The Monster in the Box

by Ruth Rendell

‘He didn’t care. He liked it. He knew I couldn’t do anything. The house was full of his pets and it smelt of them. Have you ever smelt a marrow bone that’s been lying around for a fortnight and every so often been chewed by a dog? Well, that’s what the place smelt like. He had a snake and I can’t say I was too keen on that. It wasn’t in a cage or anything. Just lying curled up on a shelf next to a couple of books and a pot plant. One of the books was the Bumper Book of Dogs. Kathleen had said he was living with a woman and he was, the one called Adele he eventually married, but she wasn’t around. There was a building outside in the grounds. They really were grounds, a couple of acres, I should think, and the building was a kind of glorified shed or stables. He took me out there. Everything was very neat and trim. “Shipshape” was the word he used for it. “Shipshape enough for you?” he said. There were about a dozen dogs in separate pens and of course they all came up to the wire, looking pathetic and whining and wagging their tails. The smell was there too but somewhat modified by the fresh air.

  ‘“I do this because I love animals,” he said. “It’s not my main source of income. I’m in business.” I didn’t ask what business because I could see he expected me to ask. Something to do with cars or slum cottages, I expect. “Some of these boarding kennels are a disgrace. I like to think I run a luxury hotel for dogs.” Well, I didn’t comment on that. He showed me a pen where there was a mother dog with five puppies, all mongrels but very appealing. You needn’t look like that as if I’m going soft on you. I assure you this is relevant.’

  ‘OK. I believe you. Thousands wouldn’t.’

  ‘We went back into the house and he handed me a brochure setting out their terms. It was very expensive. I wasn’t going to commit myself, though I stood there reading it, or pretending to read it, while I sort of sized up the place.’ Then he did something rather nasty. It was obviously intended to tease or possibly frighten me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The snake was apparently asleep but he took it down from the shelf and draped it round his neck with its head right up against his face. Right up against the scarf he was wearing. He was fondling it like you might a kitten. He came up very close to me and I was determined not to flinch but it took a hell of a lot of self-control on my part to stay standing there and trying to look – well, unfazed. “What do you think, Mr Wexford?” he said. I don’t know how calm I was. I hope I didn’t tremble but I’m not sure. I just said, “Thanks very much. I’ll let you know,” or “I’ll be in touch,” something like that and I got out of there. When he’d closed the door after me I could hear him laughing.’

  ‘Did you let him board the dog?’

  ‘You must be joking. As it happened, the poor little beast died, got distemper. Had its injections too early or too late or something. I didn’t speak to Targo again, didn’t see him again, not until Billy Kenyon was killed. That must have been two or three years later.’

  ‘Where was I? I mean, I remember the case but not being involved in it.’

  ‘You were away doing that course. The forensics thing in Dover.’

  ‘Of course I was. Are you going to tell me why that sentimental bit about the mother dog and the appealing puppies was relevant?’

  ‘When he took in a pregnant bitch no one wanted – and he did a lot of that – Targo made a point of finding good homes for the puppies. Well, the good home he found for one of those puppies I saw was on the Muriel Campden Estate with Eileen Kenyon, Billy’s mother.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  Kingsmarkham’s botanical gardens, seven acres of them between Queen Street and Sussex Avenue, were still well maintained but had long been reduced in size to no more than half that by one of the lawns becoming a children’s playground with swings and climbing frames and the tropical house turned into a coffee bar and brasserie. The picnic area had taken over most of the rose garden and Red Rocks fallen into disuse. It had not always been so. Once the place was looked after by a superintendent and deputy and five gardeners who took pride in their work. Visitors on their way to a day out at Leeds Castle or Sissinghurst would make a detour to take a look at Kingsmarkham’s rock gardens in the spring or its prize blooms in the orchid house.

