by Ruth Rendell
“Sacred Globe is probably asleep still,” Wexford said. “Why not? They’ve nothing to worry about. Or they don’t think they have.”
Burden was behind him and Karen now. They came up alongside a wall with a gate in it, opened the gate, and passed through, entering an almost enclosed courtyard with a checkerboard floor of stone squares and mown grass squares. Tubs stood about filled with pink-and-white-striped petunias and yellow Jamaican daisies. Ahead of them was an arched opening between the Jacobean part of the house and the encircling wall, an arch he had passed under and seen a dog and a man, greenness and grayness …
He pointed in silence at the flint-walled building. Its single window faced the rear of the Georgian part of the house, a wall hung with a creeping plant that covered it to a width of about four feet and a height of eight. As he had expected, the sun which was already high in the sky had brought out its flowers, and on the left-hand side at the top and the right-hand side halfway up had opened perhaps twenty blue trumpets.
Half close his eyes and he could see a patch of blue and another smaller patch. The isolated blossoms disappeared, returned when he opened his eyes. Blue as the sky at noon on a summer’s day.
“I wonder if the door’s locked,” he said softly.
A stout heavy door, oak probably, with locks top and bottom. He tried the handle and the door opened. It was a strange feeling, seeing the place at last. The basement room. The prison. It was very much as Dora had described it, about twenty feet by thirty, with the stone sink under the window, the shelves, the door into the washroom. The five camp beds were still there and the blankets folded quite neatly on top of them.
Two stone steps down to the stone-flagged floor. A chilly place, cool enough once to have kept dairy products sound. Shelves on the wall and a lot of cobwebs hanging. He went to the window, saw a sky-blue patch about six feet up, and saw it much more clearly than Dora would have, because the rabbit-hutch structure had been taken down. The wood in the window frame was splintered and there was a hole where that bullet had gone in.
Outside again, he half expected a Siamese cat to come sauntering out from one of the outbuildings or, when he looked up, to see a black cat sunning itself on top of a wall. But, no. He knew almost for certain now that he wouldn’t see them, just as he wouldn’t find any sand from the Isle of Wight.
He had calculated that there were very likely four people in that house, six if he was lucky. Who would answer the front door?
Andrew Struther. It was usually Andrew Struther. And it was this time. Probably they had fixed it that it was always he who came to the door. To be on the safe side. But not quite safe enough. Andrew hadn’t long been up, you could see that, had perhaps only this minute got up. He was wearing khaki shorts and a dirty white T-shirt, sneakers on his feet, no socks.
“I expect you thought policemen took Sundays off, didn’t you, Mr. Struther?” said Wexford.
“Should I know what you’re talking about?”
“We’ll have the explanations inside.”
They pushed past him into the hall. Bibi was there in jeans and the heavy boots Dora had described, holding the dog Manfred by its collar. Wexford said to her, “Lock that dog up somewhere. Anywhere. Do it now.”
“What?”
“If it touches one of us it gets destroyed, so for its protection, lock it up.”
“The Hermaphrodite,” said Karen softly.
“Exactly. Where are the rest of you, Andrew?” Burden remembered the man’s insistence on his surname and style and Struther remembered too. It showed in his face, but he made no reference to it, only said again, this time more querulously, “Should I know what this is about?”
“We have your parents in custody. They were arrested in the early hours of the morning,” Burden said. “Now, where is Ryan Barker?”
“You’re making a mistake.”
The girl came back without the dog, went up close to Andrew Struther, looked into his face. “Andy?”
“Not now.” Struther said to Wexford, “He’s not here. He’s been kidnapped, remember?”
“Search the house.”
“You can’t do that!”
“Show him the warrant, Mike,” said Wexford, and to Vine, “If you go down the back here and turn to the left it should bring you into the tall part of this house. On the top floor you’ll find the room where Roxane Masood was kept. The window is in the wall where that blue climber is in flower.” He said to Andrew Struther, “Where’s Tarling?”
