The Monster in the Box

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘I don’t,’ said Burden. ‘Listen to me. You’ll tell him that God knows over how many decades Targo murdered three people in Kingsmarkham and environs. How do you know? You intuited it. Where’s the evidence, he’ll say, and you’ll give him all that stuff about Targo killing people other people want out of the way and how once upon a time he stalked you. So now you’d like to track his car and put a watch on all UK exits in case he tries to go abroad on a fake passport. You what, he’ll say, and then he’ll say, go away and stop wasting my time.’

  And this was what happened – with small variations. Freeborn didn’t tell Wexford to stop wasting his time or to go away but he did tell him there could be no question of putting a watch on ports and airports. Targo was not even a missing person. Old he might be but, if what Wexford said about his physical health and strength was accurate, to believe that his disappearance was in any way age-related was nonsense.

  ‘Has his wife reported him as missing, Reg?’

  Wexford shook his head. ‘She says that going off like this and switching off mobiles isn’t unusual with him.’

  ‘Well, then.’

  There was no more to be said.

  Damon Coleman and Lynn Fancourt had questioned everyone in the Pomfret neighbourhood of Cambridge Road without any positive result. Wexford went back to Cambridge Cottages and carried out, purely for his own satisfaction, a reconstruction of what he thought had happened on the morning Andy Norton was murdered. He played Targo’s part himself. Being Targo, he let himself into the shed and found the box of rope coils and balls of string from which the killer had taken the window-sash cord. Straightening up, he banged his head on the roof. Targo was about seven inches shorter than he, so he wouldn’t have done that. Holding a short length of rope – a length just short enough and long enough to strangle someone – he sat down on a stool and asked himself what sort of time he was trying to recreate. Five thirty? No, too early. Six, then. And how had Targo got here? In one of his vehicles, parked it anywhere in Pomfret and walked to Cambridge Road. It wasn’t a very big place.

  The back door was unlocked but when had it been unlocked? Wexford got off his seat and, carrying the length of rope, walked down the path past the chrysanthemums and the Michaelmas daisies to the small area of yard between the back door, the wall and the kitchen window. Targo would only have wanted to be invisible while he was doing that under the cover of darkness but once there there was no hiding place for him. It seemed likely that the back door was unlocked. Did he go in without knocking? Or knock and fetch Norton down? How did he know Catherine Lister had left? Because he saw a light come on in the house next door. Wexford looked over the dividing wall and saw that this would have been quite possible. Wexford did what Targo may have done and rapped on the glass with his fist. Lynn came to open it and Wexford stepped inside.

  Surely the first thing Andy Norton would have said was to ask him what he was doing there and how had he got in. Well, no doubt he had asked. That wouldn’t have deterred Targo once he was inside. It hardly mattered what he said, for the grim truth was that Norton would never see him again.

  Wexford walked into the living room as Targo must have done, following Norton, and there got the sash cord round his neck from behind, the way the thuggee of India had once done with their garrottes. He felt his anger rise as he thought of this gentle and innocent man becoming another of Targo’s victims.

  All I want, he thought, sitting in the car, is a small breakthrough. Just something to make one other person believe me or approach believing me. One person to give me the benefit of the doubt. I don’t know what to do now, short of trying to call all those numbers all over again, short of going back to Wymondham Lodge and talking to that woman and being assaulted by a pack of crazy dogs. I don’t know what to do unless I get a breakthrough.

  Lynn Fancourt had seen him sitting there and was coming up to the car. He opened the driver’s window.

  ‘I’ve been talking to a woman in Oxford Road, sir,’ she said. ‘That’s the street that runs parallel to this one. The lane’s between the gardens. But maybe you know that.’

  ‘I know that, Lynn. What have you got to tell me that I don’t know?’ Make it good, he didn’t say aloud.

