The Monster in the Box

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘Left over from someone’s Christmas party, I suppose.’

  ‘You’re out of date,’ said Burden. ‘Shops in the high street have been selling Christmas stuff since September.’ He spooned out some rice and korma for himself. ‘Surely,’ he said, returning to the subject of Targo, ‘we know why he went there. He wanted that computerised thing that switches lights and heating on.’

  ‘Yes, maybe. But doesn’t it strike you as very odd that a man who apparently hasn’t basic computer skills – like me – a man who needs help with using the equipment in his office, wants to buy a device that presumably demands those skills for its functioning? His wife is at home all day to see to switching things on and making the heating work. Also, there’s the matter of why he stayed so long. He came in the afternoon – half past two or three, nobody seems sure – but it’s sure when he left. Not till at least eight fifteen because the nail bar lady and Mrs Scott saw his car still there “after eight fifteen”.’

  ‘It looks as if he didn’t want to leave until after dark.’

  ‘Yes, but it would have been dark at five, so that doesn’t really answer the question.’

  ‘We’ve thought he might have been buying clothes and maybe a suitcase and just left the car there.’

  ‘But we know he wasn’t buying clothes, Mike. No one sold him clothes in Kingsmarkham that afternoon and if he went to Stowerton or Myringham to buy them why would he, for instance, take a taxi or a bus when he could have used his own car? I’m starting to wonder something quite different. Suppose he was with Ahmed and his mother for only an hour or two and when he left he left on foot? Took himself off somewhere by train or took a taxi to Gatwick?’

  ‘He can’t have done that.’ Burden took some more spinach on the grounds that his wife, though she wasn’t there to see, would approve of healthy eating. ‘He can’t have gone on foot because his car was found up in north Essex.’

  ‘He isn’t the only person in the Kingsmarkham area who can drive a car, Mike. Suppose he went off walking and someone else – later on in the dark to avoid being seen – drove the Mercedes up to within easy distance of Stansted to make it look as if he had gone there.’

  ‘Some pal, d’you mean? Some accomplice? How about his wife?’

  ‘Mavis says she never drives the Mercedes. But that means nothing. She could have driven it. Her prints were all over the interior, as they would be whether she drove it that day or not, and no one else’s were. She could have taken the van down to Glebe Road at nine, say, or ten, left it somewhere not in Glebe Road and driven the Mercedes up the M11 to north Essex.’

  ‘Wait a minute, Reg. We always come back to the problem of whoever drove the car up to that village having to get to Stansted or, harder, get back to London. Say she drove the car away from Glebe Road at nine she’d have had a three-hour journey ahead of her, through the Dartford Crossing, up the M25, onto the M11, past Stansted airport, out along the A120 to Thaxted or Braintree and then to that village. So she gets there at midnight more or less. How does she get back?’

  Wexford looked out at the gathering clouds, uniformly grey overhead but on the distant horizon black and thick. A storm was coming. He turned back to Burden. ‘There are trains early in the morning from Stansted into London. But she wouldn’t be in Stansted. And the Tip-Top man I saw drove no one out of Melstead that night and no one the following morning. Besides, we saw her in Stringfield at ten the following morning. No, you’re right, it can’t be done. Besides, I don’t believe her capable of doing it. The answer has to be that whoever drove that car up there had an accomplice driving another car in which to fetch him or her back. Who these people are we don’t know and are no nearer knowing than we were a week ago.’

  A sudden gust of wind blew the half-open window wide. Wexford went to close it as thunder rattled.

  ‘Is it true that when I was young storms only happened in the summer or am I imagining it?’

  ‘Well,’ said Burden, ‘as I often tell you, you’ve got too much imagination.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  No roofs were torn off, no building collapsed. Perhaps a dozen trees were blown over, one of which blocked the Kingsmarkham to Brimhurst road, another wrecking Burden’s rock garden. Heavy rain swelled the Kingsbrook and it burst its banks at the point where Wexford’s old garden used to reach, flooding a small area where nothing much grew and nothing grazed.

  ‘It’s like that joke about the dullest headline you can think of,’ he said to Burden. ‘“Small Earthquake in Chile, None Injured.”’

