Road Rage

by Ruth Rendell

  “Rubber Face and the Driver brought our breakfast. It was more white bread, dry bread, and a slice of some sort of tinned meat, the cheapest sort like Spam, and three packets of crisps. That must have been to sustain us through the day because again we got nothing else till the evening. Nothing to drink either but water from the tap.

  “But they did come back for the tray. Roxane didn’t shout at them this time. She just started asking when they were going to let us go, what they wanted, how long this was going to go on. You have to understand that we didn’t know they called themselves Sacred Globe. We didn’t know they wanted the bypass stopped or their threats or anything. And Roxane desperately wanted to know. Of course neither of them answered. As I’ve said, they never spoke. They never even seemed to hear, though it’s hard to tell a thing like that when someone’s face and head are covered up.

  “In the middle of the afternoon Roxane began hammering on the door. Ryan had been very subdued after being thrown on the ground the evening before, and his stomach hurt him, but once she’d started he helped her. They banged on that door and kicked it and this went on for a good half hour.

  “At last the door was opened and Rubber Face came in with Tattoo. I was very frightened, I don’t mind admitting it, because I thought they were going to beat Roxane up and maybe Ryan too. But nothing like that happened. Tattoo simply got hold of Roxane and pinned her arms behind her. She screamed and yelled but he took no notice. He handcuffed her like that with her hands behind her. Rubber Face manhandled Ryan out of the way and, when he tried to put up a bit of resistance, grabbed him and locked him in the washroom.

  “They had a hood with them and they put it over Roxane’s head and took her away. They just took her away, I’ve no idea where or what happened to her. She spoke to me, she said, ‘Good-bye, Dora,’ through the hood, it was sort of muffled, but that’s what she said. I never saw her again.” Dora paused. She shrugged a little, shaking her head. “I never saw her again,” she repeated. “They may have put her with the Struthers, wherever they were, I just don’t know. All I can say is that about ten minutes afterwards for the first time I heard footsteps overhead, but that may have had no connection with where they put Roxane.”

  “One set of footsteps or more than one?”

  “I don’t know. More than one set, I think. Ryan was let out of the washroom after an hour. Tattoo and the Driver came in and let him out and after that he and I were alone. We just sat there and played word games. I don’t think I’ve ever in my life so longed for something as I longed for a pad of paper and a pencil—or, come to that, Scrabble or Monopoly. After a time we just talked. He told me things I don’t think he’d ever told anyone before.

  “His father had been killed in the Falklands War. They’d been married just three months, his father and mother. She was pregnant when the news came and he was born seven months later. The reason she was in the hospital was to have a cone biopsy—that’s the operation where they take off a bit of the cervix because of precancerous signs. It was the second she’d had. She was going to get married again and she wanted more children—she’s only thirty-six now—but it’s not likely she’ll have any after all that. I’m sorry, I don’t suppose you want to hear all this, it’s not relevant. It just seemed to me a heavy burden to lay on a boy of fourteen, confiding it all to him.

  “Anyway, he confided in me, and that’s how we passed the evening. They were very late bringing our breakfast on Friday morning. I suppose they’d seen to the others first, I mean to Owen and Kitty and Roxane, wherever they were. It was Tattoo and Rubber Face. They brought us bread rolls, very stale, jam in those individual containers, and an apple each.

  “Ryan and I had decided we’d ask them what had happened to Roxane, though we didn’t think we’d get an answer. We did ask and we didn’t get an answer. I think that was the longest day of my life. There was nothing to do. Ryan went completely silent, maybe he thought he’d said too much the evening before, maybe he was embarrassed. Whatever it was, he didn’t answer me when I spoke to him. He lay on his back on his bed staring at the ceiling. For the first time I seriously began thinking we’d never be released, we’d go on like this for weeks and then we’d be killed.

  “Gloves appeared at lunchtime. It was the first time we’d seen him since the Wednesday morning. I thought it was Rubber Face at first, but his build was much slighter than Rubber Face’s. Tattoo was with him. That was when I saw Gloves’s eyes. I said I only saw the eyes of one of them, didn’t I? Well, it was Gloves’s eyes.