  ‘She’s called Wentworth, Pauline Wentworth. On the morning Andy Norton was killed she came downstairs to answer her phone just before six. She hasn’t got an extension upstairs. She answered the phone because her daughter’s due to have a baby and she thought that was what it was about. It wasn’t, it was a wrong number. But she didn’t go back to bed because she knew she wouldn’t go to sleep again. It was dark, of course, but there was a big moon if you remember. She went into the kitchen and put the kettle on for tea. It was then she looked down the garden and noticed that the door in her rear wall was flapping open. No mystery about that, she’d left it open the night before. She went down the garden to close it and as she did so she saw someone go through the door in the wall into Andy Norton’s garden.’

  ‘Why didn’t she call us?’

  Lynn cast up her eyes. ‘She says because she thought she recognised him. This person, she meant. She thought she recognised him as a man she’d seen a couple of years ago out walking his dogs. One of his dogs had gone after her cat and she’d told him to put it on a lead. She said he was a small man, no taller than her, and not young, but – listen to this, sir – and when she’d seen him before he had a big birthmark on his neck but this man didn’t.’

  Wexford kept his excitement under control and spoke calmly. ‘She could see that in the dark – well, moonlight?’

  ‘She keeps a light on all night at the end of her garden. Apparently we told her – I mean, uniform did – to do that after she’d had a breakin.’

  ‘What did she think this man was doing?’

  ‘She didn’t know, of course. But she thought it was all right because he was what she called “a respectable person” and an animal lover. Maybe, she said, one of his dogs had got into the garden and he wanted to get it back without disturbing the householder. In my opinion, sir, these animal people are a bit nuts.’

  He laughed. ‘Thank you, Lynn,’ he said. ‘Well done.’

  I know him, Wexford said to himself. I know the way he works and the way his mind works but this new scenario I am imagining, it can’t be that way. And, letting himself into his house, he went to find his wife.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘I felt I knew him really well,’ she said slowly. ‘He was a friend. As you know, I don’t usually feel like that about someone I’ve only known a few weeks.’ She suddenly thought of something. He guessed what it was from her face and knew it was the very thing he wanted her not to feel. ‘He wasn’t killed because of anything to do with this house and – well, me, was he?’

  ‘I don’t know why he was killed,’ he said truthfully and then he lied. ‘But it couldn’t have had anything to do with you. That’s out of the question.’

  ‘Only I’d hate to think that. I’d never get over that. Oh, Reg …’

  He held her close. She put up her face for a kiss. It was just the way she had done this the second time they had gone for one of those evening walks at Newquay. The most trusting act he had ever known …

  Later he was back in Pomfret. ‘Can you describe him?’

  ‘Not very tall,’ said Mrs Wentworth. ‘I mean, nowhere near your height.’ The look she gave Wexford, wondering, unflattering, slightly disapproving, made him feel like a giant in a freak show. ‘I used to live in Stringfield and I’d seen him about once or twice, always with a dog, but not for years. I mean I hadn’t seen him since I came here. I told the young lady I thought it was him but then I wasn’t sure because he used to have a birthmark and this man didn’t. You can’t get rid of something like that, can you?’

  ‘Wonderful things are done with plastic surgery these days, Mrs Wentworth,’ said Wexford.

  ‘When I saw him in Stringfield he used to wear a scarf. Even in the summer in quite hot weather he wore a
scarf. And then someone told me he wore it to cover up that mark and one day he took the scarf off when I was looking at him and I saw it. So you say he had it removed?’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘Well, then, it was him. I could see quite clearly what with my light and the moonlight. I did think it was him but when I saw he didn’t have that awful birthmark I said to myself, well, it can’t be him, can it? But it must have been. He wasn’t with a dog that morning, though. I thought that’s why he was going into Mr Norton’s garden. I thought, maybe his dog’s got in there and he’s looking for it.’

  Would that be enough to persuade Freeborn of the need for a call to locate Targo’s car? Enough to put out a watch for him at Heathrow, at Gatwick and other possible airports? That he had left his passport behind meant nothing. He was the sort to have several passports. And a lot of time had been lost. It was now two days since Andy Norton’s body had been found. But Wexford had got his breakthrough. For the first time in all his years of watching Targo and being stalked by Targo, of suspecting him and of being certain of his repeated guilt, he had concrete evidence that Targo was a murderer.

