Road Rage (17 page)

“Why haven’t they done what they said they would?” she had asked him.

It wasn’t then but now that he repeated to himself the words delivered to Tanya Paine that Burden had remembered:
Stop the work for the time being while we negotiate. But a public assurance via the media we must have by nine tomorrow morning. If not, the first of the hostages will die and the body be returned to you before nightfall
 …

“While we negotiate …” But no overture of negotiation had come, no request for any kind of talk. And the message said nothing about returning the hostages, only about killing them if work on the bypass wasn’t suspended. There had been nothing at all about what must be done before the hostages could come back.

“We’ll keep you informed as soon as anything happens,” he said to Audrey Barker.

The phone rang as he was speaking. She picked up the receiver and was instantly calmed by the voice at the other end. A little color came into her face. She spoke in monosyllables but gently, almost sweetly. It occurred to him as he left and set out for Framhurst that he knew less about her and her son than about any of the hostages. There was something about her and her mother that inhibited asking, and this was increased by their plight.

Who and where, for instance, was Ryan’s father? Was there anyone else at home in Croydon? Probably Mrs. Peabody was a widow but he didn’t know that. Audrey Barker had been in a hospital for an operation, but he didn’t know what for or how serious it was or even if she was fully recovered now. Who was the caller that she had talked to on the phone? Perhaps it didn’t matter, any of it, perhaps these things were simply their private business that in the circumstances no one should inquire into.

Hadn’t he told his team himself that the backgrounds of the hostages should be of no particular interest to them or their operation?

Rain had begun to fall more heavily as he entered that part of the country now inevitably associated with the bypass. Here, the apocryphal visitor from Mars would have suspected nothing, have received no hint of destruction, pollution, environmental damage. The deep lanes wound between overgrown banks and high hedges, the wind sighed in the high branches of beech trees, the
woods slept quietly under the soft patter of rain, and a few still-green leaves fluttered down.

In Framhurst a dozen or so tree people sat on the pavement under the tea shop’s striped awning, drinking Coke and one of them a cup of tea. Robin Hood’s Merry Men probably looked rather like that, Wexford thought, not in the orange knee breeches and fringed green tunics of cartoon film but a medieval version of denim with brown cagoollike garments on top, bearded, dirty, but strangely the representatives now of those who cared about preserving England. But why did they always look like this? Why weren’t they ever men in gray suits? He slowed as he passed them, then quickly drove on to Markinch Lane.

Savesbury House was impressive. Burden had described it as half barrack, half architectural hotch-potch, but Wexford saw the mixture of styles as charming, as essentially English. The drive ran deep between groves of tall trees, their branches reaching for the sky. Then the lawns opened out and the flower beds were displayed with their rare unnameable herbaceous plants. If you stood on the edges of those lawns and parted the foliage with your hands you could doubtless see the whole great panorama of Savesbury and Stringfield and the river winding below you.

A dog padded from the side of the house as he left his car. The animal approached him with stealthy silent menace, a shaggy black German shepherd, behaving in the intimidating way such dogs sometimes do, curling its upper and lower lips back about an inch to show a trim double row of bright white teeth.

Wexford’s father had been one of those people of whom it is said that they can “do anything with dogs.” He hadn’t quite acquired that art himself but some of his father’s talent had come to him, by association or by genes, perhaps he just wasn’t afraid, and he put out his
hand to this creature and said a casual hallo. He didn’t like dogs, he had never liked the various dogs Sheila had foisted on him and Dora to “mind” while she was away, but they liked him. They fawned on him, as this one did, stuffing its nose into his coat pocket when he bent down to it.

The white-faced girl called Bibi, a cigarette hanging from her mouth, opened the door. He had seen her before but in the distance, just as he had seen Andrew Struther, when the two of them came to see Burden at the police station. Her face, that Burden and Karen Malahyde had simply found good-looking, reminded him of a cartoon character the artist wants to look beautiful and evil, the Snow Queen perhaps or Cruella De Vil. That red hair was a most peculiar color, nearer crimson than mahogany, and he didn’t think it was dyed.

She grabbed the dog by its collar, cooing at it, “Come here, Manfred, come to Mother, sweetheart,” as if he had been sticking pins into it.

