Road Rage Page 2

  The badger movers set about a similar reversal of the usual order of things. Instead of preserving habitats, they were obliged to destroy them. In opening and sealing up a sett that, if it remained in occupation, would have been in the direct path of the new bypass, they had first to cut away a dense mass of brambles. The growth of brambles had been vigorous, indicating it was new this year, springing from heavily pruned stock, and the prickly trailing runners were heavy with green fruit. They lifted the cut mass with gloved hands and found something lying beneath that made them recoil, one of them shout out, and another retreat under the trees to vomit.

  What they found was the badly decomposed body of a young girl.

  Kingsmarkham police had no real doubts as to who this was. But they made no announcement of their guess as to identity. It was the newspapers and television that named her, with few reservations, as Ulrike Ranke, the missing German hitchhiker.

  She had been nineteen, a law student at Bonn University, the only daughter of a lawyer and a teacher from Wiesbaden, and she had come to England the previous April to spend Easter at the home of a girl who had been an au pair in her parents’ house. The girl’s family lived in Aylesbury and Ulrike had set out to make her journey on the cheap. It had never been quite clear why. Her parents had supplied her with enough money for a return air ticket to Heathrow and her train fare. However, Ulrike had hitched across France and taken the ferry to Dover. That much was known.

  “I don’t find it at all mysterious,” Wexford had said at the time. “I would have if she’d done what her parents told her to do. That would have been astonishing, that would have been a mystery.”

  “What an old cynic you are,” said Inspector Burden.

  “No, I’m not. I’m a realist, I don’t like being called a cynic. A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. I’m not like that, I just don’t like mealy-mouthed hypocrisy. You’ve had teenage children, you know what they are. My Sheila used to do that stuff all the time. Why spend good money when you can do it for free? That’s their attitude. They need the money for music and the means of playing it, black jeans, and prohibited substances.”

  It seemed he was right, for on the girl’s body, in the pocket of her Calvin Klein black jeans, were twenty-five amphetamine tablets and a packet containing just under fifty grams of cannabis. There was nothing on her to show that she was Ulrike Ranke and no money. Her father identified her. The man who had raped and strangled her two months before either had not recognized the contents of her pocket for what they were or had no use for them. The money that she had carried on her in notes, all five hundred pounds of it, was gone.

  Framhurst Copses had not previously been searched. None of the countryside around Kingsmarkham had come under scrutiny. There was no reason to suppose Ulrike Ranke had passed this way. Kingsmarkham was miles from the route she might have been expected to take from Dover to London. But someone had put her body in a woodland declivity and hidden her under the fast-growing tendrils of blackberry bushes. In the opinion of the pathologist and forensic examiners the body had not been moved, she had been killed where she lay.

  Because there had been no search, there had been no inquiries either. But immediately the identity of the dead girl was announced, William Dickson, the licensee of a public house named the Brigadier (he called it a hotel), phoned the police with information. Once he had seen photographs of Ulrike Ranke in the Kingsmarkham Courier he recognized her as the girl who had come into his saloon bar in early April.

  The Brigadier was on the old Kingsmarkham bypass, one of those madhouses put up in the late thirties, pseudo-Tudor, thickly half-timbered, apparently huge but in fact only one room deep. A car park behind was overshadowed by a very large prefabricated building, designed as a dance hall (Dickson called it a ballroom). The car park was surfaced in macadam but all around the house and the area in front was graveled. Very unpleasant to walk on, as Detective Sergeant Barry Vine remarked to Burden, worse than a shingle beach.

  “It was just before closing time on Wednesday, April third,” Dickson said when the two policemen came in.

  “Why didn’t you say so before?” said Burden.

  He and Vine were sitting at the bar. Alcohol had been offered and refused by both. Vine was drinking mineral water, which he had paid for.

  “What do you mean, before?”

  “When she went missing. Her picture was all over the papers then. And the TV.”

  “I only look at the local,” said Dickson. “All I ever see on the telly is sport. Folks in the bar trade don’t get a lot of leisure, you know. I’m not exactly overburdened with quality time.”