  Burden smiled politely, the way he did when Wexford’s humour failed to amuse him. ‘I know it’s going to cost me a fortune to have that tree moved.’

  Wexford reflected on his own garden, which was fast returning to its normal condition of untidiness and neglect, and then he thought of Andy Norton who, however you looked at it, had died because of him.

  Like some character in nineteenth-century fiction, searching the metropolis for a fallen woman, for some girl who had gone astray, Hannah Goldsmith was scouring London for Tamima Rahman. She actually told herself this as she drove from Mrs Qasi in Kingsbury to Mrs Clarke in Acton, reflecting that these days it was only among Muslims (or perhaps Orthodox Jewry) that a young girl’s chastity would be so valued or its loss so productive of danger and even death. She had started with an optimistic view. Wexford didn’t believe Tamima was in danger either of a forced marriage or, much worse, of being injured or even killed for the honour of the family. He was usually right while she was often wrong. What she wanted now was simply to find Tamima – in almost any circumstances – find her alive and well and with Rashid Hanif. Sympathetic to a Muslim culture she might be, but still she found it impossible to believe that there was anything wrong in a girl who was over the age of consent spending a week or two alone with her boyfriend. In her view, the only fault would lie in their missing out on their education.

  Rashid Hanif had money. Not much probably but enough to take Tamima to some cheap hotel for a couple of weeks. That the pair could be staying with relations was not to be considered. No good Muslim would give sanctuary to Rashid and Tamima in defiance of their parents. But a relative might have some clue as to where they would be likely to go. That was why Hannah was seeking out a small colony of Rahman relatives living in Acton as well as Akbar Hanif’s sister in Ealing. For all that, a small voice echoing somewhere inside her head kept telling her, ‘You won’t find Tamima. You know you won’t. She’s dead. Rashid may be dead too. They’re a modern-day Romeo and Juliet.’

  Mrs Clarke, née Rahman, lived in a small semi-detached house and appeared to be the only one at home. In her fifties, she was a handsome woman if rather too thin, her eyes midnight brown, her hair unnaturally black, the rainbow-shaded trousers and silk top she wore she could just carry off with that colouring. No, she hadn’t seen her niece Tamima for four or five years. Of course she knew the girl was staying with her daughter, she and her daughter were very close, but she couldn’t recall that the subject of Tamima had ever been discussed between them. From what her daughter Jacquie had told her, she understood Tamima had stayed for a while in the flat Jacquie shared with a friend she had known since university. ‘Uni’ was what she called it, a term that grated on Hannah’s ears. I’m getting as precious and fussy as the guv, she told herself. It must be catching.

  Next door lived Amran Ibrahim, Yasmin Rahman’s brother, with his wife Asha. Both insisted to Hannah that they hardly knew Tamima and hadn’t seen her since she was a little girl. She drove to Ealing. Akbar Hanif’s sister Amina lived in a handsome detached house of 1920s vintage, a far cry from his home in Rectangle Road, Stowerton. She was a big, expensively dressed woman in her late forties and she had no objection to talking about family matters. Childless herself, she was very attached to her brother’s children.

  ‘I’d be very surprised if Rashid did what you’re suggesting,’ she said over the coffee she made for herself and Hannah. ‘He’s not only a good boy who works
hard at school – gets very good exam results – but, well, he’s been brought up to respect his parents. It wouldn’t be too much to say fear his parents, especially his mum. They’ll arrange a marriage for him one day and he’s told me he’s happy with that. It won’t be till he’s finished university anyway. What makes you think he’s not camping in Derbyshire the way Fata says he is?’

  Hannah had been in contact with Derbyshire police, suggested they should find Rashid Hanif (while certain they wouldn’t be able to) and been told, though very politely, that they had no time to waste on such things.

  ‘I think he’s somewhere else with Tamima Rahman. Or he has been.’

  ‘It seems very unlikely to me. He’s simply not that sort of boy.’

  It was Rashid’s uncle, Fata’s brother in Hounslow who gave her the first clue. He and his wife had twice been to Brighton where they had stayed in a B & B. ‘Very lovely,’ he said. ‘Very good. Nice people run it. You know they are not allowed by the law to turn people away because they are Asian – my wife is from south India. They are not allowed but some people when they see a brown face – well, they make it clear one isn’t wanted. But Mr and Mrs Peddar at the Channel View showed us nothing like that. They welcomed us.’

