Road Rage

by Ruth Rendell

  “Well, for God’s sake, they’re not kept here.”

  Wexford looked about him, at the gardens, the rising moon, the flower-hung rear wall of the mill. No out-buildings, no sheds or garages in sight. The moonlight, strangely white for a radiance that proceeded from that golden crescent, now lit everything, showed every detail of the garden.

  “I know that,” he said. “Please don’t be so defensive, Mr. Godwin. I am not accusing you of anything. I only want your help.”

  The look he got was warmer. There couldn’t be much doubt in the mind of anyone who knew about these things that Godwin was guilty and suspicious because he had himself sampled a good many of these garden drugs, probably grew cannabis somewhere, smoked catalpa beans, chewed magic mushrooms. The list, as he had implied himself, was endless. But now was no time for taking an interest in that.

  “Tell me about this plant, will you? It’s blue?”

  “Look.” Godwin picked a closed flower off a stem. He unwound the spiraled petals and disclosed an interior the brightest and richest of sky blues. “Nice color, wouldn’t you say? The wild one that grows here as a weed is white, of course, and its little cousin is the pink convolvulus.”

  “Does it come up every year?” Wexford sought for the unfamiliar word. “Is it a perennial?”

  “I grew it from seed.” Godwin’s geniality had returned. “Come into the theater. I’ll buy you a drink while you’re waiting for your ladies. Mind you,” he added in a challenging tone, “I’d kidnap a few people myself if I thought it’d stop that goddamned bypass.”

  Wexford followed him up the steps, around the side of the mill, out of the moonlit shadows, and into bright artificial light. He held in his hand the flower bud and the leaf Godwin had given him. Where had he seen buds and leaves like that before? Seen them very recently?

  “Would it move?”

  They were in the empty bar now, Wexford confining himself to sparkling water, Godwin with a pint of lager. He said, “How do you mean, move?”

  “Would the flowers be out in one place one day and another the next?”

  “Each one only lasts a day, so broadly speaking, yes. You’re quite likely to get all the flowers out in one patch and then another lot out on a higher patch. If I make myself clear. Mind you, they wouldn’t come out at all on a really dull day.”

  On a dull day, such as they had had recently … Where had he seen that plant before?

  26

  His car phone was silent. There were no messages on the phone at home. When he had driven Dora to their home and Jenny to hers, when Dora had gone to bed and at once to sleep, he put through calls to all those people who were on the watch. There was nothing. The town was quiet, less busy at night than usual, less traffic, it seemed. Only two incidents had been reported: an attempted break-in at a shop in Queen Street, a case of driving over the permitted limit.

  It was eleven-fifty. Nearly five hours had passed since Sacred Globe’s deadline. He realized how he had been measuring this case out in minutes. Time, time, it was all a matter of time. Had they killed her? Would they kill her? Her body could even now be no more than half a mile from where he was, sitting silently in the dark in his own house.

  He remembered another midnight, the night Dora had come home. Moonlight falling on his face had awakened him or else it was the sound of her footfalls on the gravel. Gravel had been in the sleeping bag with Roxane Masood’s body. Hold on to that. And the dust from the wings of a moth only found in Wiltshire had been on Dora’s clothes. Cat hairs and a smell of acetone. A butterfly tattoo. He opened the French windows and went out into the garden. A dreadful idea had come to him.

  Last time, when Dora had come home, he had thought it was a messenger from Sacred Globe. He had thought they would target him personally. Suppose, now, they brought Kitty Struther’s body here? They could have done so while he was out and Dora was out.

  The sickle moon was overhead now, sailing silver-white in a rack of cloud, not full enough or bright enough to shed much light. He fetched a flashlight, searched the garden. His heart knocking, he opened the garage doors, flashed the light inside. Nothing. Thank God. The garden shed remained. For fifteen seconds he knew what he would find when he unlatched that door, but he held his breath and unlatched it and found what was always in there, a lawnmower and tools and old plastic bags and other junk.

  It proved nothing. Of course it didn’t, yet that wasn’t the way his mind saw it. He began to see all sorts of unreasonable things and he sat down in his chair in the dark and started to think.