  “But you recognized her as soon as you saw her in the Courier?”

  “Nice-looking chick, she was.” Dickson looked over his shoulder, reassured himself of something, and grinned. “Very tasty.”

  “Oh, yes? Tell us about April the third.”

  She had come into the bar at about ten-twenty, a young blond girl “dressed like they all dressed” in black but with some sort of jacket. An anorak or parka or duffel, he didn’t know, but he thought it was brown. She had a shoulder bag, a big overstuffed shoulder bag, not a backpack. How could he remember so well after nearly three months?

  “I’ve got a photo, haven’t I?”

  “You what?” said Vine.

  “There was a hen party going on,” said Dickson. “Girl getting married at Kingsmarkham Registry Office on the Thursday. She asked the wife to take their picture, her and her friends round their table, and she handed her this camera, and just as the wife took their picture this German girl came in. So she’s in the picture, in the background.”

  “And you’ve a copy of this photograph? I thought you said it wasn’t your camera?”

  “The girl—the bride, that is—she sent us a copy. Thought we’d like to have it, seeing as it was in the Brigadier. You can see it if you want.”

  “Oh, yes, we want,” said Burden.

  Ulrike Ranke was well behind the group of laughing women and out of the brightest lights, but it was plainly she. Her coat might have been brown or gray or even dark blue but her jeans were unmistakably black. A string of pearls could just be glimpsed lying against the dark stuff of her blouse or sweater. The canvas and leather bag on her right shoulder looked overfull and heavy. She wore an anxious expression.

  “When I saw that picture in the Courier I said to the wife to find that photo and the minute I set eyes on it I realized.”

  “What did she come in here for? A drink?”

  “I told her she couldn’t have a drink,” Dickson said virtuously. “I’d called for last orders. It was knocking ten-thirty. It wasn’t a drink she wanted, she said, she wanted to know if she could make a phone call. Comical way of talking she had, like an accent, couldn’t get her tongue round some words, but we get all sorts in here.”

  It never ceased to surprise Burden that the British, the vast majority of whom can speak no language but their own, are not above mocking those foreign visitors whose command of English is less than perfect. He asked if Ulrike had made her phone call.

  “I’m coming to that,” said Dickson. “She asked to use the phone—called it a ‘telephone,’ long time since I’ve heard that expression—and said she wanted a taxi. That’s who she’d be phoning, a taxi firm, and did I know of one. Well, naturally, we get a lot of calls for taxis out here. I said she’d find a number by the phone, we got a card stuck up on the board by the phone. I said she’d have to use the pay phone, I wasn’t having her using the one in the office.”

  “And did she?”

  “Sure she did. She came back in here. The clientele was all gone by then and the wife and I was having a clear-up. She started telling us how she’d hitched a lift from Dover in a lorry. The driver had dropped her off here, he was parking for the night in a lay-by. I said to the wife I reckon she was lucky he did drop her off, good-looking young kid like that.”

  “She wasn’t lucky,” s
aid Burden.

  Dickson looked up, startled. “No, well, you know what I mean.”

  “She called a taxi? D’you know which one?”

  “It was Contemporary Cars. It was their card stuck up by the phone. There was other numbers on a bit of paper but that was the only card.”

  “And the taxi came?”

  For the first time Dickson looked less than proud of himself, the picture of rectitude and earnest integrity slipping slightly.

  “I don’t rightly know. I mean, she said they’d said fifteen minutes, they’d said it’d be Stan in fifteen minutes, and when I went up to bed like half an hour I looked out of the window and she was gone, so I reckon he turned up all right.”

  “Are you saying,” said Burden, “that she didn’t wait for him in here? You sent her outside to wait for him?”

  “Look, this is a hotel, not a hostel …”

  “This is a public house,” said Vine.

  “Look, the wife had gone to bed, she’d had a heavy day, and I was clearing up. We’d had a hell of a day. It wasn’t that cold out. It wasn’t raining.”

  “She was nineteen years old,” said Burden. “A young girl, a foreign visitor. You sent her out there to wait in the dark at eleven o’clock at night.”

