18

The barren piece of waste ground where the Railway Arms had once stood was bounded by chain-link fencing, up against which grew the kind of trees and bushes always found on sites of this sort, elders and brambles and the suckers from felled sycamores. Nettles abounded, at this time of the year waist-high. On the wall of the bus station on the right-hand side graffiti faced faded lettering on the opposite building. Long before the aromatherapist and the photocopiers and hairdresser came, but not before the shoe repairer, the words COBBLER and BOOTMAKER had been printed on the pale brickwork. The graffiti consisted of the single rubric GAZZA, and the paint used had run from the brush in long red drips.

Around Contemporary Cars’ trailer the turf had become a dusty hayfield, sprawled with litter. Visitors to the pub and the discount store discarded their cigarette packets and crisps bags over the fence. The sleeping bag, camouflage-patterned, was in the farthest corner among the nettles, half under the brambles. The zipper that fastened it along the whole length of the right side had been opened about eighteen inches to disclose what appeared at first to be only a mass of black silky hair.

“I didn’t undo the zip,” Peter Samuel said, anticipating censure that never came. “I knew better than that. I could see what it was, I could see that hair, without touching it.”

“I undid it,” Burden said. “Her knees have been bent to get the whole of her inside that bag. When did you find her?”

“Half an hour ago. It was a bit after six. I’d been in there watching you on the telly and I came out to my car, looked over here, and I saw. I don’t know what made me look, I just glanced up and I saw it. A brown and green sleeping bag, I reckoned someone had just dumped it, you’d be surprised the rubbish people unload on here. I saw the hair, I thought it was an animal at first …”

“All right, Mr. Samuel. Thank you. If you’d like to wait in the trailer we’ll come and have a word with you in a moment.”

As soon as he had arrived at the site Wexford had felt a sinking of the heart, a dread and apprehension he didn’t want justified, that he would have liked to run away from. There was, of course, no running away and no help. A glance at Burden’s face had been enough anyway, his pale cold face and the set mouth. Vine said nothing and Karen said nothing. They turned and watched Peter Samuel walking back across the scrubby grass, and then they looked at Wexford. He trod heavily across the nettles to the other side of the sleeping bag, closed his eyes, looked.

The face, of which only the left profile was visible, was badly bruised and with death the bruise colors had become livid, yellowish, green and brown. But the features were unmistakable and he thought of the portrait, a tranquil gentle beautiful face and clear dark eyes.

“It’s Roxane Masood,” he said.

Dr. Mavrikiev, the pathologist, took no more than fifteen minutes to get there. The photographer arrived at the same time with Archbold, the Scene-of-Crimes officer. Mavrikiev undid the zipper to its fullest extent and knelt down in front of the body. It was now possible to see that what Burden had guessed was true and the girl’s legs had been bent to an angle of ninety degrees. The body was dressed in black hipster trousers, a red T-shirt, and red velvet jacket. A hand, waxen yet delicate as ivory, slid off her thigh as the pathologist gently turned her over.

Wexford had come, if not to like, to have a certain respect for Mavrikiev. He was a young man, of Baltic or Ukrainian descent, very fair with pale eyes like crystal quartz, an unpredictable creature, rude or charming according to his mood. Unlike his seniors, particularly Sir Hilary Tremlett, he never indulged his wit at the expense of the corpse, never talked about the “dead meat” or speculated unkindly as to how the body might have looked in life. But it was impossible to tell what he was thinking or to read anything in the cold face that might have been carved out of birch wood it was so immobile.

“She’s been dead for at least two days,” he said. “Maybe longer. I will, of course, be able to be more accurate about that later on. But a time-honored method of assessing the time of death will show you that, for rigor mortis has come on, established itself, and worn off again. Note the limpness of that hand. If it’s of any help to you at this stage”—he looked up at Wexford—“I’d very approximately put the time of death as late Saturday afternoon.

“Now when she was brought here I can’t tell you, but she must have been put in that bag fairly soon after her death because once rigor was established it would have been impossible to bend the legs into that position without breaking the knees. Incidentally, the legs are broken but not in aid of getting them into the bag. So you can calculate that the body was placed into the bag on Saturday evening, at any rate before midnight on Saturday.”

