Burden wasn’t very interested. He disliked listening to Wexford’s disquisitions on social vagary and psychological symptom. What was the point of it except to distract? He had already got Fancourt, Hennessy, and Lowry on to Kingsmarkham, Stowerton, and Pomfret builders. The ones in the phone book were easy, the others, those who did this work after their legitimate jobs, they were the hardest to find. Kids leaving school who have painted their mothers’ front rooms think of taking up building work, Wexford had once said, in the same way as anyone who can type thinks he has a book inside him.

  “I’ll tell you what I’d say. It’s that they did it themselves. Sacred Globe. One of them’s an amateur plumber, there’s lot of it about. A frequent visitor to the do-it-yourself store on the old bypass.”

  Wexford brightened. “We should get someone out there as well, then. See if they have a regular customer or did have a regular customer, who bought a lavatory pan from them and a basin and the pipework and whatever back in, say, June.”

  “Reg,” said Burden.

  Wexford looked at him, looked hard and silently.

  “That washroom could have been built ten years ago. It could have been built onto that basement—”

  “Dora said it was new,” Wexford interrupted. “And it’s not a basement, it’s a dairy.”

  “If you say so. I was going to say it could have been built as a part of a flat conversion that was never finished. It doesn’t have to have been built on in the past few weeks, just as the nonlactic soy milk doesn’t have to have come from Framhurst or that damned moth from Wiltshire. Sherlock Holmes worked like that, making huge leap assumptions, but we can’t do the same.”

  “They’re in a house near here,” said Wexford stubbornly. “A house that overlooks the bypass or is seriously threatened by the bypass.”

  “I’ll take you to the theater,” he said. “I know I’m being absurd, but I don’t want you going out alone. Not yet. Jenny can make her own way, but I’ll take you.”

  Instead of saying she wouldn’t go, Dora said, “You haven’t got time, Reg.”

  “Yes, I have.”

  By the middle of Saturday afternoon when most builders in Kingsmarkham and Stowerton had been eliminated from the inquiry, Nicky Weaver came up with a positive lead. A. and J. Murray Sisters, an all-women firm based in Pomfret and specializing in small building jobs, volunteered the information that they had built a shower room onto a flat conversion at a farm in Pomfret Monachorum. The job had been carried out in the previous June.

  Ann Murray, an electrician and the elder of the sisters, told Nicky that they had been g
lad of the work, had jumped at the chance, in fact. Even though the recession was over, they hadn’t found it easy to convince the locals that women made as effective building contractors as men, that they all had City and Guilds qualifications and kept their estimates low. The Holgates, of Paddocks, a onetime farmhouse on the Cambery Ashes Road near Tancred, had approached them, she thought, because Gillian Holgate also had a trade usually confined to men. She was a motor mechanic.

  The work required was to convert an old larder in a cottage next door to the main house into a shower room. The cottage, then consisting of one room up and one down with a kitchen, was to be a home for the Holgates’ daughter. A. and J. Murray Sisters had started the job on June 10 and completed it on June 15, the plumbing being carried out by Maureen Sheridan and the electrics and decoration by Ann Murray herself. It was the right time and the right place. Or it seemed to be.

  Wexford went up there, taking Nicky and Damon Slesar with him. Outside the gate to Paddocks he got out of the car and looked down across the valley. It was hard to say from this point if the bypass site would be visible or not. The woods of Tancred lay between here and the distant river and they would certainly muffle any traffic sound. Perhaps when the bypass was built it might be possible to see a segment of it, a triangle of double white highway between the dark trees and the green hillside.

  Slesar opened the gate and they drove in, up a long straight driveway, macadam, not gravel. The farmhouse had a red shingled facade and a low roof of red tiles. On the hard dark gray surface, in a broad patch of sunlight, lay two cats, one asleep, the other on its back, green eyes wide open, white paws gracefully waving. One of the cats was a Siamese, the other a tabby.

  Next door, the building that was evidently the cottage was in the process of external painting. A woman up on a pair of steps was applying cream-colored emulsion to its plasterwork with a roller.

  Wexford got out of the car and Nicky got out and the woman, who looked about forty, was tall and thin and wearing paint-stained dungarees, came toward them rather diffidently.

  “Mrs. Holgate?”

  She nodded.

  Slesar said, “We’re police officers.”

  Very taken aback, she said, “What is it? What’s happened?”

  “Nothing at all, Mrs. Holgate. Nothing for you to be worried about.”

  By now Wexford was almost certain this was true, in spite of the cats. The cottage was too small to contain the basement room. Even from here you could tell that the ground area measured nothing like twenty feet by thirty. But he had to look. Might they look?

  Rallying a little from her initial shock, Gillian Holgate said she would like to know what it was about. Nicky said they had information that a room in the cottage had been converted into a bathroom three months before.

  “I had planning permission,” Mrs. Holgate said. “Everything was aboveboard.”

  Wexford was rather amused to be taken for an official of the county planning department. But Mrs. Holgate seemed satisfied without further explanation and ushered them in through the front door of the building she had been painting. The place was obviously occupied though its occupant wasn’t home at present. The downstairs room was furnished, was rather comfortably untidy, and a generous estimate would set its measurements at ten feet by twelve.

  Wexford had been uneasy about this annex or conversion ever since he had heard it described as a shower room, since Dora had been emphatic the room she had used had contained only a lavatory and basin. Of course it was possible the shower had been removed or walled-in before the hostages were brought there—possible but unlikely.

  And they saw now that this was another dead end. The room the Murray sisters had converted was large, its walls tiled, its shower cabinet of generous size. Its window was of frosted glass and curtained. From the main room quite a big picture window had a view of Tancred woods.

