Road Rage (22 page)

“What was it like?”

“His voice? Cockney, but not natural. I mean, it was like cockney that’s been learned.”

Burden caught Wexford’s eye and nodded. The man who had phoned Tanya Paine had a cockney accent he thought sounded as if learned from tapes. He said to Dora, “What exactly did he say?”

“I’ll try to remember accurately. Now then—‘Tell them the suspension has been noted. Suspension isn’t enough. Work has to stop permanently. Tell them negotiations start on Sunday.’ Then he told me to repeat it and I did. I’d lost my voice from nerves, but it came back because if they were giving me a message I knew they must be sending me home.”

“They put you in a car? Did you see the car?”

“Not then. They turned the hood around so that I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t see any more of the place where we were than when I arrived. They put me in the backseat of a car and fastened the seat belt on me. The drive took about an hour and a half. I’d have moved the hood around so that I could see out but what with the seat belt and the handcuffs I couldn’t. When the car stopped the driver opened the door, came around, and took off the hood. It was dark but I could see it was the same man who had brought me, the short, dark-bearded
man. The one who smelled. He still smelled. He’d put on dark glasses. Shades, do they call them?

“He took off the handcuffs, undid the seat belt, and helped me out. He gave me my handbag—it was the first I’d seen of it since Wednesday. He didn’t speak, I never heard his voice. The car was parked alongside the cricket field, which is about a quarter of a mile from our house. I think he parked there because it’s just field on one side and the Methodist church and graveyard on the other. No one to see, I suppose.

“It was past midnight and all the street lamps were out. He got back into the car, leaving me there. I tried to see the registration, but it was too dark. As for the make and color, it was lightish, it could have been any of those creamy-gray colors or grayish or light blue. He didn’t put his lights on until he was a good fifty yards away. The number started with an L and ended with a five and a seven.

“After that I walked home. My house keys were in my bag. I tried to let myself in the back way but the door was bolted on the inside, so I went around to the front. But you asked me why they let me go. I’m sorry, I never really answered that. Just to deliver the message? It couldn’t be just that. I honestly don’t know why.”

“All right,” said Wexford, “that’s enough for today. You can talk some more to me at home, if you like, but that’s an end of the formal stuff for now. You’ve given us plenty to go on.”

It was as ugly a house as only the Victorians in their later architectural phases could build. The remarkable thing, as Hennessy remarked to Nicky Weaver, was that it had evidently been intended as a dwelling house and not an institution. The principal building material was brick of a yellowish khaki, the sickly color occasionally broken by
lines of red tile. Eight sash windows were close up underneath the shallow slate roof. There were eight more below, these slightly deeper, but on the ground the three on either side of a front door that stood plumb in the center were set in pointed Gothic arches. It was a mean, squat front door without benefit of paneling, with no porch, not even set in a recess. Still, Marrowgrave Hall was an enormous place, as Damon Slesar saw when he walked around the side, for the whole front edifice was repeated on the back, the roof merely taking a kind of dip in the middle.

The only outbuilding was a garage, a prefabricated affair that stood separate from the house. Hennessy looked through the single window at the back but there was nothing inside except a pile of empty sacks. Nicky rang the doorbell. It was answered by a woman of enormous girth, one of those people who are so hugely fat that it is a wonder they can bear the daily heaving of this mass of flesh from place to place. She was probably still in her forties, with a pale moonface and loose mouth, a little thin reddish hair. A floral tent enveloped her, reaching to her heavily bandaged knees and shins.

“Mrs. Panick?” said Nicky.

“You’re the police, dear. We’ve been expecting you. We had a call.”

“May we come in?”

The smell was of food. It was quite a nice smell, especially if you happened to be hungry, a compound of vanilla and burnt sugar and something fruity. An occasional whiff of cheese joined in as they were led down a dour corridor, then frying bacon, finally as they entered a cavernous kitchen a heady amalgam of the lot, rich, hot, almost succulent. Their progress was necessarily slow as Patsy Panick lumbered ahead of them with difficulty. In
the kitchen she stood, hanging on to a chair, getting her breath.

