7

The sheet of paper was A4 size, Wexford guessed, 80 grams weight, plain white, the kind you can buy by the ream from any office supplier. Once the letter would have had to be handwritten, later typed—and typing was almost as great a giveaway as handwriting. Now, with computers, detection was nearly impossible. The expert would probably be able to say which software had been used, which word-processing program, and that was all. No spelling mistakes anymore, no capitals in error for lowercase, no slipped letters, no chipped digits.

There might be fingerprints, but he doubted it. The writer had folded the sheet once and then, in the same direction, once more. The envelope it had come in lay beside it. Most laser printers are unable to print envelopes but a program is available for printing envelope labels and this facility had been used. It was, he thought, dreadfully anonymous.

They sat around Brian St. George’s desk, the letter lying in the middle of the leather inlay. St. George was immensely pleased with himself, a complacency he had stopped trying to deny. He kept smiling wonderingly, amazed at the plum of a story which had come his way.

He was a cadaverous gray man with a hatchet face and a big belly that hung like a half-filled sack from his bones. His pale gray chalk-striped suit was in serious need of dry cleaning. A woman may wear a crew neck or an open-collared shirt under a suit but on a man this gives the appearance of his being half-dressed, and it was a long time since St. George’s sweatshirt had been the white it was when it started life. He could hardly keep his hands off the letter. They strayed toward it and he pulled them back, like a boy teasing an insect.

“I suppose I can photocopy it?” he said.

“You can have that P.A. of yours in here to copy it by hand,” said Burden. “But it’s not to be touched.”

“They’re not used to copying by hand.”

“Do it yourself then.” Wexford had never previously encountered the editor of the Kingsmarkham Courier that he could remember and he didn’t much like what he saw. “Which national newspapers did you have in mind to release this to?”

“The lot,” said St. George, suddenly nervous, fearing the worst.

“You can do that, but with the strict embargo that nothing is to appear until we give the go-ahead. That goes for the Courier too, naturally …”

“Yes, but hold hard a minute, publicity’s the best thing out in a case like this. You want publicity. You’ve a lot more chance of finding these people if everyone knows what’s going on.”

“Nothing at all till we give the go-ahead. I hope that’s understood. This is a very serious matter, the most serious you’re ever likely to be involved in. Mr. Vine will stay here with you to see my instructions are carried out.”

“It is your wife, isn’t it?”

Wexford didn’t reply. He had read the letter on the desk: “… Ryan Barker, Roxane Masood, Kitty Struther, Owen Struther …” and then, when he reached his wife’s name, the four syllables had come at him and struck him like a blow, black hard letters leaping off the sheet. His eyes had closed involuntarily. He hoped now he hadn’t recoiled, actually stepped back, but he feared he had. Feeling the blood recede from his face, feeling as if it retreated like a withdrawing tide into the center of his body, he had had to sit down suddenly.

His voice had deserted him, but it was back now, deep and strong. “Who beside yourself has seen this letter, Mr. St. George?”

“Call me Brian. Everyone does. No one but my P.A. Veronica has actually seen it.”

“Keep it that way. Mr. Vine will speak to Veronica. At present silence is absolutely imperative. You will speak to these national newspapers and we will have a meeting with their editors later today.”

“Okay, if that’s the way you want it. It seems a crying shame, but I bow to the inevitable.”

“We shall ask British Telecom to put a trace on your phones,” Burden said, lifting the letter in gloved fingers and slipping it between plastic. “How many lines are there?”

“Only two.” St. George said it in the tone of a man who would like to have said “twenty-five.”

“These Sacred Globe people have expressed their intention of making contact again today. Everything that comes over the phone into these offices must be recorded. I shall send you an officer to take Mr. Vine’s place in due course.”

“By God, you’re taking things very seriously,” said St. George, still smiling.

Wexford got up. He said, “I expect you know it’s an offense to attempt to pervert the course of justice.”

“No need to look at me. I’m a law-abiding sort of chap, always have been, but I suppose I’m allowed to express an opinion, and in my opinion you’re making a grave mistake.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

Wexford could think of half a dozen nastier things to say, but he hadn’t the heart for any of them. Going down the stairs they passed a young woman coming up. She had black curly hair hanging to her waist and a scarlet skirt that measured about nine inches from waist to hem. The personal assistant, probably.

