The Monster in the Box

by Ruth Rendell

  CHAPTER NINE

  All the time he was engaged Wexford thought how wonderful it would be if Dora were living in his flat with him. She was often there, of course she was, but she always went home to Hastings where her parents lived. It became an obsession with him to long for her when he was alone, to imagine her letting herself in with her own key, making a phone call to a friend on his phone, running a bath and walking about the flat in his dressing gown. Because of this, because he wanted to see a dream made reality, they went back to Kingsbrook Court after their wedding – a small quiet affair – before going away on their honeymoon. And the real thing was better than the imagined cameos.

  His expected promotion had come. This meant they could afford to take out a mortgage on a house and they had just moved in when their first daughter was born. It also meant more responsibility, longer hours and more travelling. Dora bore the evenings he was late, the evenings he had promised to take her out until work got in the way, the nights when it was his turn to get up for the baby but in the event was too tired even for her crying to wake him. She bore them with some resentment and he took her resentment patiently because it meant she loved him and wanted his company. He was happy and doing well. Another baby was on the way. He hadn’t forgotten Targo and the man was always at the back of his mind, sometimes at the forefront. When Targo had sold his mother’s house and was back in Birmingham, sometimes with Tracy Thompson and sometimes alone, later while he was in Coventry, Wexford had interested himself in the murders that took place in those particular areas of the Midlands. Several were of women who had plainly been killed by husbands or live-in partners. There were the inevitable child murders, most of them also associated with sexual abuse. Only one case was a strangling. The woman was a prostitute called Shirley Palmer, eighteen years old, and the suspect had previously been convicted of a serious assault on a woman in Stowerton, for which he had served a prison sentence. This gave Wexford a reason to go up to Coventry and sit in on the questioning.

  To the investigating officers, and to a lesser extent himself, it was clear that Thomas Joseph Mullan was guilty, but Targo was always in his mind. Targo had killed once and would kill again. He was living nearby. He had strangled Elsie Carroll, or Wexford firmly believed he had, and that he had no apparent connection with the victim was in line with his part in the Carroll case. But this very fact made it impossible for Wexford to suggest to Detective Inspector Tillman that it might be worth questioning him or at least checking if Targo had an alibi. He could imagine the conversation.

  ‘He stared at you? You think he stalked you?’

  ‘I’m sure he did. On three separate occasions. There’s no doubt about it.’

  ‘And this goes to show he killed this woman he didn’t know? You’ve no evidence, have you?’

  It was impossible. He was starting to see that there was no one he could confide in, no one to whom he could tell that he believed Targo to be a murderer, and expect not to be met with incredulity. Of course he hadn’t tried. He tried no one until he began telling the story to Burden all those years later.

  At last, late in the evening, Mullan was charged with murder and Wexford went back to the hotel where he was staying the night. He phoned Dora to ask how she was and how his little girls were. Sheila had had a temperature when he left. Dora said she was fine now, both of them were fast asleep. In those days no one said ‘I love you’ as an invariable concomitant of a phone call to one’s wife and no one said ‘Lots of love’ when terminating a conversation.

  ‘I miss you,’ Wexford said instead and she said, ‘I miss you too and I haven’t got all the excitement of a wet night in Coventry.’

  After that he went downstairs to the bar and asked for a glass of red wine. People were just starting to drink wine instead of beer or spirits.

  ‘Claret or burgundy, sir?’

  ‘Oh, claret,’ said Wexford, who didn’t much care.

  He was thin then and had no need to worry about his weight so he carried a dish of nuts and a bag of crisps to a table along with his wine. It wasn’t the kind of place where the barman waited on you. The room was half empty. He sat down in a scuffed leather armchair. The only difference between this bar and one in a pub was that you sat in armchairs.

