Road Rage Read Online Free PDF Page A

you,” he’d said—marched in the orderly ranks of middle-class KABAL. Its members had all rather ostentatiously eschewed green garments and, indeed, anything in the nature of the gear that might associate them with the New Age.
    Wexford, who watched the march from his office window(and waved to his wife, who didn’t see him), noted some newcomers. Their banner proclaimed them as members of SPECIES. He amused himself for a while trying to think of what this could be an acronym for—Save and Protect Environmental Culture in Ecological Something or Sanctuary for the Preservation of Earth Cooperation and Integration Something Something.
    At their head marched a commanding figure. He was tall, at least as tall as Wexford himself, and he exceeded six feet by a good three inches. He carried no banner, waved no flag, and his clothes were very different from the uniform that was a mixture of denim and medieval pilgrims’ gear. This man, whose head was shaved, wore a great cloak of a pale sand color that flapped and rippled as he walked. Wexford saw with something of a shock that his feet were bare. His legs appeared to be bare too, as much as could be seen of them. The swinging folds of the cloak hid so much.
    If he hadn’t been concentrating on this man, staring at his profile of huge forehead, Roman nose, and long chin, he might have seen one of the marchers throw a stone through the window of Concreation’s offices on the Pomfret Road. However, up there at his window, he was probably too far away to have seen anything.
    This converted Georgian house, which housed the company building the bypass, was separated from the roadway by a lawn and drive-in. No one seemed to know who had thrown the stone, though there was a lot of speculation, the more conservative partakers in the demonstration suggesting a member of either SPECIES or Heartwood. Wexford asked Dora later, but she hadn’t seen the stone thrown, only heard the crash and turned to look at the smashed window.
    The rest of the demonstration passed without incident. Three days later eviction notices were issued on peopleliving in the four camps on the bypass route. But before the Under Sheriff of Mid-Sussex could begin carrying out the evictions, building had begun on two new tree camps, one at Pomfret Tye, the other at Stoke Stringfield, “under the auspices,” as the announcement to the press rather grandly had it, of SPECIES.
    The crime tape around the area where Ulrike Ranke’s body had been found came off and the badger movers returned to their task. The British Lepidopterists announced that eggs of
Araschnia levana
had been seen on nettles in the new plantation, though no larvae had yet been hatched.
    It was August and the tree felling had resumed when the masked raiders came into Kingsmarkham by night and made their onslaught on the premises of Concreation.

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    T hey invaded the building, smashing windows, computers, fax machines, phones, and copiers. They pulled open the drawers of filing cabinets and either tore up the contents or slung them in the shredders. The police got there very quickly, but while arrests were being made, another group had occupied the headquarters of Kingsmarkham Borough Council. A third rampaged about, destroying High Street shops.
    Some of those arrested were tree people, but the hooded ones, wearing black stockings over their heads with eye and mouth holes, were newcomers to the town. They had come in during the day and set up a new camp on the bypass route, this one making the seventh. Yet more eviction orders had been applied for.
    The day after what became known as the Kingsmarkham Rampage, Mark Arcturus, a spokesman for the campaigns section of English Nature, appealed for the protest to remain law-abiding.
    “Everything we can accomplish,” he said, “will be lost if the public associates the protest with violence and criminal damage and we shall lose the public support we have enjoyed, which has been so heartening to us.