Road Rage

by Ruth Rendell

  “I might ask you if the name Sacred Globe was your personal invention, Mr. Tarling,” Nicky said. “It’s very much in accord with the sort of thing you’ve been telling us. After all, you call yourself the King of the Sacred Grove.”

  “… and what was the nature of the inspiration that came to us individually to reject what is known in our society as ‘normal’ life and take up the despised cause of the vulnerable, the tender, the fragile, without whom, however, life as we know it on this planet must face hideous destruction …”

  Her face was different. No doubt it would later revert to normal but at the moment her expression was not only bemused, it was as if he were seeing her face slightly out of focus, a little blurred, as if she had lost control of it and the features had become untidy. She was like someone asleep whose eyes were nevertheless open, a sleepwalker who isn’t walking.

  Karen must have left her for a moment, perhaps to get tea. She hadn’t seen him. The voice that spoke, her own voice, dwindled and faded away and there was silence. He saw her reach up to switch off the device, but she didn’t know how to do this. She shrugged, turned, saw him.

  “Dora,” he said.

  At once she was herself again. She smiled. She smiled at him radiantly and said, “It’s amazing, Reg. I not only didn’t know I knew all that, I didn’t know I’d said it. Not till it was played back. And yet my voice sounds just like my voice always does.”

  “I’m glad you weren’t upset.”

  “Not at all, not a bit. Dr. Rowland was very nice. He just asked me to make myself comfortable and relax as much as I could. Then he said all that stuff you read about hypnotists saying, only it was very reassuring and not a bit mumbo jumbo—ish. I thought it would be like the dentist when they give you that drug that doesn’t send you to sleep but puts you into a sort of half-doze and when the tooth’s out or the root canal’s done or whatever it seems as if only a moment has passed. But it wasn’t. It was like a dream. Yes, like a dream, the kind you don’t know you’re dreaming. And then the tape was played back to me and I found I’d said all that about the blue thing …”

  “The what?”

  “I remember now, of course I do. But I don’t think I would have if I hadn’t been hypnotized. I could tell you all of it now or you could listen to the tape. What would you like?”

  “Both,” he said, “but I can’t now. I’ve got to go on television.”

  The camera crews were already coming in. A trestle table was set up for them at one end of the room. The Chief Constable sat in the middle with Wexford on his left, Audrey Barker on his right, Andrew Struther next to her, and Clare Cox with Hassy Masood on Wexford’s left.

  The hostage families had been instructed to say nothing in the nature of a plea to Sacred Globe, to say nothing at all if possible, just to be there. As it turned out, Andrew Struther answered for all of them, and as he was probably the most articulate, this was just as well. In answer to the inevitable question he said, “We’re leaving this to the police to handle, the best and only possible thing to do in the circumstances. This isn’t the time or the place for airing the grief and anxiety we all feel. All we can do is wait and leave it to the experts.”

  Audrey Barker began to cry. It was good television, but it didn’t help the determined and businesslike atmosphere Wexford had hoped to create. Someone asked if it was true Chief Inspector Wexford’s wife had originally been among the hostages and if so, why was she released. The scene was cut before anyone answered.

  The phones that had quieted during the past few hours began ringing immediately the next news item came on. A man in Liverpool had seen Roxane Masood going into a cinema with a dark man, probably an Indian. A Mr. and Mrs. Struther had just left a Little Chef restaurant on the A.12 near Chelmsford. Were the police aware that a huge conservationists’ rally, masterminded by Sacred Globe, was about to take place near Glencastle Forest?

  By coincidence another fax had arrived from Gwenlian Dean in Wales. Gary Wilson and Quilla Rice had arrived at the SPECIES rally and their camping place noted by her officers. Did Wexford wish her to have them questioned? He sent back a message to the effect that he was anxious to know their movements after his encounter with them at Framhurst, when they had left for Glencastle, and what connection they had with Conrad Tarling.

