8

Did you guess right?” Burden said.

“I’m afraid so.”

Wexford was reading the transcription Jenny had made, as accurately as she could, of Sacred Globe’s phone message. There was nothing in it to surprise him, it was in fact routine stuff, but the threat to kill the hostages if the “price” was not paid still reared up off the page at him.

His new team had come into the room and it would shortly be time to address them. As well as Burden from Kingsmarkham, there were Detective Sergeants Barry Vine and Karen Malahyde with the four DCs, Lynn Fancourt, James Pemberton, Kenneth Archbold, and Stephen Lambert. The Regional Crime Squad had sent him five officers from their complement of fourteen: DI Nicola Weaver, DS Damon Slesar paired with DC Edward Hennessy, and DS Martin Cook paired with DC Burton Lowry.

Wexford had met Nicola Weaver for the first time ten minutes before. A woman had still to be very good to have risen to where she was at her age. She couldn’t have been more than thirty. Hers was a sturdy figure, not very tall, she had strong features, black hair severely cut, the fringe at right angles to the sides, and she wore a wedding ring. Her eyes were a clear turquoise blue and though she seldom smiled, when she did she showed perfect white teeth. She had shaken hands with him, a firm handshake, and said as if she meant it, “I’m very glad to be here.”

Slesar was dark, handsome in a strained bony way, one of those tall skinny people who can eat anything without putting on weight. His very short hair was a dull lampblack, his skin the olive of the Welsh- or Cornishman. Wexford had a feeling he had seen him somewhere before, met him, but for the moment he had no recollection of where. DC Hennessy was his opposite, thickset, of medium height, with a pudgy face, reddish hair, and light hazel eyes like a ginger cat’s. The other sergeant was thickset and heavyish with bright sharp eyes. DC Lowry was black, skinny, and elegant like a cop in a television serial.

Karen Malahyde greeted DS Slesar like an old friend—or something more? At any rate she didn’t favor him with the short cool look and tight nod she gave most male newcomers, but smiled, whispered something, and sat down next to him. Could he have encountered Slesar in her company? Was that the solution? Somehow he didn’t think so. It was something of a mild joke among them all that Karen never seemed to have a boyfriend.

He began by telling them what some but not all of them knew already, that his wife was among the hostages. Nicola Weaver, who evidently didn’t know, said something to her neighbor, Barry Vine, and raised her eyebrows at his answer.

Wexford told them about the two messages, beginning with the one to the Courier, which had resulted in the Chief Constable’s press conference and an undertaking secured from all national newspapers that they would print nothing until he lifted the embargo. The second message, he said, had been received by Inspector Burden’s wife at their home, and he had a copy of Jenny’s transcript shown on the screen.

“I think and hope this may be an instance of someone being too clever—and in his opinion amusing—for his own good. We might have expected the message to come to my house, since my wife may well have told her captors who she is and who I am. To choose Inspector Burden’s home took us by surprise, as was the aim. We must try to avoid being taken by surprise again.

“But in being clever he may also have been unwise. How did he know about Mike Burden? How did he know of his existence? Perhaps because Mike had had dealings with him and it’s unlikely these were of a—how shall I put it?—a social nature.” A ripple of laughter made him pause. “That is something we have to go into,” he went on. “No doubt Sacred Globe found his phone number in the book, but we have to investigate how he knew whom to look up.

“The hostages were taken at random. We know that. Therefore there’s little point in much investigation of their backgrounds. That isn’t going to help us find where they are or who has them. We have to begin from the other end, with Sacred Globe itself. That’s our starting point and getting on with it is imperative. This means contact with all the pressure groups protesting currently at the building of the bypass.

“Most of them—a couple of days ago I’d have said all of them—are legitimate groups of sincere people protesting against what they see as an outrage in a peaceable way. But in these instances there are always the others, those in it for the pleasure of causing disruption, for example, the rioters who invaded Kingsmarkham one Saturday night a month ago and many of whom, perhaps like our hostage-takers, were masked and seemingly unidentifiable.