  Dickson turned his back. “I’ll think twice,” he muttered, “before I phone your lot with information next time.”

  * * *

  Later that day, after hours of questioning, Stanley Trotter, a driver for Contemporary Cars and a partner with Peter Samuel in the company, was arrested for the murder of Ulrike Ranke.

  3

  Sheila Wexford intended to have her baby at home. Home births were fashionable and Sheila, her father said with a kind of fond sourness, had always been a dedicated follower of fashion. He would have liked her to go into the world’s best obstetrics hospital, wherever that might be, some four weeks before the birth was due. When labor began he would have preferred the top obstetrician in the country to be present, along with a couple of caring medical assistants and a troop of top-of-their-finals-year midwives. An epidural must be administered after the first contraction, and should labor continue for more than half an hour, a cesarean be performed—a keyhole one if possible.

  That, at any rate, was what Dora said his preference would be.

  “Nonsense,” said Wexford. “I just don’t like the idea of her having it at home.”

  “She’ll do what she likes. She always does.”

  “Sheila isn’t selfish,” said Sheila’s father.

  “I didn’t say she was. I said she did what she liked.”

  Wexford considered this contradiction in terms. “You’ll go up and be with her, won’t you?”

  “I hadn’t thought of it. I’m not a midwife. I’ll certainly go after the baby’s born.”

  “Funny, isn’t it?” said Wexford. “We’ve come a long way in sexual enlightenment, the equality of women and men, got rid of the old shibboleths. Men are present at the births of their children as a matter of course. Women breast-feed in public. Women talk publicly about all sorts of gynecological things they’d once have died before mentioning. But you can’t imagine that there’s anyone who wouldn’t balk, to say the least, at the idea of a father being present when his daughter gives birth, can you? You see, I’ve shocked you. You’re blushing.”

  “Well, naturally I am, Reg. Surely you don’t want to be present at Sheila’s …?”

  “Lying-in? Of course I don’t. I’d probably pass out. I’m only saying it’s an anomaly that you can be there and I can’t.”

  Sheila lived in London with the father of her child, an actor called Paul Curzon, in a mews off Welbeck Street. The baby would be born there. Wexford, whose knowledge of London was shaky, checked it out in his Geographer’s Atlas, and found that Harley Street was near enough for comfort. Harley Street was full of doctors, as everyone knew, and hospitals too probably.

  Contemporary Cars was housed in a prefabricated building of temporary appearance on an otherwise empty lot in Station Road. It had once been the site of the Railway Arms, a pub which was less and less frequented, its onetime customers finding beer prices exorbitant and drunk-driving laws draconian. The Railway Arms closed down, then was pulled down. Nothing else was built and there were those in Kingsmarkham who called the windswept litter-strewn site, fringed with nettles and surrounded by spindly trees, an eyesore. The arrival of the converted mobile home, in their eyes, hardly improved matters, but Sir Fleance McTear, chairman of both KABAL and the Kingsmarkham Historical Society, said that in view of the projected bypass it was the least of their worries.

  Peter Samuel, the self-styled chief executive of Contemporary Cars, told everyone his business would soon be moving into permanent premises, but so far there had been no sign of this. The old Railway Arms site offered plenty of parking space for taxis and very convenient exits and entrances into the station approach. It was in these trailerlike offices with their stowaway tables, shower cabinet, and pull-down beds from former days on the road that Burden first interviewed Stanley Trotter.

  At first Trotter denied all knowledge of Ulrike Ranke. His memory jogged by Vine’s quoting from William Dickson and mentioning the German girl’s accent, Trotter eventually recalled taking Ulrike’s phone call—taking the call, not driving out to the Brigadier. He had intended to do that himself, he said, but was due to pick up someone off the last train from London, so passed the job on to one of the other drivers, Robert Barrett.

  The difficulty there was that when questioned, Barrett had no recollection of his movements on the night of April 3 beyond being sure that he had fares throughout the evening, it was a busy evening. The whole week had been busy—something to do with Easter, he thought. But he was sure of one thing: he had never, in the five months he had worked for Contemporary Cars, picked up a fare from the Brigadier.

