Road Rage

by Ruth Rendell

  The waterwheel was long gone. Sails there had never been. The building of white weatherboard and red brick, a huge graceful structure, had been converted some ten years before into a theater and become the regular venue of repertory companies. The lane that led down to it from Pomfret Monachorum was of reasonable width and serviceable surface. Once there the theatergoer had everything the civilized in pursuit of culture could wish for: a large car park concealed by tall trees, a restaurant with river frontage, a splendid view across Stringfield Bridge to the woods, meadows and downs beyond, and, of course, the auditorium that was big enough to hold four hundred people.

  One of its disadvantages was that actors onstage were bedeviled by flying insects, drawn in by the light, moths and lacewings and daddy longlegs. Legend had it that a bat had tangled itself in an actress’s hair while she was playing Juliet. Wexford, who had never been there before, thought there might be mosquitoes and he counseled Dora and Jenny to avoid the river terrace and stay inside for their preperformance glass of wine.

  “I’ll come back for you,” he said. “Will ten forty-five suit?”

  “Reg, we can call for a taxi,” Jenny said. “I should have brought my own car, I don’t know why I didn’t. It’s not as if we intend to go boozing.”

  “Well, now you can. A bit. I’ll come back for you, so you needn’t worry.”

  Extinction with Christine Colville and Richard Paton ran for three hours, not including the two intervals. He read that on the program up on the foyer wall. This play, by Jeffrey Godwin himself, alternated its performances with a modern-dress version of Twelfth Night and with Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata. An ambitious company, who set their sights high. A voice behind him said, “How’s Sheila?”

  He turned and saw standing at his shoulder a tall genial-looking man with brown curly hair and beard.

  “You must be Jeffrey Godwin,” he said. “Wexford—but you know that. Sheila’s fine, got a baby daughter.”

  “I saw it in the paper,” said Godwin. “Lovely. I hope to see mother and child in the not too far distant future. Are you coming to tonight’s performance?”

  Wexford said he wouldn’t be and explained that he was particularly busy at the moment. But his wife was here and her friend. He said good-bye to Godwin and made his way back to the car park, skirting the mill’s still sunlit gardens from which came a heavy scent of late-flowering roses.

  Back in Kingsmarkham he went to the police station and into the old gym. Damon Slesar was there with Karen Malahyde and three staff working at computers. Wexford said to the two detective sergeants that the witching hour was past, it was after seven-thirty now. Give Sacred Globe a couple of hours and the time would come for the returning of Kitty Struther’s body.

  “It may be an empty threat,” Damon said.

  Karen looked at him, shaking her head. “I don’t think so. Why would they start being merciful and civilized at this stage? They’re more likely to be made cruel by desperation.”

  “Merciful” was an interesting word for her to have used, Wexford thought. He asked her what duties had been arranged for her and Slesar that evening.

  “I’m doing Contemporary Cars, sir, and Damon will be at Mrs. Peabody’s.”

  A pity they couldn’t be together, he thought. It was obviously what they would have liked. But he hadn’t got the personnel, the backup. They needed everyone, even himself, for surveillance duties. On the watch, there was a good chance of catching Sacred Globe, he thought optimistically. But what a price to pay for catching them! Kitty Struther’s death. He imagined Monday morning’s papers. Tomorrow’s television, come to that. He switched the image off, because thinking like that was negative and pointless, and saw Slesar’s hand just close quickly over Karen’s before leaving the old gym.

  After Karen too had gone he sat at the window, eyeing the precincts of the police station and its car parks, front and back, the entrances to both of which could be seen from this point. If they caught someone tonight and followed him—or her—back to where they had come from, what would he need in the way of assistance?

  He thought of the gun that Rubber Face had had with him in the car when Dora was taken. Rubber Face again had a gun when bringing food to the hostages in the basement room, and on that occasion he had fired it, probably only to frighten, but could they be sure of that?

