Wexford 22 - The Monster In The Box

by Ruth Rendell

  The sternness of Jasmine's expression concentrated itself on two deeply cut parallel lines between her dark eyes. 'My daughter has gone away to stay with her auntie. We have told you she was going many times before. Now she has gone. My son Oman had the day off work and drove her there.'

  They drank their coffee, Ahmed filling up the silence by giving a gratuitous lecture on innovative autonomous robotic kits with forward, backup and turn actions. To Wexford it might as well have been delivered in Swahili and he got up to leave before his cup was empty. But before going to the door he crossed purposefully to the fireplace, put one hand on the shiny granite and looked closely at the right-angled corner of the mantelpiece. He touched it with one finger and, at a soft in drawing of breath from Ahmed, turned away with a polite smile. Mrs Raman's expression was unchanged. Ahmed got up to show them out.

  'What was all that with the fireplace, guv?' Hannah asked outside.

  Wexford was contemplating the Harley-Davidson which had joined the other vehicles on Burden's former front garden. 'Something happened there not long ago,' he said. 'I don't know what it was but Yasmin and her son know. They're scared it may have left some sort of mark.'

  'Has it?'

  'Not so far as I could see.'

  'Tamima's aunt is called Mrs Asia and she lives in Farmstead Way, Kingsbury, London NEW. Do you think Tamima really has gone there?'

  'I don't know, Hannah, and I don't care. At present the missing Targo occupies all my thoughts.'

  Wexford had decided that unsatisfactory though she was, Mavis Targo must be the best source of information available on her husband. She opened the door of Wymondham Lodge, said, 'He's pining away. He won't eat.'

  These were the first words she addressed to him. There had been no greeting, not even an enquiry to know what he wanted. For a moment he had thought she was speaking of her husband, that he had come home, that he was ill and somewhere in the house. He should have known better, he told himself. Of course it was a dog she was talking about, probably the cream-and-white fluffy one which sat disconsolately in its basket in a corner of the ornate living room. And he wondered if it was a shared passion for canines which had brought this ill-assorted pair together. But perhaps it was not so incongruous a match; for now, looking at her, he saw that she and Targo were rather alike, they might have been brother and sister, the same sort of height, the same stocky build, coarse features, staring blue eyes. If this were horror fiction, he thought, she would turn out to be Targo himself in disguise and she a corpse in the cellar. But how then had he achieved that formidable cleavage which showed at her neckline? He almost laughed.

  She was still talking about the Tibetan spaniel missing Targo when the puppy appeared at the French windows, yapping and flinging itself against the glass. She rushed to let it in, opened the doors and as she did so there came from somewhere in the grounds a shrill chattering sound and a low resounding roar. The puppy scampered about, jumping up at Wexford and covering the pale carpet with muddy footprints.

  'He doesn't miss his master,' she said. 'He's too young, aren't you, sweetheart? I can't say I'm sorry. I couldn't be doing with two of them breaking their hearts.'

  'I don't suppose you've heard from your husband?'

  'Nothing. Not a word. It's a long time now, even for him.'

  'I am sorry to have to ask you this, Mrs Targo, but I'm afraid it's necessary. Does the name Tracy Cole mean anything to you?'

  'Oh, God, yes. You needn't be sorry. She wasn't the last one before me, she was the last but one. She's not called Tracy Cole now, she's been married twice since him and her split up.'

  'Would you have a phone number for her? An address?'

  'You're barking up the wrong tree if you think he'd go to her.'

  The hackneyed metaphor, used in this house, made him smile.

  'Just the same, do you have a number?'

  Her answer came reluctantly. 'He's got her number on his mobile. I know he has, though he denies it. It's not written down anywhere, I wouldn't have that. I've got her married name somewhere. She wasn't married when he was with her, in case you didn't know.' Wexford said nothing. He waited. 'I don't know if you do know, but she was very young. Her dad had just died and left her that big house and what they call a portfolio of shares. She was only eighteen and she had to wait till she was twenty-one to inherit the rest.'

