Road Rage (41 page)

Despair he had seen before in all its forms. This was just another example. To suggest counseling to this woman, to suggest some kind of bereavement support, would be insulting. All he could do was look at her and say, feeling how wretchedly inadequate it was, “I am very, very sorry. You have my deepest sympathy.”

As he left his phone began to bleep. He sat in his car and listened to Burden’s account of the car with two men in it who had driven into the car park of the Concreation building. They had got out, opened the trunk, and lifted out a black plastic bag, sealed at both ends and the length of an average human body.

“I really thought this was it, Reg. The only thing was that one of them could easily lift it on his own. But he held it the way one
would
carry a body—carry a living person, for that matter.”

“What was it?”

“They’d been clearing out a loft,” said Burden. “It was the usual sort of rubbish from a loft, old newspapers, old clothes, most of it recyclable.”

“Then why didn’t they take it to the dump to be recycled?”

“They explained all that. They were scared stiff. Originally they’d been going to stick all the stuff in dustbins—they’re brothers-in-law, by the way—but they’ve got environmentally conscious neighbors that they didn’t want seeing paper and cloth disposed of like that. But the dump, with the recycling bins, is three miles away, while Concreation’s yard, with a dumpster that was brought in empty yesterday, that was two minutes from home.”

Wexford sat in his car for a few moments, but it was too near Hennessy’s, it would attract attention. He drove back to Kingsmarkham and along the deserted, coldly lit High Street. All those shops, he thought, with bright lights in their windows and not a soul about to look into
them. Cars in plenty, though, parked cars whose owners were in the Olive and Dove, the Green Dragon, the York Wine Bar, and who would move on to Kingsmarkham’s only nightclub, the Scarlet Angel, when it opened at ten.

The sky was dark now, dark and bright, scattered with stars. There was no moon, or no moon had yet risen. He tried to remember whether there had been a moon on the previous night and if there had been, whether it had been full or a mere curve of light. His phone rang again while he was parked in Queen Street.

Barry Vine. He was at the station. One of the taxis in the Contemporary Cars fleet had just dropped a fare on the station approach. The fare had one large suitcase and a long bundle, so heavy that the driver couldn’t lift it out of the trunk. A porter was sought but, of course, there had been no porters at Kingsmarkham Station for twenty years.

“The chap just disappeared,” Vine said. “I mean, I thought he had. There was this bundle lying there on the pavement, the cab had gone, and this fellow had vanished into the station. I was looking at it when he came back.”

“What was it?” said Wexford for the second time that evening.

“Golf clubs.”

“I trust it’s not still there.”

“Someone found him a cart in what used to be the lost-and-found department.”

He looked at his watch. It was nine. He would go to Rhombus Road, Stowerton, and then to Savesbury House on his way to the Weir Theatre. Maybe not to go into either place, just to run his eye over them, to check for he hardly knew what. Sacred Globe, after all, had said Kingsmarkham, not Stowerton or Framhurst.

Nicky Weaver must have had the same idea, for she was in her car parked in front of a house a few doors down
from Mrs. Peabody’s. This time Wexford interrupted the surveillance. He went over to her car, tapped on the window, and got in beside her. She turned to him her pretty face, the intent eyes, the look of sharp intelligence. He saw all this in the momentary light brought by the door opening. Her geometrically cut black hair, turned under at the tips, reminded him that when he was young such a style was called a pageboy. And he saw her tiredness too, the permanent strained pallor of the woman who has a high-powered job and is a wife and mother too.

“Has anything happened?” he asked her.

“A man called at the house. At about seven. I think he must be Audrey Barker’s fiancé. Anyway, he hugged her on the doorstep and he’s been inside ever since. Mrs. Peabody went out. I thought she was being tactful, leaving them alone together, but she’d only gone to the corner shop for a pint of milk.”

“That Indian place Trotter used to live above?”

“Small world, isn’t it?” said Nicky.

“They won’t bring Kitty Struther’s body here. They’ll do something entirely unexpected.”

