Road Rage Read Free Page B

foreign visitor. You sent her out there to wait in the dark at eleven o’clock at night.”
    Dickson turned his back. “I’ll think twice,” he muttered, “before I phone your lot with information next time.”
    *   *   *
    Later that day, after hours of questioning, Stanley Trotter, a driver for Contemporary Cars and a partner with Peter Samuel in the company, was arrested for the murder of Ulrike Ranke.

3
    S heila Wexford intended to have her baby at home. Home births were fashionable and Sheila, her father said with a kind of fond sourness, had always been a dedicated follower of fashion. He would have liked her to go into the world’s best obstetrics hospital, wherever that might be, some four weeks before the birth was due. When labor began he would have preferred the top obstetrician in the country to be present, along with a couple of caring medical assistants and a troop of top-of-their-finals-year midwives. An epidural must be administered after the first contraction, and should labor continue for more than half an hour, a cesarean be performed—a keyhole one if possible.
    That, at any rate, was what Dora said his preference would be.
    “Nonsense,” said Wexford. “I just don’t like the idea of her having it at home.”
    “She’ll do what she likes. She always does.”
    “Sheila isn’t selfish,” said Sheila’s father.
    “I didn’t say she was. I said she did what she liked.”
    Wexford considered this contradiction in terms. “You’ll go up and be with her, won’t you?”
    “I hadn’t thought of it. I’m not a midwife. I’ll certainly go after the baby’s born.”
    “Funny, isn’t it?” said Wexford. “We’ve come a long way in sexual enlightenment, the equality of women andmen, got rid of the old shibboleths. Men are present at the births of their children as a matter of course. Women breast-feed in public. Women talk publicly about all sorts of gynecological things they’d once have died before mentioning. But you can’t imagine that there’s anyone who wouldn’t balk, to say the least, at the idea of a father being present when his daughter gives birth, can you? You see, I’ve shocked you. You’re blushing.”
    “Well, naturally I am, Reg. Surely you don’t want to be present at Sheila’s …?”
    “Lying-in? Of course I don’t. I’d probably pass out. I’m only saying it’s an anomaly that you can be there and I can’t.”
    Sheila lived in London with the father of her child, an actor called Paul Curzon, in a mews off Welbeck Street. The baby would be born there. Wexford, whose knowledge of London was shaky, checked it out in his
Geographer’s Atlas
, and found that Harley Street was near enough for comfort. Harley Street was full of doctors, as everyone knew, and hospitals too probably.
    Contemporary Cars was housed in a prefabricated building of temporary appearance on an otherwise empty lot in Station Road. It had once been the site of the Railway Arms, a pub which was less and less frequented, its onetime customers finding beer prices exorbitant and drunk-driving laws draconian. The Railway Arms closed down, then was pulled down. Nothing else was built and there were those in Kingsmarkham who called the windswept litter-strewn site, fringed with nettles and surrounded by spindly trees, an eyesore. The arrival of the converted mobile home, in their eyes, hardly improved matters, but Sir Fleance McTear, chairman of both KABAL and the Kingsmarkham Historical Society, said that in view of the projected bypass it was the least of their worries.
    Peter Samuel, the self-styled chief executive of Contemporary Cars, told everyone his business would soon be moving into permanent premises, but so far there had been no sign of this. The old Railway Arms site offered plenty of parking space for taxis and very convenient exits and entrances into the station approach. It was in these trailerlike offices with their stowaway tables, shower cabinet, and pull-down beds