Road Rage (11 page)

There are gardens and gardens, his wife said. Most of them are full of stuff from the local garden center, but the other kind, the rare kind, contains plants you hardly ever see, plants her father called “choice,” the ones that only have Latin names. The gardens of Savesbury House came in this latter category. Burden would have been hard put to name a single one of these flowers, these bedding plants and climbers, but he could tell the effect was very pleasing. The sun that succeeded the rain of the day before brought out a subtle sweet scent from whatever it was that spread its blossoms over the Georgian facade.

A Gothic front door on the older part of the building, black and worn, arched and studded, looked as if it hadn’t
been opened since Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. Burden was approaching it, his eye on a curly iron bellpull, when a man came around from the side of the house. He glanced at Burden, curled his lip at Karen, eyed Burden again, and said, “What d’you want? Who are you?”

It was the kind of accent that the majority of the British people laugh at and Americans can’t understand, a plummy drawl that is never acquired by public school alone but requires parental backup and preparatory education from the age of seven.

Burden had no incentive to be nice. He said, “Police,” and produced his warrant card.

The man, who was young, no more than in his midtwenties, looked at Burden’s photograph and back at the original as if he seriously expected a hoax. He said to Karen, “Have you got one too, or are you just along for the ride?”

Karen exhibited warning signs, familiar to Burden, though not perhaps to her questioner. Her eyes snapped, then stared unblinking. “Detective Sergeant Malahyde,” she said and put her card in his face.

He stepped back a little. He was tall, well-built, in riding breeches and hacking jacket over a white T-shirt, his features copyable by an artist or photographer as the archetype of an English upper class, straight nose, high cheekbones, tall forehead, firm chin, and the kind of mouth that was once called clean-cut. His hair, of course, was straw blond and his eyes steel blue.

“All right,” he said. “What have I done? What misdemeanor have I committed? Have I driven without lights or subjected some young lady to sexual harassment?”

“May we go inside?” Burden said.

“Oh, I don’t really think so, do you?”

“Yes, I do think so, Mr. Struther. It is Mr. Struther, isn’t it? The son of Owen and Kitty Struther?”

He was temporarily disconcerted, returned Burden’s look in silence. He walked up to the front door and pushed at it. The door came open with a long drawn-out groan. Over his shoulder he said, affectedly casual, “Has something happened to my parents?”

Burden and Karen followed him into the house. The hall was low-ceilinged, half-timbered, a huge sprawling place with a stone-flagged floor on which black carved furniture stood about, the kind that looks as if Elizabeth I might have sat on it or eaten off it. They all had to duck under the lintel to get through the doorway into a living room. Here was floral chintz, Indian rugs, Arts and Crafts tables, and all was exquisitely clean and sweet-smelling.

“Do you live here, Mr. Struther?” They hadn’t been asked to sit down, but Burden did so.

“I look the sort of guy who would live at home with Mummy, do I?”

“May I know where you do live?”

“London. Where else? Fitzhardinge Mews, West One.”

He
would
have a West One address, Burden thought. “Then I suppose you are here to take care of the house while your parents are away on holiday?”

That did surprise him. He looked at Karen’s legs, pursed his lips. “Something like that,” he said. “It’s scarcely a hardship to come here on my own holiday. My mother fears burglars, my father has some phobia about an inefficient drain, ergo …! Now can we come to the point?”

“You were here yesterday morning,” Karen said, “when a driver from Contemporary Cars came to collect your parents and drive them to Kingsmarkham Station?”

“Gatwick airport, actually. Yes, why?”

“Where were they going?”

“You mean, where are they now. Florence. A city more familiar to you as Firenze, no doubt.”

“If you make a phone call to their hotel, Mr. Struther, you will find that they are not there. They never went there.” Burden had been about to say that Kitty and Owen Struther had been abducted but he waited. The man’s hostility was almost tangible. “If you make that phone call you will find that your parents are missing.”

“I am not hearing this. I do not believe this.”

“It is true, Mr. Struther. May I know your first name, please?”

“Not to call me by it, I beg. I’m old-fashioned about things like that. My
Christian
name is Andrew. I am Andrew Owen Kinglake Struther.”

“You do know where your parents are staying, Mr. Struther?”