  He helped himself to a handful of peanuts – no one seemed to have discovered cashews then – lifted the glass to his lips, drank, set it down and looked about him, as he always did in these circumstances, at the clientele. There was a group of four salesmen, then still called commercial travellers, three middle-aged couples he could tell were married because they didn’t speak to each other – he made a mental resolution never to let himself and Dora get that way, never let them be identified as married by their silent indifference – and an over-made-up blonde woman sitting alone. Such was the state of things in those days that if this had been a pub it was doubtful if a woman on her own would have been served. He thought, by the look she gave him and a certain desperation in her eyes, that she would have liked to pick him up. He looked sharply away and saw that, seated at a table in the far corner, also alone, was Targo.

  It gave him a bit of a shock. The last time he had seen him was some years before when he had passed Wexford’s house on his way to the river and the water meadows, paused and stared up at his windows. And repeated that behaviour day after day. He had no dog with him in here. Targo was drinking something which might have been lager or pale ale. He was better dressed than in former days – or more showily dressed – in black jeans and a brown leather jacket. His shirt was black, he wore a black-and-white-chequered tie and his yellowish-brown hair, which had been clipped quite short in the stalking days, had been allowed to grow long, had developed a slight curl and reached to his shirt collar. But he still wore the scarf. It was black, brown and white stripes this time. The naevus was still there.

  If gazing at someone will force him to look up and meet your eyes, Wexford’s stare had this effect on Targo. Or maybe it didn’t. Maybe the man had been sitting there waiting for him to come into the bar, was aware of every move he made and had calculated when he would arrive. It might even be that Targo was more aware of Wexford’s movements than he was of Targo’s.

  They looked at each other. Targo stared. Staring at someone is usually a sign of recognition but of course there was no doubt that Targo recognised him. Once, years before, having his photograph taken for some identification requirement, the photographer had complained that Wexford blinked too much, but trying to hold his eyelids still only made things worse. Targo seemed to have no problem. Had he practised, even studied how to do it? As Wexford wondered, the man’s gaze fell, he got up and walked out of the bar, leaving his glass half full.

  Wexford started to go after him but stopped at the door and turned back. Go after him for what purpose? He already knew where the man lived and he knew from the notes Tillman had provided that Targo hadn’t been among Shirley Palmer’s regulars, that Targo’s name wasn’t mentioned at all. No one answering Targo’s description had been seen in the neighbourhood of her beat either on the night she was killed or in previous days and weeks. How excited Wexford would have been if it had! Then he could have talked to Tillman about Elsie Carroll and the stalking, even about his conviction that Targo wanted him to believe himself responsible for murders where it was physically impossible he had been the perpetrator. As things were, there was nothing he could do. Or was it less a matter of doing anything but more of being able to confirm, now absolutely for sure, that Targo was pitting his wits against Wexford’s? He was challenging him, saying in effect, you can do nothing but I can kill where I like or not kill, only make you believe I kill hecatombs of victims until you begin to doubt if I’ve killed anyone at all.

  Something had been different about Targo and for a while Wexford had pondered what it was. Then he realised. No dog had been with him. He asked the barman if dogs were allowed.

  ‘Oh, no, sir. We can’t have dogs in here. There’s a notice outside saying so.’
r />   There was – outside the street door by which Targo had left and by which he no doubt had entered.

  Burden came to Kingsmarkham soon afterwards and as they got to know each other well, becoming friends as well as colleagues, he thought that here was someone he could tell. But something stopped him. It was a while since Coventry and that sighting – you couldn’t call it a meeting – of Targo in that hotel bar. He had never seen him again. He even thought sometimes, not that he had been wrong or mistaken, but that he must let it go, that justice could not always prevail and that there were some people, many perhaps, who had committed terrible crimes for which they would never be punished. If Targo was one of them, so be it. The man began to take on the aspect of a character in a recurring dream, someone who has no existence in life but only in the dream where he is vivid enough and haunting enough. Wexford actually did dream about him or had dreams in which he fleetingly appeared but never spoke and he understood that the reason for this might be because Targo himself, the real Targo, though they had encountered each other on several occasions, had only once had a real conversation with him. But Wexford knew where he lived, back in Birmingham now and with a woman who was not his second wife. He appeared not to have married again. The driving school was a success, had expanded and now he sold second-hand motor vehicles. He had also bought up several small slum properties for rent.