“Someone in these groups, in SPECIES or KABAL, is going to be able to help us. Even someone with Sussex Wildlife or Friends of the Earth, both legitimate, concerned societies, may well have come in contact with very different elements while on other protests. These people have to be talked to and any clues they may give us quickly followed up. The tree people and those in the camps have to be talked to. They may be our most valuable sources of information.

“I’ve said that the hostages’ backgrounds aren’t apparently of much significance, but, on the other hand, I would draw your attention to a connection between Tanya Paine, Contemporary Cars’ receptionist, and the hostage Roxane Masood. Miss Masood and Miss Paine appear to have been acquaintances if not close friends, they knew each other, which is the principal reason for Miss Masood’s calling that particular taxi firm. This may mean nothing, it’s probably no more than coincidence, but it is a tiny lead that shouldn’t be neglected.

“The Chief Constable is at present with the Highways Agency. What will come of that meeting I don’t know. I do know, as sure as I have any certainties about this business, that government isn’t going to say, ‘Okay, forget about the bypass, let the hostages go and we’ll build it somewhere else.’ Nothing like that is going to happen. That isn’t to say there won’t be some sort of interim compromise. We must wait and see what he has to say when he returns from his meeting.

“Meanwhile, because time is very important, we all have to get going on the lines I’ve just laid down. Principally, to find out who Sacred Globe is, their members, their leaders. We have to wait too for the message we are told will be sent before nightfall.

“Are there any questions?”

Nicola Weaver got to her feet. “Is this to be classified as a terrorist incident?”

“Doubtful,” Wexford said. “Not at any rate at this stage. As far as we can tell, Sacred Globe isn’t attempting to overthrow the government by force.”

“Wasn’t there a group or an individual who planted bombs on new housing estates?” This was Inspector Weaver again. “I mean, bombed them to discourage new building? They’re a possibility, I should think.”

“What about the guy who made concrete hedgehogs and put them on motorways?” This was DC Hennessy’s contribution. He added, “The idea being simultaneously to avenge squashed hedgehogs and wreck cars.”

“Anyone like that can be a lead,” Wexford said.

Turning with a slight frown from Karen Malahyde, who had apparently been whispering information to him, Damon Slesar asked, “I understand Inspector Burden’s wife is a schoolteacher at a local school. Could one of these Sacred Globe folks have been in her class at school or be a parent of such a child?”

“It’s a good point,” said Wexford. “Good thinking. That way he might know whose wife she was.” At once, as he uttered those words, his own wife came powerfully into his mind, seemed to stand before his eyes. He blinked, resumed, “This is another lead to look into as soon as you leave this room. Talk to Inspector Burden and find out where his wife taught up till five years ago and where she has begun teaching now. Right. That’s all. I hope you’re all happy to work late tonight.”

It was still only four o’clock. Before nightfall, Wexford repeated to himself, before nightfall the third message would come. Now, in early September, night didn’t fall until eight o’clock, if by the term one meant after sunset and when dusk has begun. In the next four hours that message might come to almost anyone. The same options as earlier applied and earlier they had been wrong.

Jenny had, with commendable presence of mind, immediately punched out the number 1471 that summons a recorded voice telling the subscriber the caller’s number. But the caller had, prior to the call, put in the number that negates this procedure, so there was no result. These days any call could be traced if the caller’s number was known, except that a call box was almost certainly being used and this time it would be a different call box. Were they in the vicinity, he wondered, or a hundred miles away? Were the hostages together or held separately?

He asked himself, knowing he shouldn’t ask, shouldn’t touch it, shy away from this, whom they would kill first. If things didn’t go the way they wanted—and how could they?—who would be first?

The only call to come in during the next hour in connection with the hostages was from Andrew Struther, son of Owen and Kitty Struther, of Savesbury House, Framhurst.

