The Monster in the Box

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘I see.’

  What Wexford really meant was that he didn’t see – it amounted to mending a machine without touching it or even seeing it – but he accepted it and was satisfied. He hardly knew what he had suspected, for, whatever Targo’s murderous propensities, he must have constant contact in business and his personal life with people whom he knew in honesty and innocence.

  The trees in Glebe Road had begun to shed their leaves. Wexford started the walk back to the police station, recalling how when he was a child he always made a point of treading on a fallen leaf, enjoying the crunching sensation underneath his feet. He tried it now, crushing a dried crinkled plane leaf, and was pleased to find it gave him much the same feeling. But back to the Rahmans. There was nothing sinister about the Targo—Rahman connection, he thought. Nevertheless, the fact remained that Targo had resumed his stalking of him or, rather, begun stalking his wife. It came to him then that, in accordance with the old marriage service, a married couple used to be called ‘one flesh’ and, thinking of that, he felt a pang, as if what seemed a threatened hurt were being done to himself. The first thing he did when he was in his office was to send for DC Damon Coleman and, wondering if he might be doing something indefensible, considering that in everyone’s eyes but his own Targo was an innocent man, set him to keep his own house under surveillance. The stalker stalked, he thought.

  Some years before, when his daughter Sylvia had been taking a course in psychotherapeutic counselling, she had taught him about the ‘box’ as a means of dealing with anxieties.

  ‘If you’ve a problem weighing on your mind, Dad, you have to visualise a box – maybe quite small, the size of a matchbox. You open it and put your worry inside – now don’t start laughing. It works. Close the box with the worry inside and put it away somewhere, inside a drawer, say.’

  ‘Why not throw it in the sea?’

  ‘That’s a bit final. You may want to take it out again one day.’

  ‘And this is going to take all problems away?’

  ‘I don’t say that, Dad, but it might help. If you find yourself thinking of the worry you also think it’s locked away in the box so you can’t touch it.’

  He had scoffed. But still he tried it. Several times since then he had put Targo in a box and sometimes it had worked well. He tried it again now, carefully placing Targo and the white van and a bunch of dogs and his own fear into the box and hiding it in a drawer of the desk in his office. And the white van failed to reappear. No silver Mercedes was parked in Wexford’s street and no man with cropped white hair walking a Tibetan spaniel had been seen. It had, of course, no longer been possible to tell Damon Coleman of the distinguishing mark, the naevus on the neck. That was gone.

  Damon had seen Dora Wexford leave the house twice on foot and twice in her car but he was sure she hadn’t seen him. Damon was an expert in the role of the invisible watcher. A woman he recognised as Wexford’s daughter Sylvia came once and stayed about an hour. Jenny Burden called with her son. Apart from these, the only caller he had seen was a man in his sixties who arrived on Thursday at three in the afternoon in an ancient Morris Minor. Damon finished his surveillance at five by which time the visitor had not come out.

  This wasn’t quite what Wexford had wanted. His wife and her callers were not to be watched but, rather, whoever might be watching her. Damon’s report reminded him of the kind of thing a private detective might produce for a husband who believed himself deceived. That made Wexford smile. The idea of Dora’s infidelity was absurd, even the mildest disloyalty out of the question.

  But his fear was in the box and the box was shut up inside the top left-hand drawer of his desk. As often, when he used the box – the invisible container created by his own mind – the apprehensiveness or anxiety locked inside it had faded away. Just as the box had no real existence so it seemed that the fear had none either.

  Rashid Hanif had just come out of the gates of his sixth-form college on the Kingsmarkham bypass when Hannah spoke to him. If she had simply walked up to him he might not have been so obviously taken aback, but he had seen her car draw up and park ahead of him and this very good-looking young woman he recognised from the Raj Emporium step out of it, flourishing a warrant card. He was good-looking himself, a tall handsome boy with pale skin, brown hair and grey-blue eyes.

  Hannah could tell he was frightened and she wondered why. After all, he might be only seventeen but he was a man and most men – at any rate the innocent ones – were happy to speak to her. ‘I’d like to ask you about Tamima,’ she said. ‘We could talk in my car. I could give you a lift home.’

  Making that offer was a mistake. ‘Oh, no. No, thanks. I don’t need a lift home. I can walk.’

  ‘I know you can walk,’ Hannah said. ‘I don’t have to take you to your house, just to the corner of the street. Come on. Those books you’re carrying must be heavy.’

  He allowed her to shepherd him into the passenger seat of the car. Hannah had no intention of driving off immediately. She sat in the driving seat and turned to face him. ‘I’ve seen you talking to Tamima in the Raj Emporium, Rashid. I’ve seen you quite a few times. She’s your girlfriend, isn’t she?’

  He shook his head, said in a low voice, ‘I wish.’

  ‘But she’s not? Why is that? Because your parents are against it or hers are?’

  There was a long pause during which his fingers tightened on the handle of the heavy bag. ‘Both,’ he said, and then, ‘Look, I mustn’t talk to you about that. I’ll get into trouble. My dad’s told me not to see her again. But I’m not to talk about it, OK?’

  Hannah started the car, said nothing for a moment or two and then, when they were in Hartwell Lane heading for the Hart Estate, said, ‘You can only see her in the shop, is that right?’

  ‘I’m not to talk about it.’ He immediately did so. ‘They took her to Pakistan to keep her away from me but she missed me and she wanted to come back. Now they’ll send her to her auntie in London.’

  ‘Did she tell you this?’

  ‘She didn’t tell me but it’s what I think. I told you, I’m not supposed to talk about it. Can I get out now? I can walk from here.’