  ‘And you told your sister and her husband?’

  ‘Yes, we did. But they never went there. How can you have holidays when you have seven children?’ He laughed. ‘You can do nothing when you have seven children.’

  Would Rashid take Tamima there? Hannah thought it possible. She took the precise address from Rashid’s uncle and, in high hopes that they had at least been there, phoned the Channel View. Mrs Peddar at once came over the line as an indiscreet woman.

  ‘We have many Asian visitors. I really like them, they’re so well behaved. In fact, we’ve thought of specially advertising for Asians but we can’t, it’s against the law.’

  ‘The people I have in mind,’ said Hannah, ‘are very young, a man and a young woman.’ It went against the grain with her to refer to any female person as a girl.

  ‘That sounds like Mr and Mrs Khan. To tell you the truth, I don’t think they’re Mr and Mrs at all, I’m sure they’re not married, but nobody cares any more about that sort of thing, do they? I think it’s rather nice, calling themselves Mr and Mrs, it sort of shows – well, respect.’

  Hannah thought she came across some daft opinions in the course of her work but few dafter than that. ‘I’d like to come down and see them, Mrs Peddar.’

  ‘They haven’t done anything wrong, have they? I’d find that hard to believe.’

  ‘No, nothing wrong,’ said Hannah.

  ‘I’ve been going over what we talked about yesterday,’ Wexford said when Damon brought in tea for himself and Burden. ‘and I’ve been thinking some very politically incorrect thoughts.’

  ‘I think them all the time,’ said Burden rather gloomily. ‘What are yours?’

  ‘I told you that when I went up to Melstead I talked to the Asian man called Anil Mansoor who runs the general shop and post office. It’s in the street where Targo’s Mercedes was found. Nothing he said was much help and certainly nothing was suspicious. But one thing he did say I ignored at the time but it’s come back to me now. He said, “Sussex? I have cousins in Sussex. Maybe you know them.”’

  Burden had begun taking sugar in his tea. It was a new departure that had been going on for perhaps a couple of months. He fancied a change, he said when asked, which Wexford thought an inadequate explanation. He watched Burden wistfully, hoping to see him put on weight but if anything he seemed thinner than before. Now, as if in defiance, he loaded three spoonfuls into his teacup.

  ‘So?’ he said.

  ‘This is where the political incorrectness comes in. If he’d been – well, white, I’d not have stored that remark of his in my mind. So he had cousins in Sussex? So what? But because he’s Asian I’m thinking of other Asians, I’m thinking of the Rahmans.’

  ‘But there are hundreds if not thousands of Asians in Sussex.’

  ‘I told you it was politically incorrect.’

  Burden drank some of his syrupy tea with evident enjoyment. ‘OK, but what are you getting at?’

  ‘We’d considered that Targo might not have driven the Mercedes himself. Suppose one of the Rahmans drove it? Drove it to Melstead because he knew the place, knew how to get there down all those narrow lanes, because he had been there before to visit his cousin, the postmaster?’

  ‘That’s pure speculation.’

  ‘A lot of what we do is.’

  ‘Are you saying that the Rahmans and this postmaster – what’s his name? Mansoor? – were in cahoots with Targo and this was done to help him with his getaway? Make us think he’d left from Stansted when in fact he left from some other airport or exit or never left at all but is still in this country?’

  Burden poured himself another cup of tea. And with a glance at Wexford which the latter interpreted as challenging, ladled in the sugar. ‘There’s no sign they’re in need of money, is there?’

  ‘Well, you could say that everyone is in need of money. Often for reasons one knows nothing about.’

  ‘If you’re right,’ Burden said thoughtfully, ‘and more than one member of the Rahman family is involved, it solves the problem of how Targo got from Melstead to Stansted airport in the middle of the night. Targo, accompanied, say, by Osman, drove the Mercedes to Stansted from Sussex. Osman, on his own, drove it to Melstead, left it there and was taken back to Sussex by Ahmed or their father in their own car.’

  ‘I’m going to talk to them. Come with me, why don’t you?’

