Wexford 22 - The Monster In The Box

by Ruth Rendell

  Burden began to expostulate, as he had done on the previous occasion this had been discussed. 'But you'd no evidence. Just a look and a man being fond of his dog. You'd nothing.'

  Wexford shook his head. 'I had the stalking. It started again. I'd just got married and we were living in one of those houses near the Kingsbrook. You remember.'

  'Sure I do. There was a meadow at the end of your garden that ran down to the river.' Burden added rather sadly, 'It's all built on now.'

  'Well, people have to have places to live,' said Wexford. 'Targo began exercising his dog down there. It was the same dog, the golden spaniel, and it must have been very old by then. There were a good many ways of getting into that meadow, one of them being the Kingsbrook towpath and another a gate to a path off the high street, but he chose to pass my house and take the footpath that ran down to the right of it. I got used to seeing him and I didn't like it.'

  'What, just because he was walking his dog?'

  'At that time, Mike, he was living – alone, I think – in his mother's old house at 8 Glebe Road. To have come into the meadow by any of a dozen entry points would have been easier than walking uphill to my house and using that footpath.'

  'What did he do when he saw you?'

  'Well, of course, he seldom did see me. It was summer when this started and very early in the morning. I'd see him from my bedroom window just after I'd got up. Sometimes he'd pause and look up at my windows the way he did when I had that single room. He always had a scarf tied round his neck. He always stared. Once and only once I was getting into my car – it was later because autumn had come – he said good morning and I said good morning and after that the stalking stopped. He didn't stay long. He sold the place he'd inherited and went back to Birmingham.'

  'If it was stalking,' said Burden, 'you'd nothing to go on for calling him a psychopath.'

  'I had the man who sneaked across the Carrolls' garden at seven o'clock, the short man, the man who lived so near the Carrolls that he could have left his sleeping child, done the deed and been back home in ten minutes.'

  'It's a bit thin, isn't it, for calling someone a psychopath and a serial killer? Just that one murder and that of a woman he'd never even spoken to?'

  'Ah, but there were his fantasy murders. I mean the killings he wanted me to think he'd done. Yes, I'm serious. Maureen Roberts, for a start. The next real one – as far as I know – was years later after he'd done rather well for himself – inherited his mother's place, had money from that Tracy – bought a house and set himself up running a boarding kennels. You'll remember the case. Well, I know you do. You mentioned it the other day, that poor chap who was strangled in the botanical gardens. Billy Kenyon. Remember?'

  'You mean you think Targo was responsible for that?'

  'More than "think", Mike. I'm sure.'

  'Are you going to tell me?'

  'Maybe I'll wait till you ask.'

  Chapter 7

  She was behind the counter at the checkout.

  'And it wasn't even Tosco,' Burden said, as if the size or status of the supermarket where Tamima Rahman was working made any significant difference. 'It was one of those Indian places where you can buy everything you can think of in tins and they sell hall meat. They call them corner shops only it's not on a corner. Just one checkout and she was at it.'

  'There's nothing we can do, Mike,' Wexford said. 'We couldn't stop her leaving school, we couldn't make the Rahmans apply to a sixth-form college and we can't ban the child from working. She's over sixteen.'

  'But such work. It wouldn't be so bad if it was some sort of office job or something which involved training.'

  'What a snob you are. I suppose the proprietor's a family friend. He offered the job and she was glad to take it. It may be only temporary.'

  'Jenny says she's going to this place – it's called the Raja Emporium – and she's going to ask her. She could hardly believe it when I told her.'

