Free Road Rage by Ruth Rendell Page A

makes her an allowance and it’s liberal, I can tell you. She’d always used the same company since they started. She phoned just before eleven. She knew the girl who worked for them, answered the phone, I mean. Tanya Paine. They were at school together.”
    “Roxane can’t have gone to Contemporary Cars yesterday, Ms. Cox,” said Burden. He thought of how to put it. “Their phones were down. They were out of order. She must have called another company.”
    “Well, she didn’t,” said Clare Cox. “I was up in my studio, painting. That’s what I do, I’m a painter. She came in and said the cab was coming in fifteen minutes and she’d catch the eleven thirty-six. I don’t know why I said it, but I did, I said, ‘Right,’ and then I said, ‘How’sTanya?’ and she said, ‘I don’t know, I didn’t talk to Tanya, it was some guy answered.’ ”
    “You mean she phoned Contemporary Cars at—what?—ten-fifty? And they answered?”
    “Of course they did. And the cab came for her at ten past eleven. I saw her get in it and that was the last I saw of her.

6
    W exford finally got home to his daughters and his granddaughter at ten at night. But he was glad to have been busy, up to a point to have been distracted. Sylvia’s insistence that he must be exhausted irritated him, though he gave no sign of annoyance. Her emphasis on the unfairness of it, on the way he had to do everything himself if he wanted it done, sent him to the dining room in quest of a small whisky. Upstairs Amulet was screaming the place down.
    “My posterity is driving me to drink,” he said to himself.
    Then he thought how wonderful it would be to have Dora here to say it to. It was years since he had actually thought, in positive words, that to see his wife would be wonderful. How quickly, he reflected, disaster or potential disaster disturbs that which we accept as normal, shifts the aspect, makes us see the truth. You could so easily understand those who said, I will never be rough with her again, never off-hand, never take her for granted, if only …
    Earlier, once they had left Clare Cox, he and Burden with Vine and Fancourt had moved in on Contemporary Cars. They had moved in, gone over the place once again, and then fetched Peter Samuel, Stanley Trotter, Leslie Cousins, and Tanya Paine down to the police station.
    Burden was looking at Trotter rather in the way aNazi-hunter might have looked at Mengele if he had found him lying low in a suburb of Asunción: with satisfaction and vengefulness and something like glee.
    Who had driven Roxane Masood to the station? Who had driven Ryan Barker?
    “I’ve told you enough times,” Peter Samuel said. “We never got no calls between half ten and twelve midday. We couldn’t have on account of Tanya here being out of action.”
    Tanya Paine was becoming aggressive. “I didn’t make it up, you know. I didn’t tie myself up. I’m a victim and you’re treating me like a criminal.”
    “I’ll need the name or at any rate the address of the fare you drove to Gatwick,” Burden said to Samuel. “I don’t understand how you all just accepted not getting any calls for an hour and a half. Didn’t it occur to you to go back and find out why not?”
    “We was busy,” said Trotter. “You know where I was, going from Pomfret to the station and then to Stowerton, you know all that. It was a
relief
to me there weren’t no calls, I can tell you.”
    “Anyway, it wasn’t all that abnormal,” Leslie Cousins said. “I can think of dozens of times when it’s been slack.”
    Burden rounded on him. “I’ll have the addresses of the fares you took, please.” He said to all of them, “I want you to think. Have you any idea, even a suspicion, who it could have been that came into the place and tied Tanya up? Anyone you’ve talked to? Anyone who knew no one ever went back there before twelve noon?”
    Peter Samuel asked if they minded if he smoked. He was a stout heavy man with three chins