Road Rage (27 page)

“She’s done very well, Reg, superlatively well. She’s an observant woman. But yet …”

I do not like “but yet,” reflected Wexford, quoting someone or other. Cleopatra, he thought. He said quickly, “I know. There’s a lot there and at the same time there isn’t much.” But could you have done as well? Could I? In a misogynistic way, normally quite foreign to him, he thought how most women he knew would have collapsed under Dora’s ordeal, caved in, been stricken dumb. “They were clever, sir,” he said. “Clever and cocky. They must have been to take the risk of letting her go.”

“Yes. Odd that, wasn’t it? We still think it was because they found out who she was?”

Wexford nodded, but dubiously. The MacAllan bottle was raised along with the Chief Constable’s eyebrows and
he was tempted but he said no. He could have gone on drinking all evening, but what was the point? He had to keep sensible tonight and be alert tomorrow.

“You know what I’m thinking, Reg?”

“I think so, sir.”

“Hypnosis. Would she consent?”

It was a method, newly fashionable, of extracting information and observations that lay buried, that would probably remain buried, unless unearthed by means other than the subject’s own volition and intent. Wexford hadn’t much experience of it. He knew or he had heard that it often worked. He felt a sudden violent revulsion against putting Dora through it. Why should she have to suffer this—this
assault
? This taking away of her free will, this indignity.

“I don’t know if she’ll consent,” he said. Surprisingly, he had no idea what her reaction would be. Horror or interest, recoil or even attraction? “I must tell you”—this was very hard to say, to express, to a man of so much higher rank and power, but he wouldn’t sleep if he didn’t say it—“I must tell you, sir, that I’m not prepared to persuade her.”

Montague Ryder laughed, but pleasantly. “Suppose I ask her?” he said. “Suppose I ask her tonight and then, if she agrees, we’ll get hold of the psychologist to hypnotize her tomorrow? Would you mind that?”

“No, I wouldn’t mind,” said Wexford.

T
elevision stole the press’s thunder and the Kingsmarkham kidnap story appeared on ITN’s news at 8:45 and BBC 1’s at 9:15, prefaced in each case by the words “News is just coming in …”

By the later time Dora was in bed with a gin and tonic and a hint from her husband that Monday could be the day of her encounter with a hypnotherapist. Wexford regretted now that the hostages’ names had been released, or rather that the name of a former hostage had. But even he was unprepared for his doorbell ringing at seven in the morning and for the arrival of three reporters and four cameramen on his doorstep.

The two daily newspapers he took had already come. Both used the story as their front-page lead. Somehow, one of them had got hold of a photograph of Roxane Masood, and this, with pictures of the bypass site, a facsimile of the first Sacred Globe letter, and a picture of himself—the hated portrait of him all smiles, holding up a beer tankard, that they kept in their archives—dominated the broadsheet. He was glancing through the text when the doorbell struck his eardrums with a reverberating peal.

Luckily he was dressed. He could imagine another photograph featuring the crimson velvet dressing gown. Before he opened the door he knew who it was. The chain was on, he had put it on for some reason ever since Dora came back, and the door opened only six inches.
His grandmother, a Pomfret native, used to open her front door a couple of inches to unwelcome callers and snap, “Not today, thank you.” He had been very small when she died but he remembered, though he restrained himself from repeating her words now.

“Press conference at the police station at ten A.M.,” he said.

Flash bulbs went off and cameras clicked. “I’d like an exclusive interview with Dora first,” one of them said impertinently.

And I’d like your head on a plate. “Good morning,” he said and shut the door. The phone rang. He snapped into the receiver in his grandmother’s words, “Not today, thank you,” and pulled the plug out.

A photographer had got around the back and was looking through his kitchen window. For the first time he was glad of the “Roman” blinds Dora had had put up the previous summer. He pulled them down, he drew curtains, made the tea, poured a cup for Dora and a mug for himself, took them upstairs. She was sitting up in bed with the radio on. News of the Kingsmarkham Kidnap—the title had been coined and would be kept—had displaced everything else, Palestine, Bosnia, party political wrangling, and Diana, Princess of Wales.

“Is there a ladder in the garage?” he asked her.

“I believe so. Why on earth do you ask?”