Burden was rather surprised to hear the voice of a reasonable man using reasonable words, even apologizing.

“I’m sorry, I’m afraid I was a mite discourteous. The fact was this tale of my parents being missing seemed to me so totally incredible. However—I’ve phoned the Excelsior in Florence and they’re not there. They’ve never been there. I’m not exactly worried …”

“Perhaps you should be, Mr. Struther.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t entirely follow … Hasn’t there simply been a mistake?”

“I think not. The best thing would be for you to come down here and we’ll give you the facts as we know them. I’d have done so this morning, but you were”—Burden endeavored to be polite—“not particularly receptive.”

Struther said he would come. He didn’t know the whereabouts of Kingsmarkham Police Station and Burden had someone give him directions. Pass through Framhurst, over the crossroads, keep straight on, follow the signs for Kingsmarkham … DCs Hennessy and Fancourt had gone to the bypass site to interview tree people at the Elder Ditches and Savesbury camps, where Burden was to join them. Detective Inspector Weaver was with the KABAL hierarchy, and Karen Malahyde with Archbold were researching SPECIES, where their headquarters was, how many members they had nationwide, what they did and if it ever involved breaking the law.

A phone call came to Wexford from Sheila to say Sylvia was going home. Neil had been in touch with the news that their younger son Robin had chicken pox. She was going home but would be back the next day, as soon as she was certain she couldn’t carry the chicken pox virus or bacterium back to Amulet. Wexford had given up arguing, protesting, telling them both to go home. He just uttered, “Yes, darling, that’s fine” and other consoling pap, adding that he didn’t know when he’d get home. The message wouldn’t come to his home, anyway. Sacred Globe would know very well he wouldn’t see much of the inside of his house at the moment.

A promise had been extracted from Peter Tregear of Sussex Wildlife to be with him by five-thirty, when Andrew Struther arrived, accompanied by his girlfriend whom he introduced as Bibi. Both wore sunglasses, though it wasn’t a bright day. The girl’s were the mirror kind that you can see your own face in. She wore a red-and-white-striped Breton top, so skimpy that every time she moved, an inch of tanned midriff showed. She seemed highly conscious of her good looks and allure, fidgeting her body into provocative poses. Wexford left them to Burden. He felt Burden was owed an apology, though he doubted if it would come.

Perhaps because Burden had told him he should be worried, Struther had brought with him a photograph of his missing parents. They were standing in snow in bright sunshine on some ski slope. Both were smiling and screwing up their eyes, it would have been hard to identify the originals from this, but Burden didn’t think he was going to have to identify them. He saw a tall man in a dark blue ski suit, a rather shorter woman in red. From what could be seen of it under woolly hats, both had fair hair fading to gray, both had light eyes and were strong, straight, and lean. Owen Struther might have been fifty-five, his wife a few years younger.

“I must ask for your silence,” Burden said. “We are taking a very serious view of this. I don’t think I’m overstepping the mark if I say that a leak to the press will result in prosecution for obstructing the police in their inquiries.”

“What is this?” said Struther.

Burden told him. He didn’t name the other hostages. A reluctance to name Wexford’s wife had seized him.

“Unbelievable,” Struther said.

The girl gave a shriek. She sat up awkwardly, forgot to be provocative, took off her glasses. Hazel eyes, verging on the golden, had the look of an animal’s, empty of emotion, though greedy and purposeful.

“Why them?” Struther asked.

“Chance. A random selection. There have been threats. Threats to kill unless conditions are met.”

“Conditions?”

Burden saw no reason not to tell him. All the next-of-kin of the hostages would have to be told. Much as he would have preferred to shy away from it, he said, “That the building of the bypass be stopped.”

Struther said, “What bypass?”

He lived in London, he might not read the papers, watch television. There were such people. “I rather think the proposed route can be seen from the windows of your parents’ house.”

“Oh, that new road? The one people keep demonstrating about?”

