Road Rage (13 page)

A promise had been extracted from Peter Tregear of Sussex Wildlife to be with him by five-thirty, when Andrew Struther arrived, accompanied by his girlfriend whom he introduced as Bibi. Both wore sunglasses, though it wasn’t a bright day. The girl’s were the mirror kind that you can see your own face in. She wore a red-and-white-striped Breton top, so skimpy that every time she moved, an inch of tanned midriff showed. She seemed highly conscious of her good looks and allure, fidgeting her body into provocative poses. Wexford left them to Burden. He felt Burden was owed an apology, though he doubted if it would come.

Perhaps because Burden had told him he should be worried, Struther had brought with him a photograph of his missing parents. They were standing in snow in bright
sunshine on some ski slope. Both were smiling and screwing up their eyes, it would have been hard to identify the originals from this, but Burden didn’t think he was going to have to identify them. He saw a tall man in a dark blue ski suit, a rather shorter woman in red. From what could be seen of it under woolly hats, both had fair hair fading to gray, both had light eyes and were strong, straight, and lean. Owen Struther might have been fifty-five, his wife a few years younger.

“I must ask for your silence,” Burden said. “We are taking a very serious view of this. I don’t think I’m overstepping the mark if I say that a leak to the press will result in prosecution for obstructing the police in their inquiries.”

“What is this?” said Struther.

Burden told him. He didn’t name the other hostages. A reluctance to name Wexford’s wife had seized him.

“Unbelievable,” Struther said.

The girl gave a shriek. She sat up awkwardly, forgot to be provocative, took off her glasses. Hazel eyes, verging on the golden, had the look of an animal’s, empty of emotion, though greedy and purposeful.

“Why them?” Struther asked.

“Chance. A random selection. There have been threats. Threats to kill unless conditions are met.”

“Conditions?”

Burden saw no reason not to tell him. All the next-of-kin of the hostages would have to be told. Much as he would have preferred to shy away from it, he said, “That the building of the bypass be stopped.”

Struther said, “What bypass?”

He lived in London, he might not read the papers, watch television. There were such people. “I rather think the proposed route can be seen from the windows of your parents’ house.”

“Oh, that new road? The one people keep demonstrating about?”

“That one.” Burden watched Struther digest this information, nod, put up his eyebrows. “Thank you, Mr. Struther,” he said. “We’ll keep you informed. Remember what I said about not speaking to anyone about this, won’t you? It’s of the greatest importance.”

Dazed now, as if in a dream, Struther said, “We won’t say anything,” and then, “Christ, it’s just beginning to hit me. Christ.”

Peter Tregear must have passed him going out as he came in. The secretary of the Sussex Wildlife Trust was not to be told of the abductions, only of a subversive group called Sacred Globe. What did he know of them? Had he even heard of them?

“I don’t think so,” Tregear said. “There are so many of these groups and splinter groups. It’s never simple. Have you ever read a book about the French Revolution?”

Wexford looked at him in astonishment.

“Or the Spanish Civil War, for that matter. I mention those world-shaking events because in both of them, and the Russian Revolution too, it was so far from simple and straightforward. Not just two sides, I mean, but dozens of splinter groups and factions, almost impossible to follow. Human nature’s like that, isn’t it? Can’t keep things simple, people always have to have a lot of internecine squabbles, one little thing they don’t agree with and they’re off forming a collective of their own. Give me animals every time.”

“So you think the members of Sacred Globe were part of one of the other groups, but they disagreed with the rules or the aims or whatever, maybe wanted more action, less talk, more violence even, so they broke away and formed their own.”

“Or didn’t break away,” said Tregear. “Stayed
and
formed their own group.”

“Before Mark was born,” Jenny said, “I’d been teaching first at Sewingbury High School as it then was, and later at Kingsmarkham Comprehensive. Oh, and I did a bit of part-time at that private school St. Olwen’s when Mark was three and going to that nursery in the mornings.”

Wexford had found her in her husband’s office, where she had been since receiving the call. Her little boy was with his school friend, siblings and parents.

“I’ve told half a dozen people everything I can remember about that phone call,” she had said when Wexford came in. “And soon I’ll be telling them what I
can’t
remember.”

