by Ruth Rendell
“She’s upset,” Tarling said. “And no wonder. I don’t suppose it was you, was it? It was the bailiffs. But you all get tarred with the same brush and who’s to blame for that?”
“As you do, Mr. Tarling, and who’s to blame for that?”
Tarling began a lecture on environmental issues, the destruction of ecological balance and the danger of what he called “emissions.” Burden nodded once or twice, then left him and went home, from where he phoned into the old gym and announced where he would be that evening. They had agreed to keep one another constantly informed of their whereabouts.
“They weren’t exactly cooperative,” he said to Jenny while eating a fast supper at the table with his son. “I got started on the wrong foot, I suppose. This Quilla—how does a woman get to be called Quilla? What’s it short for or long for?—she gave me a name. And the other one, the Freya one, softened up a bit and gave me a place. I strongly suspect neither exists.”
“I suppose you’re going out again?” Jenny said it neutrally, not at all in a tone of exasperation.
“Well, what do you think? That we’re going to have a nice evening watching a detective series on telly?”
“Mike,” said Jenny, “I’ve remembered something—well, someone. At the Comprehensive before Mark was born.”
He stopped eating.
“I don’t want to remember it in a way because it’s so—well, isn’t it awful in our society, the way people with morals and high ideals and courage get labeled as subversive and terrorists? The way that happens and other people who never did a thing in their lives for peace or the environment or against cruelty, they’re the ones that are respected?”
“No one’s talking about terrorists,” said Burden.
“You know what I mean. Or I bloody well hope you do. I’ve made you see things a bit more my way, haven’t I?”
“Yes, love. I’m sorry. I’m a bit tired.”
“I know. Mike, there was a boy at school—it would be six years ago, he was seventeen then, so he’d be twenty-three now—he was an animal-rights person when animal rights were mostly about being against the fur trade and saving endangered species. He was an idealist and I don’t think he’d have hurt anyone, though when I come to think of it he never seemed to care much for people’s rights. He left school and went up north somewhere, and later on, it was after Mark was born, someone, one of the teachers, I happened to meet her, told me he’d been convicted of stealing a lot of animals or maybe birds from a pet shop and releasing them somewhere. And the thing was, he asked for ten other offenses of that kind to be taken into consideration. So I thought …”
“Why did you never tell me?”
“You wouldn’t have been interested.”
Burden said quietly, “No, you thought I’d say, ‘Serves him right,’ or, ‘These people are a menace to society,’ and perhaps I would have. What was his name?”
“Royall, Brendan Royall.”
His little boy was beginning to read. Burden had never before come across a child who, instead of being read to, now wanted to read to the parent who had done so for him night after night for four years. But he hadn’t known a parent like that before or many children, come to that. He kissed his wife and for a moment laid a loving hand on her shoulder.
“ ‘I really couldn’t eat mouse pie,’ ” read Mark. “Mummy, you’re not listening.”
Mouse pie, said Burden to himself, mouse pie. The things these writers thought of. Upsetting to an animal-rights activist, that would be, a source of distress no doubt to this Brendan Royall …
He drove himself to Clare Cox’s. The Jaguar was still outside. Hassy Masood had returned with his second family, for the front door was opened by a young girl in a sari.
The tiny living room was full of people. Masood, who had changed his denim suit for one of dark gray broadcloth, proceeded to introduce them.
“My wife, Mrs. Naseem Masood, my sons, John and Henry Masood. My stepdaughter, Ayesha Kareem, who is Mrs. Masood’s daughter by her first marriage to Mr. Hussein Kareem, now alas dead. Roxane’s mother, Miss Clare Cox, you of course already know.”
