Road Rage

by Ruth Rendell

  He saw them so clearly and observed so much because the tea shop was on a corner of a crossroads, one turning leading to Sewingbury, the other to Myfleet, and boasted Framhurst’s single set of traffic lights. The light had turned red as he approached. He had already identified the man (from Burden’s description) as Gary and the woman as Quilla, when she suddenly sprang to her feet, jumped off the pavement, and placed herself in front of him in the middle of the road. Wexford shrugged, wound down the window.

  “What do you want?”

  She seemed taken aback that he wasn’t angry and hesitated, both hands up to her face. He waited. There was no traffic behind him, none ahead. She brought her face up to the car window.

  “You’re a policeman, aren’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “Not one of the ones who came talking to us at the camp?”

  “Chief Inspector Wexford,” he said.

  She seemed taken aback or shocked, shaken anyway. Perhaps it was only his rank, a higher one than she had expected.

  “Can I talk to you?”

  He nodded. “I’ll park the car.”

  There was a space around the corner on the Myfleet road. He walked to where she was now sitting at the table with the bearded man.

  “Your name is Quilla,” he said, “and you’re Gary. Shall we have a cup of tea.”

  They seemed astonished that he knew their names, almost superstitiously affected, as if a name taboo was in existence and he had broken it. He explained, it was simple. Gary smiled diffidently. You could have sat there till Doomsday, Wexford said, before anyone would come out to serve you. He went into the shop and presently a girl of about fifteen came out to take their order.

  “I could do with something hot inside me,” Quilla said. “You’re always cold in our business. You get used to it, but a hot drink’s a welcome thing.”

  “Would you like something to eat?”

  “No, thanks. We all had some crisps when the others were here. That was when we saw you go through, and the King said you were a policeman.”

  “The King?”

  “Conrad Tarling. He knows everybody—well, he knows them by sight. The others went back to the camp, but I said I’d wait and see if you came back and Gary waited with me.”

  “You want to tell me something?”

  The tea came, three cups and saucers, a large pot, synthetic sweetener in packets, and the kind of liquid in plastic cups that looks like milk but never originated in a cow. Wexford thought it was disgraceful in the midst of the countryside and said so.

  “Take it or leave it,” said the girl. “That’s all there is.”

  “We campaign to stop that sort of thing too,” said Gary. “We’re against everything that’s unnatural, everything that’s synthetic, pollutant, adulterated. We’ve dedicated our lives to that.”

  Instead of saying that it was extremely difficult in modern life to sort out the natural from the unnatural, if indeed anything natural remained, Wexford asked them how long they had been professional protesters.

  “Since I was sixteen and Quilla was fifteen,” Gary said. “That’s twelve years ago now. I’m in the building line, but we’ve never had jobs—well, paid jobs. The work we do is pretty hard.”

  “How do you live, then?”

  “Not on the benefit. It wouldn’t be right to be kept by a government and taxpayers when we’re opposed to everything they think and everything they live by.”

  “I don’t suppose it would,” said Wexford, “but it’s a novel viewpoint.”

  “We don’t need much. We don’t need transport often and we make the roof over our own heads. We do itinerant farmwork when we can get it. I do the odd building job. I cut grass. She makes straw dollies and sells them and she makes jewelry.”

  “A hard life.”

  “The only possible one for us,” said Quilla. “I heard—well, I don’t know how to say this.”

  “What did you hear? That we were looking for names?”

  “Freya said. Freya’s the woman the bailiffs nearly dropped out of a tree yesterday. She said you were looking for a terrorist.”

  Wexford drank the last of his tea. The undertaste of nonlactic soy-milk creamer ruined it. “That’s a way of putting it.”

  “What’s he supposed to have done?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Okay. But if you’re looking for someone who doesn’t care for human life, who’d do anything, abominable things, to save a beetle or a mouse, I can tell who you want. Brendan Royall, he’s called. Brendan Royall.”