“I’m not going to hang about,” Wexford said. “I’m going straight to the Chief Constable. Meanwhile we’ll need a trace on all our phones.”

“Yes. I wonder how many B.T. can do. It won’t be an unlimited number. Who are these Struthers, Reg? Kitty and Owen? Why weren’t they reported missing?”

Donaldson opened the car door and they got in the back. Wexford punched out one of the numbers of the Mid-Sussex Constabulary headquarters in Myringham, then asked for the Chief Constable’s extension. He seldom saw the Chief Constable, most of his dealings being with Freeborn, the deputy.

Montague Ryder was a distant lofty figure who suddenly seemed approachable when, in response to Wexford’s insistence on urgency, he came to the phone and agreed instantly to a meeting as early as possible.

“I’ll go over there now, or once we’ve dropped you. I don’t think it’s odd the Struthers haven’t been reported missing, Mike. They’re probably a married couple living alone. I expect they intended going away on holiday. I’ve been wondering about the interval between Dora calling for a car at ten-thirty and Roxane at ten fifty-five, but this accounts for it. There wasn’t an interval, these Struthers called for a car around ten forty-five. The probability is they phoned Contemporary Cars to catch one of those trains between the eleven-nineteen and the twelve-oh-three …”

“Or to go to Gatwick. If it was a holiday they might have been going by air.”

“True. But whatever it was, if they left an empty house behind them, who would know they were missing? If they left a family member behind, he or she wouldn’t expect to hear from them. It would be odder if they had been reported missing. What is odd is that there were two of them and one of those two is a man maybe in the prime of life.”

“You mean, it’s harder to abduct such people than …” Burden tried to be tactful, but failed abysmally. “Well, than one on his—her—his own.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe he’s an elderly man. They could both be in their seventies for all we know. I’ll have them checked out. The phone book may be enough. Struther’s not a common name in this neck of the woods. Are we going to say anything about this to the boy’s mother and grandmother and the girl’s mother?”

“Not yet.”

“What do they want, Reg? What’s this price of theirs?”

“I think I know.”

Wexford turned his face away and Burden said no more. He got out of the car and went into the police station. There, though there were others to do it for him, he looked up Struther in the phone directory himself. There were two Struths, fifteen Strutts, but only one Struther: O. L. Struther, Savesbury House, Markinch Lane, Framhurst.

He punched out the number. Four double rings and then, of course, one of those damned answering machines. Burden hated them. At least the greeting message on this one wasn’t facetious, not the kind that said, “Call me back if there’s money in it” or “If you want to take me out to dinner I’m on.” A man’s voice, which could have been middle-aged or old, but certainly wasn’t young. The English it used was very correct, even pedantic. Courteously, it named the woman first.

“Neither Kitty nor Owen Struther is available at present to answer your call. If you would like to leave a message, please do so after the tone, giving your name, the date, and the time. Thank you.”

Burden thought it worth a try. He left a message, asking whoever might be there—a slim chance but a possibility—to contact Kingsmarkham Police as a matter of urgency. Then he got on to British Telecom.

The Regional Crime Squad’s Major Crime Unit, consisting of a detective chief inspector, one inspector, six detective sergeants, and six detective constables, all specially trained, was housed in an unpretentious building in Myringham. Once it had been a set of auction rooms. It was built of brown bricks with vaguely Gothic windows and a door around the side. Through these windows computer screens could usually be seen with people staring into them.

Wexford had passed it on his way to the Constabulary Headquarters, an altogether more impressive place put up in the eighties when architecture was beginning to take a turn for the better after the lamentable previous ten years. The headquarters, out on the Sewingbury Road, had an ambitious roof, a kind of terraced mansarding, with a large square tower in the middle, curved wings, and a pillared portico. On the lawn in front stood a statue of Sir Robert Peel, who as well as being the founder of the police force was said to have occupied a house at Myfleet for ten months between the autumn of 1833 and the summer of 1834.

The Chief Constable had a suite in the tower. An anteroom was full of the usual computer operators. One of them left her machine and took him through, knocking on a brass-fitted mahogany door. Wexford had that feeling of the heart rising into the throat, though he wasn’t in the least nervous of Montague Ryder. It was rather that, at present, every happening seemed fraught with foreboding, every moment in passing time pregnant with dread.

