Road Rage (35 page)

“We simply wanted to ask you a few questions.”

“You simply wanted that before,” said Frenchie Collins. “And you simply acted like I was something the dog brought in—no, correction, like something the dog did on the floor.”

You could tell she was young, though it was hard to say how, yet she had all the lineaments of age, dry graying hair, coarse lined skin, two missing front teeth, wrinkled hands which shook. Her skeletal body was wrapped in a once white toweling dressing gown and her feet buried and lost in gray woolly socks.

“Ms. Collins …”

“I said I wouldn’t talk to you. I don’t mind talking to him. He seems a nice enough young guy.”

Karen and Damon exchanged a glance.

“All right,” Karen said, “if that’s what you’d like. I won’t say a word.”

“I don’t want you
here
,” said Frenchie Collins. “Right? Understood? I’ll talk to him on his own, though Christ knows what I can tell him, I don’t know anything about
those Sacred Globe people. You,” she said to Karen, “can sit in the car. No doubt there is a car?”

Karen went down and did just that. She had a feeling Frenchie Collins knew something that she could get out of her but that Damon couldn’t. Of course it was absurd to think like that about a person who refused to talk to her. Because she was a sensible woman and ambitious, with an eye to rising in the police force, she spent the time she waited for Damon in some honest analysis of her own behavior, examining recent attitudes toward some of the people Wexford called “our customers.” If you had very high standards of hygiene and method and order it was hard not to apply them to others, but she would try. The great thing was to be aware of your shortcomings, for that was the first step in setting things to rights.

Am I smug, she was asking herself, am I complacent? An honest answer—yes, I am, yes, I am, and intolerant and near to bigotry—was being forced out of her when Damon came back.

It had all been in vain. Frenchie Collins had bought the sleeping bag, as they thought, had taken it to Zaire, but had abandoned it there along with much of her other property. She had been too ill and weak by that time to carry more than the bare essentials.

“So she says,” said Karen.

“ ‘Africa has killed me,’ she said. Those were her words. And you have to admit she looks in a bad way. I suppose it could be AIDS.”

“No, it couldn’t. Hasn’t been time. I don’t think she’d have thrown that sleeping bag away, abandoned it or whatever she says. People like her never have any money and they don’t abandon things like that. She’d have been more likely to have got inside it at the airport and had herself carried onto the plane.”

“The sleeping bag could have been bought in the north of England where Outdoors’ other outlets are.”

Karen remembered that she was supposed to be nice and tolerant, not prejudiced and not smug. Especially with this man, she wanted to be nice. It was a long time since she’d known any man she wanted to seem as nice to as she did to this one.

“The rest of the evening is ours,” she said and she smiled. “We could spend it up here, but it would be nicer to go home, wouldn’t it?”

It was after nine when they got back. No message from Sacred Globe. Wexford knew there wouldn’t be, or they would have called him, but he was still disappointed. More than disappointed. A feeling he seldom had these days, a feeling he hadn’t experienced much since he was young, flooded over him. It was panic and he clenched his hands, suppressing it, breathing deeply.

He had been in his office ten minutes. He didn’t know why he had come up here. There was nothing to do tonight. Go home, tell Dora all those things he was beginning to have doubts about. Oh, no, they won’t kill them, of course not. We’ll find them. We’ll find Sacred Globe. We’ll find the man with the tattoo on his left forearm and the one who smells of acetone. What kind of illness could you have that made you smell of nail varnish remover? Something wrong with the kidneys? The pancreas? The body manufacturing too many ketones?

But we’ll find them. The man who has to wear gloves because something disfigures his hands. Eczema perhaps or scars. Or because he was black. The woman who wears heavy boots to help her look like a man. The house with a black cat and a Siamese which has a dairy from whose window you can see a shifting patch of blue that’s as blue as the sky but isn’t the sky.

He went down in the lift, walked across the foyer as Audrey Barker burst through the swing doors.

The duty sergeant called out, “Excuse me!”

She looked, he realized, as he had never seen her before. She looked happy. More than that—elated, almost manic with happiness. Hair is supposed to stand on end through shock or horror but hers flew out in that wild way from joy. She was smiling, laughing, as if she couldn’t stop.

