Road Rage Read online

  HIGH PRAISE FOR

  RUTH RENDELL AND

  ROAD RAGE

  “Rendell writes with such elegance and restraint, with such a literate voice and an insightful mind, she transcends the mystery genre and achieves something almost sublime.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “ABSORBING AND TIMELY … An adroit plotter, Rendell also is an insightful social commentator who poses provocative moral questions within the context of an entertaining story.”

  —Orlando Sentinel

  “RENDELL GIVES LUMINOUS INSIGHTS INTO THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE IN-BETWEEN OF HUMAN NATURE.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “HAUNTING.”

  —Boston Herald

  “PROBING AND AMBITIOUS … a masterful tale of eco-terrorism that chills Chief Inspector Wexford as none of his earlier cases have.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “ABSORBING … The latest Inspector Wexford tale from the redoubtable Rendell has a spectacularly unexpected twist. It is as human drama rather than conventional mystery that Rendell’s books usually excel anyway, and this is no exception.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “RENDELL CREATES VERY REAL CHARACTERS AND WEXFORD IS ONE OF HER BEST … a methodical, extensive search moves the book along to a very surprising ending … a very pleasing mystery.”

  —San Francisco Examiner

  “RENDELL IS ONE OF THE TOP BRITISH PROS, her prose and plot so tightly wrapped, readers who like to solve the mystery before the author reveals it will want to ponder every detail, as if working a crossword puzzle.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “Road Rage has the satisfying qualities of the traditional British mystery—an intriguing puzzle, a stalwart and intelligent detective, and a satisfying ending. But it adds considerable depth to the tradition as well. Wexford is a complex and interesting character in his own right, and the issues which lead to the crimes he grapples with are compelling.”

  —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Random House, Inc.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1997 by Kingsmarkham Enterprises, Ltd.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Crown Publishers, Inc., 201 East 50th Street, New York, New York 10022.

  The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80613-0

  Reprinted by arrangement with Crown Publishers, Inc.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  1

  Wexford was walking in Framhurst Great Wood for the last time. That was how he put it to himself. He had walked there for years, all his life, and walked as well as ever, was as strong, and would continue to be so for a long time yet. Not he, but the wood would change, the wood would scarcely be there. Savesbury Hill would scarcely be there or Stringfield Marsh, and the river Brede, into which the Kingsbrook flowed at Watersmeet, that too would be unrecognizable.

  Nothing would happen yet. Months must pass first. For six months the trees would remain and the uninterrupted view over the hill, the otters in the Brede and the rare Map butterfly in Framhurst Deeps. But he didn’t think he could bear to see it anymore.

  And that will be England gone,

  The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,

  The guildhalls, the carved choirs.

  There’ll be books, it will linger on

  In galleries; but all that remains

  For us will be concrete and tyres.

  He walked among the trees, chestnuts, great gray beeches with sealskin trunks, oaks whose branches had a green coating of lichen. The trees thinned and spread themselves across the grass that rabbits had cropped. He saw that the coltsfoot was in bloom, earliest of wild-flowers. When he was young he had seen blue fritillaries here, plants so localized that they were seen only within a ten-mile radius of Kingsmarkham, but that was a long time ago. When I retire, he had told his wife, I want to live in London so that I can’t see the countryside destroyed.

  A defeatist attitude, she said. You should fight to keep it. I haven’t noticed fighting keeping it, he’d said. She was on the committee of the newly formed KABAL, Kingsmarkham Against the Bypass and Landfill. They had already had one meeting and had sung “We Shall Overcome.” The Deputy Chief Constable had heard of it and said he hoped Wexford wasn’t thinking of joining as there was going to be trouble, trouble of a peace-disturbing and possibly violent kind, in which the Chief Inspector might well be, at least peripherally, involved.

  A little breeze had got up. He came out of Framhurst Great Wood onto the open land and looked up at the ring of trees crowning Savesbury Hill. From here not a roof or tower or spire or silo or pylon could be seen, only birds flying in formation toward Cheriton Forest. The road would pass through the foundations of the Roman villa, the habitat of Araschnia levana, the Map butterfly, found nowhere else in the British Isles, cross the Brede and then the Kingsbrook. Unless the impossible happened and they made a tunnel for it or put it on stilts. Araschnia and the otters would like stilts about as much as they liked concrete, he thought.

  Kingsmarkham wasn’t the only town in England whose bypass had been swallowed up in building and so become just another street. When that happened a new bypass had to be built, and when that too was engulfed, another perhaps. But he would be dead by then.

  With this gloomy thought he returned to his car, which he had left parked in Savesbury hamlet. He always came to his walk by car. Would he be prepared to give up his car for the sake of England? What a question!

