Road Rage (16 page)

Neither Lynn nor he got very far with rooting out clues to Sacred Globe and they moved on to Framhurst Great Wood. There, to Burden’s surprise and considerable dismay, they found Andrew Struther and the red
haired Bibi sitting on a log in conversation with half a dozen tree people.

Struther jumped up, looking guilty.

“I say, I know what you must be thinking, I’m frightfully sorry but it really isn’t that way. I haven’t actually disclosed a thing.”

“Come over here, will you, Mr. Struther?”

Bibi seemed to take his departure as an excuse for getting to know the tree people better. She got up off the log and followed a young man in nothing but a pair of shorts and a big straw hat to where a ladder was placed up against the trunk of a massive chestnut. He indicated to her to go ahead of him and went up close behind her as she took her first upward steps, giggling wildly.

Burden said, “May I ask what you’re doing here, Mr. Struther? You have friends among these people? Yesterday you indicated to us that you didn’t even know a bypass was planned.”

“That was yesterday.” Struther had gone rather red. “You can actually learn quite a lot in twenty-four hours, Inspector, if you put your mind to it. I thought I’d better learn something, considering what’s happening to my parents.”

“I hope you’ve said nothing to any of these people about that.”

Now it was an aggrieved look that Burden got. “No, I haven’t. I was bloody careful about that. I made a point of it. I was told not to and I haven’t.”

“Then what exactly are you doing here? I don’t suppose
you’re
making an environmental assessment.”

“I thought if I talked to them, one of them might give me a clue about who would do a thing like that, who’s likely to be—well, a sort of terrorist.”

Precisely, in fact, what he and the rest of the team were doing. It sounded strangely feeble on Struther’s lips.

“I’d leave that to us, if I were you, sir,” Burden said. “It’s our job, you see. Leave it to us and get off home. Someone will be along to see you later.”

“Really? What will that be about, then?”

“I’d prefer to leave that till later, Mr. Struther, as I’ve said.”

The girl had disappeared inside a tree house. Struther looked wildly about for her, began shouting, “Bibi, Bibi, where are you? We’re going home, darling.”

The tree people watched him impassively.

Karen Malahyde had run the woman called Frenchie Collins to earth at her mother’s home in Guildford. Nicky Weaver, Damon Slesar, and Edward Hennessy were working on flimsy material given them by the SPECIES cadre, and Archbold and Pemberton were tracing by phone and computer environmental activists nationwide. Wexford had a meeting scheduled for two-thirty. He had already spoken to the Chief Constable and his deputy and talked on the phone to Brian St. George.

The editor of the
Kingsmarkham Courier
sounded indifferent and Wexford thought he knew why. If he had been allowed to use the story when the letter first came from Sacred Globe on the previous morning, he would just have got it into this week’s edition of his newspaper. Now, on Friday, it was too late. As far as he was concerned he would have been happiest if nothing more had been heard from Sacred Globe, the hostages, or the police until the following Wednesday evening.

“I still think you’re making a mistake,” he said. “When something like this happens the public has a right to know.”

“Why do they?” said Wexford rudely. “What right? Who says so?”

“It’s a first principle of journalism,” said St. George
sententiously. “The right of the public to know. Muzzling the press never did anyone a mite of good. Not that it’s any skin off my nose, I couldn’t care less, only I don’t mind it going on record that I think you’re making a grave mistake.”

But the Chief Constable said, “We’re going to keep it dark, Reg, as long as we can. Frankly, I’m surprised we can. But since we can, let’s keep at it.”

“It’s Friday now, sir. I’ve a hunch the press isn’t going to be all that interested. They’d think of it as a waste, using a piece of news like that at the weekend.”

“Really? I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

“What they’d like,” said Wexford, “is to have the embargo lifted on Sunday evening. Great stuff for Monday morning’s papers.” He suppressed a sigh. “If you approve, sir, I’d like to tell the hostage families of the—well, the conditions and the threat. I think we ought to. I’ll do it myself.”

Audrey Barker and Mrs. Peabody first. He would go to Stowerton on his own, then to Clare Cox in Pomfret, finally to Andrew Struther, as soon as the meeting was over. The Chief Constable seemed to think it a good idea. You could keep it from the press but not from those families, not in fairness and humanity.