  11

  It was the only name to have come to them twice, from two completely separate sources. Brendan Royall was Jenny Burden’s ex-pupil, the boy who had “never seemed to care much for people’s rights” but had committed eleven offenses in connection with the theft and subsequent liberation of animals.

  To Quilla—her surname was Rice, Wexford discovered—Brendan Royall was the enemy, the activist who not only gave protest a bad name but did things in the course of his campaigning that were opposed to all she stood for. It was her indignation over the very case Jenny had mentioned, he thought, which had led her to speak to him.

  “They died, all those creatures he liberated. The birds didn’t know how to fly and he didn’t know what to feed them. He was carrying the animals in the back of a van down the motorway and the back doors came open. It was carnage, it was abominable. I don’t believe he cared, it was done for the principle, he said.”

  “I’m surprised he’s not here,” Gary said. “I’ve been expecting him to turn up ever since we came and the first camp started. It’s his sort of thing, you see.”

  Quilla nodded eagerly. “Not the spoiling the countryside so much as those insects and whatever. The Map butterfly and the yellow caddis. He’d kill a hundred people to save a stick insect. I once heard him say people weren’t necessary, they were just parasites.”

  Wexford offered them a lift back to the tree camp. They refused at first, they could walk, they wouldn’t be beholden, but the rain started again and Wexford said it seemed a shame when he was going that way anyway. Quilla said she didn’t know where Brendan Royall was at present. He ought to have been here, putting up some sort of demo along the Brede, and she couldn’t understand why he wasn’t. When Gary had last heard of him he had been in Nottingham, but Quilla said she had come across him later than that, in some connection with making a tunnel for weasels under the A134 in Suffolk. The difficulty was that, like them, he never really lived anywhere.

  “His parents are around here somewhere,” said Quilla. “I’ve got an idea he may have gone to school here.”

  “That’s right,” said Gary. “He did. I don’t know about living around here, but he told me his grandad used to have a big house near a place called Forby and it should have been his, only his dad cheated him out of it.”

  “He would say that.”

  “He wanted to turn it into a sanctuary for animals that had been illegally imported. It was a great big place with a lot of grounds. Only his dad came in for it and sold it. His dad gave Brendan some of the money, but that wasn’t good enough for him. He wanted the house or all the money for the cause.”

  It was almost six when Wexford got back to the station. Nothing more had been heard from Sacred Globe. They would have reached him on his car phone if it had, but still he’d hoped …

  “This Brendan Royall is the most positive lead we’ve got so far,” he said to Burden. “He’s just the sort we’re looking for, obsessed with what they all call Nature with a capital N, and with a total disregard for human life.” He winced when he said that part, but Burden pretended not to notice. “Gary Wilson says he can’t understand why he’s not here, protesting with them, but I can. I hope I can.”

  “You mean because he’s one of those Sacred Globe people? He’s not in a tree camp because he’s somewhere else holding the hostages?”

  “Why not? I want everyone to stop whatever they’re doing and go o
ut after Brendan Royall. Someone—you, if you like—should talk to Jenny and see if she can remember where the Royall parents lived. Or live. It’s only six years ago, the fellow’s only twenty-three now. Then there’s the house that was the grandfather’s. Someone in Forby is bound to know. It shouldn’t be hard. Let’s get the team in here, Mike, and brief them.”

  The third meeting of the day. It was six-thirty. Everyone was back from what had proved largely fruitless searches. Karen Malahyde had been to the council flat in Guildford, been redirected by a tired old woman who said she never wanted to see her daughter again, and finally found Frenchie Collins ill in bed in a dirty room in Brixton. She had been in Africa, had picked up some infection and was still far from recovery. Karen saw no reason to doubt this nor disbelieve her when she said she had lost four stone in weight.

  Barry Vine had been talking to KABAL and DS Cook with his DC to the Heartwood collective, whose leader, a bold young woman, had asked Burton Lowry if he was doing anything that evening. Lowry replied coolly that he was hunting hostage-takers, so she said some other time and gave him a long heavily charged look. None of that was passed on to Wexford. He told them about Brendan Royall, the parents, the grandfather’s house, the eleven offenses.

