by Ruth Rendell
“His voice, I couldn’t believe it, I thought I was dreaming, but I knew it was real, and he’s all right, he’s fine …”
“We’ll go upstairs, Mrs. Barker. The lift’s on its way.”
They got into it. She jumped into it. She clutched his arm with a shaking hand.
“He’s all right. He’s quite all right. He likes them and they like him. He’s joined them, and now they won’t hurt him!”
22
Audrey Barker sat opposite him on the other side of his desk with a cup of tea in front of her. She was calmer now and some of the wild joy had gone out of her face. The anxious look was returning, the mouth-pursing that prematurely pleated her upper lip. He let her sip the strong sweet tea, noticing the shaking of the hand that held the cup, the chatter of teeth against the china. Let her take her time. It was, in any case, now far too late to attempt a tracing of the call.
Sweat broke on her upper lip. “I should have phoned you, shouldn’t have I?”
“I’m not sure if it would have made any difference, Mrs. Barker. Will you tell me what Ryan said?”
“I nearly fainted when I heard his voice. I couldn’t believe it, I was stunned, I thought I was dreaming or going mad. He said, ‘Mum, it’s me,’ and of course I knew it was him, but I still said, ‘Who is that? Who is it?’ and he said, ‘Mum, it’s Ryan, calm down, it’s Ryan,’ and then, ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘this is a message from us,’ so I said, ‘Who’s us? What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘Sacred Globe. I’m one of them now.’ I mean, it was something like that he said, I may not have got his exact words.”
“But you’re sure he said that. He said, ‘I’m one of them now’?”
“Yes, I’m sure. ‘I’m one of them now.’ I didn’t know what he meant and I asked him.” She had been looking down, her hands clasped in her lap, as she made an effort to remember accurately, but now she raised her head and met Wexford’s eyes. “He said he simply meant what he said. He’d joined them. They’d asked him to join them. He was flattered, of course, he was proud. He’s only a child. He can’t make those sort of choices. I was feeling happy and I’m not anymore. It was stupid of me, wasn’t it? I was happy because he’s all right, he’s alive, but now I realize he’s one of them I …”
“What else did he say?”
“He said—and it didn’t sound a bit like him talking—he said, ‘Our cause is just. I didn’t know but I do now. We want the best for the world. It’s “we,” Mum, do you understand?’ ”
“Did you ask him where he was?”
She put one hand up to her head. “Oh God, I didn’t think of it. He wouldn’t have told me, would he? He said something like, I can’t remember exactly, ‘We want the bypass rerouted’ or he may have said re—something else, I don’t know. But that’s what he meant. ‘I’ll come back to you tomorrow,’ he said, and I didn’t know, I don’t know, what that meant. I mean, could it be he meant he’s coming home?”
“It sounds more as if another message will come. Mrs. Barker, I’d like you to repeat what you’ve told me and we’ll record it on tape. Will you do that?”
At first Wexford had been astonished by Ryan Barker’s allying himself with Sacred Globe. But, of course, it wasn’t new, it certainly wasn’t unknown, this defection of a hostage to his captors and espousal of their cause. And this cause in particular held a special appeal for young people. It was the young who were fired with outrage at the destruction of the environment—their future environment—and with a burning fervor to reverse “progress” and restore some unspecified natural paradise.
He said to Audrey Barker when she had finished recording her conversation with Ryan, “He idealizes his father, doesn’t he? I wonder if he sees Sacred Globe as something his father would have approved of, or that he thinks he’d have approved of. I understand his father was particularly keen on natural history.”
She looked at him as if he had suddenly, inexplicably, begun speaking to her in a foreign language. A huge weariness had settled on her, causing a sagging of her face and a slumping of her shoulders. He repeated what he had said, embellishing and rephrasing it.
“I know your husband was killed in the Falklands. I know about the album of drawings. My impression is that Ryan has done what some children who have lost a parent do, make paragons of them, idolize them, and model themselves on them. Erroneously, of course, Ryan sees Sacred Globe as an organization his father would have admired and have wanted to support. So he supports it in his stead.”
