Free Road Rage by Ruth Rendell Page B

and split veins on his cheeks, probably no more than forty but looking older. He had the cigarette packet out before anyone replied.
    Burden said rather unpleasantly, “Not if it helps your concentration.”
    Trotter didn’t ask if anyone minded his smoking. The moment their cigarettes were lit Tanya Paine began an artificial coughing. Cousins, the youngest of them and Tanya’s contemporary, grinned and cast up his eyes. He said that any of their fares might know they never went back there before midday.
    “A regular fare might notice. I mean, one of us could have said. Why not? No harm in that, is there? I mean, one of us only has to say we’re busy, none of us never goes back to the office before twelve.”
    At last Samuel said he sometimes had occasion to tell a fare he hadn’t a radio link with the office but worked a car-phone system. That was if the fare asked. Sometimes a fare wanted to be picked up when he came back on the train, for instance. Could he call directly from the train on his cell phone?
    “That’s when I’d tell him. I’d say to call the office and Tanya’d get through to one of us, depending on who was likely to be available.”
    “So you’re saying that anyone you’ve ever driven might know?”
    “Not
anyone
,” said Samuel. “Only them as asked.”
    It was after this that they were allowed to go home, and Vine with Lynn Fancourt and Pemberton started house-to-house inquiries in the vicinity of Kingsmarkham Station. Only there weren’t many houses. Contemporary Cars’ office stood on half an acre of waste ground overlooked by nothing much, bounded on one side by the blank brick wall of the bus station and on the other by a tall thin building that housed a shoe repairer on its lowest level and an aromatherapist, a photocopying agency, and a hairdresser on the upper floors. Outside and for a few feet inside the chain-link fencing which bounded the land,thin straggling trees, poplars and elders, grew out of six-foot-high nettles.
    Opposite, beyond a row of cottages, was a pub called the Engine Driver, then a cash-and-carry hardware store, then the station car parks.
    Two hours later they knew very little more than when they started. Housewives, shoppers, drivers bent on catching trains, pub patrons don’t notice two men parking a car and mounting the steps of a mobile home unless they have reason to do so. The men could easily have put masks on once they had entered Contemporary Cars’ office, for they would not have been seen by Tanya Paine until they had opened a second door.
    Wexford pondered on how much more
noticeable
women were than men. If the intruders had been women someone might well have noticed them. Would this change as the equality gap between the sexes narrowed even more? Would women dressed like men, women in jeans, dark jackets, short-haired, without makeup, be as easily ignored?
    He went to bed, then got up again when all was quiet. Sleep was impossible, unthinkable. Sheila’s bedroom door was ajar and he stood in the doorway for a moment, watching her sleeping, the baby also sleeping beside her, in the crook of her arm. Such a sight would once have given him intense pleasure. For the first time in his life he understood what it was to want to roar aloud one’s misery and terror. The thought of his children’s reaction if he actually did that, their panic and fear, almost made him smile. He sat downstairs in an armchair in the dark.
    Reading was as impossible as sleep. He thought of the Contemporary Cars business, knowing now for certain what had happened. The two men, with several accomplices, were arranging the taking of hostages. They had immobilized Tanya Paine in order to have uninterruptedaccess to the phones for an hour and a half—or as long as it took. Very likely they weren’t particular as to who their hostages were. They only had to be three people who phoned Contemporary Cars for a taxi between ten-thirty and eleven-thirty. The three they got were