“That one.” Burden watched Struther digest this information, nod, put up his eyebrows. “Thank you, Mr. Struther,” he said. “We’ll keep you informed. Remember what I said about not speaking to anyone about this, won’t you? It’s of the greatest importance.”

Dazed now, as if in a dream, Struther said, “We won’t say anything,” and then, “Christ, it’s just beginning to hit me. Christ.”

Peter Tregear must have passed him going out as he came in. The secretary of the Sussex Wildlife Trust was not to be told of the abductions, only of a subversive group called Sacred Globe. What did he know of them? Had he even heard of them?

“I don’t think so,” Tregear said. “There are so many of these groups and splinter groups. It’s never simple. Have you ever read a book about the French Revolution?”

Wexford looked at him in astonishment.

“Or the Spanish Civil War, for that matter. I mention those world-shaking events because in both of them, and the Russian Revolution too, it was so far from simple and straightforward. Not just two sides, I mean, but dozens of splinter groups and factions, almost impossible to follow. Human nature’s like that, isn’t it? Can’t keep things simple, people always have to have a lot of internecine squabbles, one little thing they don’t agree with and they’re off forming a collective of their own. Give me animals every time.”

“So you think the members of Sacred Globe were part of one of the other groups, but they disagreed with the rules or the aims or whatever, maybe wanted more action, less talk, more violence even, so they broke away and formed their own.”

“Or didn’t break away,” said Tregear. “Stayed and formed their own group.”

“Before Mark was born,” Jenny said, “I’d been teaching first at Sewingbury High School as it then was, and later at Kingsmarkham Comprehensive. Oh, and I did a bit of part-time at that private school St. Olwen’s when Mark was three and going to that nursery in the mornings.”

Wexford had found her in her husband’s office, where she had been since receiving the call. Her little boy was with his school friend, siblings and parents.

“I’ve told half a dozen people everything I can remember about that phone call,” she had said when Wexford came in. “And soon I’ll be telling them what I can’t remember.”

“Don’t do that,” he had said. “We’ve picked your brain enough on that. Now we want to know how he came to phone you.” He listened in silence to the enumeration of her teaching experience. “Did your pupils—sorry, you call them students now, don’t you?—did they know who Mike was, what Mike did?”

“I suppose so. Some of them did. Kids aren’t like they used to be when we were young, Reg.” She was flattering him there, he thought, considering she was getting on for twenty years his junior. She smiled at him. “We’d never have asked teachers personal questions. We’d have got short shrift if we had. It’s different now. For one thing they genuinely want to know. They’re interested in people the way we weren’t. Or I wasn’t. At the Comprehensive they call me by my Christian name.”

“And they’d ask you about your husband? What he did?”

“Oh, all the time. The ones I taught five years ago, ten years ago, and the ones now. Except that now every one of them knows he’s a policeman.”

“And back then? Say seven years ago? I’m thinking of seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds at that time. Is there anyone you can think of who specifically asked?”

“I think pretty well everyone knew then, Reg. They were all interested in my wedding—you remember what a big showy wedding we had, all my mother’s doing—and it was in the local paper then what Mike did.” She looked at him doubtfully. “Where’s Mike now?”

“Somewhere at the bypass site. Why do you ask?”

“I hoped he’d be coming home. But he won’t, will he, not for hours? Can I go, Reg? I need to fetch Mark.”

Not for hours … It would have been the end of a normal day but Burden knew that for him it was only half over. Eyes peering at you from forest depths and forest trees was an image constantly recurring in children’s literature. He was always reading such descriptions to his son, but the eyes in the children’s books belonged to animals and these were human. He was aware of them from the branches above him and the scrubby coverts beneath. A sacking curtain was pulled aside at the entrance to one of the tree houses and a man stepped out, saying nothing, staring down, his face impassive.

