Road Rage Read Online Free Page B

easily disposable of all jewelry, and for the five hundred pounds she was carrying.”
    “Do you know he was short of money?”
    “His sort is always short of money.”
    Dieter Ranke came to Kingsmarkham two hours before Burden’s extension was up. In the meantime he and Detective Sergeant Karen Malahyde had questioned Trotter again but made no progress. Ulrike’s father rejected the brown canvas bag after a cursory glance. The cheap pearl necklace found in Trotter’s flat provoked an outburst of anger. He shouted at Barry Vine, then apologized, then wept.
    “You will now allow my client to go,” said DamianHarmon-Shaw in a very smooth voice and smiling condescendingly.
    Burden had no choice. “He’s got off scot-free,” he said to Wexford, “and I know he killed her. I can’t bear that.”
    “You’ll have to bear it. I’ll tell you what really happened, if you like. When that miscreant Dickson had turned her out into the street Ulrike wasn’t at all happy being on that road with no other house in sight. If the pub lights were put out, there wouldn’t have been any light, it would have been very dark indeed out on the bypass. She waited for the taxi, but before it came another car stopped and the driver offered her a lift. A car or a lorry—who knows?”
    “And she’d take it, in spite of the dangers?”
    “Individual instances are quite different, though, aren’t they? People think themselves judges of character. They think they can tell what someone’s like from a face and a voice. It’s dark, it’s late, she’s cold, she’s no idea where she’s going to sleep that night, if she’s going to sleep anywhere, she doesn’t know when she’ll get to Aylesbury. A man comes along in a car, a warm well-lit car, and he’s a nice man, not young, a fatherly man who doesn’t make personal remarks, who doesn’t ask her what’s a lovely girl like her doing out on a dark night, but just says he’s on his way to London and would she like a lift. Maybe he says more, that he’s on his way to pick up his wife in Stowerton and drive her to London. We don’t know, but we can imagine. And Ulrike, who’s tired and cold and knows a decent older man when she sees one …”
    “Great scenario,” said Burden. “There’s only one objection. Trotter did it.”
    But the next day Stanley Trotter was back at work, busy along with Peter Samuel, Robert Barrett, Tanya Paine, and Leslie Cousins in picking up from the station anddriving to the meeting point the hordes of bypass demonstrators who arrived from London.
    Some walked. It was only a mile. The young and the poor were obliged to walk. Some of the activists were virtually penniless. A comfortably-off elite, most of the Wildlifers, a few Friends of the Earth, and a large number of independent but dedicated conservationists, formed a long queue outside the station waiting for taxis from Station Taxis, All the Sixes (named for its phone number), Kingsmarkham Cabs, Harrison Brothers, and Contemporary Cars.
    The meeting point was the roundabout on the road between Stowerton and Kingsmarkham. Something over five hundred people gathered there, members of a group called Heartwood carrying tree branches felled the day before, so that, as Wexford put it, they looked like Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane.
    They marched through the town, heading for Pomfret and the site that would be the start of the new bypass. Councillor Anouk Khoori, joint managing director with her husband of the Crescent supermarket chain, had dressed herself from head to toe in appropriate green, even to green eye shadow and green fingernails.
    The dying leaves on Heartwood’s green branches dropped off along the route, leaving a trail down the middle of the road. Debbie Harper was there in her sandwich board, but this time it was apparent she was adequately clothed underneath it in blue jeans and green T-shirt. Dora Wexford, having met with no opposition from her husband—“I wish I could join