An elderly man was sitting at a long pine table, eating a meal, presumably his lunch, though it was not much past eleven-thirty. He was nearly but not quite as fat as his wife. Women and men put on weight differently and while his wife’s was distributed more or less evenly all over her, Robert Panick’s had rested, accumulated, swelled, and become mountainous, only on his stomach. Slesar remarked afterward, when they were on their way back through Forby, that he had read somewhere about Thomas Aquinas having to have a great ellipse cut out of the table at which he worked to accommodate the Angelic Doctor’s huge belly. Robert Panick could have done with an ellipse cut out of this one but no one had thought of it and he was obliged to sit some two feet back from the table and bend as far forward as his girth allowed to eat his food.

It had apparently been a plateful of fried meat, liver and bacon perhaps, with chips, peas, and fried bread. More of the same sizzled in two pans on the stove. A plate of Mrs. Panick’s half-eaten meal was also on the table and, approaching it, she absentmindedly lifted a forkful to her mouth.

“Give them something to eat, Patsy,” said Panick, who hadn’t otherwise seemed to notice their presence. “Some of those chocolate biscuits with the jelly in or we’ve got some frozen Mars in the freezer.”

“No, thanks,” said Slesar for all of them. “Very good of you but, no thanks all the same. We wanted to ask you about the house. You bought it off a Mr. James Royall about seven years ago, I believe?”

“That’s right, dear. Only it was six years. Jimmy’s my cousin. His daddy that lived here was my uncle. We’d always loved this house, hadn’t we, Bob? It’s a lovely old
house, a real lovely antique, and when we got the chance to have it—well, Bob had done ever so well in business and just sold up, and why not blow some money on the house of our dreams? That’s what we said.”

Her husband nodded and, having finished up the last scrap of fried bread, passed his plate to her for a refill. Most of the contents of the two pans went onto it. Mrs. Panick sat down in front of her own plate and the chair emitted a long painful creak.

“You don’t mind if I go on with my meal, do you? I wish you’d have something yourselves. A nice piece of Victoria sponge? I made it myself this morning. Well, all right, if you’re sure. Our needs are very modest, dear, as you see, and we don’t run a car, there’s a very nice delicatessen in Pomfret that delivers twice a week, so we felt we could afford the place and the upkeep, and we manage quite okay, don’t we, Bob? Mind you, I think my cousin Jimmy made a special price for us, us being family.”

“The son, Brendan,” Nicky said, “I suppose you know him too?”

“Know him? He’s more like a son to us. I mean, first cousin once removed, that’s a laugh. He’s like our own. And he won’t have anything to do with Jimmy and Mag, dear. Says his dad’s cruel to animals as well as cheating him out of his inheritance and it is true my uncle John often said Brendan could have the place when he went. His dad did give him a bit of the money we paid over but he spent most of it on his Euro-theme. Still, I said to Brendan, ‘Don’t you worry, dear, it’ll be yours one day.’ ”

“Meaning?”

“That we’d leave it to him in our wills.”

“So you see him?”

“See him? He always pops in when he’s down this way. I say to Bob, Brendan’s made us his parents since his own
was so unsatisfactory. We’re—what’s the term I want?—yes, surrogate, we’re surrogate parents for Brendan. And I think he knows he’ll always get a good meal here. Now you’ve eaten all the rest of that fry-up, Bob, I’m going to have to find myself something else.”

“There’s a pudding, isn’t there?” said Panick in the tone of someone asking a bank manager if it can possibly be true his account is in the red.

“Of course there’s a pudding. When have I served you a meal without a pudding? Not in all our married life. But I’ve got an empty corner wants filling now and I reckon I’ll have to attack the Camembert the way the French do, before the dessert, right?”

“Do you know where Brendan is now, Mrs. Panick?”

“Well, he won’t be with his mum and dad, dear. That’s for sure. Nottingham maybe? He was down here a couple of weeks back, no, I tell a lie, more like a month, something to do with butterflies or frogs, he loves animals, does Brendan. That’s his work, you know, saving animals, a bit like the RSPCA. And he came in to see us and we happened to be having pheasant that night, frozen of course, the season not starting till next month, but none the worse for that, and I did bread sauce and orange sauce though that’s not strictly the thing with pheasant, and oven chips and a suet roll to fill up and a chocolate roulade with clotted cream.