“He phoned me,” she shouted. “My son phoned me!”

Wexford said, “Mrs. Barker, just a moment … What exactly are you saying?”

“I didn’t want to phone you, you don’t know who you’re talking to on the phone, but my son, Ryan, he phoned me half an hour ago. I thought you’d be here, you’d still be here. At a time like this … I couldn’t keep still, I had to move, run, I came straight here, to tell you myself.”

Wexford nodded. He said very steadily in an effort to calm her, “Yes, you tell me. Tell me all about it. Let’s go upstairs to my office.”

“His voice, I couldn’t believe it, I thought I was dreaming, but I knew it was real, and he’s all right, he’s fine …”

“We’ll go upstairs, Mrs. Barker. The lift’s on its way.”

They got into it. She jumped into it. She clutched his arm with a shaking hand.

“He’s all right. He’s quite all right. He likes them and they like him. He’s
joined
them, and now they won’t hurt him!”

A
udrey Barker sat opposite him on the other side of his desk with a cup of tea in front of her. She was calmer now and some of the wild joy had gone out of her face. The anxious look was returning, the mouth-pursing that prematurely pleated her upper lip. He let her sip the strong sweet tea, noticing the shaking of the hand that held the cup, the chatter of teeth against the china. Let her take her time. It was, in any case, now far too late to attempt a tracing of the call.

Sweat broke on her upper lip. “I should have phoned you, shouldn’t have I?”

“I’m not sure if it would have made any difference, Mrs. Barker. Will you tell me what Ryan said?”

“I nearly fainted when I heard his voice. I couldn’t believe it, I was stunned, I thought I was dreaming or going mad. He said, ‘Mum, it’s me,’ and of course I knew it was him, but I still said, ‘Who is that? Who is it?’ and he said, ‘Mum, it’s Ryan, calm down, it’s Ryan,’ and then, ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘this is a message from us,’ so I said, ‘Who’s us? What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘Sacred Globe. I’m one of them now.’ I mean, it was something like that he said, I may not have got his exact words.”

“But you’re sure he said that. He said, ‘I’m one of them now’?”

“Yes, I’m sure. ‘I’m one of them now.’ I didn’t know what he meant and I asked him.” She had been looking
down, her hands clasped in her lap, as she made an effort to remember accurately, but now she raised her head and met Wexford’s eyes. “He said he simply meant what he said. He’d joined them. They’d asked him to join them. He was flattered, of course, he was
proud
. He’s only a
child
. He can’t make those sort of choices. I was feeling happy and I’m not anymore. It was stupid of me, wasn’t it? I was happy because he’s all right, he’s alive, but now I realize he’s one of
them
I …”

“What else did he say?”

“He said—and it didn’t sound a bit like him talking—he said, ‘Our cause is just. I didn’t know but I do now. We want the best for the world. It’s “we,” Mum, do you understand?’ ”

“Did you ask him where he was?”

She put one hand up to her head. “Oh God, I didn’t think of it. He wouldn’t have told me, would he? He said something like, I can’t remember exactly, ‘We want the bypass rerouted’ or he may have said re—something else, I don’t know. But that’s what he meant. ‘I’ll come back to you tomorrow,’ he said, and I didn’t know, I
don’t
know, what that meant. I mean, could it be he meant he’s coming
home
?”

“It sounds more as if another message will come. Mrs. Barker, I’d like you to repeat what you’ve told me and we’ll record it on tape. Will you do that?”

At first Wexford had been astonished by Ryan Barker’s allying himself with Sacred Globe. But, of course, it wasn’t new, it certainly wasn’t unknown, this defection of a hostage to his captors and espousal of their cause. And this cause in particular held a special appeal for young people. It was the young who were fired with outrage at the destruction of the environment—their future environment—and
with a burning fervor to reverse “progress” and restore some unspecified natural paradise.

He said to Audrey Barker when she had finished recording her conversation with Ryan, “He idealizes his father, doesn’t he? I wonder if he sees Sacred Globe as something his father would have approved of, or that he thinks he’d have approved of. I understand his father was particularly keen on natural history.”