Driving in the Framhurst direction, he passed the start of the bypass site. If it was never built and those now grass-grown earth hillocks never removed, scholars in future ages would describe them as tumuli or the burial mounds of Saxon heroes. But it would be built. It was a matter, not of protest, not of environmental assessment, but only of time.

Framhurst was as empty as the town but for three boys standing by their motorbikes and smoking outside the bus shelter. Bright strip lighting in the window of the butcher’s, illuminating nothing but empty white trays and sprigs of plastic parsley. The tea shop locked up and its canopy furled. Night obscured the view of the valley from the ascending lane. It was merely a dark spread, punctured
by many lights, a mirroring of the starlit sky. The winding river had vanished, but the Weir Theatre shone brightly, a torch on the invisible waterside.

DC Pemberton was in his car outside the gates of Savesbury House.

“It’s the only way in, sir. I checked. But the grounds are big and there’s only fences or hedges around them. Anyone could get in almost anywhere across the fields.”

“Stay where you are. But they won’t come here. It’s too far out. It’s not Kingsmarkham.”

Ten-fifteen. The play wouldn’t yet be over, but he would drive down to Stringfield Mill, take it slowly. How pleasant and comfortable it must be not to be endowed with imagination! He didn’t want his, he’d had enough of it, anyone could have it. But imagination wasn’t something you could get rid of, any more than you could determine not to love. Or not to be afraid.

That was the worst thing, thinking of her fear. All her life she had had someone else to take the strain, to—what were the words of the marriage service?—love her, comfort her, honor and keep her. Literally, it appeared, those things had been done for Kitty Struther. By parents once, by a husband of course, by a son too. She had never lived alone, earned her own living, known want or even straitened circumstances, never probably even traveled alone. But now she was alone. For more than ten days she had lived on a diet the likes of which she had never previously known, had slept—if she had slept—in the kind of bed she had never even seen before, had been cold and hungry, deprived of all the small comforts of life, without a bath or a change of clothes. And now they had taken her husband from her and were going to kill her.

Imagination, the curse of the thinking policeman. He laughed wryly to himself. The lights of the Weir Theatre blazed ahead of him, dazzling out the stars. He put the car
into the car park, walked slowly up the lane toward the river. Ten minutes yet before the curtains would fall. Consolations were always to be found in this life and one thing he could be glad about was that he hadn’t just sat through three hours of
Extinction
.

A gate in the stone wall led into the mill’s gardens. It would provide a shortcut and a pleasant one. He unlatched the gate and pushed it open. The lights were all directed away from here and the gardens lay in a cloud of pale shadow, but as he looked southward he saw the moon rising, a perfect orange-colored crescent. A waning moon, and now he remembered. It had been full the night Dora came home, eight days before.

Most flowers close up at night. He found himself surrounded by flowers whose blossoms had become buds again, shut at dusk but still giving off their various perfumes. But the roses, whose scent had come to him when he was here before, remained open, rosy-gold clusters on long stems and flat yellow faces pressed against the mossy gray wall.

Was this a private garden? Godwin’s own garden? There was no sign that visitors to the theater ever came out here. He turned a bend in the path and saw Godwin himself sitting on the topmost of the crescent-shaped steps that splayed out from closed French windows. The wall behind him was hung with roses, white and red, and with other climbers whose flowers had folded themselves away for the night.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m using your private gardens as a shortcut. I didn’t realize there were parts of the mill grounds shut off from the public.”

Godwin smiled and made a deprecating gesture with his hand. “The public won’t want it when the bypass comes.”

“It will pass very near here?”

“At the nearest point, about a hundred yards from the end of this garden. I was born here—not
here
, I mean, but in Framhurst—and I lived here till I was eighteen. It’s twelve years since I came back. There have been more changes in those twelve years than in all the rest—I won’t tell you how many. Too many.”

“All changes for the worse?”

“I think so. Destruction and spoliation but additions as well. More petrol stations, more white and yellow paint on the roads, more road signs, more billboards, more stupid useless information in print everywhere. That Framhurst’s been twinned with a town in Germany and another one in France, for instance. That Sewingbury is the floral capital of Sussex. That Savesbury Deeps has been designated a picnic area. And all the new houses. The Dragon pub in Kingsmarkham renamed Tipples and Grove’s wine bar turned into a nightclub and called the Scarlet Angel …”

Wexford nodded. He was going to say something that he didn’t believe about progress and inevitability, but he said nothing at all for a moment because he was looking at the climber which ascended the wall to a height of perhaps ten feet between the red rose and the white.