“He came rolling down our drive as happy as a lark at just on five and parked the van right outside the kitchen window so that he could get the cooking smells, he said.”

“He lives in a van?” said Hennessy, trying not to sound too aghast.

“Well, a Winnebago is the correct term, dear. He’s always on the move. You never know where he is from one moment to the next.”

“He hasn’t a fixed address?”

“Not what you’d call fixed. Not unless you count this one.”

“We’d appreciate it if you’d let us know if he turns up here.”

“You can be sure of that,” said Patsy Panick, which wasn’t at all what Nicky expected.

“Where are you hiding that pudding, Patsy?” said Bob.

Driving back through Forby, once designated (or damned) as the fifth prettiest village in England, Nicky Weaver said, “Didn’t you think they were too good to be true?”

“No one’s too good to be true,” said Hennessy, after the manner of Wexford, whom he admired. “What are you suggesting, ma’am, that they were acting?”

“I suppose not. The way they were going at that food, Brendan Royall won’t have too long to wait for his inheritance.”

“Isn’t it too bad, him living in a Winnebago?” said Damon. “Just our bloody luck.”

“What, you mean you’re envious because you want a Winnebago or sick because it means he’s always on the move?”

“Both,” said Damon.

Four men, one of them tattooed, one smelling of acetone, one wearing gloves. A red Golf, a basement room, a newly converted washroom, masks of spray-painted sacking, handcuffs, a light-colored car, registration L something five seven. A man with a learned cockney voice. These were what Wexford presented to those of his team who were not in Nottingham or Guildford at a meeting in the old gym at four, and they told him about a Winnebago and a paranoid man who had quarreled with his parents.

“I’d very much like to know if Brendan Royall has a tattoo,” he said. “Presumably, his parents could tell us.”

“Or Mrs. Panick might know,” Nicky Weaver said. Rather shyly Lynn Fancourt said she didn’t want to appear ignorant, but what was a Winnebago? Burden explained that it was a luxury mobile home, not far removed from a bungalow on wheels. Royall could range the country in it, parking in lay-bys overnight if he chose.

Then Wexford played the tapes to them. The Chief Constable arrived unexpectedly after the first one had been running for five minutes. He sat and listened. When it was over he accompanied Wexford up to his office.

“Your wife must have a lot more to tell us, Reg.”

“I know she has, sir, but I’m a bit afraid …”

“Yes, I know what you mean. And so am I. Would it help her to have counseling, do you think?”

“Frankly, sir, talking to me
is
her counseling. Just talking and having me listen. We shall talk more this evening.”

The Chief Constable looked at his watch, the way people do when they are going to talk about time. He said, “Do you remember saying to me the newspapers wouldn’t be all that interested if the embargo on this story was lifted on a Friday or a Saturday? That what they’d like best would be to have it late on Sunday?”

Wexford nodded.

“Then we’ll lift it tomorrow.”

“All right. If you say so.”

“I do. We’ll have the whole pack of them down here, we’ll have phone calls pouring in all day with sightings of the Struthers in Majorca and Singapore, we’ll have people who know the basement room is in the house next door, but nevertheless, we may also get help. And we need more help now, Reg.”

“Yes, sir. I know we do.”

“Sometimes I think it would be better if we adhered more to the continental system, like they have in France, for instance. Kept investigations secret, made them more in the nature of undercover operations, low-profile stuff, not all this sharing everything with the public. Keep the press, the public, and the victims’ families at arm’s length while the investigation goes on. Once you recruit the public, the pressure on us increases.”

Shades of that conference on continental methods … “They expect instant results,” said Wexford.

“That’s right. And then mistakes are made.”

After that Wexford went home. As he drove down the High Street he passed a straggling line of tree people, laden with packs, heading for the best places to hitch lifts to somewhere, anywhere. They were leaving, or some of them were. While the environmental assessment went on they were off to protest elsewhere.

The red Golf parked outside his house made his heart lurch. But, of course, it was Sylvia’s. He was so involved in all this he couldn’t recognize his own daughter’s car. He let himself into the house and found not one but both daughters there. Dora was holding Amulet in her arms. He had to remind himself that this was the first time she had seen the baby.