  “You can sort it out among yourselves how you do it. I’m going to talk to Mrs. Burden again, but you can proceed as you like. I don’t need to tell you that there’s been no more word from Sacred Globe.

  “One last thing. Make a start tonight. But don’t keep at it too long. The great thing is to prepare the ground for tomorrow. We’re all under a good deal of pressure, we all need our sleep. Needless to say again, all leave is canceled and we’re all coming in tomorrow bright and early. So let’s try to get some sleep tonight. That’s all.”

  He caught a flash from Nicky Weaver’s blue-green eyes. It seemed to him, perhaps erroneously, full of empathy and compassion. She attracted him. She wasn’t the sort of woman he had ever admired, she was a frightening departure from those sweet young pretty girls, and it was all the worse for that. Why did he have to feel this now, to bring him guilt and remorse, when all he really wanted in the world was to have Dora back? Inescapable, though, this appalling feeling of how wonderful it would be to have Nicky come home with him, drink with him, listen while he talked, take his hand—and then?

  Someone had told him she adored her husband, a man who had nagged her to give up work when the children were very young and since then punished her for not doing so by doing nothing himself. She had to employ a nanny for the evenings because Weaver, though not in general averse to staying at home, refused to do so if it might involve minding his own children. But Nicky would never hear a word against the man …

  “Wake up,” said Burden. “You’re coming back to have a bit of supper with me and pick Jenny’s brain—remember?”

  “I know. I’m coming.”

  “Brendan Royall or no, I’m convinced that Trotter’s involved in this somehow. I talked to him again this morning, Vine’s talked to him, in that pigsty he lives in, I know he murdered that girl, Ulrike Ranke, and I’ve a theory he’s set himself up as a hit man. You can understand that, a man kills once, he gets used to it. He’ll kill again but for money this time …”

  “Trotter didn’t murder the girl, Mike.”

  “I wish I could be as sure as you.”

  “No, you don’t. You don’t wish that at all. What you wish is that I’d listen seriously to all this rubbish about Trotter and the girl, only you know damn well I won’t. As for his other calling, where does a hit man come into all this? No one’s been killed yet.” Wexford was aware of Burden watching him carefully, almost with tenderness. “Don’t bloody look at me like that! I’ll say it again, no one’s been killed yet, and if they are it won’t be Trotter that’s responsible. Trotter was just like all the rest of that Contemporary Cars lot, a fool who knows about as much about running a business as I do about Psychoglypha citreola and as little about the environment as my granddaughter Amulet. So forget him, will you? Stop wasting your time on him. We’ve other things to do.”

  Jenny put her arms around him and kissed him sweetly. It took your wife being abducted to make women really nice to you, he thought wryly. He sat down in the Burden living room and let Mark read to him. At any rate he’d never been read to by a five-year-old before. Life was full of new experiences. It was The Wind in the Willows, old-fashioned stuff but none the worse for that, and when he had finished Mark said very politely, “I hope you don’t mind, Mr. Wexford, but Badger reminds me of you.”

  He didn’t mind. Mike brought him a stiff whisky and he accepted it because it had been preceded by an offer to drive him home.

  They ate salmon mousse, chicken casserole, and blackberry and apple crumble. No doubt, it had been put on in kindness to him because he thought it unlikely Burden ate like that every night. Jenny told him everything she could remember about Brendan Royall, every word he had ever uttered to her, every principle and theory of life he had aired. More to the point, she now recalled mention of Royall’s grandfather’s house, a paranoid rambling-on about Royall’s being cheated out of his inheritance and vague threats, which she, as his teacher, had tried to discourage, of getting even.

  “The Royalls lived outside Stowerton somewhere, north Stowerton, I do remember that. A small holding or a—I do believe it was some kind of wildlife sanctuary. In a small way, that is.”

  “Now it’ll have a fine view of the bypass approach road.”