He entered a huge room like a lounge in a good country hotel, armchairs, sofas, low tables, a big bowl of dahlias and Michaelmas daisies standing on an antique cabinet. Windows, designed less for opening and letting in light than for viewing panoramas, afforded the sight of green hills, deep valleys, and the distant rolling downs. Montague Ryder got up from where he had been sitting at a desk and came to Wexford with outstretched hand.

“I’ve been talking on the phone with Mike Burden,” he said. “I think he’s pretty well filled me in. You did right to hesitate, but we must tell those parents at once. Anything else isn’t feasible.”

He was a small man, slight but strong-looking, many inches shorter than Wexford. Abundant uniformly pale gray hair covered his head like a neat cap and his eyes were the same clear dove-gray.

“This is a bad business about your wife.”

Wexford nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Won’t you sit down?”

A green leather sofa accommodated them both, one at each end, facing each other. On the desk, a few feet away, stood a framed photograph of a pretty fair-haired woman with a child of maybe ten and another of eight. Wexford found he couldn’t look at it. He said, “These people, this Sacred Globe, will make contact again today. How or where we don’t know.”

“Burden told me. You were quite right to embargo newspaper coverage. I shall set up a meeting with newspaper representatives for later today, but I’ll do it, I shan’t need you at that.”

Wexford hesitated, then said, “I hardly suppose you’re going to need me at all, are you, sir? I mean, once I’ve given you the facts. You won’t want me on the case.”

Ryder got up. He was recognizably the kind of person who never sits still for long, a pacer, a fidget, a man with too much energy for the ordinary uses of daily life and one whom exhaustion probably hit at the end of each day. He said, “Would you like coffee? I’ll have it sent in.”

“Not for me, sir, thank you.”

“Right. I drink too much of the stuff anyway.” He perched on a chair arm. “You mean, of course, that I’d take you off the case because of your wife’s involvement. In other circumstances, that would be so, but I can’t here.” Perhaps for the first time ever, he essayed Wexford’s first name. “I can’t, Reg. We’ll call in the Regional Crime Squad, but even so I don’t have enough senior officers to dispense with you. I need you to lead this investigation. I’m putting you in charge of it.”

The first call from a national newspaper came in at 10:30. They wasted no time, Burden thought, referring the speaker and the two others who called within minutes to the Chief Constable’s office at Myringham. As far as he was concerned, the sooner they got on with that restraining press conference the better.

Where would it come to, that phone call from Sacred Globe? He presumed it would be a phone call. The post, after all, had come and there was no second delivery. A message by fax or E-mail would be too dangerous to send, its very existence a clue to the transmitter. So a phone call it would be. To the police station? To the Courier? Somehow he didn’t think so. One of those insistent national newspapers perhaps or the local authority, the mayor’s office, even the Constabulary Headquarters. No, not that last. It would be somewhere they would least suspect, yet to someone certain to pass it on …

To one of Wexford’s daughters?

He’d see about a trace on Wexford’s home phone. And then he was going to take Karen Malahyde and the two of them go up to Savesbury House, home of the Struthers. If his message had been received, it hadn’t been answered. Probably there was no one there. He couldn’t place the house, couldn’t see it in his mind’s eye, but big country houses were two a penny around here. He’d probably know it when he saw it. If the Struthers had neighbors, there was a good chance of one of them having seen something.

Facially, Karen looked like a dedicated police officer. She had been promoted to detective sergeant the previous year. Her expression was serious, her dark eyes steady, but her face was too scrubbed-looking, her hair too grimly cropped, for her to be considered good-looking. That was above the neck. Below, she had all the attributes of a catwalk model, perfect figure, and legs, as Burden’s son John had once said, to die for. Burden himself didn’t think of women in those terms and had been congratulated on this negativity by Wexford who, perhaps ironically, praised his political correctness. Karen herself was almost too P.C. for Kingsmarkham, particularly in her dealings with men. He didn’t care whether she liked him or not, yet he rather fancied she did.

She was an excellent driver and it was she who drove the two of them. In Markinch Lane they were stopped by the police cordon, for the bailiffs were still busy breaking up tree houses and clearing occupants. When the sergeant in his yellow coat realized who it was he would have made an exception and let them through but Karen good-humoredly turned around and took an alternative route via the Framhurst byroad.