  He drove home through Framhurst and Pomfret Monachorum in a pessimistic mood and therefore noticing all the ugly things, the silos like iron sausages upended, the sheds full of battery hens, electricity substations sprouting wires, looking like newly landed aliens, bungalows with red brick garden walls and wrought-iron railings, Leylandii hedges. Nietzsche (or someone) had said that having no taste was worse than having bad taste. Wexford didn’t agree. On a happy day he would have observed newly planted well-chosen trees, roofs rethatched, cattle in the meadows, ducks paddling in couples, looking for nesting sites. But it wasn’t a happy day, not, that is, till he came into his house.

  His wife’s habit was to come out of wherever she was to meet him when something good had happened, something she co
uldn’t wait to tell him. He bent down to pick up the card that had been dropped through the letter box, looked up, and saw her. She was smiling.

  “You’ll never guess,” she said.

  “No, I won’t, so don’t keep me in suspense.”

  “You’re going to be a grandfather again.”

  He hung up his coat. Their daughter Sylvia already had two children and a shaky relationship with her husband. He risked spoiling Dora’s pleasure. “Another scheme for keeping the marriage going?”

  “It’s not Sylvia, Reg. It’s Sheila.”

  He went up to her, put his hands on her shoulders.

  “I said you’d never guess.”

  “No, I never would have. Give me a kiss.” He hugged her. “It’s turned into a happy day.”

  She didn’t know what he meant. “Of course I wish she was married. It’s no good telling me one out of every three children is born out of wedlock.”

  “I wasn’t going to,” he said. “Shall I phone her?”

  “She said she’d be in all day. The baby’s due in September. She took her time telling us, I must say. Give me that card, Reg. Mary Pearson told me her son got a holiday job delivering those cards for this new car hire firm, Contemporary Cars, and he’s taking one to every house in Kingsmarkham. Every house—can you imagine?”

  “ ‘Contemporary Cars’? No one’ll be able to pronounce it. Do we need a new car hire firm?”

  “We need a good one. I do. You’ve always got the car. Go on, phone Sheila. I hope it’s a girl.”

  “I don’t care what it is,” said Wexford, and he began dialing his daughter’s number.

  2

  The route planned for the Kingsmarkham Bypass was to begin at the arterial road (an A road with motorway status) north of Stowerton, pass east of Sewingbury and Myfleet, cut across Framhurst Heath, enter the valley at the foot of Savesbury Hill, bisect Savesbury hamlet, cross Stringfield Marsh, and rejoin the main road north of Pomfret. The minimum of residential area was to be disturbed, Cheriton Forest avoided, and the remains of the Roman villa just circumvented.

  Probably the first remark on the subject to appear in a newspaper was that made by Norman Simpson-Smith of the British Council for Archaeology.

  “The Highways Agency says this road will pass through the periphery of the villa,” he said. “That is like saying an access road being built in London would only cause minor damage to Westminster Abbey.”

  Until then the protest had simply taken the form of representation by various bodies at the inquiry held jointly by the Departments of Transport and the Environment. Friends of the Earth, the Sussex Wildlife Trust, and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds were the obvious ones. Less expected presences were those of the Council for British Archaeology, Greenpeace, the World Wide Fund for Nature, KABAL, and a body that called itself SPECIES.

  But after Simpson-Smith’s comment the protests came, as Wexford put it, not in single spies but in battalions. The environmental groups, whose members numbered two million, sent representatives to look at the site. Marigold Lambourne, of the British Society of Entomologists, was there on behalf of both the scarlet tiger moth and the Map butterfly.

  “Araschnia is found thinly distributed in northeastern France,” she said, “and solely in the British Isles on Framhurst Heath. There are probably two hundred specimens extant. If this bypass is built, there will soon be none. This is not some minuscule fly we are talking about or bacterium invisible to the naked eye but an exquisite butterfly with a two-inch wingspan.”

  Peter Tregear of the Sussex Wildlife Trust said, “This bypass is a project dreamed up in the seventies and approved in the eighties. But there has been a revolution in global thinking since then. It is all utterly inappropriate for the end of the century.”

  A woman wearing a sandwich board with NO, NO, NO TO RAPE OF SAVESBURY painted on it appeared on the hill when the tree fellers moved in. It was June and warm and the sun was shining. She took off the sandwich board and revealed herself entirely naked. The tree fellers, who would have cheered and whistled if she had been young or had been sent to one of them as a strippergram, turned away and set to even more busily with their chain saws. The foreman called the police on his cell phone. Thus the woman, whose name was Debbie Harper, got her photograph—her large shapely body wrapped by then in a policeman’s jacket—in all the national papers and onto the front page of the Sun.

  That was when the tree people came.

