Road Rage (30 page)

“Mr. Masood is in the dining room. Would you like me to page him?”

As so often happens when contact is made with a reasonable polite person from what seems another world, anger was quenched. Wexford thought of the horror of fetching the man from his dinner, from his wife and sons, perhaps …

“No, thank you.” He would go himself. He phoned his home, got his daughter Sylvia.

“Dad, what on earth happened to you? Mother’s been waiting for you for hours.”

He said he had been delayed, knowing it wasn’t Dora but she making the fuss, put the phone down softly on her expostulations. The media, yes. They could wait till tomorrow, even till late tomorrow. He drove out to the Posthouse, walked into the pine and glass and tweed-carpeted interior, and there the first person he saw was Clare Cox. It hadn’t occurred to him she might be there too. It never crossed his mind. She was back in her floor-length dress, a shawl around her shoulders, her graying tawny hair flopping from its combs. Masood and she had their backs to him. They were side by side at the reception desk, ordering, as he later discovered, a taxi to take her home.

“I had to bring her here,” Masood said when he saw who it was. “Reporters, photographers, they were all over her house and garden. One of them followed us, but I shut her up in my room and the hotel kept them out. This is an excellent hotel, I recommend it.” He beamed at the receptionist and the receptionist simpered back. “I think maybe it’s safe to go home now—what do you think?”

It seemed not to have occurred to him to see Wexford in his angel of death role. But Clare Cox, herself rather resembling a Fury or a Fate with her disheveled hair and trailing clothes, went white in the face and came up to him with outstretched hands.

“What is it? Why are you here?”

Not the mother if he could help it. He made that a rule. “I’d like you to come back into Kingsmarkham with me, Mr. Masood, if you would …” The euphemisms, the circumlocutions! But what else at this moment? “There’s been a—development.”

“What kind of a development?” She clutched at his sleeve. “What’s happened?”

“Miss Cox, I think this is probably your taxi that has just arrived outside. If you would like to go home in it I promise you Mr. Masood and I will come straight to you if need be.” It sounded as if he was promising hope, relief, yet his voice had been grave. “I can tell you no more at present, Miss Cox. If you will just do as I ask.”

The taxi wasn’t from Contemporary Cars but All the Sixes. He felt an obscure relief. Immediately it was out of sight Masood began asking about this “development.” They got into Wexford’s car and Wexford stalled for a while, but when they were nearly there he told him. A sanitized version. The sleeping bag, the waste ground, and the bent legs weren’t mentioned. He would see the bruising for himself and nothing could help that.

There had never been any real doubt. Masood looked at the beautiful discolored face, made a small sound, nodded, turned away.

Wexford thought that if it had been one of his daughters, so foully dead, beaten in the face before her death, he would have rounded on this policeman, in his grief and misery yelled at him, perhaps seized him by the
shoulders, shouted into his face, “Why? Why have you allowed this?”

Masood stood meek, with head bent. Barry Vine, who was with them, offered him tea. Would he like to sit down?

“No. No, thank you.” He looked up, turning his head in a curious sideways manner as if his neck hurt him. “I don’t understand this.”

“I don’t understand it either,” said Wexford.

He remembered then that he had told Burden he thought Sacred Globe was getting cold feet, Sacred Globe was at a loss with no notion how to proceed … Well, they had proceeded.

“I have sent my wife and sons home to London,” Masood said in a calm, almost conversational tone. “I am glad now. It was just as well.” He cleared his throat. “My duty now will be to Roxane’s mother. You will come with me?”

“Of course. If you wish it.”

In the car, on the way to Pomfret, Masood said, “If anyone had told me my daughter would die young I can think of many things I might have said, but not what I
feel
now. It is the waste I feel. So much beauty, so talented. Such a waste.”

Remembering what Dora had told him, Wexford wanted to say what is sometimes said to the parents of dead soldiers, that Roxane had surely died bravely. But he lacked the heart for it, he doubted if he would be able to speak the words.

Clare Cox had been drinking since she got home. A reek of whisky came from her. If it had been drunk to save her, to anesthetize her against what she feared was coming, it was ineffective. Standing close to her, holding her hand, Masood told her, and there was no waiting for the news to sink in, for shock to pass, for this stunning to
yield to grief. Her screams began at once, like a chemical reaction, as sharp and insistent as a starved baby crying for the pain of hunger to go away.