  Jenny must do as she likes, Wexford thought. If she wants to make private enquiries, let her, but I'm having no police interference. She is determined to stick to her romance, it's her own Romeo and Juliet, and she's hanging on to it. I never would have thought her so foolish. Three weeks passed before he heard any more and by that time it had largely passed from his mind. A boy had been stabbed in the street and the perpetrator, Neil Dusan, a Molloy gang member, was in custody while Kieran Pritchard lingered between life and death. A five-year-old had disappeared and turned up with an aunt in Macclesfield but not before everyone in Wexford's team had abandoned their other work to go out hunting for him. A petrol station owner had installed spikes to spring up from the tarmac if a customer left without paying for his fuel. One driver had called the police, the second had accepted the damage to his car and paid up, but the third had pulled a gun on the owner who was now in hospital with serious if not life-threatening injuries. Wexford had no time to concern himself with Tamima Rahman who had committed no offence, had nothing illegal done to her and made no complaints.

  But meanwhile Jenny Burden had been several times to the Raja Emporium and extracted information from Tamima. Though the corner shop was busy in the evenings, for long hours only the occasional shopper visited the place and few who did weren't immigrants or the children of immigrants. Jenny wasn't quite the only white customer. On one occasion a youngish man with brown hair and blue eyes was in there, filling his wire basket with a selection of spices, his eyes lingering too long on the pretty Asian girl at the checkout. It was Tamima who lost patience with Jenny's visits but the proprietor, apparently her father's brother, was too good a businessman to tolerate her attempts to drive her former teacher away. His checkout girl got a severe dressing-down in Jenny's presence.

  Wexford found her giving an indignant report of what had happened to Dora when he got home one evening.

  'She gives the excuse that she needs the money. Apparently she's not satisfied with the pocket money she gets from her father. She insists it's temporary but she has no idea what other work is being arranged for her. If any is. It wasn't worth doing anything better than working for "uncle", she says, because her mother is taking her to Pakistan on holiday. They'll be away at least a month, staying with relatives, and she's looking forward to it. Why not look on this as a kind of gap year, I said, and get your parents to apply to Carisbrooke for next October. She didn't answer for a bit and then she said that wouldn't be possible. I asked her if she was still seeing her boyfriend.'

  'That was a bit much, Jenny,' Wexford said. 'It wasn't exactly your business, was it?'

  'You wouldn't say that if she were a white girl. You've got inverted race prejudice, you know. Caught it off Hannah Goldsmith, I suspect. I know the boy, he's a nice boy. His name's Rashid Hanif. He's going on to sixth-form college, but he'd be encouraged to. He's male.'

  'Well, is she seeing him?'

  'She says she hasn't got a boyfriend but I saw them together in the Kingsbrook Centre.'

  The place was run-down now. Once a state-of-the-art pattern for all small shopping malls, it had gradually become rather shabby, its shops down-market high-street chains mostly selling cheap clothes produced in South-East Asian sweatshops. It was rather sinister too, drug dealers operating in what had once been elegant passages leading into cafe gardens and which now stank of marijuana and urine. For Wexford it was a perpetual headache. His hope was that a promise (or threat) would at last be carried out, in spite of relentless opposition, and the place be demolished – even if demolition meant yet another supermarket and multi-storey car park taking its place.

  'It's a dump,' Dora said. 'What on earth were they doing there?'

  Jenny shrugged. 'How about hiding from her parents? Respectable Muslims won't go in there. They say it's dirty and it is. They prefer to buy from their own. Tamima and Rashid could wander about the place, maybe have cups of coffee in one of those cafes, sit on the seats by that so-called fountain that hasn't worked for months.'

  Wexford fetched her and Dora gla
sses of white wine and a large red for himself. He helped himself to a handful of cashews before Dora snatched away the nut bowl. 'Jenny,' he said, 'whatever is going on, there is nothing to be done about it. There may come a day when higher education is as compulsory for school leavers as primary school is today for five-year-olds. It may come but it's a long way off yet. The time may come when it is an offence for a girl with seven GCSEs to work on a supermarket checkout but I doubt it. It's more likely that parents may be one day prohibited from arranging a marriage between their daughter and her first cousin but if there is no coercion applied, I doubt that too.

  'Have the Rahmans locked Tamima up? Have they compelled her to work for her uncle? Are they forcing her to go on holiday to Pakistan? No to all those. I know why you think her mother is taking her to Pakistan. It's because when they get there you think she'll be made to meet a cousin who may be twenty or thirty or forty years older than she or hideous or unable to speak English, an illiterate peasant maybe, and forced into marriage with him. That what's in your mind, isn't it? Forced marriage?'