  “I expect they moved after the grandfather’s house was sold. Brendan used to say that he would get even with his father and then he boasted that he was going to get half the proceeds—as soon as he got it he was going to leave school.”

  “Did he show any particular concern for animals when he was at school?”

  “Not that I know of, Reg. But then they didn’t practice vivisection in the biology class.”

  “All right. I asked for that. You said his parents had an animal sanctuary, so I wondered.”

  “I honestly can’t remember. But I think it was more like a—do they call them petting zoos? Rabbits and a pony and a couple of goats.”

  Wexford smiled. “Did he get money from the sale of his grandfather’s house?”

  “I don’t know. But he did leave when he was seventeen.”

  Wexford got on the phone to Nicky Weaver with this new information, but Nicky already knew most of it. The grandfather had lived in some style at a house near Forby called Marrowgrave Hall, and the sanctuary or petting zoo had become something more in the nature of a theme park.

  “Don’t keep it up too long, Nicky,” Wexford said. “Remember what I said about sleep.”

  “I know. I’ll get off home now. My kids are alone or they will be in ten minutes.”

  “You’d better remember about sleep too, Reg,” Burden said, catching his last words. “It’s nearly ten. I’m going to drive you home in your car and Jenny will follow us to drive me back.”

  “Have I really had that much?”

  “Who’s counting? But, if you must know, it was two double whiskies and three glasses of burgundy.”

  “You drive me, Mike. And thanks.”

  He ought to have felt swimmy but he was stone-cold sober. He let himself into his house, closed the door behind him, and stood in the dark for a moment, making himself aware of the silence, the emptiness. Sylvia was gone, Sheila was gone. He was alone now. He walked into the living room and sat down in an armchair, still in the dark.

  The members, or whatever you called them, of Sacred Globe would go to prison for years for abduction, for threats, for holding people against their will, depriving them of liberty, he couldn’t remember the words of the charge. They wouldn’t be inside for much longer if they killed the hostages. On the other hand, if they killed them, there would be no one alive to describe their captors.

  He thought of Roxane Masood, the claustrophobe, he thought of the questions Audrey Barker had asked, and of the couple who had been g
oing on holiday to Florence. But he couldn’t think about Dora, not now, he would have cried aloud if he had allowed himself to do that.

  Why do we always go to bed at night? Most of us do. When the time comes, even if we aren’t tired. Why don’t we sleep in chairs, vary bedtimes, think, Now is the time, fall into bed, slip into sleep? Because there must be a routine to life, a framework to hang life on. Routines were what kept you sane, gave you something to do at this moment and at that, definite places to go, positive things to do. Abandon it and that way madness lies.

  He went upstairs. He got into his pajamas and the crimson velvet dressing gown and lay down on top of the bedspread. The Civil War book was on the bedside cabinet and he thought how much he would like to pick it up and throw it through the closed window. The sound of the glass shattering would be satisfying in a curious brief sort of way. Only it was Jenny’s book.

  Jenny … Her story of Brendan Royall matched Gary Wilson’s. That didn’t mean Royall need be involved with Sacred Globe. Gary and Quilla could be involved with Sacred Globe and have told him about Royall as a diversionary tactic. Suppose no outsiders were involved with Sacred Globe, suppose they stood alone. It had been taken for granted that activists in other peripheral or ancillary fields would know about or even be attached to Sacred Globe, but there was no rule about that. They could be a group of people who were individually opposed to environmental damage and had linked up as the result of a word spoken, a passion shared, a spontaneous decision.

  But, no. Because normally law-abiding people don’t behave like that. And amateurs would need one person or more than one to organize them into this form of active violent protest. But the truth might well be that they were a mix of ardent amateurs and ruthless professionals, which brought him back to where he started: that someone up in those trees, or someone in KABAL or SPECIES or in any organization represented in Kingsmarkham to fight that bypass, must know or have a clue or a tenuous connection.

  Why hadn’t Sacred Globe sent another message? Why the silence, a silence that was now more than twenty-four hours long?