The Monster in the Box

by Ruth Rendell

  As to the girl in the red dress, it had been only a glimpse he had had of her, not enough to make him go searching Sussex, just enough to make him think that one day he would like to marry a girl like her. Now he had his career to think of, his future. The breach with Alison came in a letter from her, the first letter he ever received in his new home, a room over a tobacconist’s shop in Brighton. As he had thought, she had met another man, the one who had taken her to the pictures that night he went to St Joan. They were getting married almost at once. He wrote back, wished her happy and to keep the ring, hoping she wouldn’t because he could do with the money he would sell it for, but she did keep it. Now, someone had told him, she had several grandchildren and no longer lived in this country.

  One day, walking down the high street on his way to interview a man about the disappearance of a sackful of stolen goods, he passed Tina Malcolm. George Carroll’s former girlfriend was with a man who wasn’t Carroll and pushing a baby in a buggy. As people were always monotonously telling him, it was a small world, so it wasn’t very surprising perhaps to see, on another occasion, Harold and Margaret Johnson, windowshopping in the Brighton Lanes. His friends he had left behind in Kingsmarkham and had so far made no new ones. Sometimes he went out to the pub in the evenings with DC Roger Phillips, but mostly he stayed in and read. Public libraries were in their heyday then, no nonsense about incorporating coffee shops and what technology there was, but lots and lots of good books. He read them, poetry and plays and novels. Worlds opened for him and far from distracting him from his duties (as Alison would have suggested) they seemed to make him a better policeman.

  Considered kind and polite, the way to refer to black or Asian immigrants in those days was as ‘coloured’ people. Not that there were many of them. Wexford remembered a carpet seller who went from door to door with his wares. He wore a turban and must have been a Sikh but no one knew about that kind of thing then. A black man who swept the streets was probably from Africa but no one knew what brought him here or what misfortune made pushing a cart and plying a broom a preferable existence to any other he might find. After he hadn’t been seen for several weeks Wexford heard that he had died, had been found dead of natural causes in the tiny squalid room he rented not far from where Targo had lived.

  Years and years had passed before more immigrants came and now it was becoming unusual to walk along any Kingsmarkham road without seeing one Indian or Chinese face. The way some people, particularly politicians, talked about the situation, integration versus multiculturalism, it would appear to be simple, a straightforward matter of not being racist. But Wexford’s experience had taught him what deep waters one struggles to swim in when plunging into the traditions of another culture. He had been told he was too sensitive to these issues and perhaps he was. Oversensitivity was likely to be Hannah’s problem too, notably her propensity to bend over backwards to avoid uttering the slightest word that might be construed as criticism of some nasty (Wexford’s word) custom. He had even heard her taking great care not to condemn, in a Chinese restaurateur’s presence, the process of foot-binding which had ceased to be performed in China some forty years before the man was born. Useless to tell her that the restaurateur, who was no more than thirty, might not even know that women of his great-grandmother’s generation had had their feet deliberately distorted and crippled from childhood.

  She walked in now. Anyone ignorant of her profession might far more easily have taken her for a model or perhaps popular TV presenter than a police officer. He wondered how acceptable it had been for a middle-aged Muslim like Mohammed Rahman to be questioned by a young woman in jeans and a rather too low-cut top. Hannah was sensitive only in patches.

  ‘I felt I should call on the Rahmans,’ she began. ‘Their house is very nice inside, guv. It’s small but they’ve built a beautiful extension and it’s very tastefully decorated. Mr Rahman was eating his dinner. He’d just got in from work. I must say, it smelt fantastic. I suppose Yasmin Rahman had been preparing it all day and she didn’t sit down with him, just stood behind his chair and waited on him.’Wexford waited to see how she would get out of that one. She smiled airily. ‘Still, it’s their tradition, of course, and you couldn’t see her as in any way a victim. She seems a strong, even domineering sort of woman. I told Mohammed not to mind me but carry on with his meal, he must be hungry. I didn’t think I’d find it awkward asking about Tamima and school and all that but strangely enough I did.’

  ‘Not so strange considering the knots you tie yourself up in. What did you say?’