  Those were the days when the botanical gardens were both a refuge and a pleasure ground for Billy Kenyon, a place to hide in and a place to enjoy, especially when the flowers were out. If he was capable of enjoyment. He was certainly capable of fear when his contemporaries shouted after him and he seemed never to get used to bullying and catcalls. What was wrong with Billy so that he never spoke, had never spoken, but still was able to look after himself? Harsh terms for someone like him were used in those days, ‘mentally deficient’, ‘very low IQ’, even ‘moron’. But how could anyone be those things when he valued plants and flowers the way Billy did? When he learnt the names of plants and could write them all down if not utter them?

  Today I think we’d call him autistic, Wexford thought. He would go to a special school for people with ‘learning difficulties’ – at least, I hope he would. His IQ might not have been low at all but quite high, as was often true of those with the Asperger’s type of autism. The neighbours’ children on the Muriel Campden Estate where he lived with his mother called him ‘loony’ and it was said that Eileen Kenyon did nothing to defend her son. He had left school at fifteen, the then school-leaving age, though he had seldom attended, and that was something else which Eileen failed to concern herself about. Even in his schooldays Billy had spent more time in the gardens than he had in class. The superintendent, George Clark, and deputy superintendent and the staff all knew him and knew him for a harmless innocent. On wet days they would let him sit on a chair in the temperate house and the deputy superintendent, a man called Denis Glaspell, often invited him into the big brick shed where the staff assembled in their tea breaks. Glaspell gave him a notebook and asked him to write down the Latin names of all the plants in, say, the rock garden, and Billy would do so, never making an error in identification or a spelling mistake. It was a pity, Wexford thought, when he was investigating the murder, that his teachers had never witnessed this. But would they have done anything if they had? Would they have had the time?

  Billy was seventeen when he died. On the day of his death, in the hot summer of 1976, he left his mother’s house in Leighton Close at nine in the morning, having made himself sandwiches of Mother’s Pride and pre-sliced cheese. These with an overripe banana, which was the only item of fruit to be found, would be his lunch and mean he need not return till the gardens closed. His friend Denis Glaspell would give him a cup of tea. The dog came up to him, whining to be fed, but Billy left feeding him to his mother. The neighbours said she loved the dog much more than she loved him but if he knew this he gave no sign of it.

  He had left her in bed with her lover, Bruce Mellor. How much of their relationship Billy understood no one seemed to know. But Billy’s powers of comprehension were far greater than the people close to him believed and when Bruce said, and said frequently, that he’d like to live with or even marry Eileen Kenyon but he wasn’t taking on a loony, not he, Billy no doubt had a very good idea of what he meant. Bruce didn’t mind the dog, he liked the dog. Eileen too was in the habit of telling the neighbours that it was ‘unfair on her’ that she was ‘lumbered’ with Billy and it stopped her leading what she called a normal life. She’d like to get married before it was ‘too late’.

  It was the middle of June. The best of the flowers were past, they came in May, and the late-summer blooms had yet to blossom, but roses were still out and Billy made first for the rose garden. All the roses had their names in front of them on green metal tags pegged into the soil and Billy did his best to memorise the names: Rose Gaujard, Peace, Etoile d’Hollande, but when he forgot he checked with the green tag and wrote the name down in his notebook. One of the gardeners came along at about eleven – not that Billy wore a watch or had much idea of time – and told him Denis Glaspell had a cup of tea for him in the big shed they called
the ‘office’. Billy went along to the office, drank his tea and sat listening while the gardeners talked about football and snooker and what had been on TV the night before. He had another cup of tea in the office at three in the afternoon, by which time he had eaten his sandwiches and his banana. Another thing about Billy which endeared him to Denis Glaspell was his habit of taking his litter home with him or at least placing it in one of the waste bins. Too many visitors just dropped their food wrappings and fruit peel where they had been eating.

  Denis noticed the plastic bag and the banana skin when Billy opened his backpack to put away his notebook.

  ‘Let me dispose of that for you, Billy,’ he said and Billy handed over the two items of rubbish without a smile and of course without a word. Denis had never seen him smile.