  Awaiting him was a report on the white Mercedes L570 LOO. It was the property of a William Pugh, of Swansea, and had been stolen three weeks before from outside a house in Ventnor, Isle of Wight, where the Pughs were spending their summer holiday. Forensic work was proceeding on the car’s interior.

  “I’m going to listen to my wife’s hypnosis tape now,” said Wexford, “and then I’m going home to hear it all over again from her own lips.”

  Barry Vine, pale and tired, said, “I don’t think you are, sir. I don’t think you will when you hear.”

  “Hear what?”

  “A body’s been found. On that bit of waste ground where Contemporary Cars park. It’s in a sleeping bag dumped up against the fence …”

  18

  The barren piece of waste ground where the Railway Arms had once stood was bounded by chain-link fencing, up against which grew the kind of trees and bushes always found on sites of this sort, elders and brambles and the suckers from felled sycamores. Nettles abounded, at this time of the year waist-high. On the wall of the bus station on the right-hand side graffiti faced faded lettering on the opposite building. Long before the aromatherapist and the photocopiers and hairdresser came, but not before the shoe repairer, the words COBBLER and BOOTMAKER had been printed on the pale brickwork. The graffiti consisted of the single rubric GAZZA, and the paint used had run from the brush in long red drips.

  Around Contemporary Cars’ trailer the turf had become a dusty hayfield, sprawled with litter. Visitors to the pub and the discount store discarded their cigarette packets and crisps bags over the fence. The sleeping bag, camouflage-patterned, was in the farthest corner among the nettles, half under the brambles. The zipper that fastened it along the whole length of the right side had been opened about eighteen inches to disclose what appeared at first to be only a mass of black silky hair.

  “I didn’t undo the zip,” Peter Samuel said, anticipating censure that never came. “I knew better than that. I could see what it was, I could see that hair, without touching it.”

  “I undid it,” Burden said. “Her knees have been bent to get the whole of her inside that bag. When did you find her?”

  “Half an hour ago. It was a bit after six. I’d been in there watching you on the telly and I came out to my car, looked over here, and I saw. I don’t know what made me look, I just glanced up and I saw it. A brown and green sleeping bag, I reckoned someone had just dumped it, you’d be surprised the rubbish people unload on here. I saw the hair, I thought it was an animal at first …”

  “All right, Mr. Samuel. Thank you. If you’d like to wait in the trailer we’ll come and have a word with you in a moment.”

  As soon as he had arrived at the site Wexford had felt a sinking of the heart, a dread and apprehension he didn’t want justified, that he would have liked to run away from. There was, of course, no running away and no help. A glance at Burden’s face had been enough anyway, his pale cold face and the set mouth. Vine said nothing and Karen said nothing. They turned and watched Peter Samuel walking back across the scrubby grass, and then they looked at Wexford. He trod heavily across the nettles to the other side of the sleeping bag, closed his eyes, looked.

  The face, of which only the left profile was visible, was badly bruised and with death the bruise colors had become livid, yellowish, green and brown. But the features were unmistakable and he thought of the portrait, a tranquil gentle beautiful face and clear dark eyes.

  “It’s Roxane Masood,” he said.

  Dr. Mavrikiev, the pathologist, took no more than fifteen minutes to get there. The photographer arrived at the same time with Archbold, the Scene-of-Crimes officer. Mavrikiev undid the zipper to its full
est extent and knelt down in front of the body. It was now possible to see that what Burden had guessed was true and the girl’s legs had been bent to an angle of ninety degrees. The body was dressed in black hipster trousers, a red T-shirt, and red velvet jacket. A hand, waxen yet delicate as ivory, slid off her thigh as the pathologist gently turned her over.

  Wexford had come, if not to like, to have a certain respect for Mavrikiev. He was a young man, of Baltic or Ukrainian descent, very fair with pale eyes like crystal quartz, an unpredictable creature, rude or charming according to his mood. Unlike his seniors, particularly Sir Hilary Tremlett, he never indulged his wit at the expense of the corpse, never talked about the “dead meat” or speculated unkindly as to how the body might have looked in life. But it was impossible to tell what he was thinking or to read anything in the cold face that might have been carved out of birch wood it was so immobile.