*   *   *

The village of Framhurst would be the most badly affected of all conurbations in the Kingsmarkham neighborhood. “Conurbations” was a Highways Agency word that had made Wexford laugh grimly, for Framhurst was no more than a village street, a crossroads, three shops, and a church. The school, built in 1834, had long since been converted into a house that its occupants whimsically called Lescuela.

Of the shops, one was an old-fashioned family butcher’s to which customers came from all over the neighborhood, another a general store, newsagent, and video library, and the third a tea shop with a striped awning and tables on the pavement outside. Framhurst had traffic lights at the point where Kingsmarkham Road crossed the one that passed between Pomfret and Myfleet. No one was sure how much of the new bypass would be visible from the houses that lined the village street, but there was no doubt about the coming destruction of the view from the hill to which that street led. The whole valley lay spread out below, woods, marsh, round, treecapped Savesbury Hill, and the River Brede threading through the light green and the dark green like a long crinkly strand of white silk.

Burden looked down on it. Of course you couldn’t see any of those people from here. You couldn’t see the pilgrims transformed into refugees, moving on with their bundles to pastures new. One day, not far off now, a twin-track road, three lanes each side, would change the entire face of that panorama, like a white bandage covering a long never-to-be-healed wound.

They found the house with some difficulty. It was concealed in shrubbery and tall trees and was invisible from the road. Its nearest neighbor was a cottage on the outskirts of Framhurst village. They went past the house, realized they had gone too far, and turned around. A sign on the gatepost was overgrown with tendrils of wild clematis. Karen had to get out and pull away the leaves to disclose a name: “Markinch Hall” in almost obliterated letters with “Savesbury House” printed boldly over the top of it.

“Interesting,” said Burden. “I wonder if what-are-they-called, Sacred Globe, had problems finding the place.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Struther probably gave directions over the phone.”

The gates were open so they drove in and up a graveled drive bordered by cypresses with tall alders and sycamores making a backdrop behind them. Brick and timbered walls gradually appeared as the trees thinned, and the varied colors, red, yellow, and purple, of a well-tended garden replaced much of the green. The house looked like two houses joined together, the one ancient and picturesque, gabled and lattice-windowed, the other a tall Georgian with portico. The whole must be very big, Burden thought, big enough for several families and with outbuildings or even wings behind.

There are gardens and gardens, his wife said. Most of them are full of stuff from the local garden center, but the other kind, the rare kind, contains plants you hardly ever see, plants her father called “choice,” the ones that only have Latin names. The gardens of Savesbury House came in this latter category. Burden would have been hard put to name a single one of these flowers, these bedding plants and climbers, but he could tell the effect was very pleasing. The sun that succeeded the rain of the day before brought out a subtle sweet scent from whatever it was that spread its blossoms over the Georgian facade.

A Gothic front door on the older part of the building, black and worn, arched and studded, looked as if it hadn’t been opened since Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. Burden was approaching it, his eye on a curly iron bellpull, when a man came around from the side of the house. He glanced at Burden, curled his lip at Karen, eyed Burden again, and said, “What d’you want? Who are you?”

It was the kind of accent that the majority of the British people laugh at and Americans can’t understand, a plummy drawl that is never acquired by public school alone but requires parental backup and preparatory education from the age of seven.

Burden had no incentive to be nice. He said, “Police,” and produced his warrant card.

The man, who was young, no more than in his midtwenties, looked at Burden’s photograph and back at the original as if he seriously expected a hoax. He said to Karen, “Have you got one too, or are you just along for the ride?”

Karen exhibited warning signs, familiar to Burden, though not perhaps to her questioner. Her eyes snapped, then stared unblinking. “Detective Sergeant Malahyde,” she said and put her card in his face.

He stepped back a little. He was tall, well-built, in riding breeches and hacking jacket over a white T-shirt, his features copyable by an artist or photographer as the archetype of an English upper class, straight nose, high cheekbones, tall forehead, firm chin, and the kind of mouth that was once called clean-cut. His hair, of course, was straw blond and his eyes steel blue.

“All right,” he said. “What have I done? What misdemeanor have I committed? Have I driven without lights or subjected some young lady to sexual harassment?”

“May we go inside?” Burden said.

“Oh, I don’t really think so, do you?”

“Yes, I do think so, Mr. Struther. It is Mr. Struther, isn’t it? The son of Owen and Kitty Struther?”