She shrugged her shoulders, lifting them to an exaggerated extent, as if to make a total denial. Her voice was bitter. “He wasn’t my husband. I’ve never been married. I told Ryan his father was killed in the Falklands—well, he was killed at the time of the Falklands, that was true.”
Wexford looked at her inquiringly.
“Dennis Barker was killed in a knife fight. In Deptford. They never got anyone for it. Didn’t bother, I daresay, they knew the sort he was. I had to tell Ryan something, so I made up all that and my mother stuck by me and told the same tale.”
“And the natural history?” said Wexford. “The drawings? The album?”
“They were my father’s. John Peabody’s. Look, I never told him otherwise, but kids … well, they deceive themselves to sort of make things better.”
And adults too, thought Wexford. “The point here,” he said, “is not what is fact but what he has taught himself to think of as fact. In doing this he’s putting himself in his father’s shoes, he’s being his father.”
“His father, my God! A backstreet thug. Well, he’s going the right way about it, isn’t he, joining up with a bunch of terrorists?”
“I’ll have someone drive you home, Mrs. Barker. I shall have a trace put on your mother’s phone. I shall have all your phone conversations recorded and take the precaution, with your permission, of having one of my officers in the house with you tomorrow for when Ryan calls again.”
If he called. If they didn’t send a letter or another body … He had to tell Dora. She surprised him by not being surprised.
“He was waiting for something like that,” she said. “I had that impression when we talked. I thought he’d found it in a person, in Owen Struther, a father-hero. But Owen let him down, or he must have seen it as letting him down, when he and Kitty were handcuffed and taken away. I see now that Ryan was waiting for something to aim at, a cause, a reason for living. Of course he’s only a child …”
“That’s what his mother said.”
“The poor woman.”
He told her about the real father and the fantasy father, expecting her to be at least a little affronted. None of us likes to be deceived, even if the deceiver is barely aware that he is lying and his listener a dupe. But she only shook her head and held out her hands in that gesture of submitting to the inevitable.
“What will become of him?”
“When we catch them, d’you mean? Nothing, I should think. As everyone keeps saying, he’s a child.”
“I wonder what happened,” she said.
“What do you mean, what happened?”
“I told you they never talked to us. There was no communication. How did they come to change that and talk to him after I was gone and he was alone? Did they approach him or he approach them? I’d think the latter, wouldn’t you? I mean, he must have been lonely and desperate for a human voice, so he started talking to them, perhaps asking them why they were doing this, what they wanted. And they saw their chance. It was to their advantage, wasn’t it, to have a willing guest rather than a hostage? All hostage-takers with a real cause must want that.”
“Only up to a point,” said Wexford. “If all your hostages convert, you lose your bargaining power.”
“The Struthers would never convert. Never. That just leaves them now, doesn’t it? Owen and Kitty, just the two of them.”
“It’s almost as valuable to Sacred Globe to have two hostages as to have five,” said Wexford.
They were both awake ea
rly next morning and she began talking to him about the two people of whom, up till now, she had said least. It was as if she had either been thinking about them during the long watches of the night or else her thoughts and analyses had crystallized while she slept. She brought him tea and sat on the bed. It wasn’t yet seven.
“Kitty was only in her early fifties, but still I’d say she belonged to a dying breed. All their lives they’re protected by men, they do nothing for themselves, make no decisions, have no enterprise. Oh, I know I’m just a housewife myself, but not in that helpless way, doing nothing but a little cooking, a little gardening, a little telling the cleaning woman what to do. They always have just one child, these women, it’s funny but it usually seems to be a boy, and they send him away to boarding school as soon as they can.
“That was Kitty Struther. She hardly talked, but somehow I knew all that. Confronted by something different, something threatening, she just went to pieces, she collapsed like jelly. All she ever said really was, ‘Owen, you have to do something,’ and ‘Owen, do something.’ And his response was to behave like a prisoner of war bent on escaping from Colditz. You could tell what their marriage was, she utterly dependent on him for everything and he sustaining the illusion of being brave and admirable, finding it necessary to impress her all the time.”
