Road Rage (19 page)

He sat up. He got up and pulled the curtains till they met. If he had only done that before he went to bed perhaps he wouldn’t have wakened. The hour of sleep he had had might be all he was going to get for the night. He looked around the bedroom in the grayish pearly light. Dora’s things were everywhere. Hairbrushes and a bottle of perfume on the dressing table, a scarf hanging over the back of a chair, on her bedside cabinet a box of tissues and her other watch, the one she wasn’t wearing. In closing the cupboard door he had inadvertently caught up the stuff of one of her skirts in it. The pale silky material, a handful of it, gleamed in the half-dark. He opened the door, pushed the material in, moved a hanger along the rail, smelled her scent, and closed the door again.

He was back in bed when he heard the sound. And immediately he heard it he knew he had heard it before, one minute before, and it was that which had awakened him, not the moonlight.

Sitting up, he listened. It came again. A crunch, made and repeated, footsteps on the gravel of the path. He got out of bed and reached for the clothes he had taken off, just the trousers and socks. Over the back of a chair was a round-necked sweater. He pulled it over his head, stepped softly to the bedroom door, and opened it silently. From down below came another sound, a different sound, a click, a screwing, a release. Someone was trying the back door.

It was bolted on the inside. What did they think he was, a policeman who’d leave his back door unlocked all night? This was Sacred Globe, he had no doubt about it.
As he had thought, they had sent a representative and to him, to his home, in the night. The digital clock, on Dora’s side, told him it was twelve fifty-two.

The moonlight hadn’t penetrated the thick curtains at the landing window and it was darkish. His eyes grew accustomed to it as he waited. He could see the outlines of windows now and the moon’s pale ambience, over the banisters to the hall, the window there, the open door into the living room. Below the landing window, at the side of the house, there came another footfall, then another. They had tried the back door and were returning to the front. Tap, tap, quite light footfalls, but loud too. They weren’t making silence a priority, that was for sure. Whoever they were, whatever they wanted, they weren’t afraid of him.

How would they make him let them in? By ringing the doorbell, presumably. Yet why had they tried the back door first? It came to him suddenly.
They would have Dora’s keys
.

They would have a key to the back door and a key to the front door, and for some reason they had tried the back first, but it had been bolted on the inside.

Now for the front door.

He didn’t want to be seen straightaway. He went to the front of the house, into the front bedroom, and looked out of the window, but the porch overhang blocked his view. Padding back, he heard a key turn in the front door lock. He heard the door open and someone enter the house. The door was softly, almost stealthily, closed.

The last thing he expected was light. He heard a switch click without realizing what it was, then light streamed up onto the landing. He marched out of the bedroom to the head of the stairs, prepared to confront them.

Dora was standing in the hall, looking upward.

H
e held her in his arms. He was afraid to slacken his hold in case she vanished again. It couldn’t be a dream because she was the age she really was and he was his real age too. She laughed weakly when he told her that, how in his dreams he and she were always young, but her laughter broke raggedly and she began to cry. He held her and pressed her wet face against his cheek.

“What can I do for you? What would you like? Shall I carry you upstairs? I used to be able to do that. Shall I try?”

“Like Rhett Butler,” she said through her tears. “Oh, Reg, don’t be so silly.”

“I’m a fool. I know. Oh God, I’m so happy.”

She said dryly, but with a break in her voice, “I’m not exactly down in the dumps myself.”

“A drink,” he said, “a stiff one. Have you had proper food? I won’t ask you anything about what’s happened, not tonight. The entire Mid-Sussex Constabulary will want to ask you tomorrow, but not tonight.”

She stepped a litle back from him, looked into his face.

“Why weren’t you in bed, Reg? What’s happened?”

“I thought you were a representative of Sacred Globe and I wasn’t going to meet them in that cardinal’s robe.”

“Is that what they call themselves? I suppose I am in a way,” she said, “though not what you’d call an official one. I don’t know why I was released. No one said. They
just put that foul hood over my head again and drove me here.”

“You don’t have to talk about it now. My God, no one was ever so happy to see someone else since the world began … What would you like? Tell me.”

