Road Rage Read Free Page A

backpack. How could he remember so well after nearly three months?
    “I’ve got a photo, haven’t I?”
    “You what?” said Vine.
    “There was a hen party going on,” said Dickson. “Girl getting married at Kingsmarkham Registry Office on the Thursday. She asked the wife to take their picture, her and her friends round their table, and she handed her this camera, and just as the wife took their picture this German girl came in. So she’s in the picture, in the background.”
    “And you’ve a copy of this photograph? I thought you said it wasn’t your camera?”
    “The girl—the bride, that is—she sent us a copy. Thought we’d like to have it, seeing as it was in the Brigadier. You can see it if you want.”
    “Oh, yes, we want,” said Burden.
    Ulrike Ranke was well behind the group of laughing women and out of the brightest lights, but it was plainlyshe. Her coat might have been brown or gray or even dark blue but her jeans were unmistakably black. A string of pearls could just be glimpsed lying against the dark stuff of her blouse or sweater. The canvas and leather bag on her right shoulder looked overfull and heavy. She wore an anxious expression.
    “When I saw that picture in the
Courier
I said to the wife to find that photo and the minute I set eyes on it I realized.”
    “What did she come in here for? A drink?”
    “I told her she couldn’t have a drink,” Dickson said virtuously. “I’d called for last orders. It was knocking ten-thirty. It wasn’t a drink she wanted, she said, she wanted to know if she could make a phone call. Comical way of talking she had, like an accent, couldn’t get her tongue round some words, but we get all sorts in here.”
    It never ceased to surprise Burden that the British, the vast majority of whom can speak no language but their own, are not above mocking those foreign visitors whose command of English is less than perfect. He asked if Ulrike had made her phone call.
    “I’m coming to that,” said Dickson. “She asked to use the phone—called it a ‘telephone,’ long time since I’ve heard that expression—and said she wanted a taxi. That’s who she’d be phoning, a taxi firm, and did I know of one. Well, naturally, we get a lot of calls for taxis out here. I said she’d find a number by the phone, we got a card stuck up on the board by the phone. I said she’d have to use the pay phone, I wasn’t having her using the one in the office.”
    “And did she?”
    “Sure she did. She came back in here. The clientele was all gone by then and the wife and I was having a clear-up. She started telling us how she’d hitched a liftfrom Dover in a lorry. The driver had dropped her off here, he was parking for the night in a lay-by. I said to the wife I reckon she was lucky he
did
drop her off, good-looking young kid like that.”
    “She wasn’t lucky,” said Burden.
    Dickson looked up, startled. “No, well, you know what I mean.”
    “She called a taxi? D’you know which one?”
    “It was Contemporary Cars. It was their card stuck up by the phone. There was other numbers on a bit of paper but that was the only card.”
    “And the taxi came?”
    For the first time Dickson looked less than proud of himself, the picture of rectitude and earnest integrity slipping slightly.
    “I don’t rightly know. I mean, she said they’d said fifteen minutes, they’d said it’d be Stan in fifteen minutes, and when I went up to bed like half an hour I looked out of the window and she was gone, so I reckon he turned up all right.”
    “Are you saying,” said Burden, “that she didn’t wait for him in here? You sent her outside to wait for him?”
    “Look, this is a hotel, not a hostel …”
    “This is a public house,” said Vine.
    “Look, the wife had gone to bed, she’d had a heavy day, and I was clearing up. We’d had a hell of a day. It wasn’t that cold out. It wasn’t raining.”
    “She was nineteen years old,” said Burden. “A young girl, a