It was a delicate-leaved plant with fine pointed leaves and curling tendrils. Flowers it had had and by day they must make a considerable show but now all were closed up, some furled like rolled umbrellas, others withered. He spoke now. He said to Godwin, “What is it? This plant, what is it?”

“Now, look.” Godwin got to his feet. His voice, formerly so gentle and meditative, changed in a flash and became immediately surly. “Now, look, if you’re going to search for hallucinatory drugs or whatever in garden plants, you’ve got your work cut out. There are hundreds of them. Ordinary poppies, for instance. But this isn’t
cannabis, you know. This morning glory, it’s quite hard to grow, it doesn’t bear much, you wouldn’t get enough seeds to fill an eggcup, you …”

“Mr. Godwin. Please. I am not in the drug squad. I am looking for two hostages at present in the hands of those who abducted them twelve days ago. This plant”—Wexford thought he could postpone too detailed an explanation—“this plant, or one like it, may be visible from the place where they are kept.”

“Well, for God’s sake, they’re not kept here.”

Wexford looked about him, at the gardens, the rising moon, the flower-hung rear wall of the mill. No out-buildings, no sheds or garages in sight. The moonlight, strangely white for a radiance that proceeded from that golden crescent, now lit everything, showed every detail of the garden.

“I know that,” he said. “Please don’t be so defensive, Mr. Godwin. I am not accusing you of anything. I only want your help.”

The look he got was warmer. There couldn’t be much doubt in the mind of anyone who knew about these things that Godwin was guilty and suspicious because he had himself sampled a good many of these garden drugs, probably grew cannabis somewhere, smoked catalpa beans, chewed magic mushrooms. The list, as he had implied himself, was endless. But now was no time for taking an interest in that.

“Tell me about this plant, will you? It’s blue?”

“Look.” Godwin picked a closed flower off a stem. He unwound the spiraled petals and disclosed an interior the brightest and richest of sky blues. “Nice color, wouldn’t you say? The wild one that grows here as a weed is white, of course, and its little cousin is the pink convolvulus.”

“Does it come up every year?” Wexford sought for the unfamiliar word. “Is it a perennial?”

“I grew it from seed.” Godwin’s geniality had returned. “Come into the theater. I’ll buy you a drink while you’re waiting for your ladies. Mind you,” he added in a challenging tone, “I’d kidnap a few people myself if I thought it’d stop that goddamned bypass.”

Wexford followed him up the steps, around the side of the mill, out of the moonlit shadows, and into bright artificial light. He held in his hand the flower bud and the leaf Godwin had given him. Where had he seen buds and leaves like that before? Seen them very recently?

“Would it move?”

They were in the empty bar now, Wexford confining himself to sparkling water, Godwin with a pint of lager. He said, “How do you mean, move?”

“Would the flowers be out in one place one day and another the next?”

“Each one only lasts a day, so broadly speaking, yes. You’re quite likely to get all the flowers out in one patch and then another lot out on a higher patch. If I make myself clear. Mind you, they wouldn’t come out at all on a really dull day.”

On a dull day, such as they had had recently … Where had he seen that plant before?

H
is car phone was silent. There were no messages on the phone at home. When he had driven Dora to their home and Jenny to hers, when Dora had gone to bed and at once to sleep, he put through calls to all those people who were on the watch. There was nothing. The town was quiet, less busy at night than usual, less traffic, it seemed. Only two incidents had been reported: an attempted break-in at a shop in Queen Street, a case of driving over the permitted limit.

It was eleven-fifty. Nearly five hours had passed since Sacred Globe’s deadline. He realized how he had been measuring this case out in minutes. Time, time, it was all a matter of time. Had they killed her? Would they kill her? Her body could even now be no more than half a mile from where he was, sitting silently in the dark in his own house.