Andrew said nothing. He took hold of Bibi and put his hand over her mouth. She quailed a bit, shrinking into herself.
“Let her go!” Wexford said, and to Burden, “Have they been cautioned?”
“They have. I’ve phoned for backup.”
The door opened and Vine came in with a tall gangling boy in jeans and a sweatshirt. His face looked bewildered, his mouth slack. When he saw Andrew and Bibi he made a little sound.
“Sit down,” Wexford said. “Over there. You too.” He nodded in the direction of Andrew and Bibi, who now stood trembling, rubbing her arm where Andrew had clutched her. “You sit down over there and wait. Where’s Tarling?” he asked again.
“Locked himself in his room next to where the kid was,” said Vine.
Andrew laughed. “He’s got a gun, you know.”
“No, I don’t know.” Wexford shook his head at him. “I find it hard to believe a word you say.”
“Pemberton’s gone to fetch Nicky and Slesar,” Burden murmured to Wexford. “The three of us can get him out and by then the backup’ll be here.”
Andrew half rose out of his chair. He clenched his fists, said, “What did you say?”
No one answered him. Bibi came up to him, took his arm, said, “I want my dog. Make them let him out.”
He ignored her, repeated, “You said ‘Slesar.’ What else did you say?”
Wexford heard the police vehicles’ sirens. They were coming up Markinch Hill. He left the room, crossed the hall, walked out through the front door. Emerging from the shadowy avenue were Pemberton and Slesar, coming onto the wide gravel sweep, Slesar a little way ahead. Tarling he didn’t see until it was too late, but he heard the cry behind him, up at a window, a howl of rage and despair, “You betrayed us!”
The bullet must have passed quite close to his own head. It was at the sound that he ducked, involuntarily, the deafening report. Even then he thought, A rifle, not a shotgun. Damon Slesar stood utterly still, his hands slowly rising up, even from this distance the hole the bullet made clearly visible, on his white shirt, by his heart.
He said something. Perhaps it was “no,” but Wexford couldn’t hear, no one could have heard. Slesar’s knees buckled and he fell forward and sideways, blood pouring out of his mouth.
The two cars, the van, came up the drive, and the first one, its siren still wailing, had to swerve to avoid the dead man on the gravel and the two who bent over him. Car doors burst open and the men came out. Wexford turned back to the house as Karen Malahyde came from the front door, calm, cold, staring, but uttering the same small sound of protest as Ryan Barker had made not long before.
She stood and looked at Slesar’s body but, unlike the others, she resisted kneeling beside him.
28
Kitty Struther described it as her husband’s ‘clever idea,’ ” Wexford began, “but it looks as if the original plan came from Tarling. He had been at school with Andrew Struther and though they might appear to have little in common, in fact they both shared with Andrew’s father Owen a hatred of authority interfering in their lives, or rather, imposing its will on their lives and thus changing them for the worse.”
He was filling in the details for Montague Ryder and Burden was there too, in the Chief Constable’s suite at Myringham. It was Monday and that morning five people had appeared at Kingsmarkham Magistrates’ charged with abduction and unlawful imprisonment, and one of them with the murder of Detective Sergeant Damon John Slesar. They had all, in spite of Wexfor
d’s guesses and belief, been charged with the murder of Roxane Masood.
“Tarling,” Wexford said, “was also, of course, very much concerned with protest over green issues and with animal rights. He and Andrew Struther encountered each other by chance in Kingsmarkham, back in the spring when the bypass looked as if it would become reality and the activists first began coming here. I don’t know how yet and perhaps it doesn’t matter. Suffice it to say that they did—Struther was down here visiting his parents—they recognized each other, and began discussing the bypass.
