Wexford 22 - The Monster In The Box

by Ruth Rendell

  The fact that Tina denied being with George that evening, and therefore negated his alibi, was neither here nor there. Probably she had said she hadn't seen George because she was afraid of being involved – and this was very likely true. Where he might really have been, as far as Wexford could see, Fulford made no efforts to find out.

  He could see too that it wouldn't be long before George Carroll was arrested and charged with Elsie Carroll's murder. Then another bombshell was dropped by Tina Malcolm. She came forward of her own accord, revoked her previous statement and said George had spent the evening with her. That did no good as no one believed her. It probably did harm, for it looked as if Carroll had coerced her, as perhaps he had. On the following day he was charged with the murder of his wife.

  It was a day lodged firmly in Wexford's memory for other reasons as well. He saw Targo again, out with his spaniel, this time in the high street. He didn't speak and Wexford said nothing to him but their eyes met and Targo stared. It was after this that Wexford almost went to Ventura, told him about those glances and that unblinking stare, and suggested the man's movements might be investigated. He almost went. Perhaps it was never quite as close as 'almost'. His day's work done, as yet unaware that George Carroll was at that moment being charged with murder, he imagined what would happen at the interview. He envisaged Ventura's incredulity, turning to anger, that an underling as low-ranking and as new to the job as he, could have the presumption to suggest a solution to a murder case which, as far as he was concerned, had already been solved. If he condescended enough to ask for Wexford's evidence, that in itself unlikely, how would he react when told there was none, that it was all a matter of 'feeling', of glances and a stare?

  No, it couldn't be done. It would be pointless. Apart from possibly damaging his career prospects, he would be set down as 'cocky', as 'cheeky' and getting above himself, even as showing off. He must forget it, put it out of his head. Strangely enough, that particular question came up again in the evening when he met Alison for a drink in Kingsmarkham's only wine bar. It precipitated their first real row. The following day would be a Friday and they always went out somewhere on a Friday night. A repertory company in Myringham were putting on, for one night, a production of Shaw's St Joan. Wexford very much wanted to see it, he saw very little live theatre then, and he had thought it might also appeal to Alison. Her hostility surprised him. She wanted a film, an Ealing comedy – strange that he remembered so much but he couldn't remember which one.

  'But that will be on on Saturday too,' he had said, 'and in Stowerton next week.' There had been so many cinemas then, at least one in every small town.

  'Reg,' she said, looking hard at him, 'isn't it time you faced up to it? You don't really want to see this highbrow stuff any more than you want to read those books you're always mooning over, Chaucer and Shakespeare and stuff. You're not an egghead, you're a cop. You do it to make an impression, don't you? It's just showing off.'

  He had always had a short fuse but he was learning to control it, unplug it in time. 'You're wrong there,' he said. 'I read what I enjoy and when I get a chance to go to the theatre I try to choose what I shall enjoy.'

  'Of course you would say that. It's not natural for a man always to have his head in a book.'

  He asked her, his tone growing very cool, what would be natural for a man.

  'Well, going to football or playing golf. Playing some sport. I've never known why you don't. One thing's for sure, when we're married you won't have time for books. We'll have a house and there'll be plenty to do. My dad's always painting and decorating, not to mention the gardening.'

  'I've noticed. That's why we never see him when we go round there. He's always up a ladder or down a trench.'

  'Better than having his nose in a book. That's useless if you ask me.'

  'I don't ask you, Alison,' he said. 'And I shall go to St Joan tomorrow. You must do as you like.'

  'I shall.' She got up to leave. 'And I shan't go alone.'

  Finishing his drink, he thought that things had reached a grim stage when a man started hoping the girl he was engaged to would go to the cinema with another man. A football-watching, golf-playing, DIY expert – or hadn't that expression yet been coined? – a gardener who read the Greyhound Express. You are turning into an intellectual snob, he told himself, with no grounds for being so.

  Next day he had learnt that George Carroll had been charged. It hadn't changed his opinion and he had believed that if the police charged a man with murder the chances were it was pretty certain that he would be found guilty and condemned to life imprisonment – if no longer to death. That made him shiver a bit. Was it cowardice then that stopped him speaking to Ventura or even Fulford? There was a difference between courage and foolhardiness. If he had had some evidence, a shred of evidence . . . But he had not. Forget it, he thought again. Put it behind you.

  It hadn't occurred to him then that Carroll might appeal and on appeal be freed – not on the evidence or lack of it but due to the judge's misdirection of the jury. But that was a long way in the future, after many life-changing things had happened to him. In the present was St Joan to which he went alone. Even if he had wanted to take a girl he didn't really know any girls but Alison. He hadn't developed any critical faculty then and couldn't tell if the production was good or not, though he had thought that the Maid's (assumed) accent was a bit over the top and the Dauphin a bit too foolish and effeminate. At the interval he went out to buy himself a beer and when he came back, making for his seat at the rear of the stalls, he looked across the rows ahead and there, just taking their seats next to an older woman, were two girls, one fairish and plump, the other dark with fine brown eyes and a perfect figure in her red dress. And he thought, she is the woman for me, that's my type. I didn't know that till now but she is setting my type for me.

