Road Rage (31 page)

“So you couldn’t have transferred sand from your shoes to the inside of the car?”

“The car was stolen within three hours of our getting there,” said Pugh.

Another fax had come from Gwenlian Dean in Neath. Gary and Quilla had been interviewed by one of her officers. At first they claimed to know nothing of any meeting with Wexford in Framhurst, but when their memories were jogged Quilla realized whom was meant and they both talked with apparent frankness about that encounter. Chief Inspector Dean wrote that her officer had no reason to doubt the truth of what they said, that if they had even heard Wexford’s name when he gave it to them it had scarcely registered and they had soon forgotten it.

They didn’t intend to return to Kingsmarkham for the time being but were going on to north Yorkshire, where a protest was being mounted over the proposal to build a housing estate. Only one factor in all this had surprised Inspector Dean and this, contrary to what she had been led to suspect, was Gary and Quilla’s ownership of a car. They had arrived by car and were going to Yorkshire by car, a respectable-looking four-year-old Ford Escort. Had Wexford any further interest in them?

The inquest on Roxane Masood was fixed for the following day and still there had been no message from Sacred Globe. It was as if Sacred Globe had died or disappeared, taking its hostages with it. Wexford found himself constantly looking at his watch, counting up the hours since Sacred Globe had last been in touch, forty, forty-one … He phoned Gwenlian Dean, thanked her for her trouble, and said he would see Gary and Quilla on their return. By then he hoped, he said stoutly, that he wouldn’t
need
to see them.

Meanwhile he had Karen Malahyde keep Brendan Royall under surveillance and Damon Slesar tail the King of the Wood.

Tanya Paine told Vine she had never looked in the direction where the sleeping bag was found. She never did, she never had cause to. They were in the trailer and her phones kept ringing. In the lulls between calls she craned and twisted her neck, leaned forward, shifted her chair, in an effort to prove to him that no matter what contortions she had put her body through she couldn’t have seen that corner where the sleeping bag was, an area now cordoned off with blue and white crime tape.

Vine had never before seen fingernails like hers. He couldn’t imagine how they were done. Each one had a design on it like a piece of blue, green, and violet paisley-patterned satin. Was it printed or had some artist done it with a very fine brush? Or did you buy transfers, stick them on, and lacquer over the top? It was as much as he could do to keep his eyes off those fingernails while Tanya stretched and craned.

“I’m not talking about when you were in here, Ms. Paine,” he said. “But when you arrived and when you left,” and remembering her tastes, “and when you went out for your chocolate bar and your cappuccino.”

“I could have seen it then, I suppose, but I didn’t.” She gave him a sideways glance, resentful, cagey. “And I don’t eat things like that anymore. I’m trying to lose weight. It was an apple and a diet Coke.”

No distress over the other girl’s violent and shocking death was apparent in her manner. She had seen about it on breakfast television and bought a newspaper on her way to work, the kind of newspaper—it lay between her phones—that carries the maximum of black seventy-two—point headline and the minimum of text. This one’s front page said only MY LOVELY GIRL, framing a model agency’s photograph of Roxane in a bikini.

“You were a friend of Roxane’s. You were at school with her.”

“I was at school with a lot of girls.”

“Yes,” said Vine, “but this is the one that was abducted and is now dead. It’s a bit strange, isn’t it? Let me put it like this. First of all the people who abducted her, this Sacred Globe, first of all they choose a car-hire firm where
you
work, and when one of the hostages is dead they return the body to where
you
work. The body of your friend. Bit of a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”

One of her phones rang. She answered it, wrote down a time and a place on her pad. It seemed an inefficient and old-fashioned way of doing things. The design on the ballpoint pen matched her fingernails.

“Bit of a coincidence?” Vine said again.

“I don’t know what you mean. You keep saying ‘my friend.’ She wasn’t my friend. I just knew her.”

“She made a point of booking taxis from here because you were here. She liked a chat on the phone to you.”

“Look,” said Tanya, “I can tell you why she liked talking to me. It was so as I knew she’d got a rich dad and how she was going to be a model—fat chance, I thought—and that she could afford taxis when others
have to get the bus. I thought, For two pins I’d say to you, at least my mum and dad was married and still together.”

