Road Rage by Ruth Rendell

enough.
    Ryan Barker, or his grandmother representing him, had phoned from Stowerton at 10:25 for the 11:19, Dora from Kingsmarkham at 10:30 for the 11:03, Roxane Masood at 10:55 for the 11:36. Why was there a gap of twenty-five minutes before they responded to another call? Because no calls came in? Because none came in from one person alone and they felt unable to handle two passengers? (He winced at that, at that word “handle.”) Because they had only two drivers working with them? It was possible too that one of them was one of the drivers, leaving the other to deal with the phone …
    And then what? Ryan Barker might not have been too sure of the way to the station. His driver might have taken him almost anywhere within, say, a five-mile radius before he realized. But Roxane Masood would have known within five minutes, Dora much sooner. Wexford didn’t think his wife would simply have accepted, have wept, have pled. She would have tried to do something. Not to the extent of jumping out of the car, not that.
    He clenched his fists, squeezed his eyes shut. Verbal protest, no doubt. A threat to leave the car. They must have taken steps to guard against such an eventuality. There must have been an accomplice waiting at, say, the first stop, red traffic light, halt sign, road junction. Then the rear door is opened, the accomplice enters, another one of those toy or replica guns brandished …
    Yes, that was how it was done in each case. But why?
    Look at the alternative. Kidnap three people picked out of the street in broad daylight? It would have to be in daylight because there was never anyone about after dark.These days there never was. People stayed at home in front of television, or if they went out, went in cars. They even drank at home and pub after pub was closed. Like the Railway Arms. Beer was expensive and you couldn’t go to a pub by car, anyway, not with the current laws as to driving over the permitted limit. This way, the way the kidnappers had done it, there was no suspicion, no resistance, no struggle until the route became unfamiliar, and then, with the accomplice at hand, it would have been too late.
    Another reason for that twenty-five-minute gap might be that they wanted women because women were physically less strong. And, even in Ryan Barker’s case, it was a woman who made the call. If she told them the fare would be a fourteen-year-old boy, that wouldn’t be enough to deter them. So they had a girl, a teenage boy, and a middle-aged woman as their hostages, and the last named happened to be his wife.
    They must
be
hostages, surely? There couldn’t be any other reason.
    Another why remained. None of the three had any money, not real money. He and Dora were more or less comfortably off, Roxane Masood’s father was prosperous, but Wexford doubted if he was in the millionaire league, and Ryan Barker’s family seemed in straitened circumstances, if not positively poor. What ransom therefore could they be looking for?
    Sometime during the night he made himself a cup of tea and fell asleep in the chair for an hour. A bit later he made coffee, went to the front of the house, and watched the dawn come. The dark sky began to grow pale at the horizon, a rim of lightening that was not quite light. Upstairs Amulet gave one cry before Sheila silenced and comforted her with the breast. Dark clouds shifted andpositive light, pale green and gleaming, showed clear and cold.
    With the coming of dawn over the bypass site, the Under Sheriff for Mid-Sussex, Timothy Jordan, moved in on the Savesbury Deeps camp with his bailiffs. It was the largest of the camps and its occupants had been served with eviction notices some time before.
    The protesters were either in the seven tree houses on the site or sleeping in hammocks strung between the oak, ash, and lime trees which predominated in this area. Before the sun came up Jordan had them corralled inside a circle of yellow-coated policemen. He woke them by announcing