“And the cause of death?” said Wexford.

“You’re never satisfied, are you? You want everything and you want it at once. I’ve told you before, I’m not a magician. She’s obviously been the victim of a violent attack or attacks. Look at her head and face. As to the cause of death, you can see for yourself she hasn’t been shot or stabbed and there’s been no ligature around her neck.” Sir Hilary would have made jokes about poisoning at this stage, but Mavrikiev simply got to his feet without even a shake of the head or rueful smile. “You can do whatever you have to do and take her away. I’ll do the postmortem tomorrow, nine A.M. sharp.”

Photographs were taken. Archbold went about measuring things and got badly stung by nettles. Wexford, free to touch the inside of the bag now, began to search it, felt the padded cover, slid his hand under the body.

“What are you looking for?” Burden asked.

“A note. A message.” Wexford stood up. “There’s nothing. I don’t understand this, Mike. Why? Why do this, any of it, why this girl, why now?”

“I don’t know.”

Peter Samuel was repeating the story of his discovery of the body when Wexford went into the trailer.

“How d’you know it hadn’t been there all day?” he asked.

“What, all day since the morning? No, it couldn’t have been, no way.”

“Why not? Did you go over to that corner? Did you look? Did any of you? You were busy, no doubt, with your fares, in and out. Did you even look?”

“If you put it like that, well, no. I don’t reckon we did. Well, I didn’t. I can’t speak for the rest of them.”

“So it could have been put there on the previous night? It could have been put there on Sunday night?”

“No. No way. Well, come to think of it, I suppose it could, I mean, I doubt it, I doubt it very much, but it could.”

A mounting anger was making Wexford’s head swim. Not with Samuel. Samuel was no one, of no account. The rage that filled his head and drummed in his brain was with Sacred Globe. He found himself feeling above all a bitter resentment. This, when everything must seem to them to be going their way, when, however politic and previously planned, events must seem to them to be in compliance with their demands …

And now no more demands, no promised “negotiation,” not even an impudent thanks for an apparent meeting of ultimatums. A murder instead. But he thought sickeningly how often in the history of abductions that happened, just that. All was going well, all seemed to be progressing both from the point of view of the hostages and the hostage-takers—and then a hostage murdered, her body sent home, presented to those who searched for her.

At least they hadn’t returned the poor child to her mother. It was a measure of the kind of life he led and the kind of people he encountered, he thought, that his imagination could conceive of such a thing. But it reminded him of what he had to do now. He would do it and he would do it himself.

No message from Sacred Globe had come in on the police phones, though there had been plenty of the other sort, from those deluded or fake witnesses claiming to have seen the hostages in far-flung cities or to live next door to where they were held. The screens he glanced at as he passed carried list upon list of names, addresses, descriptions, offenses committed, of everyone closely or remotely connected with nature, wildlife, and animal protest. Cross-references, possible connections, records of interviews. He forgot, briefly, his sympathy with so many of these people, their aims, their laudable desires, their ideal fading world, and lost everything in a red tide of anger. Breathing deeply, calming his racing heart, he found a voice with which to make a phone call. “The Posthouse hotel. Mr. Hassy Masood, please.”

“Mr. Masood is in the dining room. Would you like me to page him?”

As so often happens when contact is made with a reasonable polite person from what seems another world, anger was quenched. Wexford thought of the horror of fetching the man from his dinner, from his wife and sons, perhaps …

“No, thank you.” He would go himself. He phoned his home, got his daughter Sylvia.

“Dad, what on earth happened to you? Mother’s been waiting for you for hours.”

He said he had been delayed, knowing it wasn’t Dora but she making the fuss, put the phone down softly on her expostulations. The media, yes. They could wait till tomorrow, even till late tomorrow. He drove out to the Posthouse, walked into the pine and glass and tweed-carpeted interior, and there the first person he saw was Clare Cox. It hadn’t occurred to him she might be there too. It never crossed his mind. She was back in her floor-length dress, a shawl around her shoulders, her graying tawny hair flopping from its combs. Masood and she had their backs to him. They were side by side at the reception desk, ordering, as he later discovered, a taxi to take her home.