  “It must have something to do with those hostages,”

  Mrs. Holgate said wonderingly. “The Kingsmarkham Kidnap.”

  They neither confirmed nor denied. Wexford nodded enigmatically. He stepped out once more into the afternoon sunshine and a young woman who had come running out of the main house almost cannoned into him.

  She said breathlessly, “Are you Chief Inspector Wexford?”

  “I am.”

  “There’s a phone call for you.”

  “For me? Are you sure?”

  But he had his own phone. Who would know he was here? No one knew.

  He followed her into the main house. The phone receiver lay off the hook on a small hall table. He lifted it, said, “Wexford.”

  “This is Sacred Globe.”

  “Ryan Barker,” said Wexford.

  “We haven’t heard from you. You haven’t complied with our request. If there is no announcement on the evening news bulletins of a complete revision on the plan for the Kingsmarkham Bypass, Mrs. Struther dies.”

  Someone had written it for him. He was plainly reading it and reading it nervously, his voice growing squeaky. Under his breath Wexford cursed this group of people who could so exploit a child.

  He said, “What do you mean by evening bulletins, Ryan?”

  “Wait a minute, please.”

  Wexford could hear him conferring with a companion. Then, “By seven. If it’s not, Mrs. Struther dies and we will deliver her body to Kingsmarkham tonight.”

  “Ryan, wait. Stay where you are. Are you at the Brigadier on the old bypass?”

  No reply, only an indrawn breath.

  “What you ask,” Wexford said, “isn’t possible. You know that.”

  “You have to make it possible,” Ryan Barker’s voice said, growing cold now, growing remote. “You have to tell the press and tell the government. Tell them she’s going to die. We’re ready to kill her.”

  He added stiffly, obviously prompted, “We are Sacred Globe, saving the world.”

  25

  When he had phoned the Chief Constable and told him of Sacred Globe’s latest message, he walked out of the Holgates’ house and drove out of the Holgates’ drive and stood on the road, looking through binoculars across the valley.

  Somewhere, in a house, a big house, one of those houses out there among the hills and woods … There were hundreds such. And if he couldn’t find which one in the next four hours a woman would die. The second woman. Only this one would be deliberate murder. But it would happen because government would never, not in any circumstances, these or similar, not under any threat, announce the cancellation of the bypass. Therefore it would happen unless, in the next four hours, he found which house among so many held the two hostages.

  “Nothing to the media,” Montague Ryder said when Wexford walked into the suite at the Constabulary Headquarters. “We must keep it dark from them as long as we can.”

  “As long as we can” had a sinister ring. It meant, until Kitty Struther’s body is found.

  “I know they aren’t far from here, sir,” Wexford said. He glanced at the map on the wall. It was a blown-up sheet from the Ordnance Survey, the central part of the Mid-Sussex area. Ryder nodded to him and he drew with his right forefinger an oval shape that encompassed Kings-markham, Stowerton, Pomfret, and Sewingbury, the villages of Framhurst, Savesbury, Stringfield, Cambery Ashes, and Pomfret Monachorum. Places south of the town were excluded. None of them would be menaced by the new bypass. No house in their vicinity would have a view of it.

  “And that’s your criterion?”

  “One of them,” Wexford said. “Maybe the most important one.”

  Did she know they intended to kill her? He didn’t ask Montague Ryder that because Ryder could only guess, as he could. She had been, and no doubt still was, the most fearful of the hostages, the most vulnerable, the least self-contained, and with the fewest inner resources. Was she with her husband, or had they too been separated?

  And now he found himself in the dreadful position at this juncture of having nothing to do. For ten days they had all worked so hard, had
worked to the utmost of their capacity, and the result had been only to narrow down the place they were looking for into something like fifty square miles. Nothing remained but to pick out the needle in the haystack or wait for the discovery of another sleeping bag containing another woman’s body.

  “We’ll keep Contemporary Cars’ grounds under surveillance,” he said to Burden. “I doubt if they’d come to the same place twice, but I daren’t take the risk.”

  “The police station’s another possibility. So is Ms. Cox’s and Mrs. Peabody’s. The Concreation building. The Brigadier.”

  “Your house. My house.”

  They were there now, sitting in Burden’s living room. Or, rather, Burden was sitting. Wexford was pacing.

  “The Courier offices,” he said. “The Stowerton end of the bypass site. The Pomfret end.”

  “You said that kid said Kingsmarkham.”

  “That’s true. He did. We can’t police all these places, anyway. We haven’t got the backup.”

  “Has anyone thought of using a helicopter? To find where they are, I mean. We know they’re in our fifty square miles.”

  “What could you see from a helicopter, Mike? A house with outbuildings? There are hundreds. The hostages aren’t going to be up on the roof, waving distress flags.”

  Burden shrugged. “Sacred Globe will watch the BBC’s early-evening news, which is at five or five-fifteen on a Saturday, and ITN’s half an hour later. If there is no announcement, and of course there can’t be, they proceed to kill Kitty Struther. Is that what will happen?”

  “I don’t know about ‘will,’ Mike,” Wexford said bitterly. “It’s twenty to six now. It may be happening now, and we can’t do a thing to stop it.”

  Upriver from Watersmeet, where the stream that ran under Kingsmarkham High Street met the larger waterway, the Brede flows among wide meadows and winds between groves of alders and stands of willows. At one point the stones of the riverbed are large enough and regular enough to form a dam over which the determined water gushes and spouts into the deep pool below. This is Stringfield Weir and it is overlooked by Stringfield Mill, built long ago when some of the farming was arable and the means needed for grinding corn.