  No one was quite sure where Billy had been after that. One of the gardeners had seen him in the hothouse but he hadn’t stayed long. It was hot outside, though at about five the sky clouded over and it began to rain, a freak shower in a dry summer. Heavy rain always emptied the gardens and it did so that day, but lasted only half an hour before fading to a mist. There was no reason for any of the staff to keep a special eye on Billy Kenyon. He was their most frequent visitor, was entirely harmless and had an almost reverential attitude to the place. So it was never to be known who was the last person to have seen him, apart from his murderer.

  George Clark, the superintendent, went round locking the gates at nine. It was still light, though going on dusk. George did as he always did and walked round the gardens, making sure that no one was left inside – occasionally a street sleeper would try to spend the night in there – and checking on the various designated areas that no damage had been done during the day. In Red Rocks he found Billy Kenyon’s body, lying spreadeagled across the russet-coloured flat stones, one hand trailing in the water of a small pond, the other resting on his notebook. George felt for a pulse, laid his own face against the place where he thought the boy’s heart must be. Then he looked more closely at his neck and the weals round it, at his face where the eyes protruded and knew for certain that he was dead, guessed he had been strangled. A leather belt, obviously the murder weapon, lay across his forehead where it had seemingly been draped.

  No mobile phones then. George went back to his office and phoned the police, first taking a small swig from the miniature of brandy he kept there for emergencies. The little bottle was full because there had been no emergencies till now.

  ‘If this death had happened today,’ Wexford said, ‘the press would have made much of Billy’s notebook with the names of the flowers in it. They’d have called him “the dumb genius” and the “boy wonder failed by the education system”. There was nothing like that then. I don’t remember anything in the papers about Billy being other than a normal teenager. His mother and the man who wouldn’t marry her while that meant taking on Billy – they didn’t appear on television saying how Billy lit up their lives or what a saint he was. People didn’t do that then. Nor did the press refer to Eileen Kenyon’s on-and-off lover as Billy’s stepfather the way they would now.’

  ‘You’re saying things were better then?’ Burden raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Yes and no. In some ways and in some ways not. I expect that’s true whenever you contrast one period of time with another period of time. We have far more sophisticated forensic methods these days, as you know. If we haven’t yet perfected tracing perpetrators by means of DNA, we’re fast getting there. The mobile phone makes communication a whole lot easier. Parents ought to be able to keep a closer eye on where their children are – but do they? I don’t know.

  ‘To get back to Billy. He had been strangled with a leather belt. Those belts were on sale in the Saturday market but they were on sale in Pomfret market too and in Myringham market. Tracing it was impossible and there were no prints on it, though it could have taken prints. Our principal suspect was Bruce Mellor, the lover. But Eileen Kenyon ran him a close second.’

  ‘Because Bruce Mellor wouldn’t marry her while Billy was alive?’

  ‘That’s right. Neither of them had jobs and they were living on what in those days was called “assistance”. They were both at home between 5 and 8 p.m. which according to the pathologist was when Billy died. Mellor took the dog out in the morning, returning after about an hour, and neither of them went out again. For the relevant time they alibied each other. But a next-door neighbour – I don’t remember her name, Lucas or Lewis, I think – told me she had seen Bruce Mellor leave the house without the dog, this time at about six. This he denied, she had been mistaken, and Eileen denied it too.

  ‘I asked her if she wasn’t concerned when Billy hadn’t come home by ten. As I said, the garden closed at nine in summer. It still closes at nine – what’s left of it. Eileen said he was seventeen and able to look after himself. Besides, the body had been found by then and she had been informed by ten thirty.

  ‘If Bruce Mellor had gone into the botanical gardens, no one remembered seeing him. If the neighbour’s evidence was true and he had left the house next door at six he would have reached the gardens by about twenty past, by which time the rain had slackened and become a drizzle. Most visitors would have gone by then, so if Mellor had entered by either gate it was not surprising that no one had seen him. He would have been hard to ignore for he was exceptionally tall and thin and wore his yellow hair long – it was an unusual tawny colour – and either loose or tied back with an elastic band. Glaspell and his immediate superior George Clark, who found the body, and all the gardeners were closely questioned. None of them admitted to seeing Mellor. They were all, to a lesser degree, suspects but not for long. They had alibis a lot more sound than Mellor’s or Eileen’s.’