  “The holes in his hood must have been bigger than in those worn by the others. Anyway, I could see his eyes quite clearly. They were brown, a clear deep brown. He came close to me for a moment, peered at me as if he was trying to—well, verify something about me, and that’s when I saw his eyes. But it’s not much help, is it? I suppose half the population has brown eyes.

  “It was that evening they let me go. I’ve told you all about that. Oh, they fed us first if that’s of any interest. Tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce, cold of course, bread, more jam. Tattoo and the Hermaphrodite brought it. I was preparing for another night in there when they came in and took me out. Ryan was left there alone. As I’ve said, I’ve no idea what happened to the others.”

  Wexford got up as Barry Vine put his head around the door and asked if he could have a word.

  “It’s about food, sir,” he said when they were outside. “And it’s all pretty negative. You remember the nonlactic soy milk at the Framhurst Teashop?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “I don’t know why, but I got it into my head that if that place was the only outlet for the stuff in the south of England … Anyway, forget it, because you can buy it everywhere. You can buy it in supermarkets. Thanks to Sunday opening, I’ve done a pretty thorough check on that. You can buy it at the Crescent in Kingsmarkham and every one of their other branches too. Nationwide.”

  “Another lead bites the dust,” said Wexford.

  In the Chief Constable’s house outside Myfleet, in the Chief Constable’s living room, Wexford sat eating pistachio nuts and drinking a single malt. Donaldson had driven him there, would drive him back, and was at this moment sitting in the car eating a ham sandwich and drinking a can of Lilt. No one had time for proper meals anymore.

  Wexford was there to talk about the release of the hostage story to the media. In the morning. Tomorrow morning. But they had agreed on how it should be done, how limited it should be and how free, the hour of release and the defensive measures they would take. And now Montague Ryder wanted to talk about Dora. He had listened to the tapes, all of them, and had heard the last one twice.

  “She’s done very well, Reg, superlatively well. She’s an observant woman. But yet …”

  I do not like “but yet,” reflected Wexford, quoting someone or other. Cleopatra, he thought. He said quickly, “I know. There’s a lot there and at the same time there isn’t much.” But could you have done as well? Could I? In a misogynistic way, normally quite foreign to him, he thought how most women he knew would have collapsed under Dora’s ordeal, caved in, been stricken dumb. “They were clever, sir,” he said. “Clever and cocky. They must have been to take the risk of letting her go.”

  “Yes. Odd that, wasn’t it? We still think it was because they found out who she was?”

  Wexford nodded, but dubiously. The MacAllan bottle was raised along with the Chief Constable’s eyebrows and he was tempted but he said no. He could have gone on drinking all evening, but what was the point? He had to keep sensible tonight and be alert tomorrow.

  “You know what I’m thinking, Reg?”

  “I think so, sir.”

  “Hypnosis. Would she consent?”

  It was a method, newly fashionable, of extracting information and observations that lay buried, that would probably remain buried, unless unearthed by means other than the subject’s own volition and intent. Wexford hadn’t much experience of it. He knew or he had heard that it often worked.
He felt a sudden violent revulsion against putting Dora through it. Why should she have to suffer this—this assault? This taking away of her free will, this indignity.

  “I don’t know if she’ll consent,” he said. Surprisingly, he had no idea what her reaction would be. Horror or interest, recoil or even attraction? “I must tell you”—this was very hard to say, to express, to a man of so much higher rank and power, but he wouldn’t sleep if he didn’t say it—“I must tell you, sir, that I’m not prepared to persuade her.”

  Montague Ryder laughed, but pleasantly. “Suppose I ask her?” he said. “Suppose I ask her tonight and then, if she agrees, we’ll get hold of the psychologist to hypnotize her tomorrow? Would you mind that?”

  “No, I wouldn’t mind,” said Wexford.