He was temporarily disconcerted, returned Burden’s look in silence. He walked up to the front door and pushed at it. The door came open with a long drawn-out groan. Over his shoulder he said, affectedly casual, “Has something happened to my parents?”

Burden and Karen followed him into the house. The hall was low-ceilinged, half-timbered, a huge sprawling place with a stone-flagged floor on which black carved furniture stood about, the kind that looks as if Elizabeth I might have sat on it or eaten off it. They all had to duck under the lintel to get through the doorway into a living room. Here was floral chintz, Indian rugs, Arts and Crafts tables, and all was exquisitely clean and sweet-smelling.

“Do you live here, Mr. Struther?” They hadn’t been asked to sit down, but Burden did so.

“I look the sort of guy who would live at home with Mummy, do I?”

“May I know where you do live?”

“London. Where else? Fitzhardinge Mews, West One.”

He would have a West One address, Burden thought. “Then I suppose you are here to take care of the house while your parents are away on holiday?”

That did surprise him. He looked at Karen’s legs, pursed his lips. “Something like that,” he said. “It’s scarcely a hardship to come here on my own holiday. My mother fears burglars, my father has some phobia about an inefficient drain, ergo …! Now can we come to the point?”

“You were here yesterday morning,” Karen said, “when a driver from Contemporary Cars came to collect your parents and drive them to Kingsmarkham Station?”

“Gatwick airport, actually. Yes, why?”

“Where were they going?”

“You mean, where are they now. Florence. A city more familiar to you as Firenze, no doubt.”

“If you make a phone call to their hotel, Mr. Struther, you will find that they are not there. They never went there.” Burden had been about to say that Kitty and Owen Struther had been abducted but he waited. The man’s hostility was almost tangible. “If you make that phone call you will find that your parents are missing.”

“I am not hearing this. I do not believe this.”

“It is true, Mr. Struther. May I know your first name, please?”

“Not to call me by it, I beg. I’m old-fashioned about things like that. My Christian name is Andrew. I am Andrew Owen Kinglake Struther.”

“You do know where your parents are staying, Mr. Struther?”

“Certainly I do and I consider that question impertinent. You’ve had your say, I’ve registered your absurd news, and now I’d like your space.”

Burden decided to give up. He was under no obligation to make this man believe in his parents’ abduction. He had done his best. Later in the day, no doubt, Andrew Struther would be on the phone to Kingsmarkham Police Station, having had what he had been told confirmed at Gatwick and in Florence, but instead of showing contrition and asking for more facts, demanding to know why the whole story hadn’t been imparted to him earlier.

But as they entered the hall once more and crossed the stone flags there was a sound of running footsteps from above and a girl came down the staircase, followed by a German shepherd dog. She was about Andrew Struther’s age, a white-faced red-lipped girl with a mass of untidy mahogany-colored hair, wearing jeans and what looked like the top half of baby-doll pajamas. The dog was young, black and tan, not unlike the bailiff’s dogs, with a dense glossy coat. At the bottom the girl stopped, holding on to the carved banister post.

“Cops,” said Andrew Struther.

“You’re kidding.”

“No, but don’t ask. You know how low my boredom threshold is.”

The dog sat at the foot of the stairs and stared at them. Burden and Karen let themselves out but the front door slammed behind them before they could close it. Burden made no comment to Karen and she drove in silence. The sun had gone in and a light rain splashed the windscreen, too scanty for wipers to be needed. He thought of the various places Sacred Globe might phone, the places they would know about, a group practice surgery, a hospital, a High Street shop. Once they had done that the story would be out and there would be no way to stop it, never mind high-level newspaper conferences. Somehow he knew they would phone somewhere he hadn’t thought of and couldn’t cover. British Telecom was obliging but couldn’t put a trace on every possible phone, and no one else but B.T. was permitted to do it.

Karen found a parking space almost outside Clare Cox’s cottage, just where the double yellow line ended, and tucked the car behind a black Jaguar of last year’s registration. Its owner—Burden guessed it before he was told—opened the door to them. He was a small neat man, improbably dressed in a denim suit. His skin was waxencream, his hair and mustache inky black, and Burden thought he looked like a not very good artist’s rendering of Hercule Poirot.

“I am Roxane’s father. Hassy Masood. Please come in. Her mother isn’t feeling too good.”