  The blue thing. He knew what that was now and, suddenly, he knew where it was. It came to him clearly, a revelation, a picture in green and gray. Only that wasn’t possible, that couldn’t be. After a while he fetched the London phone book, the S–Z section. He punched out the number he found but there was no reply. Then he phoned Burden. It was past midnight but Burden wasn’t asleep. He wasn’t even in bed. When he heard Wexford’s voice he said, “Have they found her?”

  “No.” Wexford could state it categorically and with perfect confidence. “And they won’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Instead of replying, he said, “When would you like to go to London? Now or at six in the morning?”

  There was a short silence and then Burden said, “Do I have a choice?”

  “Sure you do.”

  “I shan’t sleep. I’m too strung up. So let’s go now.”

  Once, driving must have always been like this. Deserted lanes, empty roads, a scent in the air of fields overgrown with chamomile, not petrol and diesel. For the first ten minutes even the motorway was empty until a Jaguar passed them, roaring up the fast lane at twenty over the limit. The bright cold lights drowned the moon in their white haze. In the outskirts of London they saw an owl sitting on a telephone cable and in Norbury a fox crossed the road in front of them.

  “It’s Sunday now,” Wexford said, “but I’ve got onto Vine and told him to dig up someone in the morning and swear out a warrant.”

  Burden, who was driving, said, “Should I take the turn for Balham and go over Battersea Bridge?”

  “Turn left or go straight on, doesn’t matter so long as we cross the river more or less in the center.”

  Neither of them knew London well. But it was easier at this time of night, at two o’clock as it now was, though the traffic had thickened and begun to hold them up. The journey from the river up through Kensington and Notting Hill seemed interminable. Burden, who had been hoping to go through the park, found it closed and took Kensington Church Street instead. Then came the confusions of the Bayswater Road and Edgware Road.

  “Easy to see you never did the knowledge,” Wexford muttered.

  “The what?”

  “What taxi drivers do before they get to be taxi drivers. Going about on bicycles with maps in their hand, learning one-way streets.”

  “I’m a policeman,” said Burden austerely, “thank you very much.”

  But five minutes later he had to ask if it was all right to park on a single yellow line.

  “Quite okay after six-thirty,” Wexford said, sounding more confident than he was.

  They were in Fitzhardinge Street, off Manchester Square. No one was about and the place was as silent as anywhere ever is in central London. A thin stream of traffic continued to pass down not-far-distant Baker Street, making a ceaseless throb of background noise. They got out of the car, crossed the street, and stood in the entrance to the mews.

  This was approached by means of an archway in the terrace on the south side of Fitzhardinge Street. The street was well-lit so that it was almost as bright as day but inside the mews, on the other side of the brown sandstone arch, a single lamp burned, casting its yellow radiance over the cobbles. Of the buildings in there, some consisted of one story above a garage, others were narrow Victorian houses, flat-roofed or with a single gable, designed for the coachmen employed by the dwellers in Manchester Square or Seymour Street. Poor little artisans
’ houses, all of them, but prettified with roof gardens and window boxes, porches and new front doors, grown punishingly expensive to buy.

  “If you lived up here,” Wexford said softly, “in London, I mean, you wouldn’t have to worry about wetlands and yellow caddises and butterflies’ habitats. There aren’t any to lose.”

  Burden looked at him in amazement. “I don’t worry about those things and I like living in the country.”

  “Yes,” Wexford said. “I know.” And then, not to be patronizing and mean-spirited, “You did well remembering this address. I’m not sure I would have.”

  “My mother’s maiden name was Fitzharding,” Burden said simply, “only without the e, of course.”

  They walked into the mews through the arch. Outside the house they had come to, number four, stood two green tubs in which grew standard bay trees, their crowns spheres of dark leaves. The front door was at the side, with two sash windows to the right of it and two more above. No lights showed. In the entire mews, apart from the single street lamp, only one window had a light behind it and that was at the farthest end up against the wall of Seymour Street.

