Wexford 22 - The Monster In The Box

by Ruth Rendell

  '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 Pedal.'

  '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 Manor 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? Manor? – were in cahoots with Targo and this was done to help him with his getaway? Make us think he'd left from Stinted 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 Stinted airport in the middle of the night. Targo, accompanied, say, by Oman, drove the Mercedes to Stinted from Sussex. Oman, 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 backstreets 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 Oman 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 be ringed, lying in her lap, her head wrapped more strictly than usual in scarves, one black, one Prussian blue; Oman, 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, Oman 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 wasting police time. Is that clear?'

  Ahmed nodded. Silent, he seemed in a trance-like state or hypnotized. 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?'

  Yasmine'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 honor 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 honor killing and no one would suspect him or us if we kept quiet. There, I've told you.'

  'Not everything
, Ahmed,' said Wexford. 'Not by a long chalk. You can't leave it there. You have to go on.'

  Ahmed put his head in his hands. Through his fingers he whispered, 'I can't, I can't.'

  'I can,' said Yasmin.

  Seeing the shock and distress in his father's face, Oman had gone to sit beside him. Wexford asked himself if he had ever before seen a grown-up son take his father's hand as Oman took Mohammed's now, holding it tightly in his own. There was a solidarity in this family he had seldom seen before the immigrants came. He turned his eyes to Yasmin.

  'Well, Mrs Rahman?'

  'I was there,' she said. 'What Ahmed says is true.' Her tone changed and the note of her speech altered subtly. Wexford wondered if it were a fact that lying raised the blood pressure. She looked suddenly as if her systolic had gone up to two hundred. 'He was disgusted by what the man had said to him. So was I.' She repeated it. 'So was I. We are not the kind of ignorant cruel people who would want a daughter killed for the sake of some outdated honor.' The last word she came dangerously near to spitting out. 'Honor!'

  Incongruously, a line from Anne Finch, Countess of Winchester, came into Wexford's head from that little book he had given to the now dead Medora: 'The pale, the fall's, th'untimely sacrifice / To your mistaken shrine, to your false idol Honor!' All he said was, 'Well?'

  'Ahmed told him to go. He said we would have nothing to do with what he said. Go, he told him, and he left.'

  'How did he go, Mrs Rahman?'

  'In his car, of course. He came in his car and he went in it.'

  Ahmed spoke again. 'He went in his car, he drove off in it. I saw him. But he must have come back later.'

  Mohammed spoke. His voice sounded small and subdued. 'I wasn't well, I was in my bedroom. I looked out of the window at six thirty, I know it was six thirty, I looked at the clock. That car was there. It was still there.'

  'Very well,' said Wexford. 'I want this house searched and, if necessary, the building next door searched. You can either give me permission to do that now or I can get a warrant. A warrant will delay things but it's your choice.'

  'We are law-abiding people,' Mohammed said. 'All we want is to do what is right. You may search.'

  'You're looking for my sister's body?' Oman had perhaps misunderstood or had failed to follow what had gone before. He suddenly looked years older than he was. 'You think he killed her just the same?'

  Damon Coleman and Lynn Fancourt carried out the search with a uniformed officer. Lynn said afterwards she had never searched such a clean house, all the furniture polished to a high gloss, baths and sinks gleaming, linen sweet-smelling and carefully ironed. Tamima's room distressed her when she contemplated what she was sure had become of the girl. Posters of pop singers were on the walls. Tamima had a tiny pink radio, a pink straw basket lined with pink and white fabric and laden with teenagers' cosmetics. The room Ahmed shared with his brother – the largest in the house – was a temple of technology, full of cables and computer attachments as well as a desktop and a laptop, while Oman had apparently left no mark of his personality on the place. Perhaps he did no more than sleep there, bed down for seven or eight hours each night in the small single bed which seemed removed by design as far as possible from Ahmed's way of life and means of livelihood. Wexford, looking in there, while the search progressed, thought that if what he believed was true and Ahmed and his mother had been lying, if Ahmed himself had assisted at Tamima's murder, the Rahman sons would soon each have a room to himself. Or there would be only one son remaining to take his pick of the rooms.

  It had been dusk growing dark when they arrived and now in the deep dark of a winter's evening the rain had begun. The search of 34 Glebe Road had been completed and nothing had been found. All the time it was going on, the Rahman family had sat in their living room, Wexford, Burden and Hannah Goldsmith with them, and for once Yasmin had made no offers of tea or coffee. The lights were on, mainly from table lamps, and after a while Ahmed had picked up the evening paper. He sat looking at it. Reading it? Wexford wasn't sure. Perhaps he merely stared at the print with unseeing eyes. Yasmin got up and drew the curtains on the dark, wet night.