  16

  Television stole the press’s thunder and the Kingsmarkham kidnap story appeared on ITN’s news at 8:45 and BBC 1’s at 9:15, prefaced in each case by the words “News is just coming in …”

  By the later time Dora was in bed with a gin and tonic and a hint from her husband that Monday could be the day of her encounter with a hypnotherapist. Wexford regretted now that the hostages’ names had been released, or rather that the name of a former hostage had. But even he was unprepared for his doorbell ringing at seven in the morning and for the arrival of three reporters and four cameramen on his doorstep.

  The two daily newspapers he took had already come. Both used the story as their front-page lead. Somehow, one of them had got hold of a photograph of Roxane Masood, and this, with pictures of the bypass site, a facsimile of the first Sacred Globe letter, and a picture of himself—the hated portrait of him all smiles, holding up a beer tankard, that they kept in their archives—dominated the broadsheet. He was glancing through the text when the doorbell struck his eardrums with a reverberating peal.

  Luckily he was dressed. He could imagine another photograph featuring the crimson velvet dressing gown. Before he opened the door he knew who it was. The chain was on, he had put it on for some reason ever since Dora came back, and the door opened only six inches. His grandmother, a Pomfret native, used to open her front door a couple of inches to unwelcome callers and snap, “Not today, thank you.” He had been very small when she died but he remembered, though he restrained himself from repeating her words now.

  “Press conference at the police station at ten A.M.,” he said.

  Flash bulbs went off and cameras clicked. “I’d like an exclusive interview with Dora first,” one of them said impertinently.

  And I’d like your head on a plate. “Good morning,” he said and shut the door. The phone rang. He snapped into the receiver in his grandmother’s words, “Not today, thank you,” and pulled the plug out.

  A photographer had got around the back and was looking through his kitchen window. For the first time he was glad of the “Roman” blinds Dora had had put up the previous summer. He pulled them down, he drew curtains, made the tea, poured a cup for Dora and a mug for himself, took them upstairs. She was sitting up in bed with the radio on. News of the Kingsmarkham Kidnap—the title had been coined and would be kept—had displaced everything else, Palestine, Bosnia, party political wrangling, and Diana, Princess of Wales.

  “Is there a ladder in the garage?” he asked her.

  “I believe so. Why on earth do you ask?”

  “Show no surprise if a head appears at the window anytime now. The media are here.”

  “Oh, Reg!”

  On the previous evening the Chief Constable had been to see her. She was very tired, had been lying on the sofa in her dressing gown, but even though she had been warned of his coming, hadn’t dressed. Wexford was glad she hadn’t. He welcomed her independence of spirit and expected a further show of it when the request was made. She would say no. She would say it politely, even apologetically, but she wouldn’t agree to some shrink putting her in a trance.

  She said yes.

  And now she was saying it again, even apparently looking forward to it.

  “I must get up. I’m being hypnotized this morning.”

  As far as he could remember, there had never been so many press men and women in Kingsmarkham. Not for a serial killer. Not even for the murder of Davina Flory and her family. They had parked their cars everywhere and traffic wardens were out in force, taking numbers, leaving tickets. Wheel-clamping would soon start.

  He could picture the invasions of the cottage in Pomfret, Mrs. Peabody’s little house in Stowerton, and the onslaught on Andrew Struther at Savesbury House. He could picture it without going to see. They must defend themselves as best they could, and perhaps it was all to the good, perhaps this tremendous publicity would help.

  Already, at nine, the phone lines into Kingsmarkham Police Station were jammed by callers with information. He looked over the shoulder of one of the busy phone operators at the computer screen on which everything that came in was recorded. Roxane Masood hadn’t been abducted, she had been seen in Ilfracombe; Ryan Barker was dead and his body would be released for £20,000. The Struthers had been seen in Florence, in Athens, in Manchester, looking out of an upper window of a factory in Leeds, on a boat in Poole Harbor. Dora Wexford had never been abducted but had been planted as a spy, a decoy, a detective. Roxane Masood was going to be married in Barbados to the son of a woman who would tell them the whole story for a sum to be negotiated …

  Wexford sighed. All these people’s calls would have to be followed up and all of them would either be mistaken or malicious. Unless, of course, one was authentic, just one provided a lead …

  He had got Dora out of the house into a car driven by Karen Malahyde, a big hat and tent-shaped coat concealing most of her. After what she had been through she didn’t want anything covering her face and he hadn’t argued. The press had run after the car for a bit, taking photographs. When he came back from the old gym, where he left her listening to her own tapes and checking what she had said, he found Brian St. George waiting for him.