“ ‘The little woman’? That’s what empire builders used to say.”
“The big man and the little woman … It makes you shudder. Do you remember when Sheila was married to Andrew and his mother used to refer to her as his ‘little wife’?”
“I’d better get up,” said Wexford, “or I won’t be impressing anyone.”
“They won’t kill them, will they, Reg?”
It was the only question he’d anticipated that she had actually asked.
“I hope not,” he said, and then, “Not if I can help it.”
Savesbury House and a trace on Andrew Struther’s phone, a trace too on Clare Cox’s, though Wexford thought it unlikely Ryan Barker would call her. Her daughter was dead and her involvement, as far as Sacred Globe was concerned, was over. Most probably the call would come to Audrey Barker once more. At least the messages were coming. Anything was preferable to that silence.
Burden, taking Karen Malahyde with him, had gone to Rhombus Road. There, in Mrs. Peabody’s front room, they would sit it out till the call came. If it came. The computers in the old gym continued to store information, hundreds of thousands of bytes of it, adding now Dora Wexford’s comments on the Struthers, Audrey Barker’s tape, Karen Malahyde and Damon Slesar’s negative results from the interview with Frenchie Collins. Wexford sat in front of Mary Jefferies’s screen, reading the document he hoped would at last lead him to Sacred Globe.
A basement room, rectangular, twenty feet by thirty, one heavy door in, one lighter door out to a washroom. One window high up with a sink under it. The window barred with a cross-hatched wooden structure outside it. Something green and a gray stone step visible. The floor of stone flags, the walls whitewashed. A dairy, he knew that now—did that knowledge do him any good?
The nonlactic soy milk, which at first had seemed so promising, was obtainable all over the country. That damned Rosy Underwing had only led them on a wild-goose chase—a wild-moth chase—half across the south of England.
There remained the blue thing that came and went outside the window. Washing hanging out to dry? Did people still hang out washing? A car? It could be a blue car. That would be moved from one place to another and blue was always a popular color for cars. Yes, but eight feet up in the air? A window which when opened revealed a blue lampshade inside or a blue curtain? He didn’t much like any of those ideas. It was the way the blue thing moved that was confusing.
A report had just come in of the theft of twenty beagles from a research laboratory near Tunbridge Wells. The dogs had been taken and the premises set on fire. Kent that was, not his responsibility, not Montague Ryder’s responsibility.
Someone, he saw, had already made the connection with Mid-Sussex. Karen Malahyde had all the evidence against Brendan Royall. Did that mean Royall was, after all, unconnected with Sacred Globe? Probably. And Damon Slesar had had no success with Conrad Tarling, who though occasionally going off for long walks to inspect different areas of the site, was mostly holed up in his tree house.
Driving to Savesbury, Wexford passed near the camp. A stillness hung over the whole bypass area. At this point, roughly the center of the proposed construction, no work had yet been done. No trees had yet been cut down. It was still the unspoiled countryside of deep lanes, rich meadows, hilly terrain, and distantly, high downs. The farmer who had removed his sheep from the fields here had brought them back again. Savesbury Hill was still unravaged, a single-standing tor with its crowning ring of trees, its roots in the feeding ground of the Map butterfly. Still. He had no time to waste but for all that, he made enough of a detour to see if he could spot evidence of the environmental assessment, but there was no sign of it, unless he was looking in the wrong place.
Last time he had passed this way a fitful sun had been shining. The wind was high enough to blow clouds constantly across the sun’s face so that the bright light came and went and cloud shadows were swept across the green hillsides like flocks of great dark birds. But today it was dull, the thick gray sky threatening rain. The woods must be full of tree people, biding their time, waiting to know what the next move would be, but he could see none of them. Someone had told him that up at the Stowerton end of the bypass site, where the children had found the bones, grass and weeds were already growing on the mounds of upturned earth.