  Burden had a question. ‘Since you’re going to say that you suspect Targo of this murder, how do you account for none of them seeing him? Or didn’t you suspect him at that time?’

  ‘I didn’t because I couldn’t find the connection,’ Wexford said. ‘The link between Targo and Elsie Carroll was tenuous enough but at least he lived in the same street. When Billy Kenyon was killed Targo was living miles away in Myringham in a big house in two acres of land and had at least one prosperous business going. Eileen Kenyon lived on what she called “the dole” on a council estate with a mentally incapacitated son. There was no reason even to consider Targo and, you know, Mike, how you sometimes label me an obsessive – well, I’m not blind to that in myself –’ Medora Holland in her torn green blouse flitted across his mind’s eye ‘– and I told myself to stop it, stop even imagining it while I had two quite feasible suspects.’

  ‘There was the dog,’ said Burden.

  ‘Indeed there was the dog. But I didn’t know that. When I went to the kennels to ask about boarding, Targo didn’t tell me he’d given a woman called Eileen Kenyon in Kingsmarkham a puppy. Why would he? This was a while before the murder, no one had ever heard of Eileen Kenyon and Targo had no possible reason to tell me such a thing.’

  ‘I came back,’ said Burden, ‘just about the time you gave up on the case. Sorry to put it like that.’

  ‘Well, we did give up eventually, only we went on saying we would never give up. We always do say that, no matter how hopeless things look, don’t we? We would never rest until we’d brought Billy’s murderer to justice et cetera, et cetera. But we knew we had given up. To recap a bit: the only evidence against Bruce Mellor was that he had possibly lied about going out that evening. But Mrs Lucas – she was called that, not Lewis – may have lied. She and he were at daggers drawn since there’d been some dispute about an all-night party the Lucases had for a son’s twenty-first birthday. It may have been spite that made her say she had seen Mellor go out. Mellor alibied Eileen and she alibied him. Both had a motive of sorts but you know how unimportant motive is in preparing a sound case. It was one of our few unsolved murders.’

  ‘When did you find out about the dog?’

  ‘You mean that the dog came from Targo’s place? Not unt
il after we gave up. We questioned Mellor and Eileen exhaustively. I don’t remember an interrogation like it – not one that came to nothing, at any rate. They were inarticulate and far from bright but they stuck to their story, that they had been in all that day.

  ‘No one but Mrs Lucas claimed to have seen Mellor. Did we ever seriously suspect Eileen? Only perhaps as in cahoots with Mellor, supporting him, alibiing him, lying for him. She never denied wanting to be rid of Billy in order to marry Mellor but she said she only meant he should be in some sort of home. The trouble was that we had no evidence that Mellor had been in the gardens. No one had seen him and, as I’ve said, he was a memorable figure. Of course, we tried to trace the leather belt with which Billy was strangled. We failed. It might have belonged to Targo, may have been in his possession for years, but it might have come from any of those local markets. You try getting a market stallholder to identify something he’s sold. All we did establish was that no shopkeeper in Kingsmarkham, Pomfret or Myringham had sold such a belt for years.’

  ‘But the dog, Reg. What about the dog?’

  ‘OK, I’m coming to that. Any case of strangling – and they were few – brought me back to Targo,’ Wexford went on, ‘as Billy’s death did. I couldn’t see any possible motive for his killing Billy. But then what motive was there in the case of Elsie Carroll? If it were just that Targo was a psychopath who killed at random, why those two? Why kill people when access is difficult if the place is full of loners, available as victims in the streets by night? Then I met him again.

  ‘He’d told me he had what he called a business. It was a travel agent in Myringham High Street, a tiny little place grandly called Transglobe, and its walls were papered with advertisements for exotic places. People had started going to India and China for their holidays and he was cashing in on a new trend.’

  ‘You mean you went there to book a holiday?’