“Show no surprise if a head appears at the window anytime now. The media are here.”

“Oh, Reg!”

On the previous evening the Chief Constable had been to see her. She was very tired, had been lying on the sofa in her dressing gown, but even though she had been warned of his coming, hadn’t dressed. Wexford was glad she hadn’t. He welcomed her independence of spirit and expected a further show of it when the request was made.
She would say no. She would say it politely, even apologetically, but she wouldn’t agree to some shrink putting her in a trance.

She said yes.

And now she was saying it again, even apparently looking forward to it.

“I must get up. I’m being hypnotized this morning.”

As far as he could remember, there had never been so many press men and women in Kingsmarkham. Not for a serial killer. Not even for the murder of Davina Flory and her family. They had parked their cars everywhere and traffic wardens were out in force, taking numbers, leaving tickets. Wheel-clamping would soon start.

He could picture the invasions of the cottage in Pomfret, Mrs. Peabody’s little house in Stowerton, and the onslaught on Andrew Struther at Savesbury House. He could picture it without going to see. They must defend themselves as best they could, and perhaps it was all to the good, perhaps this tremendous publicity would help.

Already, at nine, the phone lines into Kingsmarkham Police Station were jammed by callers with information. He looked over the shoulder of one of the busy phone operators at the computer screen on which everything that came in was recorded. Roxane Masood hadn’t been abducted, she had been seen in Ilfracombe; Ryan Barker was dead and his body would be released for £20,000. The Struthers had been seen in Florence, in Athens, in Manchester, looking out of an upper window of a factory in Leeds, on a boat in Poole Harbor. Dora Wexford had never been abducted but had been planted as a spy, a decoy, a detective. Roxane Masood was going to be married in Barbados to the son of a woman who would tell them the whole story for a sum to be negotiated …

Wexford sighed. All these people’s calls would have to be followed up and all of them would either be mistaken
or malicious. Unless, of course, one was authentic, just one provided a lead …

He had got Dora out of the house into a car driven by Karen Malahyde, a big hat and tent-shaped coat concealing most of her. After what she had been through she didn’t want anything covering her face and he hadn’t argued. The press had run after the car for a bit, taking photographs. When he came back from the old gym, where he left her listening to her own tapes and checking what she had said, he found Brian St. George waiting for him.

The editor of the
Kingsmarkham Courier
was deeply aggrieved. In the same gray pinstripe and the same dirty white sweatshirt, he came up to Wexford, pushing his face close to him. His breath smelled of periodontal gum disease.

“You don’t like me, do you?”

“What makes you say that, Mr. St. George?” Wexford retreated a couple of feet.

“You lifted the embargo on this story on the worst possible bloody day of the week for me. Lift it on a Sunday and I’ve got five days before the
Courier
comes out.
Five days
. The story’ll be dead by then.”

“I’m sure I hope so,” Wexford said.

“You did it out of spite. It might just as well have been last Thursday or have waited till this Wednesday, but no, you have to do it on a Sunday.”

Wexford appeared to reflect. “Saturday would have been worse.” As the red mounted fiercely up in St. George’s face, he said imperturbably, “You’ll have to excuse me, I have work to do. You’ll no doubt be getting a lot of calls from the public, even though you haven’t the advantages of the nationals, and we’d like everything passed directly here, please.”

*   *   *

Craig Tarling, older brother of Conrad Tarling, was currently serving a ten-year prison sentence for his animal-rights activities.

“It’s not a common name,” Nicky Weaver said. “I spotted it on the computer and checked him out.”

Damon Slesar raised his eyebrows. They were on their way to Marrowgrave Hall and he was driving. “A man’s not responsible for what his relations do,” he said. “My father grows fruit and veg on the old bypass and my mum spins yarn out of animal hairs. People send her their pets’ fur in bags.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s perfectly respectable.” Nicky spoke rather sharply. Her mother worked in a greengrocer’s part-time—in the rest of her time she helped look after the Weaver children—and Nicky didn’t like his tone. “And so is fruit-growing. You shouldn’t talk like that about your family.”

“Okay, okay, sorry I spoke. You know me, my wit runs away with me. What did this brother do?”