  ‘Are you convinced now?’ he said to Burden.

  ‘Well, yes, I’m coming close to it. And I’m sorry, Reg, for doubting you all this time. I’m convinced because you’ve given me so much background, but I don’t know that anyone else will be. The Wentworth woman’s evidence is a bit shaky, isn’t it? Imagine it in court, an even moderately clever counsel telling her it would still have been dark at six in the morning at the end of October – never mind the moon and her light – and asking her how she could have seen a birthmark or the lack of one. She couldn’t see, could she? Surely she should be wearing glasses? She’s seventy-two years old and all lawyers are ageist.’

  ‘We’ve got enough,’ said Wexford, ‘for me to start a countrywide search. Don’t look so worried. I’ll go back to Freeborn and ask him first. But he’ll say yes when he knows the facts.’

  He said yes. A reluctant yes but a considered one, put into a word after several minutes’ thought. The first thing was to find that missing Mercedes. But who had made that phone call to Mavis and left a message? Was it possible that a man could disguise his voice so that even his wife wouldn’t recognise it?

  Targo had left home, Wexford thought, on the same day he had killed Andy Norton, within hours probably. He marvelled at a man so removed from all human feeling, from shock, from simple self-questioning, that he could could go about his normal business after committing a crime of such magnitude. It wasn’t quite normal business, though. He had gone without a dog and he had gone in the Mercedes. What was the significance of that? Perhaps only that he had intended to stay away for a while. Where had he gone first? To his children? No, Targo hadn’t been to see his children.

  Had he been to see his first wife? When Wexford had last seen her, that day in the Kingsbrook Precinct, she had said of their divorce that it was ‘good riddance to bad rubbish’, but people change, people become reconciled to those they would once have passed in the street without speaking.

  It was a long time since he too had seen her. In her late sixties now, she appeared to be a strong healthy woman, very pleased to see him.

  ‘You haven’t changed a bit,’ Kathleen Targo said.

  Gallantly, he told her she looked younger than when he had seen her all those years ago in the Kingsbrook Precinct. ‘I know you’re called Mrs Varney now but I had a bit of a job finding you with only Sewingbury to go on.’

  ‘That’s because I married again. Jack died a few years back and I married his best friend. He’d been a widower for about the same time.’

  She took him into a living room and offered him coffee. ‘I won’t, thanks. Things are a bit rushed at present.’ He remembered the child in the pushchair. ‘How’s Philippa?’

  ‘Just qualified as a doctor. Working all hours but you have to, don’t you, your first year or two?’

  ‘You must be proud of her.’

  ‘No doubt of that. I’m a very lucky woman, Mr Wexford. All my children have done well for themselves. I’ve got my health and strength and I’ve had two good husbands after starting off with a rotter. I can’t complain and I don’t.’

  She invited him to sit down. Photographs of her children were on the mantelpiece, tables, the top of an upright piano, and alone, on what looked like an old-fashioned music console, one of her as a bride for the second time. He wondered how he would have felt if Dora had been married before and kept a photograph of her earlier wedding in the living room. He would have hated it but then he and Dora had been young and in love, not like this couple marrying for companionship in impending old age.

  ‘You’re no longer Mrs Varney,’ he said, ‘so what do I call you?’

  ‘I’m Mrs Jones now but you call me Kathleen.’

  ‘Your first husband is missing.’

  That made her laugh. ‘A good miss, I should think. If he’s disappeared you can bet your life it’s on purpose.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you know where he is.’

  ‘You don’t suppose right. I don’t know where he is. He’d go to any one of his women before he’d come to me. Left Mavis, has he? They weren’t getting on, I know that. Joanne tells me. Alan won’t have a word said against his dad, God knows why not, but you’ve got to hand it to him.’

  Strange and interesting, Wexford thought, how grown-up children can be devoted to a bad parent – more devoted often than to a good one. Because they still hoped to please them, even so late in the day, and thus at last win their love? ‘He’s left his wife only in the sense that he’s gone away somewhere. Do you have a name and address for the woman he was living with in Birmingham?’