“Certainly I do and I consider that question impertinent. You’ve had your say, I’ve registered your absurd news, and now I’d like your space.”

Burden decided to give up. He was under no obligation to make this man believe in his parents’ abduction. He had done his best. Later in the day, no doubt, Andrew Struther would be on the phone to Kingsmarkham Police Station, having had what he had been told confirmed at Gatwick and in Florence, but instead of showing contrition and asking for more facts, demanding to know why the whole story hadn’t been imparted to him earlier.

But as they entered the hall once more and crossed the stone flags there was a sound of running footsteps from above and a girl came down the staircase, followed by a German shepherd dog. She was about Andrew Struther’s age, a white-faced red-lipped girl with a mass of untidy mahogany-colored hair, wearing jeans and what looked like the top half of baby-doll pajamas. The dog was young, black and tan, not unlike the bailiff’s dogs, with a
dense glossy coat. At the bottom the girl stopped, holding on to the carved banister post.

“Cops,” said Andrew Struther.

“You’re kidding.”

“No, but don’t ask. You know how low my boredom threshold is.”

The dog sat at the foot of the stairs and stared at them. Burden and Karen let themselves out but the front door slammed behind them before they could close it. Burden made no comment to Karen and she drove in silence. The sun had gone in and a light rain splashed the windscreen, too scanty for wipers to be needed. He thought of the various places Sacred Globe might phone, the places they would know about, a group practice surgery, a hospital, a High Street shop. Once they had done that the story would be out and there would be no way to stop it, never mind high-level newspaper conferences. Somehow he knew they would phone somewhere he hadn’t thought of and couldn’t cover. British Telecom was obliging but couldn’t put a trace on every possible phone, and no one else but B.T. was permitted to do it.

Karen found a parking space almost outside Clare Cox’s cottage, just where the double yellow line ended, and tucked the car behind a black Jaguar of last year’s registration. Its owner—Burden guessed it before he was told—opened the door to them. He was a small neat man, improbably dressed in a denim suit. His skin was waxencream, his hair and mustache inky black, and Burden thought he looked like a not very good artist’s rendering of Hercule Poirot.

“I am Roxane’s father. Hassy Masood. Please come in. Her mother isn’t feeling too good.”

Though obviously Asian, or of Asian parentage, Masood spoke with the accent of West London. The background created by Clare Cox, of Indian artifacts and
vaguely Central Asian rugs and hangings, suited his appearance but not his voice, manner, or, apparently, his taste. In the living room he shook his head disparagingly, cast up his eyes, and, gesturing with his hands, exclaimed, “This junk! Can you believe it?”

“We’d like to see Ms. Cox if that’s possible,” said Karen.

“I’ll fetch her. You’ve no news of my daughter, I suppose? I came down here last night. Her mother was in a rare old state.” He smiled tightly, wrinkling up his eyes. “So was I, in point of fact. Families should be together at a time like this, don’t you think?”

Burden said nothing.

“I’m not staying here, of course. One gets used to big places, large rooms, don’t you find? I should feel stifled here. I’m staying at the Kingsmarkham Posthouse. My wife and our two children and my stepdaughter will be joining me later today.”

“Ms. Cox, please, Mr. Masood.”

“Of course. Please sit down. Make yourselves at home.”

They found themselves both staring at the portrait. Roxane was the offspring of two not especially good-looking people whose genes cunningly combined to produce a rare beauty distant from either of them. Yet it was her father’s black liquid eyes that looked down from the wall and his thick smooth skin like whipped cream that covered those fine cheekbones, that rounded chin, those perfect arms.

“That photograph,” Clare Cox said, entering the room and seeing them looking. “It’s not good of her, not really. I tried painting her but couldn’t do her justice.”

“No one could,” said Masood. “Not even”—he sought for a suitable name, came up with one highly inappropriate—“Picasso could.”

Clare Cox was a pitiful sight. Perpetual crying had soaked and swollen her face and made her voice hoarse. The tears still lay on her red puffy cheeks. She collapsed into a chair that was swathed in a red and purple shawl and lay back in an attitude of absolute despair. Burden, who had begun to have doubts after the Andrew Struther experience, now felt that telling the parents must be right. Hope, even vain hope, was better than this.

