by Ruth Rendell
“I’ve said that the hostages’ backgrounds aren’t apparently of much significance, but, on the other hand, I would draw your attention to a connection between Tanya Paine, Contemporary Cars’ receptionist, and the hostage Roxane Masood. Miss Masood and Miss Paine appear to have been acquaintances if not close friends, they knew each other, which is the principal reason for Miss Masood’s calling that particular taxi firm. This may mean nothing, it’s probably no more than coincidence, but it is a tiny lead that shouldn’t be neglected.
“The Chief Constable is at present with the Highways Agency. What will come of that meeting I don’t know. I do know, as sure as I have any certainties about this business, that government isn’t going to say, ‘Okay, forget about the bypass, let the hostages go and we’ll build it somewhere else.’ Nothing like that is going to happen. That isn’t to say there won’t be some sort of interim compromise. We must wait and see what he has to say when he returns from his meeting.
“Meanwhile, because time is very important, we all have to get going on the lines I’ve just laid down. Principally, to find out who Sacred Globe is, their members, their leaders. We have to wait too for the message we are told will be sent before nightfall.
“Are there any questions?”
Nicola Weaver got to her feet. “Is this to be classified as a terrorist incident?”
“Doubtful,” Wexford said. “Not at any rate at this stage. As far as we can tell, Sacred Globe isn’t attempting to overthrow the government by force.”
“Wasn’t there a group or an individual who planted bombs on new housing estates?” This was Inspector Weaver again. “I mean, bombed them to discourage new building? They’re a possibility, I should think.”
“What about the guy who made concrete hedgehogs and put them on motorways?” This was DC Hennessy’s contribution. He added, “The idea being simultaneously to avenge squashed hedgehogs and wreck cars.”
“Anyone like that can be a lead,” Wexford said.
Turning with a slight frown from Karen Malahyde, who had apparently been whispering information to him, Damon Slesar asked, “I understand Inspector Burden’s wife is a schoolteacher at a local school. Could one of these Sacred Globe folks have been in her class at school or be a parent of such a child?”
“It’s a good point,” said Wexford. “Good thinking. That way he might know whose wife she was.” At once, as he uttered those words, his own wife came powerfully into his mind, seemed to stand before his eyes. He blinked, resumed, “This is another lead to look into as soon as you leave this room. Talk to Inspector Burden and find out where his wife taught up till five years ago and where she has begun teaching now. Right. That’s all. I hope you’re all happy to work late tonight.”
It was still only four o’clock. Before nightfall, Wexford repeated to himself, before nightfall the third message would come. Now, in early September, night didn’t fall until eight o’clock, if by the term one meant after sunset and when dusk has begun. In the next four hours that message might come to almost anyone. The same options as earlier applied and earlier they had been wrong.
Jenny had, with commendable presence of mind, immediately punched out the number 1471 that summons a recorded voice telling the subscriber the caller’s number. But the caller had, prior to the call, put in the number that negates this procedure, so there was no result. These days any call could be traced if the caller’s number was known, except that a call box was almost certainly being used and this time it would be a different call box. Were they in the vicinity, he wondered, or a hundred miles away? Were the hostages together or held separately?
He asked himself, knowing he shouldn’t ask, shouldn’t touch it, shy away from this, whom they would kill first. If things didn’t go the way they wanted—and how could they?—who would be first?
The only call to come in during the next hour in connection with the hostages was from Andrew Struther, son of Owen and Kitty Struther, of Savesbury House, Framhurst.
Burden was rather surprised to hear the voice of a reasonable man using reasonable words, even apologizing.
“I’m sorry, I’m afraid I was a mite discourteous. The fact was this tale of my parents being missing seemed to me so totally incredible. However—I’ve phoned the Excelsior in Florence and they’re not there. They’ve never been there. I’m not exactly worried …”
“Perhaps you should be, Mr. Struther.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t entirely follow … Hasn’t there simply been a mistake?”
“I think not. The best thing would be for you to come down here and we’ll give you the facts as we know them. I’d have done so this morning, but you were”—Burden endeavored to be polite—“not particularly receptive.”
Struther said he would come. He didn’t know the whereabouts of Kingsmarkham Police Station and Burden had someone give him directions. Pass through Framhurst, over the crossroads, keep straight on, follow the signs for Kingsmarkham … DCs Hennessy and Fancourt had gone to the bypass site to interview tree people at the Elder Ditches and Savesbury camps, where Burden was to join them. Detective Inspector Weaver was with the KABAL hierarchy, and Karen Malahyde with Archbold were researching SPECIES, where their headquarters was, how many members they had nationwide, what they did and if it ever involved breaking the law.
A phone call came to Wexford from Sheila to say Sylvia was going home. Neil had been in touch with the news that their younger son Robin had chicken pox. She was going home but would be back the next day, as soon as she was certain she couldn’t carry the chicken pox virus or bacterium back to Amulet. Wexford had given up arguing, protesting, telling them both to go home. He just uttered, “Yes, darling, that’s fine” and other consoling pap, adding that he didn’t know when he’d get home. The message wouldn’t come to his home, anyway. Sacred Globe would know very well he wouldn’t see much of the inside of his house at the moment.