Burden said good evening. Something about Hassy Masood made him feel tired before he got started. Unlike her daughter, Naseem Masood wore western dress, a very tight red suit with short skirt, a great deal of expensive costume jewelry, gold and with red stones, high-heeled white shoes. Her black hair, teased into tendrils, was nearly as long as Gary the tree man’s beard. Her daughter was tall and willowy, had coppery skin, strangely light brown eyes, long nose, and curved lips, the look of a girl from Omar Khayyam. She made Burden think of the only bit of poetry he knew and the lines about bread and wine and thou beside me in the wilderness came back to him. The little boys, pale, neat, black-haired, stared at him in a way he wouldn’t have cared for his own son to stare at anyone.
On the sofa Clare Cox lay with her feet up, her eyes closed. She made a gesture to him with her hand, a movement of greeting possibly, or more likely, despair. She wore the same nightgownlike garment he had always seen her in, reminding him of Quilla, for it was soiled now, stained down the front, perhaps with her tears.
“I am sorry to disturb you, Miss Cox,” he began, “but I know you understand that in the circumstances …”
Masood interrupted him. “Now what can we get you in the way of refreshment, Mr. Burden? A drink? A sandwich? I doubt if you have had time today for much in the way of sustenance. I don’t of course touch alcohol myself, but having seen fit to provide Miss Cox with supplies in the way of wine and brandy, I can with no trouble at all …”
“No, thank you,” said Burden. “Now, Miss Cox, this won’t take a moment.”
She opened her eyes. “Do you want to speak to me alone?”
“That won’t be necessary.”
After he’d said it he realized he might have relieved her of the rest of them, but he wasn’t thinking fast enough. He thought only that if Hassy Masood had been obedient, his wife would not know about Sacred Globe, but the questions he needed to ask could have been asked of the parent of any missing person.
She sighed. The girl called Ayesha turned on the television, turned down the sound to a murmur, and sat on the floor staring at it, six inches away. Mrs. Masood took her sons by the hand, then put an arm around each of them and pulled them to her. Masood, who had left the room, came back into it with glasses of what looked like orange Squash on a tray.
Sticking to his refusal to drink, Burden said, “What can you tell me about your daughter’s friendship with Tanya Paine?”
“Nothing. She just knew her.”
Clare Cox had turned her face away, pushing into a cushion. The girl on the floor drank her orange Squash noisily, with slurps. Burden said, “Were they at school together?”
For a moment he thought she wasn’t going to answer. Then she turned over and half sat up. “They were at Kingsmarkham Comprehensive, but they weren’t close friends, they just knew each other. Roxane’s cleverer than her. She was in the top group for art and English.”
“I don’t suppose he wants to know that,” said Naseem Masood to no one in particular.
Clare Cox spoke rapidly. It was a way of getting it over quickly, of getting rid of him. “Roxane had a job—well, it started as a holiday job—working in the instant print place in York Street and she ran into Tanya who had a job next door and they’d got into the way of having a coffee together. Then Tanya left to work for Contemporary Cars and Roxane left to be a model, but when she wanted a car she’d always go to Tanya.”
As she was speaking the eyes of everyone in the room apart from the girl on the floor had turned to the portrait on the wall. The beautiful face looked back at them. Mrs. Masood was the first to remove her gaze. Having derived the maximum from this interview, she had apparently decided she had had enough. She got up, smoothing and pulling down her skirt.
“We should be getting back to the hotel now, Hassy,” she said. “The boys want their dinner and Ayesha’s a
growing girl.” She addressed Burden. “That Posthouse is a very good hotel for a place like this.”
He asked Clare Cox if she had Tanya Paine’s address and was given the name of a block of flats in Glebe Road. Tanya, Clare Cox seemed to think, shared with three others. He waited until the Masood family had left, Ayesha, in spite of her height and her grown-up clothes, tearful and stamping her foot at being taken away from the silent screen.
“Have you no one to be with you overnight?” he asked.
“God,” she said, “give me the chance to be alone.” She wiped her eyes with her fingertips, though there had been no tears in them. “Mr. Burden? It is—er, Burden, isn’t it?”
“That’s right.”
“I wanted to tell you something about Roxane. Oh, it isn’t helpful, it isn’t anything, but it’s worrying me so …”
“What is it?”