  “She’s been dead for at least two days,” he said. “Maybe longer. I will, of course, be able to be more accurate about that later on. But a time-honored method of assessing the time of death will show you that, for rigor mortis has come on, established itself, and worn off again. Note the limpness of that hand. If it’s of any help to you at this stage”—he looked up at Wexford—“I’d very approximately put the time of death as late Saturday afternoon.

  “Now when she was brought here I can’t tell you, but she must have been put in that bag fairly soon after her death because once rigor was established it would have been impossible to bend the legs into that position without breaking the knees. Incidentally, the legs are broken but not in aid of getting them into the bag. So you can calculate that the body was placed into the bag on Saturday evening, at any rate before midnight on Saturday.”

  “And the cause of death?” said Wexford.

  “You’re never satisfied, are you? You want everything and you want it at once. I’ve told you before, I’m not a magician. She’s obviously been the victim of a violent attack or attacks. Look at her head and face. As to the cause of death, you can see for yourself she hasn’t been shot or stabbed and there’s been no ligature around her neck.” Sir Hilary would have made jokes about poisoning at this stage, but Mavrikiev simply got to his feet without even a shake of the head or rueful smile. “You can do whatever you have to do and take her away. I’ll do the postmortem tomorrow, nine A.M. sharp.”

  Photographs were taken. Archbold went about measuring things and got badly stung by nettles. Wexford, free to touch the inside of the bag now, began to search it, felt the padded cover, slid his hand under the body.

  “What are you looking for?” Burden asked.

  “A note. A message.” Wexford stood up. “There’s nothing. I don’t understand this, Mike. Why? Why do this, any of it, why this girl, why now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Peter Samuel was repeating the story of his discovery of the body when Wexford went into the trailer.

  “How d’you know it hadn’t been there all day?” he asked.

  “What, all day since the morning? No, it couldn’t have been, no way.”

  “Why not? Did you go over to that corner? Did you look? Did any of you? You were busy, no doubt, with your fares, in and out. Did you even look?”

  “If you put it like that, well, no. I don’t reckon we did. Well, I didn’t. I can’t speak for the rest of them.”

  “So it could have been put there on the previous night? It could have been put there on Sunday night?”

  “No. No way. Well, come to think of it, I suppose it could, I mean, I doubt it, I doubt it very much, but it could.”

  A mounting anger was making Wexford’s head swim. Not with Samuel. Samuel was no one, of no account. The rage that filled his head and drummed in his brain was with Sacred Globe. He found himself feeling above all a bitter resentment. This, when everything must seem to them to be going their way, when, however politic and previously planned, events must seem to them to be in compliance with their demands …

  And now no more demands, no promised “negotiation,” not even an impudent thanks for an apparent meeting of ultimatums. A murder instead. But he thought sickeningly how often in the history of abductions that happened, just that. All was going well, all seemed to be progressing both from the point of view of the hostages and the hostage-takers—and then a hostage murdered, her body sent home, presented to those who searched for her.

  At least they hadn’t returned the poor child to her mother. It was a measure of the kind of life he led and the kind of people he encountered, he thought, that his imagination could conceive of such a thing. But it reminded him of what he had to do now. He would do it and he would do it himself.

  No message from Sacred Globe had come in on the police phones, though there had been plenty of the other sort, from those deluded or fake witnesses claiming to have seen the hostages in far-flung cities or to live next door to where they were held. The screens he glanced at as he passed carried list upon list of names, addresses, descriptions, offenses committed, of everyone closely or remotely connected with nature, wildlife, and animal protest. Cross-references, possible connections, records of interviews. He forgot, briefly, his sympathy with so many of these people, their aims, their laudable desires, their ideal fading world, and lost everything in a red tide of anger. Breathing deeply, calming his racing heart, he found a voice with which to make a phone call. “The Posthouse hotel. Mr. Hassy Masood, please.”

