Free Road Rage by Ruth Rendell

my daughter missing.”
    Something cold touched the back of his neck and flickered down his spine. He nearly said that he supposed she’d taken a taxi to the station the morning before. But it was his caller who said that.
    “Pomfret, you said? We’ll come.”
    It was a cottage at the end of the short High Street where the shops came to an end, an ancient lath and plaster dwelling with eyelid gables and tiny latticed windows. Rain streamed off the eaves of the thatched roof. Pools of water lay on the path and inundated the tiny lawn. Wexford and Burden had to stand inside on the doormat and shed dripping raincoats, so heavy had the downpour been between car and front door.
    She was in her early forties, thin, intense-looking, with big dark eyes and chestnut hair hanging in a shaggy mane to her shoulders. She wore a garment that in any other time in history would have been called a nightgown, white, diaphanous, floor-length, with flounces and bits of lace. The ethnic painted beads around her neck removed any such illusion.
    “Mrs. Masood?”
    “Come in. It’s my daughter that’s called Masood, Roxane Masood. She uses her father’s name. I’m Clare Cox.”
    The interior looked as if it had been decorated and furnished in the early seventies and then frozen. Indian and African artifacts littered the place, the walls were hung with strips of Indian printed cotton and brass bells on strings, and there was a heavy odor of sandalwood. The only picture was framed in dark polished wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
    It was a photograph of a young girl, the biggest photograph Wexford thought he had ever seen, and she was almost too beautiful to be real. When you looked at it you could understand those fairy tales in which the prince or the swineherd is shown the likeness of some girl unknown to him and falls instantly in love. “This portrait is of magical beauty, such as no eyes have seen before,” as Tamino sang. Her face was a perfect oval, her forehead high, her nose small and straight, her eyes huge and black with arched eyebrows, her hair a gleaming black veil, long, center-parted, water-straight and fine as silk.
    Wexford reflected upon these things afterward. At the time he quickly turned away from the portrait and having ascertained that this was Roxane herself, asked Clare Cox to tell him what had happened on the previous day.
    “She was going to London. She had an appointment at a model agency. She’s got a fine arts degree, but she wasn’t interested in that, she wanted to be a model, and she’d tried everything, all the agencies. Mostly, they didn’t want to know, she was too beautiful, they said, and not thin enough, but she’s
extremely
thin, believe me …”
    “Yesterday morning, Ms. Cox,” Vine prompted her.
    “Yes, yesterday morning. She was going to London to this agency and then to see her father. He’s got a business in Ealing, he’s done very well for himself, and he takes her out to some very grand places, I can tell you.” She caught Vine’s eye and collected herself. “She didn’t turnup. Anyone else would have phoned to find out why not but not him, of course not. He thought she’d changed her mind, if you please.”
    “How do you know then …?”
    “He did phone. An hour ago. Some pal of his thought he could get her modeling work. I hope it’s bona fide, I said, you hear such terrible things, porno rings and whatever, and I said why don’t you ask her yourself, and he said, ‘Put her on,’ and that’s when it came out. He hadn’t seen her.”
    “Did you check with the modeling agency?”
    She put out her hands, raised her shoulders. Her voice was a thin scream.
    “I don’t even know where the bloody place is!”
    “So yesterday morning,” said Wexford, “she went to Kingsmarkham Station by taxi? Which taxi?” He was sure she wouldn’t remember. “Did you hear her make the call?”
    “No, but I know when it was and who it was. She always had taxis. Her father