“It’s—do you think they’re keeping her somewhere like a—oh, God, a small room, a cupboard even, I mean … She’s claustrophobic, you see. I mean, she’s really claustrophobic, seriously, not the way people just say they are when they don’t like going in lifts. She can’t be shut in anywhere, she can’t stand it …”
“I see.”
“This is quite a small house but she’s all right here when the doors are open. She always leaves her bedroom door open. I shut it once by mistake, I forgot, and she got in an awful state …”
What could he say? A couple of soothing sentences that offered very little comfort. But her question remained with him as he got into the car and drove back to Kingsmarkham. Sacred Globe wasn’t likely to be keeping the girl in some spacious apartment with French windows opening onto lawns and terraces. The probability was somewhere small and confined, and he thought about cases he had known or read of, people kept in sheds or tanks or chests or car trunks. How was Dora Wexford about claustrophobia? Did any of the rest of them have phobias or, come to that, allergies, special dietary requirements? It seemed to serve no useful purpose to find out …
He found Tanya Paine by herself, all her flatmates out. Solitary evenings she evidently devoted to beauty treatments, for her head was wrapped up in a towel, her nails were newly painted, and there was a powerful foul smell in the room of some kind of depilatory.
At first she took his visit as that of a concerned social worker checking up on whether she had been given the counseling she asked for. He recognized her as a total solipsist, with no interest in anyone but herself or in anything but her immediate concerns. In a way, this was an advantage, because telling her about the abductions would be out of the question.
Almost anyone else would have asked. She remained unsurprised by his questions, confirmed what Clare Cox had said but volunteered no further information. To her, it appeared, Roxane Masood was just a girl she knew, not a girl who had affected her much, a mate to have a laugh with (as she put it), someone to meet for a coffee and a danish. As soon as she could she steered the conversation back to her counselor, a woman whom she had seen once but was not giving her the satisfaction she hoped for.
“She never asked me what sort of childhood I had. Don’t you reckon that’s funny? I was all geared up to tell her a few bits about my mum and dad and she never even asked.”
The phone ringing saved Burden from making any answer. Afterward he had no idea how he knew; how the sense of what it was, of who was making this call, came to him in an inspiring flash, almost from the moment she picked up the receiver.
Perhaps it was the tone in which she said “What?” or the expression on her face, her lower lip dropping, her eyes widening. He got up, was across the room in two strides, met her eyes, and took the phone from her. She seemed relieved to be rid of it, dropping it into his hands like a snake or a hot coal.
A couple of sentences had already been uttered. Burden concentrated on listening as he had never listened before.
“… Globe. You know the hostages we have. You know our price.”
It was as Jenny had said, a dull accentless monotonous voice.
“By morning we need a public assurance of cessation of work on the Kingsmarkham Bypass. We are not exigent, we are not draconian. A moratorium will suffice. Stop the work for the time being while we negotiate.
“But a public assurance via the media we must have and by nine tomorrow morning. If not, the first of the hostages will die and the body be returned to you before nightfall.
“Pass this message on to the police and the media.”
Burden didn’t speak. He knew it would be useless and, in any case, he didn’t want the possessor of this voice to know it wasn’t Tanya Paine listening to him.
“I repeat, pass this message to the police and the media. The embargo on publicity is not of our doing. Remember that. Publicity is what we desire.
“We are Sacred Globe, saving the world. Thank you.”
The phone was put down, the burr began, and Burden turned around to see Tanya Paine staring at him, open-mouthed and with clenched fists.
9
The second meeting was at nine that night and it was in the old gym. The Chief Constable and the deputy were both there, but Wexford presided. His team had brought in a mass of information, but the most useful, it appeared, came from Burden, who had discovered a positive lead in Brendan Royall and, by the purest coincidence, been present when Sacred Globe’s phone call came to Tanya Paine.
“Why her?” Nicola Weaver wanted to know.
“That’s been puzzling me,” Burden said, “and those words he used, ‘draconian’ and ‘exigent’ and ‘moratorium.’ I’m not sure I know what ‘draconian’ means myself. She’s not what you’d call bright.”