  Very likely, since Rubber Face had it both times, there was only one gun. Possibly Rubber Face was the only shot. Possibly, very possibly, the gun was a replica or a child’s toy from a toy shop. If Kitty Struther was shot they would know, he thought grimly, that would be a way of knowing for certain.

  And when they knew, when they had followed the driver of the car that brought Kitty Struther’s body, would he need arms himself?

  Armed response vehicles patrolled the roads for sixteen hours each day. In Mid-Sussex there were two such on patrol and carrying arms. Authority to utilize and deploy firearms officers could be given only by an officer of the rank of superintendent or above except in special circumstances. These would certainly be such circumstances, but armed officers could never be interspersed with unarmed in any operation. If the severity of risk was great, all officers involved in the attack would be fully armed and work in teams of four at a minimum, or more likely eight.

  Wexford and his own would be a hundred yards away, watching through binoculars. And the price of all this was Kitty Struther’s life.

  At eight-thirty he left his watch for Lynn Fancourt to take over and drove to Pomfret and Clare Cox’s house. Ted Hennessy was outside, in his car on the opposite side of the road, but Wexford ignored him, went up to the front door, and knocked.

  She came to the door after he had knocked again and rung as well. Hassy Masood had gone back to London with his second family—what interest had he now in any of this, now his daughter was dead? She was alone. Her bereavement had aged her twenty years and she had a madwoman-in-the-attic look, her face gaunt and gray, her hair a shaggy fleece with the color and texture of dried grasses. Deep down in dark sockets her eyes stared wildly at him. Impossible for him to say now that he wanted to talk to her about the remaining two hostages, that he held the strong belief—he hardly knew why—that a woman’s body would be delivered here within the next few hours.

  “I came to see how you are.”

  She stepped aside to let him enter. “As you see,” and then she said, “Not good.”

  There are some situations in which there is nothing to say. He sat down and she sat down.

  “I do nothing all day,” she said. “I’m alone and I do nothing. The neighbors get my shopping.”

  “Your painting?” he hazarded, thinking of what they all said, that work was the remedy for sorrow.

  “I can’t paint.” She smiled, a ghastly shadowy smile. “I shall never paint again.” Tears in her eyes began to flow down her face. “When I think at all I think of her in that room being afraid. Being so afraid that she lost her life trying to escape from it.” She put up her hand and wiped the back of it across her eyes. It induced a little shiver, the way she read his thoughts. “That other woman they’ve got, they’ll kill her, won’t they? Do you think they’d take me instead if I offered? If I got it in the papers somehow, that they could have me? I’d like them to kill me.”

  Despair he had seen before in all its forms. This was just another example. To suggest counseling to this woman, to suggest some kind of bereavement support, would be insulting. All he could do was look at her and say, feeling how wretchedly inadequate it was, “I am very, very sorry. You have my deepest sympathy.”

  As he left his phone began to bleep. He sat in his car and listened to Burden’s account of the car with two men in it who had driven into the car park of the Concreation building. They had got out, opened the trunk, and lifted out a black plastic bag, sealed at both ends and the length of an average human body.

  “I really thought this was it, Reg. The only thing was that one of them could easily lift it on his own. But he he
ld it the way one would carry a body—carry a living person, for that matter.”

  “What was it?”

  “They’d been clearing out a loft,” said Burden. “It was the usual sort of rubbish from a loft, old newspapers, old clothes, most of it recyclable.”

  “Then why didn’t they take it to the dump to be recycled?”

  “They explained all that. They were scared stiff. Originally they’d been going to stick all the stuff in dustbins—they’re brothers-in-law, by the way—but they’ve got environmentally conscious neighbors that they didn’t want seeing paper and cloth disposed of like that. But the dump, with the recycling bins, is three miles away, while Concreation’s yard, with a dumpster that was brought in empty yesterday, that was two minutes from home.”

  Wexford sat in his car for a few moments, but it was too near Hennessy’s, it would attract attention. He drove back to Kingsmarkham and along the deserted, coldly lit High Street. All those shops, he thought, with bright lights in their windows and not a soul about to look into them. Cars in plenty, though, parked cars whose owners were in the Olive and Dove, the Green Dragon, the York Wine Bar, and who would move on to Kingsmarkham’s only nightclub, the Scarlet Angel, when it opened at ten.