  “Mr. Masood is in the dining room. Would you like me to page him?”

  As so often happens when contact is made with a reasonable polite person from what seems another world, anger was quenched. Wexford thought of the horror of fetching the man from his dinner, from his wife and sons, perhaps …

  “No, thank you.” He would go himself. He phoned his home, got his daughter Sylvia.

  “Dad, what on earth happened to you? Mother’s been waiting for you for hours.”

  He said he had been delayed, knowing it wasn’t Dora but she making the fuss, put the phone down softly on her expostulations. The media, yes. They could wait till tomorrow, even till late tomorrow. He drove out to the Posthouse, walked into the pine and glass and tweed-carpeted interior, and there the first person he saw was Clare Cox. It hadn’t occurred to him she might be there too. It never crossed his mind. She was back in her floor-length dress, a shawl around her shoulders, her graying tawny hair flopping from its combs. Masood and she had their backs to him. They were side by side at the reception desk, ordering, as he later discovered, a taxi to take her home.

  “I had to bring her here,” Masood said when he saw who it was. “Reporters, photographers, they were all over her house and garden. One of them followed us, but I shut her up in my room and the hotel kept them out. This is an excellent hotel, I recommend it.” He beamed at the receptionist and the receptionist simpered back. “I think maybe it’s safe to go home now—what do you think?”

  It seemed not to have occurred to him to see Wexford in his angel of death role. But Clare Cox, herself rather resembling a Fury or a Fate with her disheveled hair and trailing clothes, went white in the face and came up to him with outstretched hands.

  “What is it? Why are you here?”

  Not the mother if he could help it. He made that a rule. “I’d like you to come back into Kingsmarkham with me, Mr. Masood, if you would …” The euphemisms, the circumlocutions! But what else at this moment? “There’s been a—development.”

  “What kind of a development?” She clutched at his sleeve. “What’s happened?”

  “Miss Cox, I think this is probably your taxi that has just arrived outside. If you would like to go home in it I promise you Mr. Masood and I will come straight to you if need be.” It sounded as if he was promising hope, relief, yet his voice had been grave. “I can tell you no more at present, Miss Cox. If you will just do as I ask.”

  The taxi wasn’t from Contemporary Cars but All the Sixes. He felt an obscure relief. Immediately it was out of sight Masood began askin
g about this “development.” They got into Wexford’s car and Wexford stalled for a while, but when they were nearly there he told him. A sanitized version. The sleeping bag, the waste ground, and the bent legs weren’t mentioned. He would see the bruising for himself and nothing could help that.

  There had never been any real doubt. Masood looked at the beautiful discolored face, made a small sound, nodded, turned away.

  Wexford thought that if it had been one of his daughters, so foully dead, beaten in the face before her death, he would have rounded on this policeman, in his grief and misery yelled at him, perhaps seized him by the shoulders, shouted into his face, “Why? Why have you allowed this?”

  Masood stood meek, with head bent. Barry Vine, who was with them, offered him tea. Would he like to sit down?

  “No. No, thank you.” He looked up, turning his head in a curious sideways manner as if his neck hurt him. “I don’t understand this.”

  “I don’t understand it either,” said Wexford.

  He remembered then that he had told Burden he thought Sacred Globe was getting cold feet, Sacred Globe was at a loss with no notion how to proceed … Well, they had proceeded.

  “I have sent my wife and sons home to London,” Masood said in a calm, almost conversational tone. “I am glad now. It was just as well.” He cleared his throat. “My duty now will be to Roxane’s mother. You will come with me?”

  “Of course. If you wish it.”

  In the car, on the way to Pomfret, Masood said, “If anyone had told me my daughter would die young I can think of many things I might have said, but not what I feel now. It is the waste I feel. So much beauty, so talented. Such a waste.”

  Remembering what Dora had told him, Wexford wanted to say what is sometimes said to the parents of dead soldiers, that Roxane had surely died bravely. But he lacked the heart for it, he doubted if he would be able to speak the words.