Karen told them what had happened, the bare facts, that at any rate, at the moment, Roxane was safe. Roxane wasn’t dead or injured or the victim of a rapist. All Masood and Roxane’s mother could do for a moment was stare in stupefaction. Then Masood said, “Abducted?”

“It seems so. Along with four others. As soon as we know anything we’ll keep you informed. I promise you that.”

“But at the moment,” Karen said, “we don’t know any more. We’d like to have a trace put on your phone.”

“You mean you—someone will come and—an engineer?”

“No. B.T. can do it without coming here.”

“But they—these
abductors
—could phone
here
?”

“We don’t know where or when the phone call will come, but yes, we think it will be by phone.”

Quietly, Burden explained how important it was to have their silence. No one must be told. “Not your wife and children, Mr. Masood. No one. As far as they are concerned, Roxane is simply missing.”

He gave the same injunction to Audrey Barker and her mother in Rhombus Road, Stowerton. They too were asked for their permission to have Mrs. Peabody’s phone monitored. Audrey Barker’s reaction to the knowledge that her child was missing had been quite different from Clare Cox’s. There were no signs of tears, but her face
was whiter than ever, her eyes seemed larger, and she looked as if she had lost even more weight off her thin stringy frame. Burden remembered that she had been ill, had recently left the hospital. She looked as if she needed to be back there.

Mrs. Peabody was simply confused. It was all too much for her. She took her daughter’s hand and held it in both of her own. Over and over she kept saying, “But he’s a big boy, he’s big for his age. He wouldn’t get into a stranger’s car.”

“He didn’t think it was a stranger, Mother.”

“He wouldn’t have got into it, he’s too big for that, he knows better, he’s big for his age, Aud, you know that.”

“Can I see the other mother?” Audrey Barker said. “Can we meet? You said there was a young girl taken too. We could form a support group, the other mother and me, and maybe the other women—have they got family?”

“That wouldn’t be wise just at present, Mrs. Barker.”

“I don’t want to do anything out of turn, but I just thought—well, it helps to talk about it, to share your experience.”

You haven’t had an experience yet, Burden thought grimly, and let’s hope to God you won’t have. Aloud, he repeated what he had already said, that it was better not at present.

“They won’t want you interfering, Aud,” said Mrs. Peabody.

“These people who’ve got my son, what do they want?”

“We hope to know that today,” said Karen.

“And if they don’t get it what will they do to him?”

At the police station they waited for Sacred Globe to call. They waited at the
Kingsmarkham Courier
, Barry Vine’s
vigil having been taken over by DCs Lambert and Pemberton. It was still only noon.

It was an ill-assorted group who had been taken away and imprisoned somewhere, Wexford thought. He thought in this way to distract himself from terrible ideas, from actually picturing Dora and imagining how she must feel. A twenty-two-year-old potential model who looked like an Arabian Nights princess, an overtall schoolboy of fourteen, a married couple who, if Burden wasn’t exaggerating, belonged to that county set of an anachronistic but still surprisingly powerful elite—and his wife.

She would get on better with the boy and the girl, he thought, than the two whose horizons were perhaps bounded by the hunt, paternalistic good works, and pre-Sunday lunch sherry parties. Then he reminded himself that, after all, the Struthers had been going to
Florence
. There must be something redeemable about a couple who would spend a holiday there instead of on a Scottish grouse moor.

Dora would be all right. “Your mother will be all right,” he had said hollowly to his daughters. And they believed him, as they always did when he spoke, as it were, ex cathedra. The doubts were all inside himself. He knew the wickedness of this world as they didn’t. But he knew Dora too. She would be sensible, practical, she had a great sense of humor, and she would make it her business to comfort those young people. If they were all together, the five of them. He hoped they were together, not each in solitary confinement.

Would they know who she was? She wasn’t the sort of woman to say, “Do you know who I am?” Or even, “Do you know whose wife I am?” Would they recognize the name? Not unless she told them, he was sure of that. Only those he had had dealings with knew his name. But if she had told them, then it might well be to his house
that the call would be made. They would expect him to be there, not here. They would ask Dora and she would tell them he would be at home, waiting to hear about her.