  ‘Pretended not to know Tamima was leaving – well, had left, said we were a bit concerned that Asian girls with very good GCSEs weren’t going on to higher education as they should be. He gave me a sceptical sort of look, guv – he’s no fool – and I remembered a bit late in the day that he’s a social worker. “Leaving school is Tamima’s own choice,” he said. “Maybe she will resume her education later, who knows? But children have their own way these days, don’t they, Miss …?” I said to call me Hannah. His wife hadn’t said a word and I thought she might have no English when suddenly she spoke and very fluently. Not all girls were intellectuals, she said and she actually used that word. Some were homemakers as she had been and as Tamima was. She didn’t want a career. It was only interfering people like her teacher, that Mrs Burden, who wanted it for her, and she would, having a career herself. Maybe she needed to earn money, but Tamima would not, her husband would do that.’

  Wexford nearly laughed. ‘You must have found yourself torn in two, Hannah, what with your adherence to militant feminism and your well-known defence of the multicultural society.’

  To his delight, Hannah really did laugh, if in rather a shamefaced way. ‘You’ve got to admit it’s hard, guv. While Yasmin was going on about the virtues of being a housewife, Tamima came in. Yasmin said something to her in Urdu, I suppose it was, and whatever it was she looked mutinous – well, resentful. I couldn’t help wondering if it had been something about the boyfriend they don’t approve of …’

  ‘Come on, Hannah, that’s pure guesswork or else your Urdu’s come on a lot.’

  ‘OK, you’re right, of course. I couldn’t say anything to Tamima in her parents’ presence, though I will. As soon as the chance comes along I will. Anyway, one of the brothers arrived and Yasmin started busying herself getting his food – I noticed she didn’t get Tamima’s, suppose she had to wait till the men were done. Oh, I know, but you can’t excuse everything in every culture. So I left. It wasn’t exactly satisfactory, was it, guv?’

  He was preoccupied because he had been thinking, before she came in, of times long past. He asked himself how astonished he would have been if, when he was young, some soothsayer had told him forced marriage would one day be an issue in England. The answer was simple – he wouldn’t have believed it.

  But Hannah’s visit hadn’t been exactly satisfactory. It hadn’t been satisfactory at all. It seemed to him that she and Jenny had manufactured a serious problem out of nothing. A girl had chosen to leave school at sixteen as the law said she could. No doubt she wanted to earn some money, the way they did. That same girl had been seen walking with a schoolmate who happened to be male. Out of this, those two had composed a tragic romance. The girl was in love with a boy but snatched away from him into a forced marriage with a cousin. Perhaps she resisted, ran away with the boy, the result of which was that the two of them were murdered in horrible circumstances by one of the girl’s brothers. It was a good thing neither of them knew of his sighting of Eric Targo, otherwise they would have hauled him into the plot, as the hired assassin employed by the brother.

  He believed none of it. It was more than ever a pleasure to go home now work had begun on his garden. Andy Norton had done two afternoons’ work on the flower-beds and twice mowed the lawn. No one had got around to pruning the roses the requisite six weeks prior to blooming so this year they were a failure. But red and yellow begonias were out in the tubs and purple and red salvias
in the borders, now freed from weeds. Dora told him the names, otherwise he would have had no idea. It was enough for him to look, admire and be soothed. To forget for half an hour Targo the stalker, the murderer, the dog lover with the birthmark. The birthmark which was now gone. He’d like to know, he thought, when that naevus was removed and why, considering, to say the least, the man was no longer young.

  CHAPTER SIX

  He was to be best man at Roger Phillips’s wedding. It was a sign, Wexford thought, of the almost friendless state the man found himself in, that Roger, who had known him for less than a year, should have no one closer available for this ‘best friend’ role. And he wasn’t much better himself. He would have been lonely in Brighton if there had been less work to do and fewer books to read. And if he hadn’t met Helen Rushford. He had been taking her out once or twice a week for the past three months.