His own family was just as much involved as the Masoods and Barkers and Struthers, and saying good-bye to Sheila that morning, he had promised to phone her whether there was news or not. He would keep in touch daily, twice daily. Before he left he phoned Sylvia, told her that her sister had gone back to London, that he was all right, he was fine, but there was no news.

They were all assembled in the old gym ten minutes before time, all, that is, except Karen Malahyde, who was still off somewhere in pursuit of Frenchie Collins, and Barry Vine, who was beginning to share Burden’s view of
Stanley Trotter. Wexford walked in and everyone stopped talking. It wasn’t just respect and courtesy, he knew that. They had been talking about him among themselves, they had been talking about Dora. For the first time he found himself wishing that what he had thought would happen had happened, that the Chief Constable had put someone else in charge of this business.

Nicky Weaver, seeming a lot less tired and enervated than on the previous evening, looking brisk and energetic, had a good many leads to talk about from SPECIES and KABAL. A SPECIES officer, now apparently a reformed character, had once, quite a long time ago, been sent to prison for attempting to sabotage a nuclear power station. This man had given her a comprehensive list of names of people he said were anarchists.

“Why did he tell you?” Wexford wanted to know.

“I don’t know. Probably because he’s currently only in favor of peaceful resistance. Someone took him on a tour of the power station at Sizewell and he was so impressed he completely changed his tune.”

“It looks as if we’ve done all we can at the camps,” Wexford said. “The computer can deal with all the names we’ve come up with and make cross-references, if any. With this suspension of work on the bypass we’ve bought ourselves time and that’s important. There should be, sometime today, another message from Sacred Globe.

“They haven’t promised it. There was no undertaking in last night’s message that another would follow, but something will come. We have traces on as many Kingsmarkham, Pomfret, and Stowerton phones as B.T. can provide us with. B.T. has done us proud and there are no complaints in that area. But Sacred Globe are vain people, they’re arrogant. Such people always are. They’ll want to congratulate us on having the good sense to fall in with their demands. They’ll phone or get in touch by some
means or another. It won’t have escaped their notice that the suspension is temporary. It’s a suspension, a postponement if you like, not a full stop.

“Unless I’m much mistaken they’re going to want a full guarantee that the Kingsmarkham Bypass is canceled. And that, of course, we can’t give them. That we can never give them, come what may.”

Nicky Weaver raised her hand.

“Nicky?”

“This guarantee—it’s struck me that this is something no one, no authority, would, could, ever give. For instance, such a guarantee could be given, the hostages would be released, and there follow an immediate reneging on the undertaking. Or even if their intention was sincere, even if they promised not to build this bypass, once there was a change of government it could be built, even a change of the Secretary for Transport. So how is Sacred Globe ever to get around that?”

“I suspect they live for the moment,” said Wexford. “Get a guarantee and if it lasts five years they’ve done well. If a bypass is proposed later—well, maybe they start again. Nothing is certain in this world, is it?”

He thought he saw a shiver run through her, but perhaps it was his imagination.

F
rom Stowerton Dale to Pomfret Monachorum silence prevailed over the bypass route. It was rather cold for early September, windy with a touch of Siberia in the breeze, and from time to time a sharp shower of rain rattled down. Birds that had sung tweet-tweet, pu-wee, jug-jug at dawn were silent now and would make no sound until roosting time. In the camps the early euphoria had subsided, it was anticlimax time, and the tree people were discussing, thinking, planning, and, above all, wondering.

The heavy earthmoving equipment had been returned to the meadow where it had first been assembled. The buses that carried the security guards to the site had not run that day and the guards in their dilapidated air base huts talked among themselves about the chances of being laid off.

Stowerton children, hitherto kept away by the guards, clambered over the heaps of earth, playing at guerrilla warfare in a mountainous region. KABAL called an emergency meeting at which a decision was reached. Lady McTear and Mrs. Khoori were to draw up a petition to the Department of Transport for all members to sign (and any other supporters that could be found) that, in the light of a need for environmental assessment under an EU directive, and the unique ecological phenomena present at the site, work should never be resumed on the bypass.