  'If you put it like that, Reg, yes it is. I just don't think you know what lengths some of these people will go to in order to force marriage on a girl. I heard of one case where the parents tortured their daughter into consenting and another where a mother threatened a girl with being raped by her stepfather.'

  Wexford was relieved when Jenny went. He wanted to talk to Dora about the gardener.

  'It's true about him being an Old Etonian, but as far as I'm concerned that only means he speaks properly. You get so tired of people who can't speak their own language. Balliol as well as Eton, I think. He comes in that ancient Morris Minor he drives and gets straight on with things. I make us a cup of tea at four but he doesn't linger. He drinks it, refuses a second and gets back to work.'

  'So he's a treasure?'

  'He really is, darling.'

  She went back to the book she had been reading before Jenny came. He thought about the past. Was he, already at his age, beginning to hark back there more than living in the present? It was Dora's saying she got tired of people being unable to speak their own language properly that set him off, that fired this train of thought.

  Fancy-free, which was not quite the way he put it to himself, guilty over Helen, he had found Moffat, Edward P., Moffat, Josephine, and Moffat, Elizabeth M., all living at a house numbered 21 in a street which sounded rather posh. But now he had the address he didn't know what to do with it. Of course he looked in the phone book and found the Moffats' number but he had no idea what to do with that either. You can't write a letter to Edward Moffat Esq. – people addressed letters like that then – and ask him for the full name and home address of a Miss Medora Something who happened to take your fancy while you were being a best man. You can't phone Mrs Elizabeth Moffat, tell her you'd done a sort of Dante and Beatrice thing and fallen in love with a girl she'd brought to Roger Phillips's wedding.

  But perhaps you could go to their house with some story, some ploy. You could invent some tale – after all, hadn't you a fertile imagination, fed with literature and romance? Whatever the ploy was it must have nothing to do with his life and his work as a police officer. That was out, utterly banned. He would spend some thought-time, he decided, on a careful plan, do nothing impetuous, though of all things he wanted to do it as soon as he could think of it. He was greedy for a sight of her. But before he had reached that point he had been moved back to Kingsmarkham and promoted.

  It was his home, his parents were there and a lot of old friends. It also had the advantage of being nearer to Coulsdon. Three months had passed since Roger Phillips's wedding – the event that in his mind he called 'the fateful wedding' because that was where he had seen her – but he thought that not too long a period in which to carry out his plan. When he presented himself at the Moffats' door it would seem more casual, more a 'just passing' situation, than if he had turned up with the little book on the following day.

  It never occurred to him beforehand that a phone call would appear to them a far more natural way of setting about things. But because there was necessarily a delay in putting his plan into action, he did ask himself if he wasn't assuming too much, taking too much for granted, almost committing himself to something from which there might be no going back. Suppose she turned out to be cold and scornful or, worse, laughed at him? Having good taste in clothes and walking like a queen meant no more than that she took a pride in her appearance. It might mean worse, that she was vain and narcissistic. He would never know if he didn't try.

  The little book he bought in what was then Kingsmarkham's only bookshop was Poems by Anne Finch, Countess of Winchester. She was a poet before women were ever allowed to be poets. He read all the verse in the very slim volume because he read everything which came his way and also to give the book a slightly worn appearance. Its cover was a dark red suede and he rubbed at the suede a bit with his fingertips to mark it. This was for the Moffats' benefit, to make his story more convincing. After all, she, the unknown Medora, was hardly likely to be persuaded that she had left behind in a pew in a seaside town church a book of verse she had never seen before.

  In the event his effort, if not a total failure, was a bit of a damp squib. It crackled for a split second and then fizzled out. Mrs Moffat opened the front door to him and listened to his excuses for being there in puzzlement. At first she hardly seemed to know who he meant by Medora, then she spoke. He expected patrician accents and got what they called now, but didn't call then, Estuary English.