  The room Wexford was renting was on the first floor of a house in Queen's Lane. Conditions were primitive by present-day standards. Using the bathroom was difficult because he shared it with two other tenants and he often used to go home to his parents' house for baths, taking his washing with him. His mother was the rare owner of a washing machine. He had a gas ring in his room and a kettle in which he heated up enough water to shave in. Shaving was carried out from a bowl on a little table by the window and one morning, as he was splashing water over his face, he saw Targo pass by.

  Queen's Lane was the easiest route to the footpath across the meadows which led to the Kingsbrook Bridge. Dog walkers naturally chose it. Wexford thought very little more about it, though he did wonder why a man who lived in Stowerton would come all this way to find some open land when he could have reached woods and fields nearer home. But when it happened again the next day and again the day after that, always between seven thirty and eight in the morning, he began to suspect some other reason. The second time, Targo paused outside – apparently giving the dog the chance to sniff around the base of a lamp post and then relieve itself against it – but instead of watching the dog, he turned his eyes upwards and stared at Wexford's window. After that, this happened regularly. In today's parlance, Targo was stalking him.

  The route he was now taking home from Burden's house under the stars, under a sky where now the moon, a three-quarters-Queen's full oval, had climbed above the trees, passed across Lane by way of York Passage. The whole place had changed beyond recognition. Not uglified (Wexford used Lewis Carroll's word to himself) because the few small shops had been given eighteenth century-style fronts, the late-Victorian houses pulled down and handsome new ones built and trees planted in the pavements. These trees were now big and shady and it struck Wexford, trying to locate exactly where, on the facade of the chalet-style house which now faced him, his window had been, that as things now were Targo's spaniel would have had to lift its leg against the trunk of an ash rather than against a lamp post. What had that spaniel been called? He couldn't remember, though he had often heard Targo speak to it as he reached the footpath and let it off the le
ad. It hardly mattered. Targo didn't always use a name but sometimes a term of endearment. It had been chilling to hear this sinister creature, this murderer, call his dog 'honey' and 'sweetie'. He walked on through the lonely dark. There was no one about.

  At home, his house was in darkness but for a glow from the front-bedroom window. He went upstairs. Dora was sitting up, reading in bed.

  'Sylvia says she can get us a gardener,' she said, looking up from The Way of All Flesh which she was reading for the third time. 'He's the uncle of a friend of hers and he's an Old Etonian who's just retired from some government department.'

  'Do Eton and the Civil Service qualify him to do our garden?'

  'Probably not but she says his own garden's lovely, so that's a good recommendation.'

  'We'll give him a go and I won't send off my ad,' Wexford said. He touched the cover of her book. 'I might read that again when you've done with it.'

  His mind was too full of the past for immediate sleep. He lay in the dark and a picture of Targo appeared before his eyes: short, stocky, in those days wearing what looked like the trousers of a shabby old suit with an equally shabby raincoat. Every day when he passed Wexford's window he wore the same scarf, a brown wool thing with a fringe at each end. He walked stiffly, strutted really, and after the first few times he began whistling. The tunes he whistled were old, years and years old, 'It's a Long Way to Tipperary', 'Pack Up Your Troubles' and 'If You were the Only Girl in the World'. Wexford moved his bowl of water and his shaving things to another part of the room but still something compelled him to watch Targo and the spaniel walk by. The whistling would alert him and he would cross to the window, never moving the curtain.

  No Internet in those days, none of the records which were kept today. The electoral register was on paper, kept in post offices and of course police stations. He decided to find out as much as he could about Eric Targo without letting it be known he was searching and, necessarily, without letting it interfere with his work and his duties. Soon he had discovered that Kathleen Targo, who had given birth to a girl, was in the process of divorcing her husband. He learnt this from a woman he interviewed in connection with the robbery of the shop on the corner of Jewel and Oval Roads – she was one of those to whom nothing is irrelevant. He didn't try to stem the tide and soon she had told him, without his asking a single a question about the Targos, that Kathleen had thrown her husband out after he blacked her eye and broke her arm.

  'Mind you, he's strong,' he remembered her saying. 'She had to get help. It took three big strapping fellows from down here to get him out of the place and make sure he never went back.'

  Those were the days when the police never interfered in a 'domestic', when violence towards women was generally regarded as all part of married life and private to the couple in question. Kathleen had apparently taken the law into her own hands while Targo, Wexford discovered, was back living with his widowed mother at 8 Glebe Road. According to what records he could find, Targo had been born in Kingsmarkham, the only child of Albert Targo and his wife Winifred, a woman who had come from Birmingham. Since leaving school at the age of fourteen he had worked for a market gardener in Stowerton, for two years in refuse collection for Kingsmarkham Borough Council and as soon as he had passed a driving test, become a van driver for a hardware firm.

