Road Rage (21 page)

“Roxane Masood and Kitty and Owen Struther are the others,” Karen said.

“That’s right. Roxane was a good deal less passive than I was, I can tell you. She was struggling as they brought her in and when they took the hood and the handcuffs off her she tried to fly at them.”

“Who brought her in?”

“The driver and another man. Another tall one, taller than the driver, but not as tall as the one who was in the car with me. As far as I could tell, in his late twenties, maybe thirty. He took the handcuffs off Roxane and the driver took the hood off her.

“Roxane made for their eyes with her fingernails even though they had hoods on. The thin man fetched her a great blow across the head and she fell over. She fell on the bed and I think she passed out for a while. I went to her and held her and she came round and started to cry. But that was only because he’d really hurt her. It wasn’t crying like Kitty Struther.

“They brought the Struthers in about half an hour later. He was the stiff-upper-lip sort. He reminded me of Alec Guinness in
The Bridge on the River Kwai
. You know, very stiff and straight and
English
, refusing to have any dealings with his captors, that sort of thing. The other man that brought me, the one with the rubbery face, he brought Kitty in. She spat at him when the hood came off her. He didn’t do anything, just wiped it off.

“I once read in a book how amazed someone was to hear a really refined ladylike woman use foul language in a situation that was—well, like this one. They wouldn’t have believed she’d known it. Well, that was how I felt about Kitty Struther. The spitting and then the words she used.

“I suppose it was hysterics, but she screamed and yelled and pounded on the mattress with her fists. After a bit Owen tried to calm her down, so she started punching him. I don’t think she knew what she was doing, but she screamed for a very long time. The rest of us just sat there, appalled. And then she began this soft awful weeping. She curled up like a fetus and buried her face and at last she fell asleep.”

Dora stopped, sighed, slightly lifted her shoulders. “I expect you’d like me to tell you what I can about the rest of the people who were holding us.”

“Would you have a look at this, please, Dora.” Burden had produced a photograph, which he held out to her. “Could the dark one, the driver, be this man? Forget the beard, beards can come off and go on at the drop of a hat. Could this be your driver?”

Dora shook her head. “No. I’m sure not. He’s thin, this man, and older. Somehow I know the driver wasn’t very old, and he was heavier.”

When Karen had taken Dora away to get a cup of tea, Wexford asked, “Who is it?”

Burden put the photograph away.

“Stanley Trotter,” he said. “He also smells. We had a bit of news in today. I haven’t bothered you with it, you had enough on your plate. It’s from the police in Bonn, Bonn in Germany.”

Wexford thought. “Where Ulrike Ranke was at university?”

“That’s it. You remember the pearls? The eighteenth birthday present of matched cultured pearls for which her parents paid thirteen hundred pounds?”

“Of course I do.”

“Well, she sold them. Needed the money rather than jewelry, I reckon. The Bonn police have found it and the
jeweler who gave her seventeen hundred deutsche marks for it.”

“Not generous,” said Wexford, having done his mental arithmetic.

“No. Did she buy herself another string for twenty, something to show the parents if need be? Certainly she bought one because we know she was wearing a string of pearls in the Brigadier photograph. And was that the one … ?”

“It’s not Trotter, Mike,” said Wexford. “He’s not her killer and he’s not Dora’s driver.”

T
he signboard, planted in the grass verge, read: EUROFUN, THE ONLY INTERNATIONAL THEME-PARK IN SUSSEX. The lettering was white on a blue background and underneath it someone had painted, not very expertly, a small deer or chamois, a windmill, and what might have been the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Damon Slesar swung the car in through the open gates, or rather, the one open gate, the other being off its hinges and leaning against the fence, and up a track that would be two ruts of mud in winter.

The theme park had been arranged as a series of paddocks, through which the track wound in a haphazard way. Its distant appearance was slightly redeemed by an abundance of trees that hid some of Euro-Fun’s worst excesses, though most of these were revealed as prospect became foreground. Each section bore the name of the country represented there, lettered on a swinging sign suspended from tall pillars rather like barbers’ poles. The whole had grown shabby with the years and there were few visitors. Five people, three adults and two children, were walking about in bemused fashion in the area labeled Denmark, dubiously eyeing a wooden dollhouse with a green roof and a plastic facsimile of the Little Mermaid seated on the edge of a stagnant pond lined with blue polyethylene.