So that was a point of advantage in today’s youth meritocracy? Wexford would be interested. No one got married anymore, but if your parents were married and
still
married, status was conferred on you.

“You didn’t like her?”

Tanya seemed slowly to have realized that it might be unwise to tell a policeman that a victim of violence was personally antipathetic to you.

“I’m not saying that. You’re putting words into my mouth.”

“Why do you think her body was put here?”

“How should I know?” Now evidently seemed to her the time to tell an essential truth. “I’m not a murderer.”

“Have you a boyfriend, Miss Paine?”

He had astonished her. “What do you want to know that for?”

“If you’d rather not answer …”

She watched him write something down, said, “No, I haven’t, since you ask. Not right now.” It was an admission she would infinitely have preferred not to make and she fidgeted uncomfortably, twisting her body and showing him that she did indeed need to lose weight. “Temporarily, right now, I don’t, no.”

Her phone rang.

Neither Leslie Cousins nor Robert Barrett could give Lynn Fancourt any idea of when the sleeping bag containing Roxane Masood’s body was brought to the parking area. But while Barrett would only repeat monotonously that he hadn’t seen any strange cars about, Cousins was able to state firmly that it hadn’t been there at midnight on Saturday when he returned from taking a fare from Kingsmarkham Station to Forby.

“How can you be so sure?”

“I went down there. To the back fence.”

“Why? Because you saw something?”

Lynn could tell he didn’t want to say. His face had reddened. She remembered the occasional behavior of her father and her brothers and marveled at the curious ways of men who often, even when they have bathrooms or public conveniences not far away …

“You went down there for a natural purpose, did you, Mr. Cousins? To relieve yourself against the hedge?”

“Yeah, well, you know …”

“It was easier in the days when police officers were always male, wasn’t it? Less embarrassing.” Lynn gave the rather hard bright smile she had seen on Karen Malahyde’s face. “You went down to the back fence to relieve yourself and at that time, midnight, there was nothing lying among the nettles under those trees—right?”

“Right,” said Cousins with a sigh of relief.

The bus station might have been a mile away instead of next door for all anyone working there could have seen. The high blank brick wall blocked off everything. On the other side the shoe repairer had closed up and gone home at five on Saturday afternoon, the hairdresser at five-thirty, and the photocopiers at the same time. Only the aromatherapist lived on the premises.

The windows of her first-floor flat looked toward the Engine Driver at the front—she had had those double-glazed—and at the back over the comparative peace of the waste ground. She invited Lynn into a strongly scented living room that obviously also did duty for client consultations. The walls were covered with photographs and highly stylized drawings of flowers and grasses. A much larger photograph was of the aromatherapist herself, apparently
thrown into a state of ecstasy by the scent emanating from a flacon she held to her nose.

She told Lynn her name was Lucinda Lee, which sounded unlikely, but the truth was that people did have unlikely names.

“Half the time I get no sleep here at all,” she complained. “What with the pub at the front and those cars going in and out at the back. They’re threatening to put my rent up and when they do I’m going.”

Had she seen anything untoward between Saturday midnight and Sunday evening? To Lynn’s astonishment she had.

“They don’t usually work that late,” said Lucinda Lee. “Or maybe I should say that early. I’d just got off to sleep, it was all of one in the morning, and this car came in making an unbelievable noise.”

“What sort of noise?”

“I don’t really approve of cars. I mean, they’re the biggest agent of pollution of all, aren’t they? I haven’t got one, I wouldn’t, and I don’t know much about them. I can’t actually drive. But this one sounded as if he’d got here in it, but he couldn’t get it to start again.”

“You mean the engine stalled?”

“Do I? If you say so. Anyway, I got up and looked out of the window. I was going to shout at him. I mean, midnight’s bad enough. They use the end there as a toilet, those fellows, it’s disgusting—are they allowed to do that?”

Lynn said gently, “You were telling me you looked out of the window.”

“Well, I didn’t shout. The car was standing there and he was doing something up the end, bending over something—well, it’s embarrassing, isn’t it? Worse than dogs, at least a dog is natural.”

It was necessary to deflect her from pet subjects of pollution,
Contemporary Cars, and lavatorial lapses. Lynn interrupted her again.