“Now the occupants of Savesbury House would be a good deal less affected by the bypass than would almost anyone living in a semi on the outskirts of Stowerton or a cottage in the neighborhood of Pomfret, but the threat seemed appalling to them. Devastating. That’s a word that everyone bandies about these days and I don’t like it, but here it’s appropriate. The valley that their windows over-looked, that they could see from their garden, would indeed be devastated—that is, laid waste. And they would hear the traffic. Their peace would be broken, their silence that hitherto was only disturbed by birdsong would be lost to the muted but pretty well incessant roar of the bypass users.”
Burden interrupted him. “But why should Andrew Struther care enough to involve himself in this? He doesn’t live at Savesbury House. He’s young and young men aren’t usually much concerned about birdsong and peace and quiet. Yet he was prepared to risk his liberty …”
“Money, Mike. Money and inheritance. Savesbury House would be his one day. Perhaps he wouldn’t want to live in it, he lives in his London mews, but he’d want to sell it. Estate agents in Kingsmarkham are saying the bypass will reduce the value of all property in its vicinity, some of it by as much as fifty percent. In this case that means cutting the value of Savesbury House from three quarters of a million to not much more than three hundred thousand, not to mention making it unsalable.”
The Chief Constable glanced at Burden. “It’s a different league, Mike, but it’s there.”
“I suppose it is, sir.”
“There was money available,” Wexford went on. “For instance, the building and plumbing of the washroom. I’m pretty sure Gary Wilson did that. He’s a builder by trade. He told me so, only it didn’t register at the time. Oh, he didn’t know what he was doing it for. But he was glad of the work and the money and even more happy, if mystified, when he and Quilla were presented with a car to get them to Wales and thence to North Yorkshire, on the understanding he was to stay out of the way for a couple of months.
“That was money accomplished that. Owen and Kitty Struther had money and they were just as keen on the plan as Tarling and their son. And it was Owen Struther’s idea to set it up by using Contemporary Cars. He had used them a few times to get himself to Kingsmarkham Station and he knew that the last thing they were was contemporary, he knew their slapdash arrangements. But before the plan could be put into operation they had to have a place to put the hostages and, so to speak, a staff to guard the hostages.
“Three of them would, of course, be Tarling, Andrew, and Andrew’s girlfriend Bettina Martin, known as Bibi. It wasn’t enough—well, it was enough for the guard duty, bearing in mind that Owen and Kitty would only need to appear to be guarded—but the car abduction plan necessarily must involve more manpower. So Tarling brought in a man we’ve called the Driver just as we know Tarling as Rubber Face—it was the stocking over his face that turned his features from sharp into rubber—Andrew Struther as Tattoo, and Bibi Martin as the Hermaphrodite. And there was one more.”
Wexford hesitated. He got up and walked over to the window, where he stood for a moment, looking across another garden, another view. On some mental retina he saw it happening again and heard the shot, he saw the shocked whitening face and the blood on the shirt where the heart beat beneath. And then beat no longer.
He turned around, said, “I didn’t suspect him until the morning we left for Savesbury House. And then I didn’t exactly … Frankly, I thought it was me, seeing villains everywhere, believing nothing and no one. I should have stopped him from coming with us. I only knew he was coming when I looked around and spotted him in the car behind. And then, believing nothing and no one as I’ve said, I didn’t believe Tarling had a gun. Or if he did, that he’d use it in those circumstances.”
“You have no need to blame yourself, Reg,” said Montague Ryder.
Wexford shook his head, a gesture of self-anger, not denial. He glanced at Burden, knowing what he was thinking, some monstrous version of its being all for the best anyway. What kind of a future, a life, would there have been for Damon Slesar?
“He wasn’t at school with them, was he?” the Chief Constable asked.
“Not so far as I know, sir. Myringham Comprehensive, I believe. But he was a member of KABAL, which is perfectly respectable, and of SPECIES, which is perhaps not quite that. Strictly speaking, he shouldn’t have joined that latter organization, but then his life for the past six months has been a catalog of things he shouldn’t have done.