Outside the Framhurst Teashop tree people sat at tables or they might only have been walkers backpacking. No Conrad Tarling, no Gary or Quilla, no Freya. Perhaps they were all somewhere guarding the Struthers, but he didn’t think so. Somehow he knew it wasn’t that way at all, it was quite different, he had been looking at this whole thing from the wrong angle, but what was the use of that if you didn’t know how and where it was wrong?
Bibi opened the door to him. She had been alerted to his coming, said Andrew was about somewhere and Wexford might find him “round the back.” He walked through a brick archway onto an area with a floor like a checkerboard of stone squares and turf squares. Tubs of striped petunias and Jamaican daisies stood about, evidence of Kitty Struther’s horticultural skills. The dog Manfred was in the act of lifting its leg against a leafy climbing plant that rambled across one of the walls. Wexford turned as Andrew Struther appeared around the side of the Georgian building and followed him back to the house.
The house seemed tidier, better tended, more the way poor Kitty Struther would want to find it when she came home. Sitting in her gracious living room with its chintz and its rugs in their muted colors, its silver and its Chinese porcelain, Wexford looked once more at the framed photograph of the two remaining hostages, a copy of which Andrew had brought him. You wouldn’t guess from this, he thought, that Kitty Struther would bend and break so quickly under pressure and her husband transform himself into a strutting Colonel Blimp. In the picture she looked rather more adventurous than he, a well-kept almost athletic skier who had long ago graduated from the nursery slopes. Owen Struther reminded him of photographs from his youth of the late Sir Edmund Hillary, and Owen appeared as capable of climbing the world’s highest mountain.
“You have some news?” Andrew Struther asked.
“Nothing to comfort you much, I’m afraid. I’m here to tell you that your parents are now the only hostages that Sacred Globe holds.”
“What about the boy?”
Wexford told him. Struther clenched his hands and after a moment or two bowed his head and brought his fists up to his forehead. He seemed to make a massive effort at self-control, breathing deeply and tensing the muscles of his shoulders. He was very different now from the arrogant and supercilious man who, a week ago, had shown Burden and Karen the door. Stress had broken him.
“A call may come here. We h
ave a trace on your phone, but I would like you to cooperate just the same.”
“If by that you mean telling the little bastard what I think of him I’ll cooperate all right.”
“I mean exactly the reverse of that, Mr. Struther. I would like you to keep him talking for as long as you can. Don’t antagonize him. Talk about your parents if you like. It would be natural for you to ask after their welfare, and the more you ask and talk the more likely he is to give you some indication of where they are.”
“You think he’ll phone here?”
“No, I don’t think so. I just want to be prepared.”
If royalty had been visiting, Mrs. Peabody could hardly have cleaned and garnished her house more thoroughly. She had had notice of the coming of the two officers since eight o’clock on the previous evening and that had been enough. The spring cleaning must have taken place between then and nine in the morning when Burden and Karen arrived. Mrs. Peabody had probably got up at five.
One of the antimacassars on the back of an armchair was still slightly damp from the wash, though carefully starched and ironed. Karen touched it with her fingertip and smiled. Then she told herself that she could become like that if she didn’t watch it. In about thirty-five years’ time she could be a Mrs. Peabody, plumping up cushions before guests came, even making someone, whoever it was—Damon Slesar?—take his shoes off when he came in the front door.
“Penny for your thoughts, Sergeant Malahyde,” said Burden because she had gone rather pink.
“I was just thinking I could turn into a finicky old hausfrau like Mrs. P. if I wasn’t careful.”
“And so could I,” confessed Burden, “or the male equivalent.”
Audrey Barker was to answer the phone herself. If it rang, when it rang. She hovered, coming and going, helping her mother with whatever was left for Mrs. Peabody to do, returning with creased-up face and anxious eyes. Alone for a moment with Karen in the kitchen she volunteered, unasked, the information that her operation had been for gallstones. So much for Ryan’s more sensational version of that surgery, repeated by Dora Wexford on tape. Karen marveled at the mind, not to say the imagination, of a fourteen-year-old boy who could give his mother a cone biopsy.