They had left the car in a lay-by on the lane and walked first along the green ride, then taken the path that wound its way through groves of man-high birch saplings. Lynn Fancourt knew the way better than he did, a good deal better than Ted Hennessy, who trod warily, rather as if he were being taken on a tour of an unexplored rain forest. Twittering birds gathered in the treetops, preparing to roost. Burden thought he could hear the sound of a guitar ahead of them, but soon the music stopped and the keening voice stopped and all that could be heard was the birds’ tuneless murmuring.

Then, as the birches were left behind and the great trees began, he saw the eyes. Their approach had been heard, their footfalls on the twigs and leaf mold and dry grass, and that was why the guitar had been put away. Everyone in the trees prepared to watch for them. Burden had been used to believing that it was only animal eyes that shone in dark places, but these gleamed in just the same way. He had just taken in the fact that their arrival had interrupted the activities of three people who seemed to be involved in the building of a new tree house, when the man on the platform spoke.

“Can I help you?”

He said it like someone serving in a shop, with the same degree of friendly politeness, but he wasn’t much like a shop assistant, more a leader of men, tall with a commanding air, a cloak wrapping him. He might have been a general surveying the battlefield before the fighting starts.

Archbold said very correctly, “Kingsmarkham Crime Management. We’d like a word.”

“What are we supposed to have done now?”

“We’re making inquiries,” Burden said. “That’s all. We’d just like to talk to you.” He moved his hand, a half wave.

“Nothing to do with this camp. It won’t take long.”

“Wait.”

The cloaked man disappeared into his tree house. There wasn’t much he could do about it, Burden thought, if he didn’t come out again. And there were fewer eyes staring now. He looked up at the tree house that was in the process of being built. A wooden framework had been constructed on the firm foundation made by the two huge limbs and lopped-off trunk of a long-ago pollarded beech. A woman in an awkward-looking long dress clambered down the trunk and began searching for tools in a canvas bag on the ground. She passed a hammer up to the man with the long fair beard who had come halfway down for it. At that moment their leader—Burden somehow knew he was that—came out from behind the curtain, his cloak left behind, and shinned down his ladder, suddenly transformed into a normal person in jeans, sweatshirt, and sneakers.

Not quite a normal person perhaps. For one thing, this man was exceptionally tall, exceptionally long-legged, and with long-fingered attenuated hands. His head was shaved, his features like those Burden had seen in pictures of Native American chiefs, harsh, razor-sharp, fleshless bones and skin.

“Conrad Tarling.” He nodded as he spoke, a kind of substitute for a handshake. “They call me the King of the Wood.”

Burden could think of no rejoinder.

“Would you prove your identities, please?”

A glance at three warrant cards and the nod came again.

“We’ve been through a lot, had a good deal of trouble,” said Conrad Tarling in the tone of someone who has spent six months in a refugee camp. “What is it you want to ask about?”

Lynn Fancourt told him. While she was explaining, the hammering began. The man building the tree house had begun attaching lengths of timber to the beam construction. Lynn raised her voice. She had to shout above the noise and Burden went over to where the woman in the long dress was standing.

“Would you mind stopping that for the time being?”

“Why?” the man in the tree said.

Burden had never seen such a long beard except in illustrations to children’s books, the wizard, the woodcutter. He didn’t know why he kept on thinking of children’s books.

“Police,” he said. “We have some inquiries to make. Just hold off for ten minutes, will you?”

For answer the hammer was flung out of the tree. Not, however, in Burden’s direction or anywhere near him. The woman in the long dress picked it up and scowled at him. He heard Lynn Fancourt ask Tarling in her normal voice if he had ever heard of Sacred Globe or knew anyone in the camp who might have, when a girl in mummylike wrappings and draperies appeared, running from nowhere, from a treetop or out from among the trees perhaps, but who erupted into the midst of them, shouting and throwing out her arms.