  Mavis Targo was no Kathleen. She boasted that she never kept anything, often threw things away and regretted it afterwards. Tracy Cole's second married name couldn't be found but Mrs Targo said she had remembered it. She remembered it because it was the same surname as Targo's own second wife: Thompson. She was Tracy Thompson and the second wife had been Adele Thompson.

  'He was married to her when he was living in Myringham?' Wexford thought how odd this conversation would have sounded to him in the days when he first met Targo. Not merely odd but bizarre, incredible, having no possible connection with an English middle class as it then was, in which the great majority married and remained married until one of them died. Today's serial polygamy would then have been associated only with Hollywood. 'When he had the boarding kennels?'

  'What, Adele? I suppose he was. I hadn't met him then. It didn't last long that marriage. She didn't like dogs. She kept it from him when they met but after a time it showed. Well, it would, wouldn't it?'

  Wexford said nothing, only looked encouraging. He welcomed Mrs Targo's new loquaciousness. 'The other Thompson,' she said, 'Tracy, I mean, she lived in Edgartown, still does for all I know. That's the pushes part of Birmingham. He brags about that. Lovely house she had, he says, more a palace than a house. It's nothing for him to be proud of, is it?'

  'You said he wouldn't go to her but are you sure of that? He wouldn't hide out with her?'

  At last some kind of realization dawned. 'What d'you want him for? You've never said. What d'you think he's done?'

  'We need him to help us with our inquiries into the death of Mr Andrew Norton.'

  'Who's he? I've never heard of him and I'll bet Eric hasn't.'

  Wexford got up. His rising to his feet was a signal for the bull terrier puppy to rush over and jump up at him. Addressing the dog as 'sweetheart' – perhaps it had no other name – Mavis Targo told it in the gentlest possible tone, quite unlike her rough manner with Wexford, to get down.

  'Tell me something,' he said as he was leaving, 'when did your husband have the naevus removed?'

  She laughed. 'When we were first married. I asked him to. He did what I asked him in those days.'

  Wexford made no comment. 'You'll let us know if you hear from your husband, won't you, Mrs Targo?'

  If she was to be found, if she was still alive. He suddenly had one of his hunches that Tracy Cole, the rich woman, the woman who lived in the best part of Birmingham, she to whom Targo fled when his wife turned him out, was the refuge to whom he had gone now. Alan Targo had been six, his mother had said, and now he was what? Forty? Would Targo still want the woman he had wanted thirty-four years ago? He might. People do, and Wexford thought of his own wife to whom he had been married for so long. Kathleen had said that, no matter who else intervened, Eric Targo and Tracy Cole always went back to each other . . .

  With the information he had Tracy wasn't hard to find. Over the phone she said she hadn't seen Eric Targo for more than a year but had several times spoken to him. Wexford wondered if Mavis Targo knew that and doubted it. Tracy, who called herself Miss Thompson, said that she had quite a lot she could tell Wexford about her former lover but she would prefer to do it face to face. Would he come and see her?

  First he cleared it with West Midlands Police. The officer he spoke to on the phone was a Detective Superintendent Roger Phillips. It had to be the same one. After all this time, the occasional phone call, one or two letters, then years of silence.

  'I was best man at your wedding,' he said.

  'So you were. And a very good one, as I remember. I'm still married to Pauline and will be till death do us part. H
ow about you?'

  'The same. Still married to the same woman, thank God.' Wexford told him about Tracy Thompson and the hunt for Targo. 'I'd like to talk to her if it's OK with you.'

  'Sure. You want me to send a DC with you?'

  'Thanks but I'll have my sergeant.'

  'Bring him in afterwards for a cup of tea.'

  Wexford said he would, tried to remember, when the call was ended, what Roger had looked like, failed but recalled perfectly the pretty face of his wife. It was her parents who had been friends of the people who brought Medora Holland to the Phillips wedding . . .

  He took Barry Vine with him and they went up by train, a long journey if you start from Sussex. Wexford seldom went anywhere by rail but he read his newspapers and watched television and he knew how liable trains were to delays and cancellations and he feared the worst. But the train from Euston to Birmingham, if not on time, was only five minutes late and they made it to the place that was 'more a palace than a house' at the appointed time.