  Wexford rang the bell of number four. Although the house wasn’t divided into flats, there was an entryphone with a brass grille. He didn’t expect an answer to his ring and he didn’t get one then nor when he rang again. He knocked on the door, pushing at the letter box lid so that it rattled loudly.

  All was in darkness, all was silent, and no window was open. But he knew the house wasn’t empty. He could feel the presence of occupants, feel it he hardly knew how, perhaps by some strange sense long discounted as feasible to human beings but which animals understood. An emanation of tension, of strain growing intolerable, communicated itself to him through the pale walls of the house, through the sealed windows. It almost throbbed as if, instead of people, a crouching monster waited inside, breathing rhythmically, flexing its stubby claws.

  And the sense of this reached even Burden, who said, “There’s someone there all right. They’re in there.”

  “Upstairs,” said Wexford. “In the dark, behind those curtains.”

  He rang the bell again, putting his ear to the grille. And this time a strange thing happened. A receiver was lifted at the other end, making a sound like a sigh or the opening of a door that lets in a gust of wind. The sighing sound, the wind blowing, should have been followed by a voice, but there was no voice. Up there someone crouched with the phone to his ear, not speaking.

  Wexford said, “Detective Chief Inspector Wexford and Detective Inspector Burden, Kingsmarkham CID.” Too late he remembered he should have said Crime Management. “Open the door and let us in, please.”

  The receiver went back before he had spoken that last sentence.

  “Do you remember what Dora said?” he asked Burden. “When she talked of breaking down that washroom door and asked us if we’d ever done something like that? And we all had.”

  Grinning, Burden pressed the bell again. Again the receiver was lifted. He said harshly, “Open up or we’ll break your door down.”

  He had already taken the necessary steps backward and was running up to give the door a mighty kick when it opened. A man stood there in a dressing gown of dark blue foulard over cream-colored pajama bottoms. He was tall and lean and the vee of the dressing gown showed a mat of whitish blond hair covering his chest. The hair of his head was pepper-and-salt and, if he wasn’t quite recognizable from his photograph, his resemblance to his son both in facial features and coloring was unmistakable.

  He said nothing. He stood there. On the narrow staircase behind him a woman was slowly descending. Her feet in red slippers came first into view, then her bare legs with the stiff skirts of a red quilted housecoat reaching to the calves, then the rest of her and her white face, set and grim and ready for what must come.

  “Owen Kinglake Struther?” said Wexford.

  The man nodded.

  “You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defense if you do not mention when questioned something which you may later rely on in court. Anything you do say …”

  27

  The morning had started off hazy and cool, an autumn morning of mist penetrated by shafts of pale sunshine. But the mist had lifted now and the sun was no longer pale but bright and strong. Wexford looked up at the brilliance in the blue where the sun was and blessed it for shining when he wanted it to shine. It would show him and all of them what he wanted to see.

  Vine had the warrant. They would go in two cars and Wexford would ask for backup if he needed it. Maybe even if he didn’t need it. He should have been tired. In the event, he and Burden had had perhaps two hours’ sleep. But he felt elated, adrenaline running, every nerve in his body alert and waiting.

  It had worked last night. After entry to the house in Fitzhardinge Mews everything had gone straightforwardly. The Struthers had capitulated in an entirely middle-class, stand-up, speak-up, and play-the-game way. The curious thing was that neither of them seemed to see that they had done anything particularly wrong.

  “My husband planned it all,” Kitty Struther said proudly. “It was his idea, absolutely his brainchild. The rest of them—well, we had to bring them in. For sheer force of numbers, you understand.”

  “Kitty,” Owen Struther said.

  “Well, it’s all over, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter what we say now.” She had looked up at Wexford. “That was your wife, wasn’t it? There was the boy and the—well, the colored girl. She jumped out of a window, she wasn’t pushed. I wonder what your wife said about us. We put on a jolly good act, you know. Good as professionals. Owen was Colonel Blimp and I was the terrified little woman.”

  “Kitty.”

  She started laughing. The laughter caught in her throat on a sob and she began to cry, rocking herself back and forth. Wexford thought how Dora had said she cried so much. What had been acting and what real?