“Could you describe him and describe the car?”

Soon it became plain that the car used was small and red. At first Lucinda Lee had thought the man was Leslie Cousins but he was too tall to be Cousins and too thin. She described him as wearing jeans and a zipper jacket.

Later on Sunday morning, mid-morning it had been, when she looked out again, she had seen the camouflage sleeping bag, but she was so used to seeing rubbish dumped there that she took no further notice.

Brendan Royall had spent the night at Marrowgrave Hall. Karen left her car at its gates and made her way into the grounds, wishing there was more cover than these second-growth trees, scarcely more than saplings, and all these ubiquitous nettles. Wexford had once said to her that we were lucky in that the English countryside wasn’t dangerous as some places were, the worst to fear being adders and nettles, and whoever saw adders these days? Luckily, she didn’t react much to nettle stings.

Rabbits were everywhere, hundreds, in her estimation. They had cropped the turf so that it looked as if someone had shaved it, but still they went on eating what was left. She had been there about fifteen minutes when Royall came out of the front door with a camera. He stood there photographing the rabbits, which must have been too far away to appear as more than dark dots on the film. This done, he began walking forward, and Karen could hear the strange high-pitched whistle he was making. If it was intended to pacify the rabbits or even attract them to him, it failed and had the opposite effect. Each animal seemed to freeze before running helter-skelter for the safety of the bushes.

Then Freya came out, draped like a statue on a Roman
frieze. She said something to him and handed him something. Royall hung the camera around his neck and got into the Winnebago. This was enough to send Karen racing back to her car. By the time the Winnebago emerged she had moved back onto the edge of the ditch and under the shelter of overhanging branches. Royall turned left toward Forby. It was a cumbersome vehicle to be driving along these narrow lanes. He took them slowly and Karen kept a long way behind.

There was no way of bypassing Kingsmarkham from this direction, and Royall took the Winnebago right through the town, causing a severe holdup in York Street, which was already double-parked. He was heading for the bypass site, Karen thought, or at any rate for its environs. She wondered how Damon Slesar was getting on, who, by coincidence really, had the other surveillance task, that of keeping Conrad Tarling under observation. If anyone got the evening off, if there was any letup in the hunt for Sacred Globe, she was meeting Damon for a meal in Kingsmarkham at eight. It wouldn’t be the first time they had been out together, but the first time a meeting between them had happened by design and not by chance or from simple convenience.

Brendan Royall was heading for Myfleet, she supposed, by way of Framhurst. If he was going to one of the camps he would have turned off sooner, certainly by the time they reached Framhurst Cross. The lights were against him, she could see from a long way off, and she slowed almost to a stop. He had moved off up the Myfleet road before she got to the junction and by then the lights had turned red again. Karen thought maybe she wasn’t very good at this and she wondered if Damon was making a better job of it.

A lot of tree people were sitting at tables outside the Framhurst Teashop. She could even see, from the car,
those little pots of nonlactic soy milk. The lights changed and she sprinted up after the Winnebago, but it had disappeared from her view around one, or several, of these bends in the twelve-foot-high lane. Of course she had to meet another car, it was just her luck. She had to reverse about fifty yards before she found, not exactly a lay-by but a slight widening of the lane. She pulled into it and saw the Winnebago, the unmistakable large white mobile caravan, far away on the horizon, pursuing its course over the hillside, and now disappearing into the valley.

She hadn’t much choice but to continue in the same direction, down into the dip, up the hill, bends and windings everywhere, down into the valley, and there ahead of her was a field full of cars. Goland’s Farm. The car park for the tree people’s vans and clunkers. The Winnebago in the middle of it was like a swan in a pond of ugly ducklings. She sat in her car waiting and watching it. It couldn’t have been there for more than five minutes before she arrived.

There were people outside the house that had once been a chapel. She looked at them through her binoculars. A woman and two men, neither of whom was Brendan Royall. He must be sitting in the cab or in the back, the living area. After all, that’s what it was, a place to live in as well as drive, to sleep in, eat in, read in, and probably watch television for all she knew. She moved the car to where she had the Winnebago well in her sights. The binoculars showed her an empty cab.