  This added up to four women with strong connections to Targo he had talked to and of them Tracy Thompson was the youngest and the smallest. A tiny woman, no bigger than a child of ten, she could have been taken for a teenager until seen close to. Then the lines which crises-crossed her face showed, the white threads in her limp brown hair. She was dressed like a teenager in jeans and a Disney T-shirt printed with Dalmatians and in the setting of this house she looked an even more incongruous figure than if she had been living in a social housing flat.

  Palatial it was, grand and somewhat awe-inspiring, but as Barry Vine remarked to Wexford afterwards, also 'weird'. The furniture in the large high-ceilinged rooms looked as if it had been there, standing precisely where it was now, through several generations, untouched, never renovated, the wood surfaces never polished, curtains, though intact, faded to a grey pallor by decades of sunlight, carpets bleached or irredeemably stained. If the place was not quite Miss Haitian's abode it was Sates House after a half-hearted cleaning.

  There was no suggestion, Wexford thought, of Tracy Thompson having been left at the altar and abandoned to the life of a recluse. Rather, she had inherited this place with everything it in but was simply indifferent to her surroundings so long as she might be warm and comfortable when she chose.

  She saw him looking, said, 'It's a bit shabby, isn't it? Shame really. I keep meaning to do something about it but I don't suppose I ever shall. You see, I don't like having people in unless they're my friends; I can't stand cleaners, builders, whatever.' She flicked back her long little-girl's hair. 'What did you want to ask me?'

  'It's more a matter of what you want to tell us, Miss Thompson.'

  'Well, the first thing is, what d'you want Eric for?'

  And then she said something which nearly made Wexford shoot out of the shabby floral armchair he was sitting in. 'He hasn't gone and killed someone, has he?'

  Barry Vine was nearly as astonished as Wexford. He had gone a little pale. 'What exactly do you mean by that?' he asked her. 'Were you serious?'

  'I think I was,' she said. She seemed not in the least alarmed. 'I don't know if he was when he asked me.'

  'What did he ask you?'

  'Perhaps I'd better start by telling you about us, Eric and me, that is,' she said. 'I suppose I ought to offer you something but I don't drink tea or coffee. I expect there's some Coke.'

  'Please don't bother,' Wexford said. 'You were going to talk about your relationship with Mr Targo.'

  'Yes, well, we've known each other since for ever. He'd just come to Birmingham and my dad had just died. I was feeling pretty low. I was only just eighteen, you see, and I'd no one. My mother was dead, I'd no relatives. Everyone kept telling me how lucky I was to have so much money and this house. I was sitting on a bench in the park, thinking about things, what loneliness was and not being able to see any future, when this dog came up to me. It was a spaniel, quite old but so sweet and gentle. It licked my hand and when I stroked it it climbed up on to the bench and snuggled up beside me. It put its head in my lap. And then the owner – it was Eric – came up and he said his dog was like that with people he liked. We talked and I told him about myself and he said I ought to get a dog, he'd get me a dog. And, well, he did.'

  It didn't sound much like Targo and yet it did. It wasn't quite true that he liked dogs and disliked people but rather that he only liked people who liked dogs. 'Go on,' Wexford said.

  'We started seeing each other. I suppose you could say we fell in love. He wasn't my type and I wasn't his but we sort of clicked. His wife had left him, he wanted sometimes to see his kids but he didn't want a share of their house. I had enough for both of us, you see, but if you think he took up with me because I was rich you'd be wrong. He was crazy about me. And I was the one who got tired of it first. I gave Eric the price of a house and enough to start a business – a driving school it was – paid him off, you could say, and I married someone else. But I could never get Eric out of my head. His divorce had come through and then I got divorced. Eric didn't move back with me, he had his own house, and when I found out he'd a woman living with him there, I was so mad I got married to someone else on the rebound.