Though obviously Asian, or of Asian parentage, Masood spoke with the accent of West London. The background created by Clare Cox, of Indian artifacts and vaguely Central Asian rugs and hangings, suited his appearance but not his voice, manner, or, apparently, his taste. In the living room he shook his head disparagingly, cast up his eyes, and, gesturing with his hands, exclaimed, “This junk! Can you believe it?”

“We’d like to see Ms. Cox if that’s possible,” said Karen.

“I’ll fetch her. You’ve no news of my daughter, I suppose? I came down here last night. Her mother was in a rare old state.” He smiled tightly, wrinkling up his eyes. “So was I, in point of fact. Families should be together at a time like this, don’t you think?”

Burden said nothing.

“I’m not staying here, of course. One gets used to big places, large rooms, don’t you find? I should feel stifled here. I’m staying at the Kingsmarkham Posthouse. My wife and our two children and my stepdaughter will be joining me later today.”

“Ms. Cox, please, Mr. Masood.”

“Of course. Please sit down. Make yourselves at home.”

They found themselves both staring at the portrait. Roxane was the offspring of two not especially good-looking people whose genes cunningly combined to produce a rare beauty distant from either of them. Yet it was her father’s black liquid eyes that looked down from the wall and his thick smooth skin like whipped cream that covered those fine cheekbones, that rounded chin, those perfect arms.

“That photograph,” Clare Cox said, entering the room and seeing them looking. “It’s not good of her, not really. I tried painting her but couldn’t do her justice.”

“No one could,” said Masood. “Not even”—he sought for a suitable name, came up with one highly inappropriate—“Picasso could.”

Clare Cox was a pitiful sight. Perpetual crying had soaked and swollen her face and made her voice hoarse. The tears still lay on her red puffy cheeks. She collapsed into a chair that was swathed in a red and purple shawl and lay back in an attitude of absolute despair. Burden, who had begun to have doubts after the Andrew Struther experience, now felt that telling the parents must be right. Hope, even vain hope, was better than this.

Karen told them what had happened, the bare facts, that at any rate, at the moment, Roxane was safe. Roxane wasn’t dead or injured or the victim of a rapist. All Masood and Roxane’s mother could do for a moment was stare in stupefaction. Then Masood said, “Abducted?”

“It seems so. Along with four others. As soon as we know anything we’ll keep you informed. I promise you that.”

“But at the moment,” Karen said, “we don’t know any more. We’d like to have a trace put on your phone.”

“You mean you—someone will come and—an engineer?”

“No. B.T. can do it without coming here.”

“But they—these abductors—could phone here?”

“We don’t know where or when the phone call will come, but yes, we think it will be by phone.”

Quietly, Burden explained how important it was to have their silence. No one must be told. “Not your wife and children, Mr. Masood. No one. As far as they are concerned, Roxane is simply missing.”

He gave the same injunction to Audrey Barker and her mother in Rhombus Road, Stowerton. They too were asked for their permission to have Mrs. Peabody’s phone monitored. Audrey Barker’s reaction to the knowledge that her child was missing had been quite different from Clare Cox’s. There were no signs of tears, but her face was whiter than ever, her eyes seemed larger, and she looked as if she had lost even more weight off her thin stringy frame. Burden remembered that she had been ill, had recently left the hospital. She looked as if she needed to be back there.

Mrs. Peabody was simply confused. It was all too much for her. She took her daughter’s hand and held it in both of her own. Over and over she kept saying, “But he’s a big boy, he’s big for his age. He wouldn’t get into a stranger’s car.”

“He didn’t think it was a stranger, Mother.”

“He wouldn’t have got into it, he’s too big for that, he knows better, he’s big for his age, Aud, you know that.”

“Can I see the other mother?” Audrey Barker said. “Can we meet? You said there was a young girl taken too. We could form a support group, the other mother and me, and maybe the other women—have they got family?”

“That wouldn’t be wise just at present, Mrs. Barker.”

“I don’t want to do anything out of turn, but I just thought—well, it helps to talk about it, to share your experience.”

You haven’t had an experience yet, Burden thought grimly, and let’s hope to God you won’t have. Aloud, he repeated what he had already said, that it was better not at present.

“They won’t want you interfering, Aud,” said Mrs. Peabody.

“These people who’ve got my son, what do they want?”

“We hope to know that today,” said Karen.

“And if they don’t get it what will they do to him?”