Burden had said the interior of Savesbury House was beautifully furnished and squeaky clean. Two days in the care of Andrew Struther and Bibi had changed all that. A plate of Chum or some such stood almost in the middle of the hall floor with a bowl of water alongside it. Manfred had been chewing bones between meals and Wexford nearly tripped over half a femur that lay on the drawing room threshold. In there cups and glasses stood about on shelves and tabletops, a plate with a half-eaten sandwich sat on the seat of an armchair, and the contents overflowed from several large ashtrays. The place was stuffy and there was an unpleasant smell compounded of cigarette smoke and old marrowbones.

Andrew Struther, entering the room, also nearly fell over the femur. Before uttering a word to Wexford he said crossly to the girl, “Can’t you put that bloody Man
fred in the kennel? You said you would. You absolutely promised when I agreed to have him here
for no more than two days
. Right? Remember?”

The face he turned to Wexford was sullen and aggrieved, a very handsome marble-hewn face though, lightly tanned, a shade darker than the butter-colored hair. He and the girl were today both dressed like tree people in elegant green and brown—Elves who shop at Ralph Lauren. His parents, Wexford thought, were by far the richest of the hostages. They made Dora look poor and the others on the breadline.

“Chief Inspector Wexford, I think you said?”

“That’s right. I think you already know the condition these people have imposed.” He remembered the elucidation that had come to him while he was at Mrs. Peabody’s. “Sacred Globe, as they call themselves, has not undertaken to release the hostages on suspension of work on the bypass, only to negotiate. However, there has so far been no move made by them toward negotiation.”

“Why do you say that?” the girl asked in a petulant voice, “ ‘as they call themselves’—why do you say that?”

Wexford said stoutly, “People who commit acts of this kind aren’t deserving of respect or dignity, do you think?”

Bibi didn’t answer, but Struther rounded on her. “I just hope to Christ you aren’t starting to feel
sympathy
with a bunch of shits who have kidnapped my mother and father.”

His pale brown face had become bright red. Wexford had seldom seen calmness so swiftly transformed into violent rage. Struther took a step toward the girl and for a moment he thought he would have to intervene, but Bibi stood her ground, put her hands on her hips, and stared insolently up into his face.

“Oh, what’s the use!” Andrew Struther shouted. “But
I want that dog out of the house first thing tomorrow. Is that understood? And this place cleared up. My mother will be coming back—do you realize that? My mother will soon be back. Isn’t that right, Chief Inspector?”

“I very much hope so.” Wexford remembered his caution about the private lives of the hostage families being of no interest, but he disobeyed it again. “What is your father’s occupation, Mr. Struther?”

“Stock market.” Andrew Struther spoke shortly. “Same as me,” he added.

Manfred, in the hall, was chewing a chair leg. Whether it had mistaken the leg for a bone or just liked reproduction Chippendale Wexford didn’t know and wasn’t staying to find out. He drove slowly down the drive between the trees. The rain had stopped while he was inside Savesbury House and a pale misty sun appeared in the blue triangle among the clouds. His car thermometer told him the outside temperature in Celsius and Fahrenheit: 13 and 56, not brilliant for the time of year.

Five minutes later he was in Framhurst village street. Most of the tree people had gone from outside the tea shop but two remained. The tea shop owner had rolled up the awning, perhaps when the rain had stopped, and optimistically placed more tables and chairs out on the pavement. On two of these, with a single teacup between them on the table, sat a man with the longest beard Wexford had ever seen, a golden beard like a skein of embroidery silk, and beside him a bedraggled young woman in the kind of clothes Clare Cox favored, a dirty cotton gown with a spotted scarf tied around the waist.

He saw them so clearly and observed so much because the tea shop was on a corner of a crossroads, one turning leading to Sewingbury, the other to Myfleet, and boasted Framhurst’s single set of traffic lights. The light had turned red as he approached. He had already identified
the man (from Burden’s description) as Gary and the woman as Quilla, when she suddenly sprang to her feet, jumped off the pavement, and placed herself in front of him in the middle of the road. Wexford shrugged, wound down the window.