  Burden asked Stanley Trotter to come to Kingsmarkham Police Station. By then he had discovered that Trotter had a criminal record, previous convictions of no inconsiderable kind. His first offense, committed some seven years before, was breaking and entering shop premises in Eastbourne; his second, far more serious, was robbery, a definition that implied assault. He had punched a young woman in the face, knocked her to the ground, and kicked her, then taken her handbag. She was walking home along Queen Street, quite alone, one midnight. For both these offenses Trotter had gone to prison, and would have served a much longer sentence for the second if his victim had suffered more than a bruise on her jaw.

  But it was enough, or almost enough, for Burden. He had got Trotter to confess that he did in fact drive out to the Brigadier at 10:45 on April 3. Originally, he said, he had been too scared to admit it. He drove there, reaching the pub just before eleven, but the fare wasn’t waiting. If she had been there once she was gone by then.

  At this point Trotter demanded a lawyer, and Burden had no choice but to agree. A sharp young solicitor from Morgan de Clerck of York Street arrived promptly and, when Trotter said he couldn’t recall whether or not he had rung the bell at the Brigadier, told Burden his client had said he couldn’t remember and that must be sufficient.

  Outside the interview room Vine said, “Dickson said she was out in the street. Trotter wouldn’t have had to ring the bell.”

  “No, but he didn’t know she’d be out in the street, did he? He’d have thought—anyone would have thought—she’d be inside the pub and have rung the bell as a matter of course. Are you telling me he’d have turned up at the pub at eleven at night and finding no one there just turned round and gone back to Station Road?”

  “That’s what he’s telling you,” said Vine.

  They went on questioning Trotter. The solicitor from Morgan de Clerck took them up on every small point while providing his client with an unending supply of cigarettes, though not a smoker himself. Trotter, a round-shouldered, thin, and unhealthy-looking man of about forty, got through twenty by the end of the afternoon and the atmosphere in the interview room was b
lue with smoke. The solicitor interrupted everything by incessantly asking how long they intended to keep Trotter and finally asked if he was to be charged.

  Recklessly, Burden, hardly able to breathe, gasped out a yes. But he didn’t charge him; he just kept him at Kingsmarkham Police Station. When Wexford got to hear of it he was dubious about the whole thing, but Burden got a warrant and Trotter’s home in Peacock Street, Stowerton, was searched for evidence. There, in the two-room flat over a grocery market kept by two Bangladeshi brothers, Detective Constables Archbold and Pemberton found a string of imitation pearls and a holdall of brown canvas bound in dark green plastic.

  To Wexford it wasn’t much like the shoulder bag in Dickson’s photograph, nor did it conform to the description of his daughter’s bag Dieter Ranke had given the police. This one was an altogether cheaper affair and brown and green instead of brown and black. The Rankes were comfortably off, both parents professionals with significant jobs, and Ulrike, an only child, had wanted for nothing. Her pearls were a cultured string, carefully matched, an eighteenth birthday present for which her mother and father had paid the equivalent of thirteen hundred pounds.

  “That poor chap will have to take a look at the bag,” Wexford said, meaning Ranke and thinking of himself and his daughters. “He’s still in this country for the inquest.”

  “It won’t be so bad as identifying the body,” said Burden.

  “No, Mike, I don’t suppose it will.” Wexford didn’t want to pursue that, he might say something he’d be sorry for afterward. “I’m told the Department of Transport are applying to the High Court for leave to evict the tree people.”

  Burden looked pleased. The idea of the bypass had always been attractive to him, largely because he thought it would put an end to traffic congestion in the town center and on the old bypass.

  “No one made all this fuss in the old days,” he said. “If government decreed a road was to be built people accepted it. They took the entirely proper view that if they voted their representatives into Parliament they’d done their democratic duty and they must abide by government decisions. They didn’t build tree houses and—and streak—is it called streaking? They didn’t do criminal damage and cripple tree fellers who are only doing their job. They understood that a road such as this is being built for their own good.”