Road Rage (36 page)

“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 have 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.

The first time the phone rang was at twenty past ten. Mrs. Peabody had just brought in cups of milky frothy coffee, the Rhombus Road version of cappuccino. A lace-trimmed cloth was on the tray and a paper doily on the biscuit plate, the sugar was the loaf kind, and there was an apostle spoon in each saucer. Audrey Barker looked at it with the loathing of a woman who cares very little for the appearance of domestic appurtenances but has all her life suffered under the reproofs of a house-proud
mother. The phone ringing made her jump and bring her hands up to her head. Burden nodded to her and she picked up the receiver.

It was immediately clear this wasn’t Ryan. Burden—and Wexford—had wondered about the man Ryan had told Dora his mother was engaged to. Was this another figment of his hungry imagination? Apparently not, though, as Audrey Barker explained, putting the phone down after a minute or two. “My friend,” she called him. “He phones me every day. Well, two or three times a day.”

The time went by. To Burden it passed very slowly. Mrs. Peabody took away their coffee cups, picked up two invisible biscuit crumbs from the area of carpet between his feet. For something to do, he asked Audrey Barker to tell him about her son, his tastes, his interests, his progress at school, and she did so, manifestly becoming less tense. Ryan shone, apparently, at biology and geography, a prowess which surprised no one. He possessed a considerable library of books on natural history. She had given him a field guide to British birds for Christmas and had already bought a set of wildlife videos for his coming birthday …

The phone rang again at midday and because it was precisely twelve noon, which somehow seemed a likely time for Sacred Globe to phone, when Audrey lifted the receiver Karen got up and stood close enough to her to hear her caller’s voice. It might have been a likely time but it wasn’t the right time. The caller was Hassy Masood.

“He phones every day too,” Audrey said when the short conversation was over. “It’s what he calls being my support group. Very kind, I suppose, though frankly I could do without it. She’s not up to talking and I don’t wonder. He always explains she’s not up to it.”

Next time the phone rang it was a wrong number.
Watching Audrey, Karen thought she had never before quite seen the significance of the phrase “jumping out of one’s skin.”

The forensic science laboratory naturally gave Wexford no clue to the provenance of the sleeping bag. Nicky Weaver had made tracing it her task, now that it was clear they had been wrong in supposing it to be identified with the one bought in Brixton and sold to Frenchie Collins. She had also eliminated the north London source and she and Hennessy had widened their search to the Midlands while Damon Slesar kept up his surveillance of Conrad Tarling.

But if there was nothing in the lab report on the sleeping bag’s origin, a great deal of evidence had been gathered as to where it had been after it came into the possession of Sacred Globe.

It was made of washable material and had been washed at least once in its lifetime. After the Collins woman brought it back from Africa, thought Wexford, only she hadn’t brought it back, it wasn’t hers. She had told Slesar it wasn’t hers and why should she lie?

Few of the substances on Dora’s clothes had been found on the inside or outside of the sleeping bag, except for the cat hair. There was plenty of that. Small stains on the outside of the bag had been made in one case by coffee, black coffee without milk, and in the other by red wine. Three small irregular stones inside the bag were the constituents of gravel, all of them tiny flint fragments, but perhaps the most interesting find was a withered leaf. It had been in the bottom of the bag and in the opinion of the forensic scientist had very likely adhered to one of Roxane’s shoes. The leaf was not from a wild plant but from the cultivated climber
Ipomoea rubro-caerulea
, the morning glory.

Wexford read that part of the report again. He had
once tried growing morning glory in his own garden but the summer had been so bad that the first flowers on the sickly attenuated plant failed to come out till October, only to be immediately nipped by frost. Parts of it—Seeds? Root? Leaves?—were alleged to produce hallucinations, Sheila had told him, she knew people who chewed it, but when he looked
Ipomoea
up in an herbal, he had found only that it was a source of the purgative jalap.

On Roxane’s clothes had been found stains made by her own blood, by body lotion—presumably deposited before her abduction—by nonlactic soy milk, and by tomato sauce. He turned the pages back to the beginning and looked, unseeing, out his window.