“I had to bring her here,” Masood said when he saw who it was. “Reporters, photographers, they were all over her house and garden. One of them followed us, but I shut her up in my room and the hotel kept them out. This is an excellent hotel, I recommend it.” He beamed at the receptionist and the receptionist simpered back. “I think maybe it’s safe to go home now—what do you think?”

It seemed not to have occurred to him to see Wexford in his angel of death role. But Clare Cox, herself rather resembling a Fury or a Fate with her disheveled hair and trailing clothes, went white in the face and came up to him with outstretched hands.

“What is it? Why are you here?”

Not the mother if he could help it. He made that a rule. “I’d like you to come back into Kingsmarkham with me, Mr. Masood, if you would …” The euphemisms, the circumlocutions! But what else at this moment? “There’s been a—development.”

“What kind of a development?” She clutched at his sleeve. “What’s happened?”

“Miss Cox, I think this is probably your taxi that has just arrived outside. If you would like to go home in it I promise you Mr. Masood and I will come straight to you if need be.” It sounded as if he was promising hope, relief, yet his voice had been grave. “I can tell you no more at present, Miss Cox. If you will just do as I ask.”

The taxi wasn’t from Contemporary Cars but All the Sixes. He felt an obscure relief. Immediately it was out of sight Masood began asking about this “development.” They got into Wexford’s car and Wexford stalled for a while, but when they were nearly there he told him. A sanitized version. The sleeping bag, the waste ground, and the bent legs weren’t mentioned. He would see the bruising for himself and nothing could help that.

There had never been any real doubt. Masood looked at the beautiful discolored face, made a small sound, nodded, turned away.

Wexford thought that if it had been one of his daughters, so foully dead, beaten in the face before her death, he would have rounded on this policeman, in his grief and misery yelled at him, perhaps seized him by the shoulders, shouted into his face, “Why? Why have you allowed this?”

Masood stood meek, with head bent. Barry Vine, who was with them, offered him tea. Would he like to sit down?

“No. No, thank you.” He looked up, turning his head in a curious sideways manner as if his neck hurt him. “I don’t understand this.”

“I don’t understand it either,” said Wexford.

He remembered then that he had told Burden he thought Sacred Globe was getting cold feet, Sacred Globe was at a loss with no notion how to proceed … Well, they had proceeded.

“I have sent my wife and sons home to London,” Masood said in a calm, almost conversational tone. “I am glad now. It was just as well.” He cleared his throat. “My duty now will be to Roxane’s mother. You will come with me?”

“Of course. If you wish it.”

In the car, on the way to Pomfret, Masood said, “If anyone had told me my daughter would die young I can think of many things I might have said, but not what I feel now. It is the waste I feel. So much beauty, so talented. Such a waste.”

Remembering what Dora had told him, Wexford wanted to say what is sometimes said to the parents of dead soldiers, that Roxane had surely died bravely. But he lacked the heart for it, he doubted if he would be able to speak the words.

Clare Cox had been drinking since she got home. A reek of whisky came from her. If it had been drunk to save her, to anesthetize her against what she feared was coming, it was ineffective. Standing close to her, holding her hand, Masood told her, and there was no waiting for the news to sink in, for shock to pass, for this stunning to yield to grief. Her screams began at once, like a chemical reaction, as sharp and insistent as a starved baby crying for the pain of hunger to go away.

“Go home, Reg,” the Chief Constable said on the phone. He was in bed himself. He too had had a long day. “Go home. There’s nothing more you can do. It’s ten past eleven.”

“The press has got it, sir.”

“Have they now? How did that happen?”

“I wish I knew,” Wexford said.

Dora was asleep. He was glad of it because it meant he didn’t have to explain. The thought of telling her Roxane was dead horrified him almost as much as being with Clare Cox had done. The woman’s screams still rang in his ears. Yet Hassy Masood had passed on the news of his daughter’s death to the media. In spite of what he had said to the Chief Constable, Wexford was sure of it. Masood had told the news to Roxane’s mother, had done his best no doubt to calm Roxane’s mother—and then told the media his daughter was dead. Well, Masood had other children, a second family, a new life, and to him Roxane had been the grateful recipient of his largesse and someone to take occasionally to expensive restaurants. Her death was no more than the waste of her beauty, looks that in her case meant capital. Because Dora was there beside him, he slept like the dead. It took the alarm to wake him and it woke her first.