*   *   *

When Mrs. Peabody was young you tidied up the bedroom and put the child into a clean nightdress before the doctor came. If anyone in authority was coming you cleaned the whole house. Going shopping “into town,” you dressed up in your best. These habits die hard and it was plain that a kidnapped grandson wasn’t enough to deflect Mrs. Peabody from her conditioning. She was the kind of woman who would put clean sheets on her own deathbed.

He felt deeply, painfully, sorry for her in her pink sweater set and pearls, her pleated skirt and shiny shoes. She even had lipstick on. All the cushions in the living room were plumped up and magazines were set out in a fan shape on the little table. She could powder her face but not summon up a smile for him, just managed a subdued, “Good afternoon.”

Her daughter, from a generation who saw things quite differently, from Clare Cox’s generation, looked as if she hadn’t washed herself or combed her hair since she heard. He knew all about pacing, he had done plenty of it himself these past days and nights, and he thought she paced this house for long hours. It was apparent she couldn’t keep still, though she looked ill, in need of a long convalescence.

“I have to be here, on the spot,” she said to him. “I ought to go home, I’ve just left everything, but it would be even worse at home.” She sprang up, walked across the floor to the window, stood there clenching and unclenching her hands. “You said on the phone you had something to tell us.”

“It isn’t bad news?” Mrs. Peabody was a marvel of self-control, he thought, and he wondered what her nights were like, when the bedroom door was shut. “You did say it wasn’t bad.”

He told them of the condition, that work on the bypass must stop. Audrey Barker walked across the room again, silent and nodding, as if she had thought of this or as if she wasn’t surprised. But Mrs. Peabody looked as bewildered as if he had told her the hostages would be released only if the entire population of Kingsmarkham agreed to learn Swahili or pilot helicopters.

“What’s our Ryan got to do with that? That’s the government.”

“I quite agree with you, Mrs. Peabody,” Wexford said, “but that’s the condition.”

“They
have
stopped,” Audrey Barker said, coming up close to him, her hands working once more. “It was on the TV. Is that why they’ve stopped?”

“There’s been a suspension of work, yes.”

Mrs. Peabody seemed overawed. He could see her digesting what had been said, interpreting it into a form she could understand.

“And all on account of our Ryan?” she said. “Well, and the rest of them. Our Ryan and the rest of them.”

She shook her head in wonderment. This was fame, this was to be lifted out of obscurity, get into the newspapers, have one’s name on television.

“Our Ryan,” she said again.

Her daughter glanced angrily at her. She said to Wexford, “If the work’s stopped, why hasn’t he come back?”

Why hadn’t he? Why hadn’t any of them? It was now four in the afternoon, nine hours after that announcement of suspension had been made. Not another word had been heard from Sacred Globe. The message Burden had happened to receive was the last one and had been made twenty hours before.

“I don’t know. I can’t tell you because I don’t know.”

She had forgotten that his wife was among the hostages. “But what are you doing to find them? Why aren’t
you out there now, looking for them? There must be ways.” She was tearing at her hands now, as if to pull them off the wrists. They were marked already with selfinflicted bruises. “I’d go and look myself only I don’t know how. You know how, you must, it’s your job. What are you doing for them? They could kill Ryan, they could torture him—Oh God, oh Christ, what are you doing?”

Aghast, Mrs. Peabody laid a small wrinkled hand on her daughter’s arm. “You mustn’t speak like that, Aud. No good can come out of being rude.”

“There’s no question of torture, Mrs. Barker.” At least, that was something he could be sure of, especially if he didn’t let himself think too much about it. “And I don’t think any of the hostages will be killed. If Sacred Globe were to kill them they would lose their bargaining power.” Every word he uttered was a jab of the knife. He almost gasped. “I’m sure you can understand that.”

She turned away, then rounded on him once more. “Then why haven’t they come back to you now the bypass has stopped?”

It was the same question. Clare Cox had asked it half an hour before when he had been with her in Pomfret. Alone, the Masood family having—incredibly—“gone out for the day” to do the tour of Leeds Castle, she had been trying to paint to distract herself. At any rate, there were smears of paint on the smock she wore over one of her flowing dresses.