“Well, most of all I’d like a bath. Washing facilities weren’t all they might have been. I’d like a bath and you to bring me a very stiff gin and tonic in the bath, and then I’d like to go to sleep.”

When he came back with her drink he found all her clothes in a heap on the bedroom floor. The first time she had ever done such a thing, he thought. And grinning to himself, then actually laughing aloud with happiness, he picked up every garment and dropped them into a large sterile plastic bag.

Six-thirty in the morning was too early to call the Chief Constable, but Wexford called him. Montague Ryder sounded as if he had been up for hours and had already run twice around Myringham Common.

“I am sure you know, I don’t have to tell you, that we are going to have to talk exhaustively to your wife and she is going to have to tell us all she knows. It must be taped and probably gone through twice, with a time interval in between, to make sure nothing gets missed.”

“I know that, sir, and she knows it.”

“Right. Good. Time is of the essence and the sooner we get started the better. But don’t wake her, Reg. Let her sleep till nine if she can.”

She had been fast asleep when he crept out of the bedroom to make his phone call. He hadn’t slept much himself, getting only fitful bursts of sleep, because he kept waking to see if it was real, if she was really back and there in bed beside him. Down in the kitchen he made tea, squeezed orange juice, then made coffee as well for good
measure. The time passed like a flash. He thought of the previous morning when he had been walking Amulet about, waiting for the news, and time had dragged, had seemed to stand still. Time travels in diverse paces with diverse persons. I’ll tell you who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal, and who he stands still withal …

Sylvia was the first daughter he phoned because he wanted to phone Sheila first.

“You should have called me last night,” Sylvia complained.

“No, I shouldn’t. It was one o’clock. She’s asleep now, but you can come over and see her tonight.”

Sheila answered the phone in a tearful tone. He told her.

“Oh, Pop,” said Sheila, “how absolutely amazingly wonderful, darling. Shall I bring Amulet and come over now?”

When he went upstairs at half-past seven Dora was awake and sitting up. She put out her arms and hugged him. “I got plenty of sleep in that place, so I wasn’t tired. There was nothing to do but encourage the others and sleep.”

“Do you know where you were?”

“I haven’t a clue,” she said. “Of course I knew that would be the first thing you’d all want to know—and they knew it too. They were scrupulously careful about that from the very first.”

He brought her up her breakfast and she chose coffee. He had a shower, singing bits of Gilbert and Sullivan at the top of his voice. She was laughing at him and he loved that.

“But, Reg, tell me something,” she said when he came back into the room in the crimson dressing gown, “who’s
in charge of this? It can’t be you, they wouldn’t have had that, not with me being one of the hostages.”

“It was. It is.”

He explained why and she said, “Poor you,” and then she said, “Last night you said you expected their representative and I said I was that in a sort of way. That was because they gave me a message. That was the only time any of them spoke. They handcuffed me, they brought me out and put the hood on.” She shivered a little. “One of them spoke. It was quite a shock. You see, it had been as if they were dumb or deaf-mutes. He called it ‘the next message.’ Does that make sense?”

He nodded.

“Well, he said they’d noted the suspension but suspension won’t be enough. They want cancellation. Negotiations start on Sunday, he said.”

“How do negotiations start?” Wexford asked.

“I don’t know.”

“They didn’t say any more?”

“That was all.”

Wexford, Burden, and Karen Malahyde. Not an interview room. Everyone but Dora balked at that, she said she wouldn’t have minded, she rather liked being the center of attention, and she’d never seen the inside of an interview room except on television. But they had the recording equipment taken to the old gym and four armchairs too, to make it more like a party and less like an interrogation. The Chief Constable came over specially, shook hands with Dora, and told her she was a brave woman.

“Where do you want me to start?” she said when she was sitting down with her third cup of coffee of the day beside her. “At the beginning, I suppose?”

“I don’t think so,” said her husband. “As you said yourself, the most important thing at the moment is
where. Tell us what you can about the place you were held in.”

“But you know I don’t know where it was.”