“You turn us off our land, you drag us out of our homes, and now you come here and ask us to betray each other. It’s not enough that you wreck this country, this world, you’ve got to wreck the people too. Not just their bodies, not just the way you carried me unconscious down a ladder at dawn this morning, not just that, though I might have fallen and been disabled for life, not only that, but you’d wreck our souls too. You’d make us betray our friends and when you do that you smash the spirit!”

There was a silence that Burden broke. “Your friends?” he said.

“She’s upset,” Tarling said. “And no wonder. I don’t suppose it was you, was it? It was the bailiffs. But you all get tarred with the same brush and who’s to blame for that?”

“As you do, Mr. Tarling, and who’s to blame for that?”

Tarling began a lecture on environmental issues, the destruction of ecological balance and the danger of what he called “emissions.” Burden nodded once or twice, then left him and went home, from where he phoned into the old gym and announced where he would be that evening. They had agreed to keep one another constantly informed of their whereabouts.

“They weren’t exactly cooperative,” he said to Jenny while eating a fast supper at the table with his son. “I got started on the wrong foot, I suppose. This Quilla—how does a woman get to be called Quilla? What’s it short for or long for?—she gave me a name. And the other one, the Freya one, softened up a bit and gave me a place. I strongly suspect neither exists.”

“I suppose you’re going out again?” Jenny said it neutrally, not at all in a tone of exasperation.

“Well, what do you think? That we’re going to have a nice evening watching a detective series on telly?”

“Mike,” said Jenny, “I’ve remembered something—well, someone. At the Comprehensive before Mark was born.”

He stopped eating.

“I don’t want to remember it in a way because it’s so—well, isn’t it awful in our society, the way people with morals and high ideals and courage get labeled as subversive and terrorists? The way that happens and other people who never did a thing in their lives for peace or the environment or against cruelty, they’re the ones that are respected?”

“No one’s talking about terrorists,” said Burden.

“You know what I mean. Or I bloody well hope you do. I’ve made you see things a bit more my way, haven’t I?”

“Yes, love. I’m sorry. I’m a bit tired.”

“I know. Mike, there was a boy at school—it would be six years ago, he was seventeen then, so he’d be twenty-three now—he was an animal-rights person when animal rights were mostly about being against the fur trade and saving endangered species. He was an idealist and I don’t think he’d have hurt anyone, though when I come to think of it he never seemed to care much for people’s rights. He left school and went up north somewhere, and later on, it was after Mark was born, someone, one of the teachers, I happened to meet her, told me he’d been convicted of stealing a lot of animals or maybe birds from a pet shop and releasing them somewhere. And the thing was, he asked for ten other offenses of that kind to be taken into consideration. So I thought …”

“Why did you never tell me?”

“You wouldn’t have been interested.”

Burden said quietly, “No, you thought I’d say, ‘Serves him right,’ or, ‘These people are a menace to society,’ and perhaps I would have. What was his name?”

“Royall, Brendan Royall.”

His little boy was beginning to read. Burden had never before come across a child who, instead of being read to, now wanted to read to the parent who had done so for him night after night for four years. But he hadn’t known a parent like that before or many children, come to that. He kissed his wife and for a moment laid a loving hand on her shoulder.

“ ‘I really couldn’t eat mouse pie,’ ” read Mark. “Mummy, you’re not listening.”

Mouse pie, said Burden to himself, mouse pie. The things these writers thought of. Upsetting to an animal-rights activist, that would be, a source of distress no doubt to this Brendan Royall …

He drove himself to Clare Cox’s. The Jaguar was still outside. Hassy Masood had returned with his second family, for the front door was opened by a young girl in a sari.

The tiny living room was full of people. Masood, who had changed his denim suit for one of dark gray broadcloth, proceeded to introduce them.

“My wife, Mrs. Naseem Masood, my sons, John and Henry Masood. My stepdaughter, Ayesha Kareem, who is Mrs. Masood’s daughter by her first marriage to Mr. Hussein Kareem, now alas dead. Roxane’s mother, Miss Clare Cox, you of course already know.”