  “You haven’t asked why,” Owen Struther said. “Personally, I think we were justified. I longed for that house all my life and managed to buy it ten years ago. It was all going to be taken from us, it was going to be ruined by a ghastly road more suited to Los Angeles or Birmingham.” He touched his wife’s arm.

  “Kitty.”

  “I can’t help it,” she sobbed. “It’s all so sad.”

  “You should be more discreet.”

  “What does it matter now? If they build the road what does anything matter? They can execute me if they like.”

  “Get dressed now,” said Wexford, “and we’ll be off.”

  They were back in Kingsmarkham at twenty past four. He had snatched his bit of sleep, woken promptly, and checked on the warrant with Barry Vine. Now, in the first car, he directed Pemberton where to go.

  Pemberton didn’t question it. He knew the area and he had his map and if he was surprised he didn’t say so. It would all be over in an hour, Wexford had said, and this afternoon, he, James Pemberton, was playing golf with his brother-in-law. The Chief Inspector was in the back with Inspector Burden and DS Malahyde next to him, riding shotgun.

  He had used that phrase and Wexford heard it and said, “I don’t believe in Sacred Globe’s gun. Not a handgun.”

  “Dora said a handgun,” said Burden.

  “I know she did and that’s why I don’t think it was real. Let me put that another way. If she’d said they had a shotgun or even a rifle I’d believe in the possibility of its being real because dozens of people around here have shotgun licenses.”

  They went the Pomfret way. Marginally quicker, Pemberton said. It would be a lot slower, though, when the bypass was built. Unless they built underpasses or bridges. Burden said his wife had told him of a new proposal she had heard rumored that they were going to put a tunnel under the Brede at Watersmeet to save the yellow caddis.

  Framhurst was even quieter this morning than it had been last evening, but as they passed over the crossroads, church bells started ringing for some early-morning service. For the first tim
e Wexford took note of the car behind him, the car Hennessy was driving. He looked back, craning his neck. Vine was next to him and his heart took a little lurch because of who was in the back with Nicky Weaver.

  But he had to be wrong about that. He really knew he was. It was just that he had a horribly suspicious mind, the kind of antennae that locate ugly things, awful things that wouldn’t cross other people’s minds. But if Brendan Royall hadn’t furnished Sacred Globe with Burden’s name and telephone number, who had? He had to be wrong. He was wrong, and since he would never tell anyone, not a soul would know of the doubt in his heart, his nose for the scent of treachery.

  Frenchie Collins wouldn’t talk to Karen Malahyde, only to her companion. And before he went to the Holgates he had told only those standing close to him that he was going up there in quest of recent building work. Yet Ryan Barker had phoned him while he was there. And as for Tarling’s movements …

  “I think it may all go quietly,” was all he said aloud. They were climbing Markinch Hill. The bright sun lit up the whole valley, the green and the black-green, the dark massive woods, the sparkling silver river, white houses and red houses, flint and brown, chalk scree on downland slopes. The shadow of a thin strip of cloud floated lightly across it all.

  “House up here, is it, sir?” Pemberton asked.

  “On our left now,” said Wexford.

  Pemberton got out to open the gates.

  “Leave them open,” Wexford said. “Leave the car here. We’ll walk up. We’ll go quietly.”

  The other car had been close behind them. He walked over to it, repeated to Vine what he had just said and said, to Nicky and Damon Slesar, “I’d like you to stay in the car. Wait here till you’re called for. I’ve got more backup coming.”

  The six who weren’t staying anywhere began to make their way toward the house. Not on the drive, not to crunch the gravel, but through the shrubberies, between the trees where, through the branches, here on the ridge, the panorama of the valley opened out and spread itself like a great green tapestry unfurled. The sun made dapple patterns on the fine pale soil, the brown leaves of last autumn. On an island in a sea of trees, the house stood with its outbuildings, the double house, Jacobean at one end, Georgian at the other. The trees thinned and the house emerged, the lower floors of the Georgian part hidden by a two-story building of cut flints with a slate roof.