  The fallen trees had been cleared away but the back-streets of Kingsmarkham, thickly treed, were littered with broken branches and twigs, the last of the fallen leaves, and here and there a dislodged roof tile. Wexford and Burden encountered Hannah standing outside Webb and Cobb, facing the window, part of which was exposed by a board which had come adrift in the previous night’s storm. She seemed fascinated by the interior that was already familiar to Wexford, the crates, the boxes, the stepladder and the tray on the table filled with shards of crockery.

  ‘I was just about to go into the Rahmans, guv,’ she said. As she spoke the front door of number 34 opened and Ahmed came out, holding a hammer and a bag of nails. In a rather hoarse – perhaps nervous? – voice, he said he wouldn’t be more than five minutes. He had come out to nail the board back in place.

  ‘We’re in no hurry,’ said Burden in a cold tone. Mohammed was sitting in the armchair the family seemed to regard as exclusively for his use while Osman was in the conservatory watering plant pots. He set down the can, came in as his father said, ‘I’m glad you’ve come. We’re worried about my daughter. She’s disappeared.’

  ‘At least you acknowledge it,’ Wexford said. ‘I confess I was afraid you would stick to this story of yours that she is happily spending time in London with this relative and that.’

  He looked from one to the other of them, Yasmin sitting statue-still, her hands, heavily beringed, lying in her lap, her head wrapped more strictly than usual in scarves, one black, one Prussian blue; Osman, as handsome as his brother but bearded, still in his nurse’s attire of dark blue trousers and Mandarin jacket; Ahmed and his father both dressed like businessmen in white shirts and dark suits. He glanced at Hannah, said, ‘Detective Sergeant Goldsmith believes Tamima is in Brighton with Rashid Hanif but I don’t. What do you think?’

  The elder Rahmans were silent. Like one putting off the evil day as long as he could, Osman said, ‘I’ve seen Rashid today. He’s been camping but he came back last night and his mum brought him into A & E with a suspected broken ankle. He hasn’t seen Tamima for weeks.’

  ‘I believe that,’ Yasmin said reluctantly, as if the words were being forced out of her. Wexford turned to Ahmed.

  ‘Tamima will have to be reported as a missing person. But I warn you that if she is not missing and you in fact know where she is, you will be arrested and charged with wasti
ng police time. Is that clear?’

  Ahmed nodded. Silent, he seemed in a trance-like state or hypnotised. By fear? By knowledge? Yasmin wore one of her habitual expressions, scorn this time. She looked down at the hands in her lap as if admiring the load of rings which adorned them.

  ‘I’d like you to tell me the truth about what happened when Mr Targo came here that afternoon, ostensibly to talk about you ordering some remote-control device for him. What was the real reason, Mr Rahman?’

  Ahmed tried to clear his throat. He appeared to be one of those people whose voice apprehension paralyses. The throat-clearing served its purpose but only up to a point and when he did speak his voice was hoarse. ‘He did want that – that software.’

  ‘And what was the other purpose of his visit?’

  Yasmin’s voice was quite clear, unimpeded by nervousness. ‘You had better tell him, Ahmed.’ She paused, stared Wexford in the eyes, said, ‘It wasn’t my son’s fault.’

  ‘What your mother says is sound,’ Burden said. ‘You had better tell us. Just you without your family if that’s what you want, here or at the police station. Which is it to be?’

  ‘I’ll tell you.’Ahmed took a deep breath, exhaled and spoke in a steadier voice. ‘I haven’t told my father this. My brother doesn’t know either. My mother was here. She knows. Targo – I don’t want to call him Mister any more – he came here and asked about the software. Then he said he knew my sister was going about with a boy our family didn’t like. He’d seen her, he said. That was Rashid Hanif, of course. He said a white boy but Rashid’s not really white, he’s just pale-skinned because his mother’s Bosnian.’

  ‘What else did he say, Ahmed?’

  Ahmed looked from one to the other of them as if he expected the help that was not forthcoming. He lowered his head and shook it. ‘All right, I’ll tell you. He said he knew we wanted my sister killed to save the family honour and if that was what we wanted he’d do it. He’d kill her, he said. We didn’t have to pay him. He’d do an honour killing and no one would suspect him or us if we kept quiet. There, I’ve told you.’