The message, rendered by Burden as accurately as he could and put on the word processor, was up on the screen in front of them in a hugely magnified version.
“But it doesn’t matter, does it?” Damon Slesar said. “The sense is what matters, the crux of it, that unless there’s a public announcement by nine one of the hostages …” He had been going to say, “gets the chop,” and apparently remembering Wexford’s wife, quickly changed it to “One of the hostages’ life is endangered. She’d pass that on all right.”
“Still, it was a piece of luck for us you were there, Mike,” said the Chief Constable. “Or could they have known you were there?”
“I don’t think so, sir. I told no one.”
“How about the voice, Mike?” Wexford asked.
“Possibly the same voice as the one that delivered the earlier message to my wife. On the other hand, she thinks the voice she heard was accent-free and not disguised while I’m pretty sure the one I heard was. All those long words but a hint of a cockney accent. You know how you sometimes hear an actor talking cockney on TV and it sounds good, they learn it from tapes and they’ve learned well, but at the same time it’s not genuine, it’s not the real thing, it’s telly-cockney that we’ve got used to and accept. Well, that’s what this voice was like, someone who’d learned his cockney from a tape, and dropped his voice and took the inflections out of it. Altogether too much of a good thing, if you get my meaning.”
Lynn Fancourt and Archbold then had something to say about the name they had picked up at the Elder Ditches camp. A woman named Frances Collins, known as Frenchie, arrested in Brixton for being involved in an affray, was put forward by Freya, the dispossessed tree woman, though she spoke of her with such vindictiveness that Lynn suspected she was attempting revenge or settling a score. But it would have to be followed up.
Karen Malahyde, making inquiries at the Framhurst Copses camp, was on to two leads which directed her to a house at Flagford that had long been a commune of activists of various sorts. Slesar and Hennessy were working on the Brendan Royall angle, and Barry Vine set for a renewed interrogation of Stanley Trotter.
The Chief Constable told them what he had achieved that day. Against everyone’s will, but they had no choice, Sacred Globe’s condition would be complied with, and publicly announced.
“It goes ag
ainst the grain,” Montague Ryder said. “You know that. You all feel that. But ‘moratorium’ is the word, a good word, and that’s all it will be. That bypass is going to be built.”
The atmosphere in the gym was very different from what it would have been if the hostages had not included Dora Wexford. If the rest of them only sensed or intuited that, her husband knew it. However serious the matter, in other circumstances there would have been a degree of lightheadedness, a grim humor, a derisive profanity. As it was, they were wary, they were even embarrassed, and each one of them, in his or her own way, was afraid.
Not a single face was lit by a grin, not a single witticism or crack was exchanged, as they parted. The Chief Constable and his deputy left together. Damon Slesar, departing with Karen, the two of them side by side, made a point of saying good night to Wexford, and saying it very respectfully.
“Good night then, sir.”
They made for one car between them, but not looking into each other’s faces or speaking. Burden made the expected offer of accompanying Wexford home, staying the night if he wanted it, and Wexford again refused, though giving him heartfelt thanks.
Nicola Weaver caught up with him as he came into the car park. He thought how tired she looked. Someone had told him she had two children under seven and a not very cooperative husband. Her eyes were a curious shade of dark bluish green, the same color as the malachite in the ring she wore.
“There’s something I thought you should know,” she said to him. “You probably know already, but in case not—in this country the vast proportion of kidnap victims, more than a majority, turn up unharmed. With kids it’s different but adults—getting on for a hundred percent.”
“I did know, but thanks, Nicola.” He wasn’t going to tell her she was the fifth person to impart these facts to him that day.
“Nicky,” she said. “What good would it do them, anyway, to kill someone? It’s an empty threat.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” he said. “Good night.”
She got into her car and he got into his. The night was dark and moonless. He could see some tiny stars, infinitely distant pinpricks in black velvet. Lines came into his head and he repeated them as he drove home.