  The illness Wexford had in the seventies, a thrombosis behind the eye, took him to London to convalesce. He stayed with his nephew, a detective superintendent in the Met called Howard Fortune, who lived with his wife Denise in Chelsea. Wexford hadn’t expected to miss Dora specially, he certainly wouldn’t get into the business he deplored in other men of phoning his wife every evening. That was what he thought.

  The reality was that he slept badly. He hated sleeping alone. These days he sometimes thought how incredulous young people of the present day would be if they knew that, in spite of his relationships with several girlfriends, he had never slept a whole night in bed with a woman until he was married. Yet, after saying goodnight to those girls at some late hour, he had slept heavily until his alarm went off. In London, after his broken nights, he phoned Dora in the mornings and then went for long walks – doctor’s orders – in the neighbourhood, often wondering if he might encounter Targo on one of them.

  Targo was still living in Birmingham but it wasn’t an outside possibility that he might come to London and look for him if he knew Wexford was there. And one day, in the King’s Road, he saw a man ahead of him whose back, whose height or lack of height, whose walk were all Targo’s but when he turned his head, showing where the birthmark should have been but wasn’t, Wexford saw an aquiline face, a pointed chin and dark eyes.

  It was as he had begun to think. Targo had grown older, had given up the wits-pitting and the challenge and lost all interest. It began to seem likely that Elsie Carroll, who had been his victim for some unknown reason, was also his only victim and there had been no hideous murder spree.

  For all that, he thought of telling his story to Howard. He was very close to doing so some evenings when Denise had gone to bed early and he and his nephew were alone, having a late drink in Howard’s study. But the moment passed and he no more told him than he told Burden. His health improved, he went back to Kingsmarkham, to Dora and the girls, and there he encountered Targo’s wife – or the woman who had once been his wife.

  It was in the then newly built Kingsbrook Precinct, later called the Kingsbrook Centre. Kathleen Targo was windowshopping, pushing a child of about three in a buggy. Two days before Christmas it had been and Wexford, as usual, was doing his last-minute Christmas shopping. He recognised Kathleen, noting how much healthier and happier she looked, though many years had passed, but was surprised when she recognised him and spoke to him in the sort of friendly way he never would have associated with her.

  ‘It’s DC Wexford, isn’t it? Remember me?’

  He didn’t correct her, though he was a detective inspector by then. ‘Mrs Targo,’ he said.

  ‘I was once.’ She laughed. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.’

  ‘And this must be the baby you were expecting.’

  As soon as he said it he realised that was impossible.

  ‘No, that was Joanne. She’s seventeen now. I got married again, I’m Mrs Varney now and this is Philippa. We’ve been living here since she was born. It’s a wonder we haven’t met before.’

  She was a different woman, happy, placid. He remembered her as painfully thin apart from the swinging mound of pregnancy but now she had ‘filled out’, as they said, had ‘middle-aged spread’, as they also said. He had lost touch with Targo’s whereabouts recently and he could ask where her ex-husband now was. Her answer surprised him and he felt a quickening of his pulse.

  ‘Living in Myringham,’ she said, turning up her nose, ‘with some woman. I don’t know what she’s called and I don’t want to. Alan and Joanne see him and that’s how I get to know how he’s doing. Not that I care. He was in Glebe Road for a bit after our marriage broke up, then it was Birmingham for years. But he’s done well for himself, and he’s got quite a big house. You never got anyone for poor Elsie Carroll, did you?’