She looked at him as if he had suddenly, inexplicably, begun speaking to her in a foreign language. A huge weariness had settled on her, causing a sagging of her face and a slumping of her shoulders. He repeated what he had said, embellishing and rephrasing it.

“I know your husband was killed in the Falklands. I know about the album of drawings. My impression is that Ryan has done what some children who have lost a parent do, make paragons of them, idolize them, and model themselves on them. Erroneously, of course, Ryan sees Sacred Globe as an organization his father would have admired and have wanted to support. So he supports it in his stead.”

She shrugged her shoulders, lifting them to an exaggerated extent, as if to make a total denial. Her voice was bitter. “He wasn’t my husband. I’ve never been married. I told Ryan his father was killed in the Falklands—well, he was killed at the time of the Falklands, that was true.”

Wexford looked at her inquiringly.

“Dennis Barker was killed in a knife fight. In Deptford. They never got anyone for it. Didn’t bother, I daresay, they knew the sort he was. I had to tell Ryan something, so I made up all that and my mother stuck by me and told the same tale.”

“And the natural history?” said Wexford. “The drawings? The album?”

“They were my father’s. John Peabody’s. Look, I never
told him otherwise, but kids … well, they deceive themselves to sort of make things better.”

And adults too, thought Wexford. “The point here,” he said, “is not what is fact but what he has taught himself to think of as fact. In doing this he’s putting himself in his father’s shoes, he’s being his father.”

“His father, my God! A backstreet thug. Well, he’s going the right way about it, isn’t he, joining up with a bunch of terrorists?”

“I’ll have someone drive you home, Mrs. Barker. I shall have a trace put on your mother’s phone. I shall have all your phone conversations recorded and take the precaution, with your permission, of having one of my officers in the house with you tomorrow for when Ryan calls again.”

If he called. If they didn’t send a letter or another body … He had to tell Dora. She surprised him by not being surprised.

“He was waiting for something like that,” she said. “I had that impression when we talked. I thought he’d found it in a person, in Owen Struther, a father-hero. But Owen let him down, or he must have seen it as letting him down, when he and Kitty were handcuffed and taken away. I see now that Ryan was waiting for something to aim at, a cause, a reason for living. Of course he’s only a child …”

“That’s what his mother said.”

“The poor woman.”

He told her about the real father and the fantasy father, expecting her to be at least a little affronted. None of us likes to be deceived, even if the deceiver is barely aware that he is lying and his listener a dupe. But she only shook her head and held out her hands in that gesture of submitting to the inevitable.

“What will become of him?”

“When we catch them, d’you mean? Nothing, I should think. As everyone keeps saying, he’s a child.”

“I wonder what happened,” she said.

“What do you mean, what happened?”

“I told you they never talked to us. There was no communication. How did they come to change that and talk to him after I was gone and he was alone? Did they approach him or he approach them? I’d think the latter, wouldn’t you? I mean, he must have been lonely and desperate for a human voice, so he started talking to them, perhaps asking them why they were doing this, what they wanted. And they saw their chance. It was to their advantage, wasn’t it, to have a willing guest rather than a hostage? All hostage-takers with a real cause must want that.”

“Only up to a point,” said Wexford. “If all your hostages convert, you lose your bargaining power.”

“The Struthers would never convert. Never. That just leaves them now, doesn’t it? Owen and Kitty, just the two of them.”

“It’s almost as valuable to Sacred Globe to have two hostages as to have five,” said Wexford.

They were both awake early next morning and she began talking to him about the two people of whom, up till now, she had said least. It was as if she had either been thinking about them during the long watches of the night or else her thoughts and analyses had crystallized while she slept. She brought him tea and sat on the bed. It wasn’t yet seven.

“Kitty was only in her early fifties, but still I’d say she belonged to a dying breed. All their lives they’re protected by men, they do nothing for themselves, make no decisions, have no enterprise. Oh, I know I’m just a housewife myself, but not in that helpless way, doing nothing but a little cooking, a little gardening, a little telling the
cleaning woman what to do. They always have just one child, these women, it’s funny but it usually seems to be a boy, and they send him away to boarding school as soon as they can.