  The sky was dark now, dark and bright, scattered with stars. There was no moon, or no moon had yet risen. He tried to remember whether there had been a moon on the previous night and if there had been, whether it had been full or a mere curve of light. His phone rang again while he was parked in Queen Street.

  Barry Vine. He was at the station. One of the taxis in the Contemporary Cars fleet had just dropped a fare on the station approach. The fare had one large suitcase and a long bundle, so heavy that the driver couldn’t lift it out of the trunk. A porter was sought but, of course, there had been no porters at Kingsmarkham Station for twenty years.

  “The chap just disappeared,” Vine said. “I mean, I thought he had. There was this bundle lying there on the pavement, the cab had gone, and this fellow had vanished into the station. I was looking at it when he came back.”

  “What was it?” said Wexford for the second time that evening.

  “Golf clubs.”

  “I trust it’s not still there.”

  “Someone found him a cart in what used to be the lost-and-found department.”

  He looked at his watch. It was nine. He would go to Rhombus Road, Stowerton, and then to Savesbury House on his way to the Weir Theatre. Maybe not to go into either place, just to run his eye over them, to check for he hardly knew what. Sacred Globe, after all, had said Kingsmarkham, not Stowerton or Framhurst.

  Nicky Weaver must have had the same idea, for she was in her car parked in front of a house a few doors down from Mrs. Peabody’s. This time Wexford interrupted the surveillance. He went over to her car, tapped on the window, and got in beside her. She turned to him her pretty face, the intent eyes, the look of sharp intelligence. He saw all this in the momentary light brought by the door opening. Her geometrically cut black hair, turned under at the tips, reminded him that when he was young such a style was called a pageboy. And he saw her tiredness too, the permanent strained pallor of the woman who has a high-powered job and is a wife and mother too.

  “Has anything happened?” he asked her.

  “A man called at the house. At about seven. I think he must be Audrey Barker’s fiancé. Anyway, he hugged her on the doorstep and he’s been inside ever since. Mrs. Peabody went out. I thought she was being tactful, leaving them alone together, but she’d only gone to the corner shop for a pint of milk.”

  “That Indian place Trotter used to live above?”

  “Small world, isn’t it?” said Nicky.

  “They won’t bring Kitty Struther’s body here. They’ll do something entirely unexpected.”

  Driving in the Framhurst direction, he passed the start of the bypass site. If it was never built and those now grass-grown earth hillocks never removed, scholars in future ages would describe them as tumuli or the burial mounds of Saxon heroes. But it would be built. It was a matter, not of protest, not of environmental assessment, but only of time.

  Framhurst was as empty as the town but for three boys standing by their motorbikes and smoking outside the bus shelter. Bright strip lighting in the window of the butcher’s, illuminating nothing but empty white trays and sprigs of plastic parsley. The tea shop locked up and its canopy furled. Night obscured the view of the valley from the ascending lane. It was merely a dark spread, punctured by many lights, a mirroring of the starlit sky. The winding river had vanished, but the Weir Theatre shone brightly, a torch on the invisible waterside.

  DC Pemberton was in his car outside the gates of Savesbury House.

  “It’s the only way in, sir. I checked. But the grounds are big and there’s only fences or hedges around them. Anyone could get in almost anywhere across the fields.”

  “Stay where you are. But they won’t come here. It’s too far out. It’s not Kingsmarkham.”

  Ten-fifteen. The play wouldn’t yet be over, but he would drive down to Stringfield Mill, take it slowly. How pleasant and comfortable it must be not to be endowed with imagination! He didn’t want his, he’d had enough of it, anyone could have it. But imagination wasn’t something you could get rid of, any more than you could determine not to love. Or not to be afraid.