What precisely visitors to the place were supposed to do wasn’t clear. Perhaps only walk, look, and wonder. A
man and a woman were doing that, especially from their expressions the wondering part, among rain-damaged wax tulips in the shadow of a monstrous red and white plastic windmill, while a couple of preteens sat on the steps of a chalet staring at a cuckoo clock. The cuckoo had come out in front of the clock face and, the mechanism breaking down at this point, stayed out, silent, its beak permanently frozen open in the cuckooing position.

“You ever brought your kids here?” Damon Slesar asked.

“Please,” said Nicky Weaver, “do me a favor. Oh, look at the Parthenon! Can you believe it?”

It looked as if made of asbestos but was probably plasterboard, the pillars whitewashed drainpipes. A figure that properly belonged in a shop window but was now dressed in white pleated skirt and black jacket stood in front of the Acropolis strumming at a stringed instrument. Next door was Spain with a papier-mâché bull and matador and then came a ticket office and car park. Adjacent to the car park stood a sprawling bungalow in need of paint.

The man who came out was middle-aged, in cable-knit pullover and gray corduroy trousers. He was one of those men who have practically no hair on their heads and a great deal on upper lip and cheeks. In his case it was gray and shaggy, a thick drooping mustache and slightly curly side whiskers.

“Will that be two, then, madam? Car park straight on.”

“Police,” said Nicky, showing him her warrant card instead of the expected cash. “I’m looking for Mr. or Mrs. Royall.”

He was no stranger to police inquiries, Nicky could tell. The police always can. He thumped his chest with his fist and said, “James Royall at your service, ma’am. What can I do for you?”

Nicky knew that “ma’am” wasn’t politeness or defer
ence but intended as a joke, a parody of the style policemen use when addressing a senior female officer. James Royall was being funny.

“I’d like to talk to you about your son. Brendan—is that right?”

“Now I can’t leave my post, can I, ma’am?”

Damon Slesar turned his head, craning from side to side. “I don’t see any rush, do you? They’re not exactly queueing up.”

“We’d like to talk to you
now
, Mr. Royall,” Nicky said. “Whether you leave your post or find someone else to man it is immaterial to me.”

The little office or hut had an inner room. Nicky opened the door to it, walked in, and beckoned to James Royall. There were two kitchen chairs and a table doing duty as a desk. The walls were lined with shelving on which stood dozens, perhaps hundreds, of artifacts from the theme park, figurines, plastic animals, sections of tree, dollhouse, boat, all broken, all apparently awaiting repair.

Royall picked up the phone, said into it, “Mag, can you get down here. Something’s come up.” He looked toward Damon. “What about his nibs, then?”

“We’re anxious to get in touch with your son, Mr. Royall. Do you know where he is?”

“Ask me another.” Royall shrugged his shoulders. “You’ve come to the wrong shop, you know. Him and me and his mum, we’re what you might call ‘estranged.’ In other words, not exactly on speaking terms.”

“And what accounts for that, Mr. Royall?”

He transferred his glance to Nicky, whose appearance and tone, and perhaps also her rank and profession, he seemed to find amusing. A small smile lifted the corners of his mouth under the drooping mustache.

“Well, ma’am, I don’t know that that’s any business of yours, but speaking as an easygoing man, I’ll tell you. In
the first place my son Brendan thought for some mysterious reason, unfathomable to me, that when I came into my old man’s property I should pass it over lock, stock, and barrel to him. Nice expression that, don’t you think? Lock, stock, and barrel. Refers to guns, of course. But you’d know all about that, ma’am. The twenty K I did give him from the sale of said property wasn’t enough, oh dear, no. So he kept coming back for more. But he didn’t care for our Euro-theme. The bull and the matador, they were among what he took exception to …”

“And the moles, dear,” said a woman’s voice from the doorway.

“Oh, and the moles, Mag. You’re right. Not wanting this place to resemble the Alps, being as we already had our Swiss area, we had the cheek to call in the mole exterminator without consulting his nibs first, and that, you might say, cooked our goose.”