  ‘Tracy something. Wait a minute. Tracy Cole. After I threw him out, he was with his mum in Glebe Road for a bit and then he went to her. I’ve got the address she was living at then. Well, I’ve got it somewhere. I’m one of those people who never throw anything away so I reckon I can find it.’

  ‘I think I will have that coffee,’ said Wexford, ‘if it’s not too much trouble.’

  ‘No trouble at all.’

  Did this propensity of hers extend to never forgetting anything? Perhaps. People who hoard, people who save every useless scrap and fragment, the anal ones, as psychologists call them, usually have good memories, he had noticed. He would ask her. Those hard times – hard in more ways than one – in Jewel Road, Stowerton, might not be lost in the mists of time. In his mind’s eye, as in a dream, he saw Targo sitting by the appliance everyone in those days called ‘an electric fire’, the little boy Alan, who was loyal to him still, going up to him, kissing him goodnight and then stroking the spaniel’s silky head …

  She came back with coffee and two cups on a tray. Also on the tray was a yellowing sheet of paper on which, long ago, someone had printed an address. ‘He wouldn’t write me a proper letter. Wouldn’t even buy a stamp and stamps weren’t the price then they are now. He put this bit of paper through my front door without even an envelope to show me where he was living. He knew I’d see the address was in the best part of Birmingham. That Tracy Cole was loaded. Her dad had died and left her the house and wads of money. Her and him, Eric, I mean, it was one of those cases of a couple who never really get away from each other, one or other of them will always go back.’

  If she still lived there, Wexford thought, if she did after so long, could Targo have taken refuge with her?

  ‘Kathleen,’ he said, feeling a little awkward as everyone does when using a given name for the first time, ‘do you remember the evening I came to talk to Mr Targo when you were living in Jewel Road? It was in connection with the murder of Mrs Elsie Carroll. Do you remember that?’

  ‘Of course I do. I remembered you, didn’t I? And that was the only time we met till we ran into each other in the precinct, apart from me being rude to you on the doorstep.’

  He laughed.’You weren’t rude, just a bit sharp,’ he said. ‘This is very good coffe
e. Do you also remember that I asked your husband where he was on the night Mrs Carroll was killed and he said he was babysitting Alan?’

  ‘I’d been giving Alan his bath,’ she said, and incredibly to Wexford, so excellent was her memory, ‘and I wasn’t there when you asked that. I came in and heard him say that bit about me being at my dressmaking class. I didn’t say anything when he said he’d been here all the time doing press-ups and all that rubbish. I didn’t because I was scared of him. You could tell that, couldn’t you?’

  ‘I was very young, Kathleen. I didn’t know about domestic violence. Well, no one did much then. It was talked about as a private thing in a marriage, not to be interfered with by outsiders.’

  ‘That suited men all right, didn’t it? Eric didn’t knock me about much in those days but I didn’t want him hitting me at all when I was so near my time. I mean, I didn’t want to fall over. What I’m trying to say is that night you were asking about, I came back early from my class because the teacher was taken ill. Oh, I remember all this even though it was so long ago. When I came back Eric wasn’t there, he’d left Alan alone. Only for ten minutes maybe but he had left him and it was that made me think I’m not putting up with this, him leaving his kid alone at night, him hitting me if I step out of line and making more fuss about that dog than he ever would about the baby I was expecting.’

  His belief needed no confirmation but she had made assurance doubly sure.

  ‘I did put up with it a bit longer,’ she said. ‘Joanne was born two weeks later. You stayed in hospital a lot longer then that they do now but he came to see me just the once. Once in ten days when I’d just had his child. He wasn’t at home looking after Alan. He was at home looking after the dog while Alan stopped with my mum. I did put up with it for nearly two years more. Alan was six and Joanne was getting on for two. He hit me then, a punch in the breast. They thought punching a woman’s breast brought on cancer – it doesn’t, they know that now, but I believed it then and I said to him, that’s it, what you’ve done is going to kill me anyway but this is the end. Next day me and the neighbours threw him out and he went to his mum and to Tracy who was another mum to him.’