  Couples saved for years to give themselves a luxury wedding. He thought now of his younger daughter’s fabulous feast, the marquee, the champagne and flowers, the dinner for two hundred. It had been different in the days when Phillips got married, a small affair paid for by the bride’s father, the reception in a church hall, beer and lemonade to drink. No one drank wine then, sherry maybe and port but none of what they would have called ‘table’ wines. No gift lists deposited at a West End department store. No presents picked out and ordered on the Internet. Guests gave toast racks, tea trays or modest cheques. Wexford asked Helen what she thought he should give and she suggested bedlinen, a sensible practical gift. She was a sensible practical girl and he took her to the wedding with him.

  He had handed the ring to the bridegroom and was turning round to take his seat in the front pew when a glance at the congregation on the other side nearly made him drop the little box the ring had been in. Sitting in a pew about halfway down was the girl in the red dress. Or a girl who looked a lot like her, a twin if not quite the same girl. And, no, it wasn’t the same girl. But even prettier than the one in the red dress. The quintessence of his type, the type he now knew was his. Not a red dress but a pale pink suit with a tight top and full skirt and matching hat. Women habitually wore hats then and no woman would have gone to a wedding without a hat. Hers looked as if it were made of pale pink mist in which a rose half hid itself.

  I shall speak to her as soon as we get out of here, Wexford said to himself. I’ll start some sort of conversation with her at the reception. I shall think of something to say. Helen forgotten, he tried to think of what that something might be while the inimitable words of the Book of Common Prayer marriage service passed over him unheard and the congregation rose to sing ‘Praise My Soul the King of Heaven’. It didn’t occur to him then that, pretty as she might be, well dressed and elegant, she could be even less similar to himself in temperament, even less congenial, than Alison had proved to be. His mind was never crossed by the thought, as he sang a hymn in that church, that she might be anything other than as charming as she looked.

  In the event he never got to speak to her. When the bride and groom emerged from the vestry they soon began the procession down the aisle followed by the four bridesmaids, her parents and his parents. Wexford found himself paired up with a girl who seemed to be Roger Phillips’s sister and though he saw the girl in the pink hat as he passed her pew, she was whispering to an older woman who had sat beside her and he could do no more than cast her an imploring glance. Outside the photographs began – in a bitter east wind and spitting rain – and no groups included the girl in pink. She had gone, and the people she was with had gone. He would see her at the reception but there were even more people than at the church and he did catch sight of her but only in the distance. Seeking her out was almost impossible with Helen on his arm. Besides, he had his speech to make and other speeches to listen to. But he managed to make his enquiries while Helen and a bevy of girls had accompanied Pauline to the room set aside for her to change into her ‘going-away’ clothes.

  ‘Oh, that girl,’ Roger’s mother said. ‘I’ve never seen her before. She was staying with some old friends of Pauline’s parents but they’ve gone now. She was a friend of their daughter’s but the daughter wasn’t well and they asked if they could bring this girl with them. Someone said her name was Medora. Very unusual, I thought.’

  Byron, he thought. Byron had a character in a poem called Medora. The Giaour? And wasn’t the daughter of Augusta Leigh, his half-sister, that someone or other said was his child, wasn’t she called it too? Strange choice for one’s own daughter. But beautiful and romantic. Which parent was the Byron reader? He would ask her when they met – in the unlikely event of his ever getting to meet her.

  Still, he mustn’t be feeble for he knew that faint heart never won. Now for a way, once they came back from their honeymoon, to find out from Roger’s new wife the name of her parents’ friends and find it out without arousing suspicions. Even if he hadn’t been going about with Helen, he would still have disliked the idea of himself and the girl in the rose-pink hat becoming the subject of teasing. He couldn’t forget her and once or twice he dreamt about her. In the cold light of day he told himself what a fool he was, behaving like Dante over Beatrice. This was the twentieth century and he was a policeman, for God’s sake. Forget her. Don’t keep imagining you see her in her pink suit and her rose pink hat. He argued the case with himself the whole time Roger and Pauline were away and when they returned tried to discover the name of Pauline’s parents’ friends by a circuitous route, asking Roger to ask his wife if this couple were the Derwents his mother used to know in Coulsdon. He said he thought he recognised them from years back.

