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to do that afternoon, perhaps he would like to accompany the Deputy Chief Constable on a tour of the conservation sites. It was being undertaken prior to the environmental assessment of the Brede and Stringfield Marsh, and the bodies represented would include English Nature, Friends of the Earth, the Sussex Wildlife Trust, KABAL, and the British Society of Entomologists.
    Wexford could think of a lot of better things to do. He couldn’t imagine why Freeborn’s presence was required, still less his own, and he remembered rather sadly his resolve not to go near Framhurst Great Wood again, a decision that had already once been broken.
    Of course he said he would come, he hadn’t much choice. It was no good being an ostrich about these things. He must confront the prospect like everyone else.Perhaps he could even tell the Entomologists of his sighting of the Map butterfly. He was thinking about this and about how animals and insects and even some plants dislike the moving of their habitats, even when this is no more than a mile or two, when the call came in to Kingsmarkham Police Station from Contemporary Cars.
    Not Trotter but Peter Samuel. It was a little after noon. He had come back to the offices in Station Road to find his receptionist bound and gagged and tied to a chair, the place turned over, and the petty cash stolen.
    Barry Vine went down there with Detective Constable Lynn Fancourt. The door to the mobile home was open and Samuel was standing on the steps.
    Inside, it was a squeeze for the four of them. Tanya Paine, whose job it was to answer the phones, the one for the cars and the one for potential fares, sat on the pulldown bed rubbing her wrists. The cord that tied her had been tightly bound around her wrists and ankles. A pair of tights had been used as a gag and another to blindfold her. She wasn’t hurt but was frightened and shaken, a young woman in her early twenties, white-faced under the heavy makeup, her elaborately done long hair coming down from its chignon where the gag and blindfold had been tied.
    “I’d been driving a client to Gatwick,” Samuel said. “I was on my way back. Couldn’t make out why I hadn’t had a call from Tanya here. I mean, it was unheard-of, an hour going by without a call. I thought maybe the phone was down. So I come back here. I mean, I never come back here, not till my dinnertime, but being as I hadn’t had a call not in all of an hour and a half …”
    “All right, sir, thank you very much,” said Vine. “Let’s hear from Miss Paine. Just one man, was it, Miss Paine? Did you get a look at him?”
    “There were two,” said Tanya Paine. “They had blackmasks on with holes for their eyes and mouth. Well, not masks, hoods. It was like the pictures in the paper of that lot that broke into the bypass builders’ place. And one of them had a gun.”
    “Are you sure of that?”
    “Of course I’m sure. I was scared. I was dead terrified, actually. They opened that door and came up the steps and shut the door and the one with the gun pointed it at me and said to get in here. So I did—well, I wasn’t going to argue, was I? They made me sit in that chair and one of them tied me up. At gunpoint. I hadn’t got no choice, it was at gunpoint.”
    “What time would that have been?”
    “Ten-fifteen, ten-twenty, something like that.”
    “And you were gagged and blindfolded?” said Lynn Fancourt.
    “I don’t know why. I couldn’t see their faces, anyway, not with them masks. They blindfolded me and I couldn’t see a thing. I heard them moving about. Then they shut the door on me, that door, and I couldn’t hear either. Oh, well, I heard the phone ring a few times, I could hear that. They was here a good while after they tied me up, a long time, I don’t know how long it was before I heard the door bang.”
    The room where they were had originally been the bedroom of the mobile home. To the built-in furniture, pull-down bed, hanging cupboard, and two foldaway