Road Rage Read Free

had hitched across France and taken the ferry to Dover. That much was known.
    “I don’t find it at all mysterious,” Wexford had said at the time. “I would have if she’d done what her parents told her to do. That would have been astonishing, that would have been a mystery.”
    “What an old cynic you are,” said Inspector Burden.
    “No, I’m not. I’m a realist, I don’t like being called a cynic. A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. I’m not like that, I just don’t like mealy-mouthed hypocrisy. You’ve had teenage children, you know what they are. My Sheila used to do that stuff all the time. Why spend good money when you can do it for free? That’s their attitude. They need the money for music and the means of playing it, black jeans, and prohibited substances.”
    It seemed he was right, for on the girl’s body, in the pocket of her Calvin Klein black jeans, were twenty-five amphetamine tablets and a packet containing just under fifty grams of cannabis. There was nothing on her to show that she was Ulrike Ranke and no money. Her father identified her. The man who had raped and strangled her two months before either had not recognized the contents of her pocket for what they were or had no use for them. The money that she had carried on her in notes, all five hundred pounds of it, was gone.
    Framhurst Copses had not previously been searched. None of the countryside around Kingsmarkham hadcome under scrutiny. There was no reason to suppose Ulrike Ranke had passed this way. Kingsmarkham was miles from the route she might have been expected to take from Dover to London. But someone had put her body in a woodland declivity and hidden her under the fast-growing tendrils of blackberry bushes. In the opinion of the pathologist and forensic examiners the body had not been moved, she had been killed where she lay.
    Because there had been no search, there had been no inquiries either. But immediately the identity of the dead girl was announced, William Dickson, the licensee of a public house named the Brigadier (he called it a hotel), phoned the police with information. Once he had seen photographs of Ulrike Ranke in the
Kingsmarkham Courier
he recognized her as the girl who had come into his saloon bar in early April.
    The Brigadier was on the old Kingsmarkham bypass, one of those madhouses put up in the late thirties, pseudo-Tudor, thickly half-timbered, apparently huge but in fact only one room deep. A car park behind was overshadowed by a very large prefabricated building, designed as a dance hall (Dickson called it a ballroom). The car park was surfaced in macadam but all around the house and the area in front was graveled. Very unpleasant to walk on, as Detective Sergeant Barry Vine remarked to Burden, worse than a shingle beach.
    “It was just before closing time on Wednesday, April third,” Dickson said when the two policemen came in.
    “Why didn’t you say so before?” said Burden.
    He and Vine were sitting at the bar. Alcohol had been offered and refused by both. Vine was drinking mineral water, which he had paid for.
    “What do you mean, before?”
    “When she went missing. Her picture was all over the papers then. And the TV.”
    “I only look at the local,” said Dickson. “All I ever see on the telly is sport. Folks in the bar trade don’t get a lot of leisure, you know. I’m not exactly overburdened with quality time.”
    “But you recognized her as soon as you saw her in the
Courier
?”
    “Nice-looking chick, she was.” Dickson looked over his shoulder, reassured himself of something, and grinned. “Very tasty.”
    “Oh, yes? Tell us about April the third.”
    She had come into the bar at about ten-twenty, a young blond girl “dressed like they all dressed” in black but with some sort of jacket. An anorak or parka or duffel, he didn’t know, but he thought it was brown. She had a shoulder bag, a big overstuffed shoulder bag, not a