  Of course this turned out to be the least pressing matter on Roger’s mind. He had to be reminded twice. ‘I hope you weren’t expecting these people to be your long-lost aunt and uncle about to leave you a fortune,’ he said, passing Wexford a slip of paper. ‘As you see, they’re not called Derwent, they’re called Moffat and Pauline’s got no idea where they live.’

  ‘I think someone said the girl with them wasn’t their daughter.’

  ‘So that’s it, is it?’ Roger gave a crow of triumph. ‘I might have known.’

  Wexford had said there was nothing to know and resolved never to speak of it to Roger again. The name Moffat was written on the paper. There must be hundreds of Moffats in the country, perhaps not all that many on the south coast and Pauline’s parents, Roger had told him, had moved to Brighton from Pomfret. So should he start on the East Sussex phone book? How much easier it would have been today, he reflected, when anyone could be run to earth via the Internet. Or could be if you knew how to do it or someone working for you did. For all his resolution not to think of the girl in the pink hat as any more than his type, he was hooked on that type now and on her as its representative…

  ‘Reg.’ Burden’s voice broke rather harshly into his reverie. ‘Are you going to sit there all night?’

  He shook himself, blinked. ‘Sorry. I was thinking about the past.’

  ‘It’s usually pleasanter than the present. I thought we might have a drink somewhere. It’s gone seven and you said Dora was out. I finished that photocopy you gave me. It made me want to read more and I got Chambers’ book out of the library. But your photocopy says it all and there’s no more. He may call it Unsolved Crimes and Some Solutions but he doesn’t offer many solutions and none in the Carroll case.’

  They went into the Dragon rather than the Olive and Dove and found a quiet corner away from the crowd who had gone into the little room which used to be called the Saloon Bar to watch a football match.

  ‘Claret or burgundy?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Wexford said. ‘Their red wine all tastes the same.’

  His thoughts went back to those Burden’s entry had interrupted. It was a big step he had taken from dreaming of the girl in the pink hat to actually hunting for her. He told himself that he had already done the preliminary work – he was already thinking in policeman mode – and now all he had to do was perform a few prac
tical actions, starting with the electoral register for the Coulsdon district. You could go into a post office in those days, stand at the counter and look down the street numbers for the name you wanted. It was the Internet now, more difficult, he thought, more confusing. But to start on this while he was going about with Helen, taking her to the cinema, out for meals, for walks and a picnic in the countryside, kissing her goodnight – though no more than that – to do all this while she regarded him as her boyfriend, that seemed wrong to him. That seemed dishonourable. He told her he thought they should stop seeing each other. The look on her face appalled him, the tears that came into her eyes. She was five years younger than he and suddenly she looked very young, a child starting to cry. He told her he was too old for her, that she should find someone nearer her own age, and he sugared the unpalatable medicine by adding that she was so lovely she was wasting herself on him.

  ‘But I love you,’ she said. ‘You’re everything I want.’

  Had any other woman ever said that to him? Had Dora, his wife? He thought not but he had broken with Helen just the same and he had never seen her again. Never seen her but occasionally heard of her. She lived in the village of Stoke Stringfield now with her husband and grown-up children, the village next to Stringfield where Targo had Wymondham Lodge. He knew of her and knew her married name was Conway. You should have been ashamed, he told himself, ashamed of treating the poor girl like that and even more of romantic fantasies which were bound to have a disastrous outcome.

  He shook himself back into the present. ‘You have to remember that there was a solution,’ he said to Burden when their drinks came. ‘Arresting and charging George Carroll with the murder of his wife was the solution. And it didn’t cease to be the solution – that is in Fulford’s and Ventura’s and a lot of other people’s eyes – when Carroll got off because the judge gave some direction to the jury he shouldn’t have. The difference between them and me was that I had never believed Carroll guilty and believed him neither more nor less guilty after he was acquitted whereas Fulford and Ventura were pretty sure he was guilty and absolutely believed he was guilty after he was convicted. His acquittal made no difference to their belief but they were both very angry. That expression “hopping mad” describes them well. Ventura was positively jumping up and down with rage.