“Go home, Reg,” the Chief Constable said on the phone. He was in bed himself. He too had had a long day. “Go home. There’s nothing more you can do. It’s ten past eleven.”

“The press has got it, sir.”

“Have they now? How did that happen?”

“I wish I knew,” Wexford said.

Dora was asleep. He was glad of it because it meant he didn’t have to explain. The thought of telling her Roxane was dead horrified him almost as much as being with Clare Cox had done. The woman’s screams still rang in his ears. Yet Hassy Masood had passed on the news of his daughter’s death to the media. In spite of what he had said to the Chief Constable, Wexford was sure of it. Masood had told the news to Roxane’s mother, had done his best no doubt to calm Roxane’s mother—and then told the media his daughter was dead. Well, Masood had other children, a second family, a new life, and to him Roxane had been the grateful recipient of his largesse and someone to take occasionally to expensive restaurants. Her death was no more than the waste of her beauty, looks that in her case meant capital. Because Dora was there beside him, he slept like the dead. It took the alarm to wake him and it woke her first.

“I’ll go down,” he said quickly, seeing her already up and in her dressing gown.

He had to get to the papers first. There it was, all over the front pages: HOSTAGE MODEL FOUND DEAD, ROXANE THE FIRST TO DIE, ROXANE MURDERED, A FATHER’S GRIEF … So he had been right. He went back upstairs and told Dora.

At first she refused to believe. It was too much. There
was no
reason
. With tears running down her face, she said, “What did they do to her?”

“Don’t know yet. I have to go in a minute. I’m sorry but I must. I have to go to the postmortem.”

“She was too brave,” Dora said.

“Very likely.”

“She said good-bye to me, she said, ‘Good-bye, Dora.’ ”

Dora turned her face into the pillow and sobbed bitterly. He kissed her. He didn’t want to leave her, but he had to.

Tuesday. One week since the hostages were taken. The press reminded him of that as they crowded him on his way into the mortuary.

“Two down, three to go,” one of them said.

“How did you get your wife out, Chief Inspector?” asked a girl from a television news program.

Mavrikiev was already there. “Good morning, good morning. How are you today? Mr. Vine is about somewhere. Shall we get started?”

They all got into green rubber gowns and put on gauze masks. This was Barry Vine’s first time and though not particularly squeamish when faced with a dead body, this, Wexford thought, might be different. The sound of the saw got to people, that and the smell, more often than the sight of organs being removed.

Now that the body was exposed, Wexford saw what he hadn’t seen the night before. The right side of the head was shallowly staved in, the hair matted with dark clotted blood. It seemed to him, though, that the facial bruising was less marked, less violently colored, appearing as yellowish-green streaks and blotches on the waxen skin.

Mavrikiev worked swiftly and always in silence. While other pathologists might extract an organ, hold it up, and
comment on some peculiarity in its structure or progress of its deterioration, he proceeded coolly, speechlessly, and deadpan. If Barry Vine had turned pale it wasn’t obvious to Wexford. The mask and green cap hid so much, but after a few moments and a muffled “Excuse me,” he left the room with one gloved hand over his mouth.

Breaking his rule, Mavrikiev gave a small tight laugh and said, “A case of the eye being stronger than the stomach.”

He worked on, picking something out of the head wound with tweezers. Plastic containers now held the stomach, lungs, part of the brain, and whatever it was he had picked from the wound. He finished, stripped off his gloves, and came across the room to where Wexford had retreated. “I’ll stick to what I said about the time of death. Saturday afternoon.”

“I suppose I can ask my other question now?”

“What did she die of? That blow to the head. You don’t need any medical degrees to see that. Skull’s fractured, brain severely damaged, I won’t go into a lot of technical stuff, it’ll be in the report.”

“You mean someone struck her a violent blow to the head? With what? Can you say?”

Mavrikiev slowly shook his head. He handed Wexford one of the containers. It held a dozen or so small stones, some black with blood. “If someone struck her he must have hit her with a gravel path. I picked these out of the wound. I don’t think she was hit, I think she
fell
. I think she fell from a height onto a gravel path.”