At the police station they waited for Sacred Globe to call. They waited at the Kingsmarkham Courier, Barry Vine’s vigil having been taken over by DCs Lambert and Pemberton. It was still only noon.

It was an ill-assorted group who had been taken away and imprisoned somewhere, Wexford thought. He thought in this way to distract himself from terrible ideas, from actually picturing Dora and imagining how she must feel. A twenty-two-year-old potential model who looked like an Arabian Nights princess, an overtall schoolboy of fourteen, a married couple who, if Burden wasn’t exaggerating, belonged to that county set of an anachronistic but still surprisingly powerful elite—and his wife.

She would get on better with the boy and the girl, he thought, than the two whose horizons were perhaps bounded by the hunt, paternalistic good works, and pre-Sunday lunch sherry parties. Then he reminded himself that, after all, the Struthers had been going to Florence. There must be something redeemable about a couple who would spend a holiday there instead of on a Scottish grouse moor.

Dora would be all right. “Your mother will be all right,” he had said hollowly to his daughters. And they believed him, as they always did when he spoke, as it were, ex cathedra. The doubts were all inside himself. He knew the wickedness of this world as they didn’t. But he knew Dora too. She would be sensible, practical, she had a great sense of humor, and she would make it her business to comfort those young people. If they were all together, the five of them. He hoped they were together, not each in solitary confinement.

Would they know who she was? She wasn’t the sort of woman to say, “Do you know who I am?” Or even, “Do you know whose wife I am?” Would they recognize the name? Not unless she told them, he was sure of that. Only those he had had dealings with knew his name. But if she had told them, then it might well be to his house that the call would be made. They would expect him to be there, not here. They would ask Dora and she would tell them he would be at home, waiting to hear about her.

At one o’clock he and Burden sent out for sandwiches. He tried to eat but he couldn’t. Having one’s wife abducted was a fine way of losing weight, except that he’d prefer obesity. Once the rejected sandwiches had been removed he went down to check the progress being made in setting up an incident room.

Some five years before, an annex to the police station had been fitted up as a gym. This was at the height of the great fitness craze when it was thought advisable, at least for the younger members of the force, to work out as often as possible on exercise bikes, treadmills, ski tracks, and stair-steppers. Wexford had read somewhere that most people who start exercising keep it up for a maximum of six weeks, and this proved to be the case. Recently the gym had been used entirely as a badminton court, but, as Burden had said, not really intending a pun, that would have to be shuttled out of the way.

The inevitable computers were going in, the modems, the phones. He walked about, looking at things, not seeing, aware that eyes were on him in a new and curious way.

He had become a victim.

Now her son was at school Jenny Burden had gone back to teaching history at Kingsmarkham Comprehensive. It was a pity, as far as she was concerned, that the continental system didn’t operate here and schools start at eight and finish at two. Perhaps that would eventually come about through the European Union, a body her husband had no time for but which Jenny tended to think of as a good thing. As it was, she had to find someone to look after Mark between the time he stopped at three-thirty and the time she stopped at four.

But things were different on Thursdays, not just this Thursday, the first day of term, when her last class ended at twelve-thirty and she could go home. The nicest thing about it was being there when her friend who did the afternoon school run brought Mark home at three-forty, when he ran in and jumped into her arms. In the meantime, having eaten the one lunch she got all week that didn’t have chips or pizza in it, she was curled up in an armchair reading Roy Jenkins’s Life of Gladstone.

The phone ringing slightly annoyed her. People shouldn’t phone during these lovely quiet two-and-a-half hours, her only alone time. But she answered it, she had never managed to get into the way of letting a phone ring.

“Hallo?”

A male voice. Absolutely ordinary, she said afterward, as accent-free as a voice could be, somewhat monotonous, impossible to say if young or middle-aged. Not old, she could say that. A dull voice, perhaps purposely geared to be without a regional note or a peculiarity of pronunciation.

“This is Sacred Globe. Listen carefully. We have five hostages: Ryan Barker, Roxane Masood, Kitty Struther, Owen Struther, and Dora Wexford. I will tell you our price for them in one moment. Naturally, if the price is not paid, they will die one by one. But you know that.

“Our price is that you stop the bypass. All work on the Kingsmarkham Bypass must be discontinued and not resumed. That is our price for these five people.

“We will be in contact again. Another message will be sent before nightfall. We are Sacred Globe, saving the world.”