Road Rage by Ruth Rendell

don’t have enough senior officers to dispense with you. I need you to lead this investigation. I’m putting you in charge of it.”
    The first call from a national newspaper came in at 10:30. They wasted no time, Burden thought, referring the speaker and the two others who called within minutes to the Chief Constable’s office at Myringham. As far as he was concerned, the sooner they got on with that restraining press conference the better.
    Where would it come to, that phone call from Sacred Globe? He presumed it would be a phone call. The post, after all, had come and there was no second delivery. A message by fax or E-mail would be too dangerous to send, its very existence a clue to the transmitter. So a phone call it would be. To the police station? To the
Courier
? Somehow he didn’t think so. One of those insistent national newspapers perhaps or the local authority, the mayor’s office, even the Constabulary Headquarters. No, not thatlast. It would be somewhere they would least suspect, yet to someone certain to pass it on …
    To one of Wexford’s daughters?
    He’d see about a trace on Wexford’s home phone. And then he was going to take Karen Malahyde and the two of them go up to Savesbury House, home of the Struthers. If his message had been received, it hadn’t been answered. Probably there was no one there. He couldn’t place the house, couldn’t see it in his mind’s eye, but big country houses were two a penny around here. He’d probably know it when he saw it. If the Struthers had neighbors, there was a good chance of one of them having seen something.
    Facially, Karen looked like a dedicated police officer. She had been promoted to detective sergeant the previous year. Her expression was serious, her dark eyes steady, but her face was too scrubbed-looking, her hair too grimly cropped, for her to be considered good-looking. That was above the neck. Below, she had all the attributes of a catwalk model, perfect figure, and legs, as Burden’s son John had once said, to die for. Burden himself didn’t think of women in those terms and had been congratulated on this negativity by Wexford who, perhaps ironically, praised his political correctness. Karen herself was almost too P.C. for Kingsmarkham, particularly in her dealings with men. He didn’t care whether she liked him or not, yet he rather fancied she did.
    She was an excellent driver and it was she who drove the two of them. In Markinch Lane they were stopped by the police cordon, for the bailiffs were still busy breaking up tree houses and clearing occupants. When the sergeant in his yellow coat realized who it was he would have made an exception and let them through but Karen good-humoredly turned around and took an alternative route via the Framhurst byroad.
    *   *   *
    The village of Framhurst would be the most badly affected of all conurbations in the Kingsmarkham neighborhood. “Conurbations” was a Highways Agency word that had made Wexford laugh grimly, for Framhurst was no more than a village street, a crossroads, three shops, and a church. The school, built in 1834, had long since been converted into a house that its occupants whimsically called Lescuela.
    Of the shops, one was an old-fashioned family butcher’s to which customers came from all over the neighborhood, another a general store, newsagent, and video library, and the third a tea shop with a striped awning and tables on the pavement outside. Framhurst had traffic lights at the point where Kingsmarkham Road crossed the one that passed between Pomfret and Myfleet. No one was sure how much of the new bypass would be visible from the houses that lined the village street, but there was no doubt about the coming destruction of the view from the hill to which that street led. The whole valley lay spread out below, woods, marsh, round, treecapped Savesbury Hill, and the River Brede threading through the light green and the dark green like a long crinkly strand of white