Mrs. Royall, called to the receipt of custom and now perhaps unwilling to relinquish it, hovered in the doorway, continually glancing over her shoulder lest a car or party should slip past her unawares. She said to Nicky in a rather helpless way, “I’m Brendan’s mother.”

“Can you tell us your son’s whereabouts, Mrs. Royall?”

“I only wish I could. It’s been a cause of great sadness to me being cut off from my only child, and all over this passion he’s got for animals. We love animals too, I said to him, only you have to be practical in this world.”

Royall made the sound usually written as “pshaw!” “It’s not animals, it’s money. And you know damn well where he is. Keeping an eye on his future prospects. Sucking up to them as are in his grandad’s shoes.”

“And where might that be, sir?”

“Marrowgrave Hall,
ma’am
. As I sold to my cousin Mrs. Panick some seven years ago and passed on a fair
whack of the proceeds to that greedy grasping monkeylover …”

“Oh, Jim!” wailed Mrs. Royall.

They left as another car arrived, this time with Austrian registration plates. Nicky wondered what its occupants would think of the section devoted to their motherland with its gilt-caparisoned plastic horse, bust of Mozart, and music box that played Viennese waltzes on the insertion of a ten-pee coin.

“It wasn’t the same people who brought Roxane in or Kitty and Owen in,” said Dora. “Or, rather, I’m not sure about the tall one, it might have been him, but the driver, it wasn’t him this time. This man was taller, though not so tall as the tall one, and he was thinner, and I think he was younger.

“The tall one, his was the only face I ever saw, and I saw it through a tan-colored stocking. A fairly thick stocking, twenty denier, if you know what that means. He was white, Caucasian, as they say, his features might have been sharp or they might actually have been rubbery. I couldn’t identify him. If you showed me photographs I could say he looks a bit like that or that or that, but I couldn’t positively say. I’ve no idea what color his eyes were. There was only one of them whose eye color I actually saw.

“The driver I’ve told you about. I don’t think I can add to that. I never saw his eyes. Until the very end, I never heard any of them speak, they never spoke to us. The third one, the one who helped bring Roxane in—there was a fourth, but he didn’t appear till the next day—the third had a tattoo on his arm.”

“A
tattoo
?”

Wexford and Burden had the same thought. This is the detective story clue, even the old-fashioned detective
story clue, the ineradicable mark that is the perfect giveaway. But now, today, in reality?

“He had a tattoo on his arm?” Wexford said. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. I didn’t see it till the next day. Not till Wednesday. It was a butterfly tattoo, red and black, but I suppose all tattoos are. I’ll tell you more about it when I come to that, shall I?”

“Right.”

“I said there was a fourth man the next day,” she went on. “He was one of those who brought our breakfast. He was another tall one, the same height as the first tall one, and I honestly don’t know what to say about him. He even wore gloves, so I don’t know what his hands were like. He was just a tall masked figure, tall, thin, straight, with an athletic stride, frightening really, though I’d stopped being frightened by then. I got angry, you see, and that kills fear. I couldn’t identify any of them and I don’t think the other hostages could.”

“But you didn’t see this fourth one, the gloved one, till the next day, the Wednesday?”

“That’s right. I shouldn’t have got on to him now. I shouldn’t have got on to the tattoo. You’re telling me off in the nicest possible way, aren’t you?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it!” Karen Malahyde laughed. She hesitated, then said, “Why did they let you go?”

“I don’t know.”

“You said one of them spoke to you?”

“It was yesterday evening. About ten. I was alone by then with Ryan, just the two of us. The others had been taken away. The tall one who wore gloves came in with the tattooed one. I was sitting on my bed—I mostly was. They motioned me to get up and hold out my hands and I did. And then they put handcuffs on me.”

Wexford made a sound, turned it into a cough. He
clenched his fists and unclenched them. She looked at him, made a rueful face.

“They took me outside. I didn’t struggle or protest. I’d seen what they did to those who did that—well, to one who did that. I didn’t even say good-bye to Ryan. Well, I thought I’d be coming back. Then they put the hood on me. That was when the tattooed one spoke to me. It was only about a minute after I’d been led out but—well, that was a bad minute. I thought they were going to kill me. Still, let’s pass on. It was a shock hearing his voice.”