“Conspired—‘masterminded’ might be the better word—to set off fifty firebombs. His targets were rabbit and chicken farms, butchers’ shops, an agricultural college, and an agency selling tickets for circuses, among others. I expect he’d have targeted ostrich farms, only this was five years ago and there weren’t any then.”

“What went wrong? I mean wrong for him and right for law and order?”

“A shop assistant thought it strange for one man to buy sixty timing devices and told the police.”

On the horizon, standing up against a yellow and black sunset, stood ruined Saltram House, where, long ago. Burden had found the body of a missing child in one of the fountain cisterns. Nicky asked Damon if he had ever heard that story, it had been about the time Burden’s first
wife had died, but he shook his head, his brown eyes contrite.

The car turned into the drive. In the pale sunshine of morning Marrowgrave Hall looked no less forbidding and seemed more than ever closed up, secured against the outside world. Nicky got out of the car and stood for a moment staring at the facade, at the windows and the brickwork in its shades of dried blood and baked clay.

“What is it?” Damon asked.

“Nothing. It just seems such an unlikely place for those Panicks to live in. I’d expect a nice big bungalow at Rustington.”

Dressed up for Sunday, Bob in a dark and shiny suit, Patsy in a flowered silk tent, the Panicks had been at the table. Perhaps they always were and when they got up it was only for the clearing away of one meal and to begin the preparation of the next. Patsy carried a large white linen napkin to the door with her and was still wiping her mouth when she opened it. Once more she lumbered ahead of them down the passage toward the kitchen. The smell today was of a breakfast, the kind seaside cafés call a “full English breakfast,” served almost late enough to be brunch, but the Panicks no doubt made their own gastronomic rules. At the table, opposite Bob Panick, sat the woman called Freya—Elf, tree house building expert, and recent resident of the Elder Ditches camp.

She made a strange contrast with her hosts, for she was as thin as they were fat and dressed as unconventionally as they were formal. Face and hands were an unhealthy waxen white, but what the rest of her was like it was impossible to tell. She was swathed from head to foot in something like a very old faded sari, frayed and tattered, which, bundled around her though it was, still provided no illusion of adding bulk to her emaciated shape. But she was eating as heartily as the Panicks. In front of her was a
plateful of bacon, scrambled eggs, fried bread, fried sausages, fried mushrooms, tomatoes, and potato crisps, identical to those set before Bob and Patsy.

She showed no sign of alarm at their entry, unless giving Damon Slesar a long assessing glance was the result of fear. More likely she fancied him, as Nicky said to him afterward. Patsy said she was sure they wouldn’t mind if she went back to her meal and wasn’t it funny the police always seemed to call while they were eating?

“Hungry, I daresay,” said Bob with his mouth full. “Give them something to keep the pangs away. There’s a nice bit of ham from last night and if they don’t mind carving it themselves, so as not to interfere with your meal
again
, Patsy, that would go down a treat with some of that granary loaf and Branston pickle.”

“Nothing for us, thank you,” said Nicky.

Damon said, in a way she thought uncalled-for, that it was very kind of them, and then he redeemed himself by asking Freya if she was a friend of the Panicks. Patsy, helping herself to more from a saucepan, answered for her.

“She is
now
. I hope anyone who comes here and enjoys our hospitality can be termed a friend, don’t you, Bob?”

“You’re right there, Patsy. Is there another sausage going?”

“Of course there is. And give Freya one. As a matter of fact, Freya is Brendan’s friend. A special friend, is that right, Freya?” The woman’s tiny eyes twinkled deep in the piled flesh, like lights at the ends of tunnels. “Brendan brought her here last evening, just had a quick bite and then had to be on his way.”

Nicky remembered Mrs. Panick’s undertaking to let her know if and when Brendan Royall turned up. She had been surprised by that promise and wasn’t surprised it hadn’t been honored.

“On his way where?” she said.

The woman called Freya reacted as if her patience, sorely tried for the past ten minutes, had come to breaking point. She threw down knife and fork, sending a splatter of fat to strike the center of the napkin that was tucked inside Bob Panick’s shirt collar.

“Why can’t you leave him alone? What’s he done? Nothing. Do you know what a visitor from outer space would think if she came to this planet? She’d think you were all psychotic. Not only do you fuck up the whole planet but you punish people who try to stop it being fucked.”