  Why did she ask? Like that, then, such a non sequitur. Because she knew? He would have loved to spend the rest of the day with her, take her and Philippa into one of the smart little cafes that were then a feature of the Kingsbrook Precinct, sit them down, order coffee and cakes and talk to her about Targo. Or, rather, get her to talk to him about Targo. But that was impossible. She would very likely say no, be astonished at such a request. It was Christmas and she had a family, she’d be busy. And once again he came up against the barrier – he had no reason to suspect her first husband of anything.

  ‘I must get on,’ she was saying. ‘Nice to see you. Eric’s got four dogs, Joanne says. That old spaniel lived to be seventeen but it’s dead now and he’s got more dogs and three cats and a couple of snakes. You wouldn’t credit it, would you?’ She hesitated, then said, ‘He always did like animals more than people. Well, he didn’t like people at all. That was the trouble.’ And she laughed, the merry carefree laugh of a contented woman.

  He had said goodbye to her and gone into the perfume shop to buy scent for his wife and his elder daughter. The one he tried – that he couldn’t help trying because the assistant sprayed it on his wrist – reminded him of the perfume the girl in the pink hat had used. Medora. All that way across the years, it reminded him. He laughed, shaking his head, and bought a different kind. Was there any point in finding out Targo’s precise address? No harm in knowing, he thought.

  Dora was saying, ‘Andy Norton knows a plant from a weed. That makes a change from some of them.’

  Always interested in people, Wexford asked her what Norton had done in the Civil Service before his retirement. ‘He was in some government department, apparently. Social Security, I think it was, only they called it something else then.’

  ‘Well, on the subject of pensions, he must have a good one. Why’s he doing our gardening?’

  ‘He gets bored at home, I gather. And he likes to be out in the fresh air.’

  It was a surprise when Burden arrived. He looked a little abashed, which was unusual for him. ‘Not in the firm’s time, you see,’ he said.

  ‘If you’re saying what I think you are,’ Wexford said, ‘one day this is going to be the firm’s business.’

  ‘I’ve been in Sam V.B.’s Gardens. We got a call that someone had been stabbed but it was a false alarm or a hoax. But it reminded me of Billy Kenyon and what you said about Targo. Not,’ he added, ‘that I believe it. Not any of it.’

  ‘But you want to hear?’

  ‘I want to hear.’

  Wexford smiled. He sat him down in an armchair, fetched wine and crisps. They had run out of nuts. When he had told him about the meeting with Kathleen Varney, he said, ‘It was true that Targo was living in Myringham. In Hastings Avenue and in a much better house than the one
in Jewel Road. It looked as if he and Kathleen were both doing well for themselves. But she wasn’t quite right in one respect. He had all those pet animals but he was also running a boarding kennels for dogs.’

  ‘At his home?’

  ‘It had been a kennels before he took it on. Bought the place, rented it, I don’t know. I went over there to have a look at it – and him.’ The look on Burden’s face prompted him to say, ‘Not in the firm’s time, I may add.’

  ‘Well, I suppose you thought it was for the firm in a way.’

  Wexford laughed. ‘I didn’t even have to invent a story. Do you remember that dog Dora and I had? Sheila insisted on looking after it for some boyfriend called Sebastian, brought it home, adored it passionately for two days, fed it, walked it and then abandoned it to us the way kids do. We were going away – it was when we went to that Greek island – and I was genuinely enquiring what to do with the dog.’

  ‘Targo recognised me at once. I had a feeling he knew all about me and was waiting for me to come. Nonsense, of course. He had – has, I suppose – an uncanny habit of absolutely meeting your eyes. When he talks to you he holds your gaze in an almost hypnotic way. That was the way he looked at me when I asked him about boarding Sebastian’s dog. “I remember you,” he said as if he’d never stalked me, as if he’d never stared at me in that hotel bar in Coventry. “You were on the case when that Mrs Carroll was murdered down Jewel Road,” he said. “Must have been nearly twenty years ago.” I tell you, Mike, he knew that I knew.’

  ‘What, you mean he knew you knew he’d killed her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Burden’s tone could hardly have been more sceptical. ‘A lot to read in a meeting of eyes.’