  That was the worst thing, thinking of her fear. All her life she had had someone else to take the strain, to—what were the words of the marriage service?—love her, comfort her, honor and keep her. Literally, it appeared, those things had been done for Kitty Struther. By parents once, by a husband of course, by a son too. She had never lived alone, earned her own living, known want or even straitened circumstances, never probably even traveled alone. But now she was alone. For more than ten days she had lived on a diet the likes of which she had never previously known, had slept—if she had slept—in the kind of bed she had never even seen before, had been cold and hungry, deprived of all the small comforts of life, without a bath or a change of clothes. And now they had taken her husband from her and were going to kill her.

  Imagination, the curse of the thinking policeman. He laughed wryly to himself. The lights of the Weir Theatre blazed ahead of him, dazzling out the stars. He put the car into the car park, walked slowly up the lane toward the river. Ten minutes yet before the curtains would fall. Consolations were always to be found in this life and one thing he could be glad about was that he hadn’t just sat through three hours of Extinction.

  A gate in the stone wall led into the mill’s gardens. It would provide a shortcut and a pleasant one. He unlatched the gate and pushed it open. The lights were all directed away from here and the gardens lay in a cloud of pale shadow, but as he looked southward he saw the moon rising, a perfect orange-colored crescent. A waning moon, and now he remembered. It had been full the night Dora came home, eight days before.

  Most flowers close up at night. He found himself surrounded by flowers whose blossoms had become buds again, shut at dusk but still giving off their various perfumes. But the roses, whose scent had come to him when he was here before, remained open, rosy-gold clusters on long stems and flat yellow faces pressed against the mossy gray wall.

  Was this a private garden? Godwin’s own garden? There was no sign that visitors to the theater ever came out here. He turned a bend in the path and saw Godwin himself sitting on the topmost of the crescent-shaped steps that splayed out from closed French windows. The wall behind him was hung with roses, white and red, and with other climbers whose flowers had folded themselves away for the night.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m using your private gardens as a shortcut. I didn’t realize there were parts of the mill grounds shut off from the public.”

  Godwin smiled and made a deprecating gesture with his hand. “The public won’t want it when the bypass comes.”

  “It will pass very near here?”

  “At the nearest point, about a hundred yards from the end of this gar
den. I was born here—not here, I mean, but in Framhurst—and I lived here till I was eighteen. It’s twelve years since I came back. There have been more changes in those twelve years than in all the rest—I won’t tell you how many. Too many.”

  “All changes for the worse?”

  “I think so. Destruction and spoliation but additions as well. More petrol stations, more white and yellow paint on the roads, more road signs, more billboards, more stupid useless information in print everywhere. That Framhurst’s been twinned with a town in Germany and another one in France, for instance. That Sewingbury is the floral capital of Sussex. That Savesbury Deeps has been designated a picnic area. And all the new houses. The Dragon pub in Kingsmarkham renamed Tipples and Grove’s wine bar turned into a nightclub and called the Scarlet Angel …”

  Wexford nodded. He was going to say something that he didn’t believe about progress and inevitability, but he said nothing at all for a moment because he was looking at the climber which ascended the wall to a height of perhaps ten feet between the red rose and the white.

  It was a delicate-leaved plant with fine pointed leaves and curling tendrils. Flowers it had had and by day they must make a considerable show but now all were closed up, some furled like rolled umbrellas, others withered. He spoke now. He said to Godwin, “What is it? This plant, what is it?”

  “Now, look.” Godwin got to his feet. His voice, formerly so gentle and meditative, changed in a flash and became immediately surly. “Now, look, if you’re going to search for hallucinatory drugs or whatever in garden plants, you’ve got your work cut out. There are hundreds of them. Ordinary poppies, for instance. But this isn’t cannabis, you know. This morning glory, it’s quite hard to grow, it doesn’t bear much, you wouldn’t get enough seeds to fill an eggcup, you …”

  “Mr. Godwin. Please. I am not in the drug squad. I am looking for two hostages at present in the hands of those who abducted them twelve days ago. This plant”—Wexford thought he could postpone too detailed an explanation—“this plant, or one like it, may be visible from the place where they are kept.”