  Perhaps Debbie Harper’s picture alerted them to what was going on. Many of them belonged to no known official body. They were New Age Travelers, or some of them were, and if they arrived in cars and caravans, none of these vehicles were parked on or near the site. Debbie Harper had disrupted the tree felling and only four silver birches had so far been cut down. The tree people drove steel bolts into treetrunks at a height calculated to buckle a chain-saw blade when felling began. Then they began building themselves dwellings in the tops of beeches and oaks, tree houses of planks and tarpaulin and approached by ladders which could be pulled up once the occupant was installed.

  That was June and the site of the first of the tree camps was at Savesbury Deeps.

  Debbie Harper, who lived with her boyfriend and three teenage children in Wincanton Road, Stowerton, gave interviews to every newspaper that asked her. She was a member of KABAL and SPECIES, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, but her interviewers weren’t much interested in that. What they liked about her was that she was a Pagan with a capital P, kept ancient Celtic festivals and worshiped deities called Ceridwen and Nudd, and posed for Today wearing just three leaves, not fig leaves but rhubarb, these being more appropriate for an English summer.

  “We’re unhappy about the spiking of the trees,” Dora said on her return from a meeting of KABAL. “Apparently the chain saws can come apart and maul workmen’s arms. Isn’t that an awful thought?”

  “This is just the beginning,” her husband said.

  “What do you mean, Reg?”

  “Remember Newbury? They had to get in six hundred security guards to protect the contractors. And someone cut the brake pipe on a coach carrying the guards to the site.”

  “Have you talked to anyone who actually wants this bypass?”

  “I can’t say I have,” said Wexford.

  “Do you want it?”

  “You know I don’t. But I’m not prepared to give up driving a car. I’m not happy about sitting in traffic jams and feeling my blood pressure go up. Like most of us, I want to eat my cake and have it.” He sighed. “I daresay Mike wants it.”

  “Oh, Mike,” she said, but affectionately.

  Wexford had broken his resolution not to go back to Framhurst Great Wood. The first time he went was to watch wildlife experts building new badger setts (with ramps and swing doors like cat flaps) in the heart of the wood. The tree houses in the second camp were already being built, which was perhaps enough to drive the badgers to their new homes. The second time was after the tree fellers refused to endanger their lives by using chain saws on trees whose trunks were embedded with nails or bound with wire. A few felled trees lay about. The Highways Agency was seeking eviction orders against the tree dwellers, but meanwhile another camp took shape at Elder Ditches and then another on the borders of the Great Wood.

  Wexford climbed up Savesbury Hill, again, he told himself, for the last time, from where the four camps could clearly be seen. One was almost at the foot of the hill, one half a mile away at Framhurst Copses, a third on the threatened verge of the marsh, and the fourth and farthest away half a mile from the northernmost reaches of Stowerton. The countryside still looked much as it always had, except that a field in the neighborhood of Pomfret Monachorum was packed with earthmoving equipment, diggers, and bulldozers. These things were almost always painted yellow, he reflected, a dull, dead yellow, the color of custard that had been kept in the fridge too long. Presumably yellow showed up better against green than red or blue.

  He walked downhill
on the far side, then wished he hadn’t, for he found himself up to his thighs in stinging nettles. Their hairy pointed leaves failed to sting through his clothes but he had to keep his arms and hands held high. The nettles filled an area as big as a small meadow and Wexford was thinking that if the road had to go somewhere it would be no bad thing for it to pass through here, when he saw the butterfly.

  That it was Araschnia levana, he knew at once. Among all the tens of thousands of words that had been written lately about Savesbury and Framhurst, he remembered reading that Araschnia fed on stinging nettles in Savesbury Deeps. He advanced a little until he was a yard from it. The butterfly was orange-colored, with a chocolate-brown pattern and flashes of white, and the underwings had a sky-blue riverlike border. You could see why it was called the Map.

  It was alone. There were only two hundred of them, perhaps now not so many. When he was a child people had caught butterflies in nets, gassed them in killing bottles, attached them to cards on pins. It seemed appalling now. Only a few years ago people who opposed bypasses were looked on as cranks, loony weirdos, hippie dropouts, and their activities on a par with anarchy, communism, and mayhem. That too had changed. Conventional figures of the Establishment were as determined in their opposition as that man he could now see peering out between canvas flaps through the fork in a tree branch. Someone had told him that Sir Fleance and Lady McTear had marched in a demonstration organized by supermarket millionaires Wael and Anouk Khoori.

  Like most Englishmen he had his reservations about the European Union, but here, he thought, was one instance when he wouldn’t mind an absolute veto coming from Strasbourg.

  Toward the end of the month, the British Society of Lepidopterists created a new feeding ground for Araschnia, a stinging nettle plantation on the western side of Pomfret Monachorum. A journalist on the Kingsmarkham Courier wrote a satirical but not very funny piece about this being the first time in the history of horticulture anyone had been known to plant nettles instead of pulling them up. The nettles, naturally, flourished from the start.