  The editor of the Kingsmarkham Courier was deeply aggrieved. In the same gray pinstripe and the same dirty white sweatshirt, he came up to Wexford, pushing his face close to him. His breath smelled of periodontal gum disease.

  “You don’t like me, do you?”

  “What makes you say that, Mr. St. George?” Wexford retreated a couple of feet.

  “You lifted the embargo on this story on the worst possible bloody day of the week for me. Lift it on a Sunday and I’ve got five days before the Courier comes out. Five days. The story’ll be dead by then.”

  “I’m sure I hope so,” Wexford said.

  “You did it out of spite. It might just as well have been last Thursday or have waited till this Wednesday, but no, you have to do it on a Sunday.”

  Wexford appeared to reflect. “Saturday would have been worse.” As the red mounted fiercely up in St. George’s face, he said imperturbably, “You’ll have to excuse me, I have work to do. You’ll no doubt be getting a lot of calls from the public, even though you haven’t the advantages of the nationals, and we’d like everything passed directly here, please.”

  * * *

  Craig Tarling, older brother of Conrad Tarling, was currently serving a ten-year prison sentence for his animal-rights activities.

  “It’s not a common name,” Nicky Weaver said. “I spotted it on the computer and checked him out.”

  Damon Slesar raised his eyebrows. They were on their way to Marrowgrave Hall and he was driving. “A man’s not responsible for what his relations do,” he said. “My father grows fruit and veg on the old bypass and my mum spins yarn out of animal hairs. People send her their pets’ fur in bags.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s perfectly respectable.” Nicky spoke rather sharply. Her mother worked in a greengrocer’s part-time—in the rest of her time she helped look after the Weaver children—and Nicky didn’t like his tone. “And so is fruit-growing. You shouldn’t talk like that about your family.”

  “Okay, okay, sorry
I spoke. You know me, my wit runs away with me. What did this brother do?”

  “Conspired—‘masterminded’ might be the better word—to set off fifty firebombs. His targets were rabbit and chicken farms, butchers’ shops, an agricultural college, and an agency selling tickets for circuses, among others. I expect he’d have targeted ostrich farms, only this was five years ago and there weren’t any then.”

  “What went wrong? I mean wrong for him and right for law and order?”

  “A shop assistant thought it strange for one man to buy sixty timing devices and told the police.”

  On the horizon, standing up against a yellow and black sunset, stood ruined Saltram House, where, long ago. Burden had found the body of a missing child in one of the fountain cisterns. Nicky asked Damon if he had ever heard that story, it had been about the time Burden’s first wife had died, but he shook his head, his brown eyes contrite.

  The car turned into the drive. In the pale sunshine of morning Marrowgrave Hall looked no less forbidding and seemed more than ever closed up, secured against the outside world. Nicky got out of the car and stood for a moment staring at the facade, at the windows and the brickwork in its shades of dried blood and baked clay.

  “What is it?” Damon asked.

  “Nothing. It just seems such an unlikely place for those Panicks to live in. I’d expect a nice big bungalow at Rustington.”

  Dressed up for Sunday, Bob in a dark and shiny suit, Patsy in a flowered silk tent, the Panicks had been at the table. Perhaps they always were and when they got up it was only for the clearing away of one meal and to begin the preparation of the next. Patsy carried a large white linen napkin to the door with her and was still wiping her mouth when she opened it. Once more she lumbered ahead of them down the passage toward the kitchen. The smell today was of a breakfast, the kind seaside cafés call a “full English breakfast,” served almost late enough to be brunch, but the Panicks no doubt made their own gastronomic rules. At the table, opposite Bob Panick, sat the woman called Freya—Elf, tree house building expert, and recent resident of the Elder Ditches camp.