A promise had been extracted from Peter Tregear of Sussex Wildlife to be with him by five-thirty, when Andrew Struther arrived, accompanied by his girlfriend whom he introduced as Bibi. Both wore sunglasses, though it wasn’t a bright day. The girl’s were the mirror kind that you can see your own face in. She wore a red-and-white-striped Breton top, so skimpy that every time she moved, an inch of tanned midriff showed. She seemed highly conscious of her good looks and allure, fidgeting her body into provocative poses. Wexford left them to Burden. He felt Burden was owed an apology, though he doubted if it would come.
Perhaps because Burden had told him he should be worried, Struther had brought with him a photograph of his missing parents. They were standing in snow in bright sunshine on some ski slope. Both were smiling and screwing up their eyes, it would have been hard to identify the originals from this, but Burden didn’t think he was going to have to identify them. He saw a tall man in a dark blue ski suit, a rather shorter woman in red. From what could be seen of it under woolly hats, both had fair hair fading to gray, both had light eyes and were strong, straight, and lean. Owen Struther might have been fifty-five, his wife a few years younger.
“I must ask for your silence,” Burden said. “We are taking a very serious view of this. I don’t think I’m overstepping the mark if I say that a leak to the press will result in prosecution for obstructing the police in their inquiries.”
“What is this?” said Struther.
Burden told him. He didn’t name the other hostages. A reluctance to name Wexford’s wife had seized him.
“Unbelievable,” Struther said.
The girl gave a shriek. She sat up awkwardly, forgot to be provocative, took off her glasses. Hazel eyes, verging on the golden, had the look of an animal’s, empty of emotion, though greedy and purposeful.
“Why them?” Struther asked.
“Chance. A random selection. There have been threats. Threats to kill unless conditions are met.”
“Conditions?”
Burden saw no reason not to tell him. All the next-of-kin of the hostages would have
to be told. Much as he would have preferred to shy away from it, he said, “That the building of the bypass be stopped.”
Struther said, “What bypass?”
He lived in London, he might not read the papers, watch television. There were such people. “I rather think the proposed route can be seen from the windows of your parents’ house.”
“Oh, that new road? The one people keep demonstrating about?”
“That one.” Burden watched Struther digest this information, nod, put up his eyebrows. “Thank you, Mr. Struther,” he said. “We’ll keep you informed. Remember what I said about not speaking to anyone about this, won’t you? It’s of the greatest importance.”
Dazed now, as if in a dream, Struther said, “We won’t say anything,” and then, “Christ, it’s just beginning to hit me. Christ.”
Peter Tregear must have passed him going out as he came in. The secretary of the Sussex Wildlife Trust was not to be told of the abductions, only of a subversive group called Sacred Globe. What did he know of them? Had he even heard of them?
“I don’t think so,” Tregear said. “There are so many of these groups and splinter groups. It’s never simple. Have you ever read a book about the French Revolution?”
Wexford looked at him in astonishment.
“Or the Spanish Civil War, for that matter. I mention those world-shaking events because in both of them, and the Russian Revolution too, it was so far from simple and straightforward. Not just two sides, I mean, but dozens of splinter groups and factions, almost impossible to follow. Human nature’s like that, isn’t it? Can’t keep things simple, people always have to have a lot of internecine squabbles, one little thing they don’t agree with and they’re off forming a collective of their own. Give me animals every time.”
“So you think the members of Sacred Globe were part of one of the other groups, but they disagreed with the rules or the aims or whatever, maybe wanted more action, less talk, more violence even, so they broke away and formed their own.”
“Or didn’t break away,” said Tregear. “Stayed and formed their own group.”
“Before Mark was born,” Jenny said, “I’d been teaching first at Sewingbury High School as it then was, and later at Kingsmarkham Comprehensive. Oh, and I did a bit of part-time at that private school St. Olwen’s when Mark was three and going to that nursery in the mornings.”
Wexford had found her in her husband’s office, where she had been since receiving the call. Her little boy was with his school friend, siblings and parents.
“I’ve told half a dozen people everything I can remember about that phone call,” she had said when Wexford came in. “And soon I’ll be telling them what I can’t remember.”
“Don’t do that,” he had said. “We’ve picked your brain enough on that. Now we want to know how he came to phone you.” He listened in silence to the enumeration of her teaching experience. “Did your pupils—sorry, you call them students now, don’t you?—did they know who Mike was, what Mike did?”
“I suppose so. Some of them did. Kids aren’t like they used to be when we were young, Reg.” She was flattering him there, he thought, considering she was getting on for twenty years his junior. She smiled at him. “We’d never have asked teachers personal questions. We’d have got short shrift if we had. It’s different now. For one thing they genuinely want to know. They’re interested in people the way we weren’t. Or I wasn’t. At the Comprehensive they call me by my Christian name.”
“And they’d ask you about your husband? What he did?”
“Oh, all the time. The ones I taught five years ago, ten years ago, and the ones now. Except that now every one of them knows he’s a policeman.”
“And back then? Say seven years ago? I’m thinking of seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds at that time. Is there anyone you can think of who specifically asked?”