  For his part, he was turning over in his mind the extraordinary phenomenon of Eric Targo. The man had killed three people or possibly more but the ones Wexford was convinced about were Elsie Carroll, Billy Kenyon and Andy Norton. In all those cases he had killed someone he presumed another person very much wanted out of the way. Tamima Rahman was someone another person or people might well want out of the way, if the propensities of some immigrant families for killing a daughter who had dishonored them were taken into consideration. But if he had killed her – if, come to that, she were dead – why had he broken away from his usual procedure of carrying out the act without asking for leave, without seeking permission? It seemed a total break from custom, a departure from the way he usually acted that kept him safe. Except that it wasn't total. Wexford remembered what Tracy Thompson had told him, that it was Targo's asking her if he could kill someone for her which put an end to their relationship.

  Wexford got up and, saying nothing to the silent people in the room, went outside into the front garden and the street. A thin drizzle was falling. Strangely, someone had parked a Mercedes at the kern directly outside the Rahmans' house, but this one was black. He thought, Ahmed's story isn't right but it's right in parts. That's why Targo didn't bring a dog; he was going to drive off, find Tamima and kill her. Because Ahmed and his mother were lying in one respect? They had wanted Tamima killed to save the family honor and if it had been done they would never have spoken out, never have betrayed Targo. But Targo might have had another reason for asking permission, in other words for telling them what he meant to do. They would be blamed for her death and not he. No one would believe that he, a mere client of Ahmed's, had been involved . . .

  He went back indoors as Lynn, Damon and the uniformed officer came downstairs.

  'Nothing, sir,' Lynn said.

  'All right. We'll start next door in the shop called Webb and Cobb.' He went into the living room and asked Mohammed for the key.

  Tamima's father handed it to him in silence. Wexford gave the key to Damon and they all went to the brown-painted door which Damon unlocked.

  'Cobb means a spider, doesn't it?' Damon asked.

  'When it's only got one B,' said Wexford.

  They went in, Burden with them. There was a strong smell of musty airlessness, paint and a hint of mildew, nothing else. The mushroom scent would have been from rising damp which had made a kind of tide of black fungus climbing up the wall. Burden switched on lights which were the kind that hang from a lead in the middle of the ceiling. There were no spiders to be seen and no cobwebs. This ground floor, the area which had been the shop, comprised three rooms, the large front one, a smaller one behind and beyond the stairs a kind of dilapidated kitchen. It was all clean in here too and Wexford concluded that Yasmin made a practice of keeping this place almost as spotless as her house. Almost, for she hadn't attempted to clean off the fungus, or had attempted and failed, nor had she had much success with removing dark grey stains from the kitchen tiles.

  The larger of the rooms was of course the one which could be seen from the street between the window boards. Two built-in cupboards were empty but for a cracked jug and a spotless teapot standing on shelves. Stacked up on the floor were perhaps twenty large wooden crates and as many cardboard boxes. There was nothing on the table except a tearful of broken pottery and nothing at all in the table drawer. They opened crate after crate and box after box, found nothing.

  The kitchen was bare but in the back room were several crates of the same type as those in the shop room. Only one cupboard here, only the crates. Again the crates were opened, this time by Lynch. She lifted out pieces of china, a flowered tea set, about twenty tiny coffee cups, each one wrapped in tissue paper. Underneath or in the next crate she expected to find Tamima's body. She had been sure she must find it here ever since she had driven away from B
righton, leaving behind an indignant couple in their thirties who had insisted in angry tones that their name really was Khan and offered to show her their marriage certificate.

  The crates were empty now and there was nothing for it but to put everything back. Wexford had opened the only cupboard in this room which, because it was without shelves and was no more than a foot wide and less than that deep, seemed to serve no useful purpose. He had such a shallow narrow cupboard in his own house but it housed the electricity meter and fuse box. No such equipment occupied this space. On the left-hand side the wall was not of brick but of hardboard, as was the wall between it and the window. He now noticed that the whole room had recently been painted. That accounted for one of the ingredients of the smell. The painting had been done in that creamy-ivory shade famous among builders' merchants as 'magnolia'.

  'How has that board been – well, fixed there?' he asked Damon.

  'With screws, I should think, sir. Under the paint you'd probably find screws hidden under some sort of filler.'

  'Then find them, will you? I want that wall taken down. Just the bit between the cupboard and the window.'

  The uniformed officer, whose name was Moyle, took over. As Damon had said, he soon exposed the screws, eight of them. He went back to the van he had come in and returned with a screwdriver. Hannah, watching, found that she was shivering. PC Moyle began methodically removing the screws and the hardboard panel loosened until he was able to take hold of it with both hands, free it and set it against the opposite wall. An empty space was revealed with another such panel screwed in at the back. It was now possible to see that this had once been a large walk-in cupboard, including the one next to it.

  Moyle said, 'D'you want me to take the screws out here, sir?'

  'Yes, please.'

  Hannah smelt it first. Not a strong smell, not yet, but enough to conflict with paint and mildew scents. Charnel house, Wexford thought because long ago he had read the expression somewhere. It strengthened when Moyle lifted away the rear panel, became a reek, a stench. Hannah covered her nose and mouth with her hands and Burden screwed up his face in distaste. Inside the compartment at the back, a parcel tightly wrapped in green plastic sheeting and brown sacking, perhaps five feet six or seven long and tied with rope and electricity cable, was leaning against the wall.