“Don’t do that,” he had said. “We’ve picked your brain enough on that. Now we want to know how he came to phone you.” He listened in silence to the enumeration of her teaching experience. “Did your pupils—sorry, you call them students now, don’t you?—did they know who Mike was, what Mike did?”

“I suppose so. Some of them did. Kids aren’t like they used to be when we were young, Reg.” She was flattering him there, he thought, considering she was getting on for twenty years his junior. She smiled at him. “We’d never have asked teachers personal questions. We’d have got short shrift if we had. It’s different now. For one thing they genuinely want to know. They’re interested in people the way we weren’t. Or I wasn’t. At the Comprehensive they call me by my Christian name.”

“And they’d ask you about your husband? What he did?”

“Oh, all the time. The ones I taught five years ago, ten years ago, and the ones now. Except that now
every one
of them knows he’s a policeman.”

“And back then? Say seven years ago? I’m thinking of seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds at that time. Is there anyone you can think of who specifically asked?”

“I think pretty well everyone knew then, Reg. They were all interested in my wedding—you remember what a big showy wedding we had, all my mother’s doing—and it was in the local paper then what Mike did.” She looked at him doubtfully. “Where’s Mike now?”

“Somewhere at the bypass site. Why do you ask?”

“I hoped he’d be coming home. But he won’t, will he, not for hours? Can I go, Reg? I need to fetch Mark.”

Not for hours … It would have been the end of a normal day but Burden knew that for him it was only half over. Eyes peering at you from forest depths and forest trees was an image constantly recurring in children’s literature. He was always reading such descriptions to his son, but the eyes in the children’s books belonged to animals and these were human. He was aware of them from the branches above him and the scrubby coverts beneath. A sacking curtain was pulled aside at the entrance to one of the tree houses and a man stepped out, saying nothing, staring down, his face impassive.

They had left the car in a lay-by on the lane and walked first along the green ride, then taken the path that wound its way through groves of man-high birch saplings. Lynn Fancourt knew the way better than he did, a good deal better than Ted Hennessy, who trod warily, rather as if he were being taken on a tour of an unexplored rain forest. Twittering birds gathered in the treetops, preparing to roost. Burden thought he could hear the sound of a guitar ahead of them, but soon the music stopped and the keening voice stopped and all that could be heard was the birds’ tuneless murmuring.

Then, as the birches were left behind and the great
trees began, he saw the eyes. Their approach had been heard, their footfalls on the twigs and leaf mold and dry grass, and that was why the guitar had been put away. Everyone in the trees prepared to watch for them. Burden had been used to believing that it was only animal eyes that shone in dark places, but these gleamed in just the same way. He had just taken in the fact that their arrival had interrupted the activities of three people who seemed to be involved in the building of a new tree house, when the man on the platform spoke.

“Can I help you?”

He said it like someone serving in a shop, with the same degree of friendly politeness, but he wasn’t much like a shop assistant, more a leader of men, tall with a commanding air, a cloak wrapping him. He might have been a general surveying the battlefield before the fighting starts.

Archbold said very correctly, “Kingsmarkham Crime Management. We’d like a word.”

“What are we supposed to have done now?”

“We’re making inquiries,” Burden said. “That’s all. We’d just like to talk to you.” He moved his hand, a half wave.

“Nothing to do with this camp. It won’t take long.”

“Wait.”

The cloaked man disappeared into his tree house. There wasn’t much he could do about it, Burden thought, if he didn’t come out again. And there were fewer eyes staring now. He looked up at the tree house that was in the process of being built. A wooden framework had been constructed on the firm foundation made by the two huge limbs and lopped-off trunk of a long-ago pollarded beech. A woman in an awkward-looking long dress clambered down the trunk and began searching for tools in a canvas bag on the ground. She passed a hammer
up to the man with the long fair beard who had come halfway down for it. At that moment their leader—Burden somehow knew he was that—came out from behind the curtain, his cloak left behind, and shinned down his ladder, suddenly transformed into a normal person in jeans, sweatshirt, and sneakers.

Not quite a normal person perhaps. For one thing, this man was exceptionally tall, exceptionally long-legged, and with long-fingered attenuated hands. His head was shaved, his features like those Burden had seen in pictures of Native American chiefs, harsh, razor-sharp, fleshless bones and skin.