“What do you want?”

She seemed taken aback that he wasn’t angry and hesitated, both hands up to her face. He waited. There was no traffic behind him, none ahead. She brought her face up to the car window.

“You’re a policeman, aren’t you?”

He nodded.

“Not one of the ones who came talking to us at the camp?”

“Chief Inspector Wexford,” he said.

She seemed taken aback or shocked, shaken anyway. Perhaps it was only his rank, a higher one than she had expected.

“Can I talk to you?”

He nodded. “I’ll park the car.”

There was a space around the corner on the Myfleet road. He walked to where she was now sitting at the table with the bearded man.

“Your name is Quilla,” he said, “and you’re Gary. Shall we have a cup of tea.”

They seemed astonished that he knew their names, almost superstitiously affected, as if a name taboo was in existence and he had broken it. He explained, it was simple. Gary smiled diffidently. You could have sat there till Doomsday, Wexford said, before anyone would come out to serve you. He went into the shop and presently a girl of about fifteen came out to take their order.

“I could do with something hot inside me,” Quilla said. “You’re always cold in our business. You get used to it, but a hot drink’s a welcome thing.”

“Would you like something to eat?”

“No, thanks. We all had some crisps when the others were here. That was when we saw you go through, and the King said you were a policeman.”

“The King?”

“Conrad Tarling. He knows everybody—well, he knows them by sight. The others went back to the camp, but I said I’d wait and see if you came back and Gary waited with me.”

“You want to tell me something?”

The tea came, three cups and saucers, a large pot, synthetic sweetener in packets, and the kind of liquid in plastic cups that looks like milk but never originated in a cow. Wexford thought it was disgraceful in the midst of the countryside and said so.

“Take it or leave it,” said the girl. “That’s all there is.”

“We campaign to stop that sort of thing too,” said Gary. “We’re against everything that’s unnatural, everything that’s synthetic, pollutant, adulterated. We’ve dedicated our lives to that.”

Instead of saying that it was extremely difficult in modern life to sort out the natural from the unnatural, if indeed anything natural remained, Wexford asked them how long they had been professional protesters.

“Since I was sixteen and Quilla was fifteen,” Gary said. “That’s twelve years ago now. I’m in the building line, but we’ve never had jobs—well, paid jobs. The work we do is pretty hard.”

“How do you live, then?”

“Not on the benefit. It wouldn’t be right to be kept by a government and taxpayers when we’re opposed to everything they think and everything they live by.”

“I don’t suppose it would,” said Wexford, “but it’s a novel viewpoint.”

“We don’t need much. We don’t need transport often
and we make the roof over our own heads. We do itinerant farmwork when we can get it. I do the odd building job. I cut grass. She makes straw dollies and sells them and she makes jewelry.”

“A hard life.”

“The only possible one for us,” said Quilla. “I heard—well, I don’t know how to say this.”

“What did you hear? That we were looking for names?”

“Freya said. Freya’s the woman the bailiffs nearly dropped out of a tree yesterday. She said you were looking for a terrorist.”

Wexford drank the last of his tea. The undertaste of nonlactic soy-milk creamer ruined it. “That’s a way of putting it.”

“What’s he supposed to have done?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Okay. But if you’re looking for someone who doesn’t care for human life, who’d do anything, abominable things, to save a beetle or a mouse, I can tell who you want. Brendan Royall, he’s called. Brendan Royall.”

I
t was the only name to have come to them twice, from two completely separate sources. Brendan Royall was Jenny Burden’s ex-pupil, the boy who had “never seemed to care much for people’s rights” but had committed eleven offenses in connection with the theft and subsequent liberation of animals.

To Quilla—her surname was Rice, Wexford discovered—Brendan Royall was the enemy, the activist who not only gave protest a bad name but did things in the course of his campaigning that were opposed to all she stood for. It was her indignation over the very case Jenny had mentioned, he thought, which had led her to speak to him.

“They died, all those creatures he
liberated
. The birds didn’t know how to fly and he didn’t know what to feed them. He was carrying the animals in the back of a van down the motorway and the back doors came open. It was carnage, it was abominable. I don’t believe he cared, it was done for the principle, he said.”