“We have to believe that all these people thought their plan would work. They thought that taking hostages would stop the bypass because they thought government would give in. This wasn’t the Middle East, this wasn’t Thailand. This was England and English people holding English people, a monstrous act that would have the desired result. They really thought that. Slesar thought that.”
“He had some special reason for being opposed to the bypass?”
“I suppose you could say that,” Wexford said thoughtfully. “Like Andrew Struther, he was concerned for his parents, though in his case it was their livelihood, not a question of his future inheritance. All he could inherit would be a small holding out on the old bypass, not far from the Brigadier pub.”
“That place where they sell veg and pick-your-own strawberries?” asked Burden. “I didn’t know that.”
“Most businesses on the old bypass will be threatened by the new bypass,” said Wexford. “The old one won’t be used much, or that’s the theory, there won’t be many people stopping off for PYO strawberries. Slesar was against the bypass because it would bankrupt his parents. His father grew fruit. His mother had a subsidiary business spinning thread and weaving garments from animal hair.”
“But how did he get into all this?”
“Through SPECIES, I think. Probably at one of their rallies. Prior to the one that’s just ended in Wales they had one in Kent in the spring. Very likely he met Tarling there and the rest followed. They would have worked pretty hard on him, the Struthers particularly, because they really needed someone like him, an insider.”
“Why do you say the Struthers ‘particularly,’ Reg?”
Wexford said bitterly, “Struther’s a rich man. Not far off a millionaire.” He shrugged. “Happily for all of us in this country—there are still some things to be thankful for—there is no one a rich man can bribe to stop something like this bypass. It can’t be done. But the Damon Slesars of this world are corruptible. I don’t know this yet, but my theory is that Struther bribed Slesar considerably, probably went on raising the price until Slesar yielded. No doubt he got enough to set his parents up elsewhere even if they did lose their livelihood.
“Being their mole inside the force,” Wexford went on, “Slesar knew Mike Burden’s address and phone number for Tarling to phone there with the second message—it was usually the voices of Tarling and Andrew Struther that were heard—and knew I would be at the Holgates’ on Saturday afternoon to receive another message there. Of course the sleeping bag that Frenchie Collins bought in Brixton was the one in which Roxane Masood’s body was found, as she told Slesar once she was alone with him.”
“She knew?” Burden asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe she just took against Karen Malahyde. Anyway, whatever she told Slesar wasn’t going to find its way back to me.”
“Poor Karen,” said Burden.
“Yes. But I don’t think it had gone very deep with her. A
nd knowing what she now knows will have its effect. While she was tailing Brendan Royall, Slesar should have been tailing Conrad Tarling. Needless to say, he wasn’t. Tarling went back and forth between the camp and Savesbury House as much as he pleased. Doubtless, he went down to Wiltshire, also whenever he pleased. At some point, on his clothes, he brought back moth wing dust from Queringham Hall and by chance transferred it to the room where the hostages were kept.”
Wexford was silent for a moment. They were all thinking, he supposed, the same sort of thing, the horror of a police officer succumbing in this way, and with bribery added to treachery. And then he wondered what thought had passed through Slesar’s mind as he saw Tarling at that window with the gun, saw his fanatical face, the shotgun aimed. He had stared, the blood drawn from his face, his hands rising as if in an ineffectual warding off of death.
“You said something about the place where the hostages were kept,” said the Chief Constable in a welcome changing of the subject.
Wexford nodded. “A lot of these old houses that have been farms as well as country houses have a dairy. Mostly they’re just used to store stuff in, repositories for junk. This one probably was. My wife called it a basement room, but it wasn’t really, just rather dark and with one small window rather high up. I expect they renewed the door, had new locks fitted, and so on. Of course they didn’t dare get a building firm in to convert a cupboard into a washroom, but Tarling knew someone who would do it and say nothing, someone who lived nowhere and would very likely disappear after a few weeks.