  'Well, after that it was sort of on and off with us, though you could say he was really the only one for me as I was for him. I've been single for years now and there's never been anyone else. Eric married this Adele he'd been living with and moved to Myringham in Sussex. She came from there. And he came from a place called Stowerton. He'd already got property he let out and he started a dogs' boarding kennels. Just up his street that was with him being so mad about dogs. I helped him with the money to set it up. I thought we might get back together because Adele only lasted a few months more but he'd met that Mavis and married her and that was like the end for me. I'd invested in this property development of his, getting hold of right-to-buy properties it was, and it was doing well, but he still married Mavis and bought a big house somewhere with her money. And that's it really. Up to a year ago we were still meeting sometimes and still talking on the phone but when he asked me if there was anyone I wanted rid of – well, that was the end, the really final end.'

  Wexford had listened to all this in silence. Now he said, speaking quite slowly, 'What exactly did he ask you, Miss Thompson?'

  'You want the details?'

  'Please.'

  'He phoned and said he had to come up here on business and he'd like to see me. Time was when he'd have come up to see me and found a bit of business to do while he was here. But never mind, that's all water under the bridge. He came and I asked him if he'd be staying. No, he said, and he wanted to tell me that we wouldn't see each other again. He was with Mavis now and they'd settled down. He was getting on and having a bit on the side was no longer on. I said to him, is that what I was, a bit on the side, and all he said was, you know what I mean. He was always saying that, that I knew what he meant – especially when it was hurtful, what he said. Then he said he'd like to do something for me as a kind of thanks for all the years. Was there anyone I wanted rid of? I didn't understand him – well, no one would. He said he'd put it more plainly. Was there anyone I wanted out of the way, disposed of, and no questions asked. I thought he'd gone mad, I really did.'

  'He meant, did you want someone killed, is that what he was saying?'

  'That's what he was saying. As a kind of compensation for leaving me and maybe for us not getting married in the past.'

  'What did you say to him?' Vine asked.

  'What do you think? I said I was glad he'd said he wouldn't see me again because I felt exactly the same about him and if there was anyone I wanted rid of it was him.'

  'You didn't think of contacting us?'

  'Well, I did. But what had I got to go on? It would be my word against his. I thought they'd say it was a case of a woman scorned. I mean, look at it this way. He was married, doing well, living with his wife. I was a single woman with two failed marriages behind me, a woman who'd given him God knows how mu
ch money over the years and now he'd rejected me. How would that look to the police? Like revenge, don't you think?'

  'You've told us now,' said Wexford.

  'Because you asked about him. And I thought you wouldn't if you hadn't good reason. Right? And you do believe me, don't you? You don't see me as a woman scorned?'

  'I believe you.'

  Tea with Roger Phillips terminated in a bottle of port being brought out. Wexford had resolved some years before never to drink port again but he had one glass with Roger while he told him about the interview with Tracy Thompson and the 'compensation' Targo had offered her, told him too about Elsie Carroll and Billy Kenyon and Andy Norton. Roger echoed the words Wexford himself had used to Tracy.

  'I believe you.'

  'She says she hasn't seen him since. He's tried to phone her, left messages, but she hasn't answered them. That offer he made shocked her to the core.'

  'Well, it would, Reg. We're used to violent death and death threats so we often fail to appreciate how shocking ordinary members of the public find that sort of thing. Society hasn't really become depraved, whatever the media says. Most people lead pretty sheltered and certainly law-abiding lives. Are you thinking that he may have made that sort of offer in the past to the people who would benefit from what he was about to do?'

  'He didn't make it to me,' said Wexford, 'and he expected me to benefit from the death of Norton. I'm sure he didn't make it to George Carroll. If he had, what would have stopped Carroll telling us about it when he was charged with murder? But it may well be that Eileen Kenyon knew. He could have suggested it to Eileen Kenyon after he'd given her a puppy and seen how she was with Billy. If she knew he'd killed Billy it was in her interest to keep quiet about it.'

  'And now he's disappeared?'

  'I don't think he's with a woman. There's only this Adele left and we'll contact her but it appears she was with him for a shorter time than any other woman in his life. He could be anywhere.'