“I’ll go down,” he said quickly, seeing her already up and in her dressing gown.

He had to get to the papers first. There it was, all over the front pages: HOSTAGE MODEL FOUND DEAD, ROXANE THE FIRST TO DIE, ROXANE MURDERED, A FATHER’S GRIEF … So he had been right. He went back upstairs and told Dora.

At first she refused to believe. It was too much. There was no reason. With tears running down her face, she said, “What did they do to her?”

“Don’t know yet. I have to go in a minute. I’m sorry but I must. I have to go to the postmortem.”

“She was too brave,” Dora said.

“Very likely.”

“She said good-bye to me, she said, ‘Good-bye, Dora.’ ”

Dora turned her face into the pillow and sobbed bitterly. He kissed her. He didn’t want to leave her, but he had to.

Tuesday. One week since the hostages were taken. The press reminded him of that as they crowded him on his way into the mortuary.

“Two down, three to go,” one of them said.

“How did you get your wife out, Chief Inspector?” asked a girl from a television news program.

Mavrikiev was already there. “Good morning, good morning. How are you today? Mr. Vine is about somewhere. Shall we get started?”

They all got into green rubber gowns and put on gauze masks. This was Barry Vine’s first time and though not particularly squeamish when faced with a dead body, this, Wexford thought, might be different. The sound of the saw got to people, that and the smell, more often than the sight of organs being removed.

Now that the body was exposed, Wexford saw what he hadn’t seen the night before. The right side of the head was shallowly staved in, the hair matted with dark clotted blood. It seemed to him, though, that the facial bruising was less marked, less violently colored, appearing as yellowish-green streaks and blotches on the waxen skin.

Mavrikiev worked swiftly and always in silence. While other pathologists might extract an organ, hold it up, and comment on some peculiarity in its structure or progress of its deterioration, he proceeded coolly, speechlessly, and deadpan. If Barry Vine had turned pale it wasn’t obvious to Wexford. The mask and green cap hid so much, but after a few moments and a muffled “Excuse me,” he left the room with one gloved hand over his mouth.

Breaking his rule, Mavrikiev gave a small tight laugh and said, “A case of the eye being stronger than the stomach.”

He worked on, picking something out of the head wound with tweezers. Plastic containers now held the stomach, lungs, part of the brain, and whatever it was he had picked from the wound. He finished, stripped off his gloves, and came across the room to where Wexford had retreated. “I’ll stick to what I said about the time of death. Saturday afternoon.”

“I suppose I can ask my other question now?”

“What did she die of? That blow to the head. You don’t need any medical degrees to see that. Skull’s fractured, brain severely damaged, I won’t go into a lot of technical stuff, it’ll be in the report.”

“You mean someone struck her a violent blow to the head? With what? Can you say?”

Mavrikiev slowly shook his head. He handed Wexford one of the containers. It held a dozen or so small stones, some black with blood. “If someone struck her he must have hit her with a gravel path. I picked these out of the wound. I don’t think she was hit, I think she fell. I think she fell from a height onto a gravel path.”

Barry Vine came back into the room, looking sheepish. He kept his eyes averted from the slab on which the body, now neatly covered in plastic sheeting, lay. Wexford ignored him.

“Fell? Or was pushed or thrown?”

“For God’s sake, you’re at it again. I’m not a magician, how many times do I have to tell you? I don’t know. If you expect a great handprint in the middle of her back, that kind of thing doesn’t happen.”

“You could tell if she’d struggled,” said Wexford coldly.

“Fingernails full of flesh and blood, eh? There was none of that. If someone did it he’d likely have been left-handed but there was no someone. Her right arm is broken, two of her ribs are broken, her left leg is broken in two places and her right in one. The body’s bruised down the right side. I think she fell from a height, perhaps as much as thirty feet, and she fell onto her right side.

“And that’s it for the time being, gentlemen. I’ll thank you for your attention”—here a supercilious glance at Barry Vine—“and be off home to my brunch.”

Vine nodded to him.

“Feeling better?” asked Wexford breezily. “It’s just occurred to me that Brendan Royall, when we saw him, was dressed from head to foot in camouflage. Can it be coincidence?”