“Conrad Tarling.” He nodded as he spoke, a kind of substitute for a handshake. “They call me the King of the Wood.”

Burden could think of no rejoinder.

“Would you prove your identities, please?”

A glance at three warrant cards and the nod came again.

“We’ve been through a lot, had a good deal of trouble,” said Conrad Tarling in the tone of someone who has spent six months in a refugee camp. “What is it you want to ask about?”

Lynn Fancourt told him. While she was explaining, the hammering began. The man building the tree house had begun attaching lengths of timber to the beam construction. Lynn raised her voice. She had to shout above the noise and Burden went over to where the woman in the long dress was standing.

“Would you mind stopping that for the time being?”

“Why?” the man in the tree said.

Burden had never seen such a long beard except in illustrations to children’s books, the wizard, the woodcutter. He didn’t know why he kept on thinking of children’s books.

“Police,” he said. “We have some inquiries to make. Just hold off for ten minutes, will you?”

For answer the hammer was flung out of the tree. Not, however, in Burden’s direction or anywhere near him. The woman in the long dress picked it up and scowled at him. He heard Lynn Fancourt ask Tarling in her normal voice if he had ever heard of Sacred Globe or knew anyone in the camp who might have, when a girl in mummylike wrappings and draperies appeared, running from nowhere, from a treetop or out from among the trees perhaps, but who erupted into the midst of them, shouting and throwing out her arms.

“You turn us off our land, you drag us out of our homes, and now you come here and ask us to betray each other. It’s not enough that you wreck this country, this world, you’ve got to wreck the people too. Not just their bodies, not just the way you carried me unconscious down a ladder at dawn this morning, not just that, though I might have fallen and been disabled for life, not only that, but you’d wreck our souls too. You’d make us betray our friends and when you do that you smash the spirit!”

There was a silence that Burden broke. “Your friends?” he said.

“She’s upset,” Tarling said. “And no wonder. I don’t suppose it was you, was it? It was the bailiffs. But you all get tarred with the same brush and who’s to blame for that?”

“As you do, Mr. Tarling, and who’s to blame for
that
?”

Tarling began a lecture on environmental issues, the destruction of ecological balance and the danger of what he called “emissions.” Burden nodded once or twice, then left him and went home, from where he phoned into the old gym and announced where he would be that evening. They had agreed to keep one another constantly informed of their whereabouts.

“They weren’t exactly cooperative,” he said to Jenny while eating a fast supper at the table with his son. “I got started on the wrong foot, I suppose. This Quilla—how does a woman get to be called Quilla? What’s it short for or long for?—she gave me a name. And the other one, the Freya one, softened up a bit and gave me a place. I strongly suspect neither exists.”

“I suppose you’re going out again?” Jenny said it neutrally, not at all in a tone of exasperation.

“Well, what do you think? That we’re going to have a nice evening watching a detective series on telly?”

“Mike,” said Jenny, “I’ve remembered something—well, someone. At the Comprehensive before Mark was born.”

He stopped eating.

“I don’t want to remember it in a way because it’s so—well, isn’t it awful in our society, the way people with morals and high ideals and courage get labeled as subversive and terrorists? The way that happens and other people who never did a thing in their lives for peace or the environment or against cruelty, they’re the ones that are respected?”

“No one’s talking about terrorists,” said Burden.

“You know what I mean. Or I bloody well hope you do. I’ve made you see things a bit more my way, haven’t I?”

“Yes, love. I’m sorry. I’m a bit tired.”

“I know. Mike, there was a boy at school—it would be six years ago, he was seventeen then, so he’d be twenty-three now—he was an animal-rights person when animal rights were mostly about being against the fur trade and saving endangered species. He was an idealist and I don’t think he’d have hurt anyone, though when I come to think of it he never seemed to care much for
people’s
rights. He left school and went up north somewhere, and
later on, it was after Mark was born, someone, one of the teachers, I happened to meet her, told me he’d been convicted of stealing a lot of animals or maybe birds from a pet shop and releasing them somewhere. And the thing was, he asked for ten other offenses of that kind to be taken into consideration. So I thought …”