  'Oh, yes, my daughter's pal.' No explanation was forthcoming as to why she was staying in this house or why she came to the wedding. 'She lives in Cornwall,' she said. 'I haven't got the address but I reckon Josie could have. She's away right now, Josie, I mean.' She looked suspiciously at the book. 'Are you sure it was her left it behind?'

  'Quite sure,' he lied. 'I saw it in her hand.'

  'Well, leave it with me. I'll see what Josie says.'

  He had no choice. But he knew enough of people and human nature by that time to be pretty sure of the little book's fate. It would lie about in that house for a few weeks. The daughter might come home, glance at it, say, 'What am I supposed to do with it?' and lay it down again until a cleaning lady, tidying up, stuffed it into a bookcase between a Dennis Wheatley and a Vicki Baum.

  In the fiction he read so voraciously a character like himself might have got somewhere but not in life. He quelled his disappointment by thinking how grim it would have been had he met her and she turned out to be all those things he had considered but dismissed, vulgar and vain and empty-headed, so that a book of verses would only evoke an 'I've left school, thanks very much'. He had to forget her and get on with his work. It shouldn't be too difficult to forget someone you had never met, whatever the song said, and he repeated to himself, 'There is a lady sweet and kind, was ne'er a face so pleased my mind. I did but see her passing by, and yet I love her till I die.' Well, of course he didn't. What nonsense. Never go back, he thought, otherwise he might have contacted Helen . . . But he had a flat in Kingsmarkham now, a quarter of a big house, and the girl who lived in the next flat on the same floor was attractive and unattached . . . Next time they met on the stairs he'd ask her in for coffee.

  Meanwhile, there had been a murder in Pomfret and he was busy night and day questioning suspects. It was his first murder since Elsie Carroll and though Targo was long gone it was the thickset sturdy little man, the stalker with the spaniel, whose image came into his mind. Impossible, of course. Lillian Gray had been murdered by her husband. He had learnt that most people who meet a violent death have been dealt it by one of their nearest and dearest. The exception was a Mrs Parsons who had died in strange circumstances, killed by an old school friend who was in love with her.

  'You were here by then, Mike,' he said to Burden. 'Do you remember the case?'

  'I'll never forget it. People were still shocked by lesbianism then. I'm sorry to say I was a bit myself. You weren't
, you took it all in your stride.'

  'She wasn't really a lesbian, was she? Just a poor woman puzzled by her desire for another woman.'

  'It's a long time ago,' said Burden.

  He said nothing about wanting to hear more of Targo. Perhaps, Wexford thought, he never would. There had been few unsolved crimes in those years and no repetitions of the Carroll case with a man enduring a trial, a conviction and an appeal only to be ostracised for what Wexford was certain someone else had done.

  By that time he had found the girl who was the quintessence of his type, married her and their children had been born. But he said nothing about that to Burden, that was his private thing, to be kept even from his best friends.

  Chapter 8

  The Moffats' daughter phoned him. It was the last thing he expected. 'This is Josephine Moffat,' she said. 'You came to our house and brought a book for Medora.'

  She sounded nice and not much like her mother.

  'We met when I was on holiday down in Cornwall with my parents,' she said. 'I don't see her very often because she lives so far away and mostly we just write. But she did come up to stay when we were going to that wedding, only I couldn't on account of I got flu.' Cornwall was thought of as far away then. The world had shrunk. 'I sent her the book.'

  Now she would tell him Anne Finch's poems weren't Medora's. He had made a mistake. But, no.

  'She was named after someone in a poem herself. She says she'd like to meet you but I told her you were a policeman in Sussex.'

  He hardly recognised his own voice, it was so shy and hesitant. 'Would you give me her address? I don't even know her surname.'

  'Don't you? How funny.' Suddenly the voice was coarser and less ladylike. 'It's Holland and she lives at 14 Denis Road, Port Ezra, Cornwall.' She gave him a phone number and he wondered if he would dare to use it.