by Ruth Rendell
“So they took their hostages, and I think we know already exactly how they did that. Of course, in the case of the Struthers, Owen and Kitty just walked across from the main house and put their hoods on outside the dairy door. Then they had their fun, playing the hysteric and the brave soldier. I suppose it helped pass the time for them until Owen staged his mock escape and they were taken away, first back to the comforts of Savesbury House and then off to London to hide themselves in Andrew’s house. Incidentally, I wonder what Tarling thought when she carried her act as far as spitting at him. Still, you don’t give the boss a smack in the face.
“It must have been a shock for them when they realized they’d got my wife and they would have realized much earlier than I thought at first. They didn’t have to know the name or be told who I was. Slesar knew on the day he came along with the other two from the Regional Crime Squad. No doubt he was on the blower to Sacred Globe immediately.”
“You’ve done well, Reg,” the Chief Constable said.
“Not well,” Wexford said. “I could have saved a man’s life and I didn’t.”
* * *
Dora said she ought to have known. She ought to have guessed about the Struthers. After all, they weren’t actors, were they?
“Everyone’s an actor these days,” said Wexford. “They learn it off the TV. Look at all those people who get interviewed after disasters. They’ve no shyness, they all behave as if they’ve learned scripts by heart or got monitors in front of them.”
“Why did they let me go, Reg?”
“At first I thought it was because they’d found out who you were, through Gary and Quilla. But that wasn’t so. They knew who you were. They knew because Slesar knew. Incidentally, he probably wore gloves not because he had something wrong with his hands, but to make you think there was something wrong with them. And they didn’t release you because they thought you might have seen the morning glory—”
Dora interrupted him. “I don’t understand why they didn’t just cut that thing down.”
“Probably because Kitty Struther wouldn’t let them. She grew it from seed, remember. No doubt she loved it. On no account are you to cut down my Ipomoea, she’d have said, and you don’t argue with the boss. No, they let you go because they’d planted false clues on you.”
“They did what?”
“You were my wife, so when you got home they knew the first thing that would happen would be questioning you in depth and subjecting your clothes to forensic tests. If Roxane, say, or Ryan had been released, who knows what would have happened to their clothes before they reached us? Maybe gone into a washing machine or at any rate been carefully brushed by Mother.” Wexford paused for a moment, thinking of Clare Cox, who would never again tend her child’s clothes. He sighed.
“They knew that would never happen here. They knew what would happen and did happen, that I’d drop your clothes into a sterile bag as soon as you took them off. They planted clues on that skirt of yours. Iron filings. Cats’ hairs. Easy for Slesar to obtain from his mother who spins and weaves with pet animal hair. Just as they made sure you’d carry away a picture in your mind of a tattoo on a man’s arm and a smell of a man with some kind of kidney disease, a tattoo easily achieved with a transfer and a smell produced by pocketing a tissue soaked in nail varnish remover.
“A lot of this was Slesar’s brainstorm. And some of it, I think—I hope I’m not being paranoid—was Slesar getting back at me. He bore a grudge against me, you see, for what he saw as my humiliating him in public.”
“Did you do that?”
“Let’s say he saw it that way.”
She shook her head wonderingly. “Reg, you’ve accounted for them all but the Driver. You still don’t know who the Driver was.”
“I do. He’ll be arrested tomorrow. And then those unfortunate Tarlings may be the only parents in Britain with three sons serving life sentences. The Driver was Conrad’s brother Colum.”
“Isn’t he in a wheelchair?”
“Anyone can sit in a wheelchair, Dora. So much of it, as his father told me, was in ‘his poor mind.’ You did say he walked oddly, stiffly, but none of us thought much of that.”
“So it’s all over?”
“All over. It was all for nothing. A young woman with all her life before her is dead, a misguided young man is dead, a boy who can’t tell truth from fantasy is going to present the shrinks and social workers with a problem for years to come, and six people are going to prison. And the bypass will still be built.”
“Not if we can help it,” said Dora stoutly. “There’s a meeting of KABAL tonight to prepare for next Saturday’s demo. If all this has taught us anything it’s that the Brede Valley and Savesbury Hill are worth fighting for. There’ll be twenty thousand people pouring into Kingsmarkham at the weekend.”
He sighed and nodded. Probably this wasn’t the first case of an investigating officer being entirely in agreement with the aims of hostage-takers while hating the way they tried to secure their ransom. Probably not—if it mattered. He smiled at his wife.
“And, Reg, after that I’d like to go up and see Sheila and the baby for a few days.” She looked at him with a half smile. “If you’ll drive me to the station.”
To the
Chief Constable and Officers
of the Suffolk Constabulary
My grateful thanks to Faber and Faber Ltd.
for the extract from Philip Larkin’s “Going Going”
from his collection High Windows.
My thanks are especially due to
Chief Inspector Vince Coomber of the Suffolk
Constabulary, who gave me good advice and corrected
my mistakes.
ALSO BY RUTH RENDELL
The Keys to the Street
Blood Lines
The Crocodile Bird
Going Wrong
The Bridesmaid
Talking to Strange Men
Live Flesh
The Tree of Hands
The Killing Doll
Master of the Moor
The Lake of Darkness
Make Death Love Me
A Judgement in Stone
A Demon in My View
The Face of Trespass
One Across, Two Down
Vanity Dies Hard
To Fear a Painted Devil
CHIEF INSPECTOR WEXFORD NOVELS
Simisola
Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter
The Veiled One
An Unkindness of Ravens
Speaker of Mandarin
Death Notes
A Sleeping Life
Shake Hands Forever
Some Lie and Some Die
Murder Being Once Done
No More Dying Then
A Guilty Thing Surprised
The Best Man to Die
Wolf to the Slaughter
Sins of the Fathers
A New Lease of Death
From Doon with Death
BY RUTH RENDELL WRITING AS BARBARA VINE
The Brimstone Wedding
No Night Is Too Long
Anna’s Book
King Solomon’s Carpet
Gallowglass
The House of Stairs
A Fatal Inversion
A Dark-Adapted Eye
RUTH RENDELL’s many writing awards include Edgars and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America as well as four Golden Daggers from England’s Crime Writers Association. She is also the author of The Keys to the Street, Simisola, and The Crocodile Bird.
She lives in England. In 1997 she was named a life peer in the House of Lords.
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