“We must hope to find where it was from what you tell us.”

“That almost means beginning at the beginning because it was the journey that took me there. But I don’t know which way he went or how long it took, you don’t when you’ve got a hood over your head. But I’d guess we were driving for an hour, not more, and for some of the time we were on a big road, possibly a motorway.”

“Could it have been in London?” Karen asked. “London or just outside London?”

“I suppose it could have been the southern suburbs, Sydenham, Orpington, somewhere like that, but I don’t know, I haven’t a clue really. I wasn’t in the car long enough for it to have been north London. It could have been almost anywhere in Kent or Hampshire, it could have been the coast.”

Dora was very pale, her husband thought. And in spite of having slept heavily, she had had less than six hours and she looked tired. He had wanted to drive her straight to Dr. Akande at the medical center, but she had refused, she had almost laughed at him. They shouldn’t delay, she had said, she was all right. But when she was dressing he had seen her stagger and have to catch hold of a chair.

Disapproval was no uncommon feeling for Burden to have and he disapproved of the whole thing. Dora should have seen the doctor, been given a thorough examination, probably given a tranquilizer if not a sedative. He had no time for counseling himself—though giving lip service to the whole counseling theory because it was police policy—but he firmly believed in the principle of shock hitting victims a good deal later than one would expect. Shock would hit Dora and then she’d have a breakdown.

She had dressed in a gray skirt and gray and yellow checked blouse, oldish clothes, comfortable and familiar. When she left to go to Sheila she had been wearing a new suit, caramel-colored linen. She had worn it for four days, it had got crumpled and creased as linen does, and now she never wanted to see it again. The other clothes in her suitcase she hadn’t seen since that hood was first put over her head, for they had taken the case away and, for all she knew, still had it in their possession. She had been allowed to bring her handbag back with her, but not that suitcase and not the presents she had been taking with her to Sheila.

She had paused to drink her coffee and when she began again seemed to realize for the first time that she was being recorded. Her voice grew more stilted and became slower.

“The hoods we wore, we all had them on sometimes, were like small sacks with eyeholes and the sacking had been sprayed, I think, with black spray paint. Or soaked in paint. My hood was quite thick and heavy. They didn’t take it off till I was inside.”

“Talk naturally,” Wexford said. “Forget the machine.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll try.”

“No, it’s okay, you’re doing fine.”

“Well, then, you’re going to want to know inside what and that I can’t tell you.” She gave the recorder a glance, cleared her throat. “But it was on the ground floor and I think partially belowground. I went down two steps to get into it. Like a basement but not like a cellar. Am I explaining that properly?”

“I think that’s perfectly clear,” said Burden.

“I want you to know that I took pains to notice everything from the start, to note the size and shape of everything and all the time to try and pick up clues to where I was. I thought it might be necessary and it has been.”

“Good for you, Mrs. Wexford,” said Karen. “You’re a marvel.”

Dora smiled. “Wait till you hear. The results didn’t match up to the intention. The boy was already there when I arrived. Ryan Barker he’s called, but I suppose you know that. He was in the room, sitting on one of the beds. He was just sitting there, staring. The room was quite big, about a third the size of this gym, and oblong, but there was only one window and that was on one of the shorter walls and quite high up. Not all that high up, though, because the ceiling was rather low. I’d say not seven feet. Reg wouldn’t have bumped his head on it but he’d have been scared of doing that. I can’t do the room measurements in meters, but I’d say it was about thirty feet by eighteen to twenty.

“There was the door I came in by and another door that led into a very tiny washroom with a lavatory and basin. There were four beds in the room, narrow single foldaway beds. Later on they brought in another one, and I think it was because they only intended to take four hostages but in fact took five …”

“What makes you think that?” Karen asked.

“You don’t want me having opinions, do you? Well, if you think it could be useful. I had a feeling they thought there’d be only one of the Struthers when in fact it was both. And later on Owen Struther said his wife had phoned for a car, so they thought they’d be picking up a woman on her own. Anyway, they brought in a fifth bed. The beds were the only furniture apart from two kitchen chairs.”