Road Rage (44 page)

“We have to believe that all these people thought their plan would work. They thought that taking hostages would stop the bypass because they thought government would give in. This wasn’t the Middle East, this wasn’t Thailand. This was England and English people holding English people, a monstrous act that would have the desired result. They really thought that. Slesar thought that.”

“He had some special reason for being opposed to the bypass?”

“I suppose you could say that,” Wexford said thoughtfully.
“Like Andrew Struther, he was concerned for his parents, though in his case it was their livelihood, not a question of his future inheritance. All he could inherit would be a small holding out on the old bypass, not far from the Brigadier pub.”

“That place where they sell veg and pick-your-own strawberries?” asked Burden. “I didn’t know that.”

“Most businesses on the old bypass will be threatened by the new bypass,” said Wexford. “The old one won’t be used much, or that’s the theory, there won’t be many people stopping off for PYO strawberries. Slesar was against the bypass because it would bankrupt his parents. His father grew fruit. His mother had a subsidiary business spinning thread and weaving garments from animal hair.”

“But how did he get into all this?”

“Through SPECIES, I think. Probably at one of their rallies. Prior to the one that’s just ended in Wales they had one in Kent in the spring. Very likely he met Tarling there and the rest followed. They would have worked pretty hard on him, the Struthers particularly, because they really needed someone like him, an insider.”

“Why do you say the Struthers ‘particularly,’ Reg?”

Wexford said bitterly, “Struther’s a rich man. Not far off a millionaire.” He shrugged. “Happily for all of us in this country—there are still some things to be thankful for—there is no one a rich man can bribe to stop something like this bypass. It can’t be done. But the Damon Slesars of this world are corruptible. I don’t know this yet, but my theory is that Struther bribed Slesar considerably, probably went on raising the price until Slesar yielded. No doubt he got enough to set his parents up elsewhere even if they did lose their livelihood.

“Being their mole inside the force,” Wexford went on, “Slesar knew Mike Burden’s address and phone number
for Tarling to phone there with the second message—it was usually the voices of Tarling and Andrew Struther that were heard—and knew I would be at the Holgates’ on Saturday afternoon to receive another message there. Of course the sleeping bag that Frenchie Collins bought in Brixton was the one in which Roxane Masood’s body was found, as she told Slesar once she was alone with him.”

“She knew?” Burden asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe she just took against Karen Malahyde. Anyway, whatever she told Slesar wasn’t going to find its way back to me.”

“Poor Karen,” said Burden.

“Yes. But I don’t think it had gone very deep with her. And knowing what she now knows will have its effect. While she was tailing Brendan Royall, Slesar should have been tailing Conrad Tarling. Needless to say, he wasn’t. Tarling went back and forth between the camp and Savesbury House as much as he pleased. Doubtless, he went down to Wiltshire, also whenever he pleased. At some point, on his clothes, he brought back moth wing dust from Queringham Hall and by chance transferred it to the room where the hostages were kept.”

Wexford was silent for a moment. They were all thinking, he supposed, the same sort of thing, the horror of a police officer succumbing in this way, and with bribery added to treachery. And then he wondered what thought had passed through Slesar’s mind as he saw Tarling at that window with the gun, saw his fanatical face, the shotgun aimed. He had stared, the blood drawn from his face, his hands rising as if in an ineffectual warding off of death.

“You said something about the place where the hostages were kept,” said the Chief Constable in a welcome changing of the subject.

Wexford nodded. “A lot of these old houses that have
been farms as well as country houses have a dairy. Mostly they’re just used to store stuff in, repositories for junk. This one probably was. My wife called it a basement room, but it wasn’t really, just rather dark and with one small window rather high up. I expect they renewed the door, had new locks fitted, and so on. Of course they didn’t dare get a building firm in to convert a cupboard into a washroom, but Tarling knew someone who would do it and say nothing, someone who lived nowhere and would very likely disappear after a few weeks.

“So they took their hostages, and I think we know already exactly how they did that. Of course, in the case of the Struthers, Owen and Kitty just walked across from the main house and put their hoods on outside the dairy door. Then they had their fun, playing the hysteric and the brave soldier. I suppose it helped pass the time for them until Owen staged his mock escape and they were taken away, first back to the comforts of Savesbury House and then off to London to hide themselves in Andrew’s house. Incidentally, I wonder what Tarling thought when she carried her act as far as spitting at him. Still, you don’t give the boss a smack in the face.

“It must have been a shock for them when they realized they’d got my wife and they would have realized much earlier than I thought at first. They didn’t have to know the name or be told who I was. Slesar knew on the day he came along with the other two from the Regional Crime Squad. No doubt he was on the blower to Sacred Globe immediately.”

“You’ve done well, Reg,” the Chief Constable said.

“Not well,” Wexford said. “I could have saved a man’s life and I didn’t.”