Barry Vine came back into the room, looking sheepish. He kept his eyes averted from the slab on which the body, now neatly covered in plastic sheeting, lay. Wexford ignored him.

“Fell? Or was pushed or thrown?”

“For God’s sake, you’re at it again. I’m not a magician,
how many times do I have to tell you? I don’t know. If you expect a great handprint in the middle of her back, that kind of thing doesn’t happen.”

“You could tell if she’d struggled,” said Wexford coldly.

“Fingernails full of flesh and blood, eh? There was none of that. If someone did it he’d likely have been left-handed but there was no someone. Her right arm is broken, two of her ribs are broken, her left leg is broken in two places and her right in one. The body’s bruised down the right side. I think she fell from a height, perhaps as much as thirty feet, and she fell onto her right side.

“And that’s it for the time being, gentlemen. I’ll thank you for your attention”—here a supercilious glance at Barry Vine—“and be off home to my brunch.”

Vine nodded to him.

“Feeling better?” asked Wexford breezily. “It’s just occurred to me that Brendan Royall, when we saw him, was dressed from head to foot in camouflage. Can it be coincidence?”

S
tanley Trotter was still in bed in Stowerton, in the two-roomed flat in Peacock Street, when Burden called on him early on Tuesday morning. One of the Sayem brothers who kept the grocery market downstairs let him in, took him up, and pounded on Trotter’s door. Perhaps he bore a grudge against the upstairs tenant for something or other, for when Trotter came to the door in pajama bottoms and dirty vest, Ghulam Sayem smiled smugly to himself. His face had worn much the same expression when Burden announced himself as a police officer.

It was quite a warm day, sultry and windless, but Trotter’s windows were shut tight. The room smelled unpleasant. It was exactly what Burden had expected and he analyzed the smell as compounded of sweat, urine, Malaysian take-away, and mold, the kind that forms on damp towels that are left about unwashed. Somewhat vain of his appearance and careful of his clothes, he didn’t like sitting on the greasy chair with the cigarette burns on its arms, but he hadn’t much choice. He dusted it with a tissue he had in his pocket.

Trotter watched him. “I don’t know what you think you’ve come for,” he said.

“Seen a paper this morning, have you? Seen the telly? Listened to the radio?”

“No, I haven’t. Why would I? I was asleep.”

“You’re not interested then? You don’t want to know what I’m on about?”

Trotter didn’t say anything. He rooted about in the pockets of a garment lying across the bed, found cigarettes, and lit one. It brought on a liquid spluttering spasm of coughing.

“You should put yourself down for a heart-lung transplant, Trotter,” said Burden. “They tell me the waiting list’s as long as your arm.” He coughed himself. It was infectious. “How long were you going to leave the body there?” he snapped.

“What body?”

“How long were you going to leave the sleeping bag there, Trotter? Or were you going to find it yourself? Was that the idea?”

“I’m not saying anything to you without my lawyer,” said Trotter.

He put the cigarette down on a saucer but without stubbing it out, got into bed, and pulled the covers over his head.

The sleeping bag had gone off to the forensic science lab at Myringham. It was made by a company called Outdoors and according to its label manufactured from a fabric that was part polyester, part cotton, and part Lycra, lined with nylon, and thinly filled with polyester fiber.

Meanwhile, an examination of the stolen car had yielded a mass of cat hairs, pebbles from a south-coast beach, and sand, which, in the opinion of the earth and soil expert, was from the Isle of Wight. There wasn’t a fingerprint on it anywhere, inside or out.

The car had been stolen from Ventnor, Isle of Wight. But the hostages couldn’t be there, Wexford thought. Dora would have known if she had crossed water. Her
captors would never have taken the risk of using the ferry and that was the only way to reach the island.

William Pugh, of Gwent Road, Swansea, was the owner. Wexford put through a phone call to him and asked if he had a cat. Two cats, in fact, for the hairs were from a Siamese and a black. Pugh said he hadn’t but he had a Labrador, which had been in a kennel while he and his wife were away, as if Wexford were conducting a survey into pet statistics.

“I suppose you went on the beach, Mr. Pugh?”

“We did not. I am seventy-six and my wife is seventy-four.”