“I think pretty well everyone knew then, Reg. They were all interested in my wedding—you remember what a big showy wedding we had, all my mother’s doing—and it was in the local paper then what Mike did.” She looked at him doubtfully. “Where’s Mike now?”
“Somewhere at the bypass site. Why do you ask?”
“I hoped he’d be coming home. But he won’t, will he, not for hours? Can I go, Reg? I need to fetch Mark.”
Not for hours … It would have been the end of a normal day but Burden knew that for him it was only half over. Eyes peering at you from forest depths and forest trees was an image constantly recurring in children’s literature. He was always reading such descriptions to his son, but the eyes in the children’s books belonged to animals and these were human. He was aware of them from the branches above him and the scrubby coverts beneath. A sacking curtain was pulled aside at the entrance to one of the tree houses and a man stepped out, saying nothing, staring down, his face impassive.
They had left the car in a lay-by on the lane and walked first along the green ride, then taken the path that wound its way through groves of man-high birch saplings. Lynn Fancourt knew the way better than he did, a good deal better than Ted Hennessy, who trod warily, rather as if he were being taken on a tour of an unexplored rain forest. Twittering birds gathered in the treetops, preparing to roost. Burden thought he could hear the sound of a guitar ahead of them, but soon the music stopped and the keening voice stopped and all that could be heard was the birds’ tuneless murmuring.
Then, as the birches were left behind and the great trees began, he saw the eyes. Their approach had been heard, their footfalls on the twigs and leaf mold and dry grass, and that was why the guitar had been put away. Everyone in the trees prepared to watch for them. Burden had been used to believing that it was only animal eyes that shone in dark places, but these gleamed in just the same way. He had just taken in the fact that their arrival had interrupted the activities of three people who seemed to be involved in the building of a new tree house, when the man on the platform spoke.
“Can I help you?”
He said it like someone serving in a shop, with the same degree of friendly politeness, but he wasn’t much like a shop assistant, more a leader of men, tall with a commanding air, a cloak wrapping him. He might have been a general surveying the battlefield before the fighting starts.
Archbold said very correctly, “Kingsmarkham Crime Management. We’d like a word.”
“What are we supposed to have done now?”
“We’re making inquiries,” Burden said. “That’s all. We’d just like to talk to you.” He moved his hand, a half wave.
“Nothing to do with this camp. It won’t take long.”
“Wait.”
The cloaked man disappeared into his tree house. There wasn’t much he could do about it, Burden thought, if he didn’t come out again. And there were fewer eyes staring now. He looked up at the tree house that was in the process of being built. A wooden framework had been constructed on the firm foundation made by the two huge limbs and lopped-off trunk of a long-ago pollarded beech. A woman in an awkward-looking long dress clambered down the trunk and began searching for tools in a canvas bag on the ground. She passed a hammer up to the man with the long fair beard who had come halfway down for it. At that moment their leader—Burden somehow knew he was that—came out from behind the curtain, his cloak left behind, and shinned down his ladder, suddenly transformed into a normal person in jeans, sweatshirt, and sneakers.
Not quite a normal person perhaps. For one thing, this man was exceptionally tall, exceptionally long-legged, and with long-fingered attenuated hands. His head was shaved, his features like those Burden had seen in pictures of Native American chiefs, harsh, razor-sharp, fleshless bones and skin.
“Conrad Tarling.” He nodded as he spoke, a kind of substitute for a handshake. “They call me the King of the Wood.”
Burden could think of no rejoinder.
“Would you prove your identities, please?”
A glance at three warrant cards and the nod came again.
“We’ve been thro
ugh a lot, had a good deal of trouble,” said Conrad Tarling in the tone of someone who has spent six months in a refugee camp. “What is it you want to ask about?”
Lynn Fancourt told him. While she was explaining, the hammering began. The man building the tree house had begun attaching lengths of timber to the beam construction. Lynn raised her voice. She had to shout above the noise and Burden went over to where the woman in the long dress was standing.
“Would you mind stopping that for the time being?”
“Why?” the man in the tree said.
Burden had never seen such a long beard except in illustrations to children’s books, the wizard, the woodcutter. He didn’t know why he kept on thinking of children’s books.
“Police,” he said. “We have some inquiries to make. Just hold off for ten minutes, will you?”
For answer the hammer was flung out of the tree. Not, however, in Burden’s direction or anywhere near him. The woman in the long dress picked it up and scowled at him. He heard Lynn Fancourt ask Tarling in her normal voice if he had ever heard of Sacred Globe or knew anyone in the camp who might have, when a girl in mummylike wrappings and draperies appeared, running from nowhere, from a treetop or out from among the trees perhaps, but who erupted into the midst of them, shouting and throwing out her arms.
“You turn us off our land, you drag us out of our homes, and now you come here and ask us to betray each other. It’s not enough that you wreck this country, this world, you’ve got to wreck the people too. Not just their bodies, not just the way you carried me unconscious down a ladder at dawn this morning, not just that, though I might have fallen and been disabled for life, not only that, but you’d wreck our souls too. You’d make us betray our friends and when you do that you smash the spirit!”
There was a silence that Burden broke. “Your friends?” he said.