*   *   *

Dora said she ought to have known. She ought to have guessed about the Struthers. After all, they weren’t actors, were they?

“Everyone’s an actor these days,” said Wexford. “They learn it off the TV. Look at all those people who get interviewed after disasters. They’ve no shyness, they all behave as if they’ve learned scripts by heart or got monitors in front of them.”

“Why did they let me go, Reg?”

“At first I thought it was because they’d found out who you were, through Gary and Quilla. But that wasn’t so. They knew who you were. They knew because Slesar knew. Incidentally, he probably wore gloves not because he had something wrong with his hands, but to make you think there was something wrong with them. And they didn’t release you because they thought you might have seen the morning glory—”

Dora interrupted him. “I don’t understand why they didn’t just cut that thing down.”

“Probably because Kitty Struther wouldn’t let them. She grew it from seed, remember. No doubt she loved it. On no account are you to cut down my
Ipomoea
, she’d have said, and you don’t argue with the boss. No, they let you go because they’d planted false clues on you.”

“They did what?”

“You were my wife, so when you got home they knew the first thing that would happen would be questioning you in depth and subjecting your clothes to forensic tests. If Roxane, say, or Ryan had been released, who knows what would have happened to their clothes before they reached us? Maybe gone into a washing machine or at any rate been carefully brushed by Mother.” Wexford paused for a moment, thinking of Clare Cox, who would never again tend her child’s clothes. He sighed.

“They knew that would never happen here. They
knew what would happen and did happen, that I’d drop your clothes into a sterile bag as soon as you took them off. They planted clues on that skirt of yours. Iron filings. Cats’ hairs. Easy for Slesar to obtain from his mother who spins and weaves with pet animal hair. Just as they made sure you’d carry away a picture in your mind of a tattoo on a man’s arm and a smell of a man with some kind of kidney disease, a tattoo easily achieved with a transfer and a smell produced by pocketing a tissue soaked in nail varnish remover.

“A lot of this was Slesar’s brainstorm. And some of it, I think—I hope I’m not being paranoid—was Slesar getting back at me. He bore a grudge against me, you see, for what he saw as my humiliating him in public.”

“Did you do that?”

“Let’s say he saw it that way.”

She shook her head wonderingly. “Reg, you’ve accounted for them all but the Driver. You still don’t know who the Driver was.”

“I do. He’ll be arrested tomorrow. And then those unfortunate Tarlings may be the only parents in Britain with three sons serving life sentences. The Driver was Conrad’s brother Colum.”

“Isn’t he in a wheelchair?”

“Anyone can sit in a wheelchair, Dora. So much of it, as his father told me, was in ‘his poor mind.’ You did say he walked oddly, stiffly, but none of us thought much of that.”

“So it’s all over?”

“All over. It was all for nothing. A young woman with all her life before her is dead, a misguided young man is dead, a boy who can’t tell truth from fantasy is going to present the shrinks and social workers with a problem for years to come, and six people are going to prison. And the bypass will still be built.”

“Not if we can help it,” said Dora stoutly. “There’s a meeting of KABAL tonight to prepare for next Saturday’s demo. If all this has taught us anything it’s that the Brede Valley and Savesbury Hill are worth fighting for. There’ll be twenty thousand people pouring into Kingsmarkham at the weekend.”

He sighed and nodded. Probably this wasn’t the first case of an investigating officer being entirely in agreement with the aims of hostage-takers while hating the way they tried to secure their ransom. Probably not—if it mattered. He smiled at his wife.

“And, Reg, after that I’d like to go up and see Sheila and the baby for a few days.” She looked at him with a half smile. “If you’ll drive me to the station.”

The Keys to the Street
Blood Lines
The Crocodile Bird
Going Wrong
The Bridesmaid
Talking to Strange Men
Live Flesh
The Tree of Hands
The Killing Doll

Master of the Moor
The Lake of Darkness
Make Death Love Me
A Judgement in Stone
A Demon in My View
The Face of Trespass
One Across, Two Down
Vanity Dies Hard
To Fear a Painted Devil

CHIEF INSPECTOR WEXFORD NOVELS

Simisola
Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter
The Veiled One
An Unkindness of Ravens
Speaker of Mandarin
Death Notes
A Sleeping Life
Shake Hands Forever
Some Lie and Some Die

Murder Being Once Done
No More Dying Then
A Guilty Thing Surprised
The Best Man to Die
Wolf to the Slaughter
Sins of the Fathers
A New Lease of Death
From Doon with Death

BY RUTH RENDELL WRITING AS BARBARA VINE

The Brimstone Wedding
No Night Is Too Long
Anna’s Book
King Solomon’s Carpet

Gallowglass
The House of Stairs
A Fatal Inversion
A Dark-Adapted Eye