Burden said good evening. Something about Hassy Masood made him feel tired before he got started. Unlike her daughter, Naseem Masood wore western dress, a very tight red suit with short skirt, a great deal of expensive costume jewelry, gold and with red stones, high-heeled white shoes. Her black hair, teased into tendrils, was nearly as long as Gary the tree man’s beard. Her daughter was tall and willowy, had coppery skin, strangely light brown eyes, long nose, and curved lips, the look of a girl from Omar Khayyam. She made Burden think of the only bit of poetry he knew and the lines about bread and wine and thou beside me in the wilderness came back to him. The little boys, pale, neat, black-haired, stared at him in a way he wouldn’t have cared for his own son to stare at anyone.

On the sofa Clare Cox lay with her feet up, her eyes closed. She made a gesture to him with her hand, a movement of greeting possibly, or more likely, despair. She wore the same nightgownlike garment he had always seen her in, reminding him of Quilla, for it was soiled now, stained down the front, perhaps with her tears.

“I am sorry to disturb you, Miss Cox,” he began, “but I know you understand that in the circumstances …”

Masood interrupted him. “Now what can we get you in the way of refreshment, Mr. Burden? A drink? A sandwich? I doubt if you have had time today for much in the way of sustenance. I don’t of course touch alcohol myself, but having seen fit to provide Miss Cox with supplies in the way of wine and brandy, I can with no trouble at all …”

“No, thank you,” said Burden. “Now, Miss Cox, this won’t take a moment.”

She opened her eyes. “Do you want to speak to me alone?”

“That won’t be necessary.”

After he’d said it he realized he might have relieved her of the rest of them, but he wasn’t thinking fast enough. He thought only that if Hassy Masood had been obedient, his wife would not know about Sacred Globe, but the questions he needed to ask could have been asked of the parent of any missing person.

She sighed. The girl called Ayesha turned on the television, turned down the sound to a murmur, and sat on the floor staring at it, six inches away. Mrs. Masood took her sons by the hand, then put an arm around each of them and pulled them to her. Masood, who had left the room, came back into it with glasses of what looked like orange Squash on a tray.

Sticking to his refusal to drink, Burden said, “What can you tell me about your daughter’s friendship with Tanya Paine?”

“Nothing. She just knew her.”

Clare Cox had turned her face away, pushing into a cushion. The girl on the floor drank her orange Squash noisily, with slurps. Burden said, “Were they at school together?”

For a moment he thought she wasn’t going to answer. Then she turned over and half sat up. “They were at Kingsmarkham Comprehensive, but they weren’t close friends, they just knew each other. Roxane’s cleverer than her. She was in the top group for art and English.”

“I don’t suppose he wants to know that,” said Naseem Masood to no one in particular.

Clare Cox spoke rapidly. It was a way of getting it over quickly, of getting rid of him. “Roxane had a job—well, it started as a holiday job—working in the instant print place in York Street and she ran into Tanya who had a job next door and they’d got into the way of having a coffee together. Then Tanya left to work for Contemporary Cars and Roxane left to be a model, but when she wanted a car she’d always go to Tanya.”

As she was speaking the eyes of everyone in the room apart from the girl on the floor had turned to the portrait on the wall. The beautiful face looked back at them. Mrs. Masood was the first to remove her gaze. Having derived the maximum from this interview, she had apparently decided she had had enough. She got up, smoothing and pulling down her skirt.

“We should be getting back to the hotel now, Hassy,” she said. “The boys want their dinner and Ayesha’s a growing girl.” She addressed Burden. “That Posthouse is a very good hotel for a place like this.”

He asked Clare Cox if she had Tanya Paine’s address and was given the name of a block of flats in Glebe Road. Tanya, Clare Cox seemed to think, shared with three others. He waited until the Masood family had left, Ayesha, in spite of her height and her grown-up clothes, tearful and stamping her foot at being taken away from the silent screen.

