Road Rage Read Online Free PDF Page B

himself not to be a fool, to banish it from his mind, at least until that due date, for there is no point in worrying twice, once for real and once about the prospect of future worry.
    “Most of the things you have worried about,” he said to Dora on the evening of September 1, “have never happened.”
    “I know,” she said, “I taught you that axiom,” and as she spoke the phone rang.
    He picked up the receiver.
    “Hi, Pop,” said Sheila. “I just had the baby.”
    He had to sit down. Fortunately, the chair was there.
    “Can you hear me, Pop? I had the baby and she’s fabulous. She’s called Amulet. She’s got black hair and blue eyes. And do you know, it wasn’t half as bad as I expected.”
    “Oh, Sheila …” he said, and to Dora, “Sheila had the baby.”
    “Well, aren’t you going to congratulate me?”
    “Congratulations, darling.”
    “She weighs three-point-four-four kilos. I don’t know what that is in pounds, you’ll have to find conversion tables. I could have phoned you when labor started, but I knew it would only worry you and then things happened so fast …”
    “Here’s your mother,” he said. “Tell your mother all about it.”
    Dora talked for fifteen minutes. When she finally putthe phone down she said to Wexford that she’d be going to London in two days’ time.
    “She asked me to come tomorrow.”
    “Why not go tomorrow?”
    “Too many things to see to here. I can’t just up sticks and go off like that. Besides, I think I should give her a day or two. Let her get used to the baby. It’s not as if there’ll be anything for me to do there except be with them. She’s got a private nurse.”
    “Amulet,” said Wexford. “I expect I shall get used to it.”
    “Don’t worry. She’ll be called Amy.”
    SPECIES and the tree people swarmed over the earthmoving equipment during the night, removing metal parts, cutting cables, immobilizing engines, and mixing iron filings with diesel fuel. A number of arrests were made, a guard was put on the diggers, and James Freeborn, the Deputy Chief Constable of Mid-Sussex, appealed for a government grant of £2.5 million for policing the bypass.
    Wexford asked for a meeting with him to discuss the outbreak of shop-breaking and petty thieving in Sewingbury and Myfleet. Four hundred security guards, hired by the Highways Agency, were housed in decaying huts on the former army base at Sewingbury. Local residents put the blame on them, complained that they were responsible for pub brawls and that the buses which transported them to the bypass site caused traffic congestion, noise, and pollution.
    “An irony, isn’t it?” Wexford said to Dora. “Who shall have custody of the custodian? But thanks to this meeting I won’t be able to drive you to the station.”
    “I’ll get a taxi. If I wasn’t carrying all this stuff, all these presents you insist on, I’d walk it.”
    “Phone me this evening. I want to hear all about this child. I want to hear her
voice
.”
    “The only voice they have at that age,” said Dora, “is crying, and we’ll have as little of that as possible, I hope.”
    He left the house at nine for his meeting. Before he went he meant to tell her not to phone Contemporary Cars. It wasn’t particularly important, but he didn’t care for the idea of Stanley Trotter driving his wife. Of course it might not be Stanley Trotter, it might be Peter Samuel or Leslie Cousins, and even if it was Trotter the chances were he wouldn’t mention Wexford or his arrest or Burden’s unfounded suspicions. That really depended on whether Trotter was paranoid or aggrieved or just relieved to have been released when he was. Anyway, he hadn’t warned her, but at the time he hadn’t said a word to her about Trotter so if worse came to worst she could justly plead ignorance.
    His meeting ended without any firm policy being agreed on, but his presence there seemed to put ideas into Freeborn’s head. If he hadn’t anything better