  Inescapable was the feeling that Targo was proud of what he had done, knew that Wexford knew it and was teasing him, defying him to come out with it to his superiors, knowing that without a shred of evidence against him he was safe. Wexford had an aunt who sometimes used the expression 'I wouldn't give her the satisfaction' and he steadily ignored the homicidal dog walker, refusing to give him the satisfaction. Ignored him, as far as Targo knew. But Wexford watched him proceeding towards the footpath, knowing that as soon as he reached the grass and trees he would let the spaniel off the lead, first stroking its sleek golden head. He learnt a lot about Targo in the few days he watched him, the stiff way he walked, strutted really, the cockiness that might have been put on for Wexford's benefit but which Wexford felt was natural to him. Then there was the attention he gave to the dog, stopping once or twice to pat it and say something, 'Good boy' or 'honey' perhaps, but Wexford was out of earshot.

  After a few weeks Targo ceased to walk his dog that way. He had made his point, whatever that was. About that time a Kingsmarkham woman was murdered by strangling. Her name was Maureen Roberts and there was no doubt her husband was her killer. He was in their house when she died, he made no attempt to defend himself and on the following day he confessed to the crime. It was very different from the killing of Elsie Carroll. But she had been strangled. The murder weapon was one of her own stockings. The day after Christopher Roberts, her husband, was charged with her murder Targo reappeared, walking his dog to the Kingsbrook footpath past Wexford's window.

  'This time,' Wexford said to Burden at lunch next day, 'I was looking out of the window. I mean, anyone passing could see me. I'd gone to the window to open it. I didn't expect to see Targo because it seemed he had given up exercising his dog that way. But there he was, strutting along, bending down right outside my window to pat the dog on the head, and then looking right up at me. He had a blue-and-white-striped wool scarf wound round and round his neck.'

  'Chelsea,' said Burden.

  'Oh, possibly.' If he had taken the interest in football advocated by Alison he would have known about things like that. But he did know that it was the same scarf as Targo had been wearing when he went into the Rahmans' house in Glebe Road the other day. 'He didn't smile,' he went on. 'He seldom does but he stared at me and opened his eyes very wide. I knew he meant me to think he'd killed Maureen Roberts.'

  'He must be mad.'

  'At least you're not saying I must be mad.'

  'No, but I'm tending that way.'

  'It was a strangling, you see, and he meant to take the strangling of victims as his trademark, whether he did it or not. And in this case he certainly didn't do it. Well, he winked at me and then he walked on, the same walk he had always taken until a few weeks before. When he came to the field and the path he bent down, stroked the dog's head and let him off the lead and that was the last I saw of him for a long time. He moved away from Kingsmarkham to Birmingham where his mother came from. He had relatives there and soon one very good friend. He started a driving school and I thought I'd seen the last of him.

  'I had until a few years later when the stalking began again.'

  Burden was giving him the sort of look he would have given his wife when she raised once again the subject of Tamima Rahman. It was compounded of those two opposites, patience and exasperation.

  'You aren't going to want to hear any more of this, are you?'

  'There's more?'

  'Oh, yes, lots more, but I'm not suggesting telling you now.'

  They had left the restaurant and walked across to the Broadbridge Botanical Gardens. There on a seat along the main central path which led to the arboretum and the subtropical house, they sat down and contemplated the artificial lake with its island, its ducks and its two black swans. A squirrel ran down one tree, sat up on its haunches for a moment on the grass, before running up the trunk of another. A dog began to bark at the foot while the squirrel stared at it with loathing, making angry chattering sounds.

  'I've got to go back,' Burden said. 'It's gone two and I'm due in court at half past when Scott Molloy comes up for perverting the course of justice. See you.'

  Wexford watched him go, then got up himself. He seldom visited the botanical gardens these days but once he had been a frequent visitor. They had been designed and built to the specifications of a local philanthropist, who had died and left several of his millions to the town on condition they spent them on his dream gardens and called them after him, Samuel V. Broadbridge. A tropical house was to be included on the site, an absolute facsimile of the one on the campus of his alma mater, a fabulously wealthy Californian university, as well as an alpine garden, a miniature Red Rock
s (in the Rockies) and a small Yosemite-like ravine.

  That was in the late seventies and before that the acres had been open fields. Wexford had been all prepared to despise the place but once it began to mature and the fine trees to grow, the magnolias, locusts, cottonwoods and live oaks, all of which liked the mild south-of-England climate, he had begun to appreciate it. It was different, but difference need not mean worse. He should walk in here more often, he thought. He should walk anywhere more often. But where else could he find himself transported to a square mile of the western United States while no more than a mile from his own home?

  After all, the open fields hadn't been very attractive, nor had the farm buildings on them. If Samuel V. Broadbridge hadn't stepped in with his dazzling millions, one of the several new housing estates would have been built on those fields. He watched a green woodpecker alight on the lawn which matched its feathers and begin pulling prey out of the grass. That was only one of the species of relatively rare birds which Sam V.B. (as he was known quite affectionately round here) had saved from expulsion if not destruction. Of course, there had been a worm in the bud and not the kind of worm the woodpecker would have appreciated. And Targo had been responsible for that too . . .