“Have you no one to be with you overnight?” he asked.

“God,” she said, “give me the chance to be alone.” She wiped her eyes with her fingertips, though there had been no tears in them. “Mr. Burden? It is—er, Burden, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“I wanted to tell you something about Roxane. Oh, it isn’t helpful, it isn’t anything, but it’s worrying me so …”

“What is it?”

“It’s—do you think they’re keeping her somewhere like a—oh, God, a small room, a cupboard even, I mean … She’s claustrophobic, you see. I mean, she’s really claustrophobic, seriously, not the way people just say they are when they don’t like going in lifts. She can’t be shut in anywhere, she can’t stand it …”

“I see.”

“This is quite a small house but she’s all right here when the doors are open. She always leaves her bedroom door open. I shut it once by mistake, I forgot, and she got in an awful state …”

What could he say? A couple of soothing sentences that offered very little comfort. But her question remained with him as he got into the car and drove back to Kingsmarkham. Sacred Globe wasn’t likely to be keeping the girl in some spacious apartment with French windows opening onto lawns and terraces. The probability was somewhere small and confined, and he thought about cases he had known or read of, people kept in sheds or tanks or chests or car trunks. How was Dora Wexford about claustrophobia? Did any of the rest of them have phobias or, come to that, allergies, special dietary requirements? It seemed to serve no useful purpose to find out …

He found Tanya Paine by herself, all her flatmates out. Solitary evenings she evidently devoted to beauty treatments, for her head was wrapped up in a towel, her nails were newly painted, and there was a powerful foul smell in the room of some kind of depilatory.

At first she took his visit as that of a concerned social worker checking up on whether she had been given the counseling she asked for. He recognized her as a total solipsist, with no interest in anyone but herself or in anything but her immediate concerns. In a way, this was an advantage, because telling her about the abductions would be out of the question.

Almost anyone else would have asked. She remained unsurprised by his questions, confirmed what Clare Cox had said but volunteered no further information. To her, it appeared, Roxane Masood was just a girl she knew, not a girl who had affected her much, a mate to have a laugh with (as she put it), someone to meet for a coffee and a danish. As soon as she could she steered the conversation back to her counselor, a woman whom she had seen once but was not giving her the satisfaction she hoped for.

“She never asked me what sort of childhood I had. Don’t you reckon that’s funny? I was all geared up to tell her a few bits about my mum and dad and she never even asked.”

The phone ringing saved Burden from making any answer. Afterward he had no idea how he knew; how the sense of what it was, of who was making this call, came to him in an inspiring flash, almost from the moment she picked up the receiver.

Perhaps it was the tone in which she said “What?” or the expression on her face, her lower lip dropping, her eyes widening. He got up, was across the room in two strides, met her eyes, and took the phone from her. She seemed relieved to be rid of it, dropping it into his hands like a snake or a hot coal.

A couple of sentences had already been uttered. Burden concentrated on listening as he had never listened before.

“… Globe. You know the hostages we have. You know our price.”

It was as Jenny had said, a dull accentless monotonous voice.

“By morning we need a public assurance of cessation of work on the Kingsmarkham Bypass. We are not exigent, we are not draconian. A moratorium will suffice. Stop the work for the time being while we negotiate.

“But a public assurance via the media we must have and by nine tomorrow morning. If not, the first of the hostages will die and the body be returned to you before nightfall.

“Pass this message on to the police and the media.”

Burden didn’t speak. He knew it would be useless and, in any case, he didn’t want the possessor of this voice to know it wasn’t Tanya Paine listening to him.

“I repeat, pass this message to the police and the media. The embargo on publicity is not of our doing. Remember that. Publicity is what we desire.

“We are Sacred Globe, saving the world. Thank you.”

The phone was put down, the burr began, and Burden turned around to see Tanya Paine staring at him, open-mouthed and with clenched fists.