  ‘I’m sure you can,’ said Hannah. ‘If you’ll tell me her auntie’s name and where she lives I’ll drive to the end of Hartwell Lane and drop you off.’

  The boy shifted in his seat. Now he was clutching the bag of books. ‘It’s Kingsbury. But she’s not gone yet. Maybe she won’t go, I don’t know.’

  ‘And the name, Rashid?’

  The house where his family lived was in sight. Hannah pulled over, leaving the engine running. ‘The auntie’s name, Rashid?’

  The two words came out in a choked rush, ‘Mrs Qasi,’ and he flung open the car door and ran.

  Hannah knew she must bide her time. It was true that Tamima might not go to London. If, for instance, she agreed to give Rashid up she might remain here. But that was unlikely. The Rahman parents wouldn’t trust her to keep any promise she might make, especially if she were working in that shop where anyone might come in and have access to her. Besides, their aim was not only to divide her from Rashid but to marry her to someone else.

  ‘It would be hard to force marriage on a girl here. In a place like this where everyone knows everyone else,’ she said to Wexford.

  ‘Used to,’ said Wexford, thinking of the villagey town of his youth.

  ‘Still does,’ Hannah persisted. ‘Especially if you’re an immigrant. People are always on the watch for them to do something un-English, something bizarre or something they wouldn’t do. Think of the drama there’d be if Tamima ran away on the steps of the mosque or the register office or wherever. In London she couldn’t do that, she wouldn’t know where she was or where to go. Think about it, guv.’

  ‘Hannah,’ he said, ‘what I’m thinking about is the drama you’re making out of a young girl’s visit to London. To go shopping, no doubt. Maybe see a film or a show.’ Smiling at Hannah’s mutinous expression, ‘S
he hasn’t gone yet. But I’ve met those Rahmans and they impressed me as intelligent enlightened people, the last to force ancient traditions on a beloved daughter. I’ll be very surprised if Tamima doesn’t go away for a couple of weeks, have a good time and come back to take a better sort of job somewhere.’

  On the way home he wondered if he had been rather rash in saying that. Was Hannah’s theory so far-fetched? Perhaps what provoked his pacifying rejoinder was her vehement determination to prove that a forced marriage was intended without any evidence for it. But that was not so different from his certainty that Targo was at least twice a murderer. He had no evidence either. Yet he constantly said to himself that he knew it for a fact. Hannah, too, probably was even now telling herself the same: that, though she had no evidence, she was still convinced that the Rahmans were planning Tamima’s marriage to some old man she had never seen before. If Hannah’s theory was a fantasy, wasn’t his just as likely to be one too?

  For once, very few cars were parked along his street. No white van or silver Mercedes was numbered among them. Of the few that were there, not one had a dog sitting on the passenger seat, the driver’s window a few inches open to give it air. He let himself into his house, called out, ‘It’s me,’ as if others existed who had keys.

  Dora came out into the hall. He put his arms round her and kissed her with a little more than his usual fervour.

  ‘I suppose that’s because you’ve been imagining me lying dead somewhere,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘And don’t you set Damon Coleman to watch this house without telling me. Poor chap, he looked so bored. I nearly went out and told him my lover wouldn’t be round before two.’

  Wexford laughed. The laughter was a bit forced.

  ‘It was that white van,’ Dora said, ‘wasn’t it?’

  ‘It seems to have stopped. That’s something to celebrate, so let’s have a drink.’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A second glass of red wine had been tempting but he had refused it. Not because he had some sort of premonition he would be called out – that hardly crossed his mind – but because it was early, he had only just sat down to his dinner, and if he had more claret now he would want another before bed. So he left the silver stopper his daughter Sheila had given him in the neck of the bottle and applied himself to the fusilli alla carbonara and roquette salad he didn’t much like but which Dora deemed good for him. As you got older, he thought, your taste reverted to the food of your youth. In your middle years you had quite liked deep-fried melon flowers and filo pastry and chorizo but now you wanted what you never got, sausages and steak-and-kidney pudding and stewed plums and custard. On the other hand, his preferred drink used to be beer but now he hardly touched it. He was musing on this, wondering if Dora felt the same but somehow feeling sure she didn’t, was on the point of asking her, when the phone rang.

  She knew it would be for him. She passed it to him without answering it herself.

  ‘I have to go.’ He got up, leaving half his fusilli. ‘Something serious,’ he said. It was the phrase he always used to her when he was called out to an unexplained death or a lethal attack. So it had been when Billy Kenyon’s body was found in the botanical gardens, so it was when Nicky Dusan was stabbed. It was this economy of explanation he was later glad he adhered to. Telling her the address he was called out to this evening, though at the time it meant nothing to him, would have shocked and horrified her so that he would have baulked at leaving her alone.

  She nodded, accepting. The days when she would have lamented his failing to finish his dinner were long gone. Now, his girth staying the same if not exactly increasing, she was pleased when he missed a meal or only ate half of it.

  Again glad his evening’s drinking had been limited to one small glass of red wine, he drove himself to Pomfret. Two police cars, a police van and an ambulance – not to be needed – were already parked outside the row of white stucco cottages. He left his car fifty yards up Cambridge Road. A blue-and-white-striped canvas barrier with a doorway in it had already been erected to cover most of the front of number 6. Barry Vine lifted the flap over the doorway and came out as he approached.

  ‘Pathologist’s just come, sir,’ he said. ‘He’s with the deceased now.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Dr Mavrikian,’ Barry said.

  ‘I don’t mean the pathologist,’ said Wexford. ‘Who cares, anyway? I mean who’s what you call “the deceased”?’

  Barry knew very well Wexford’s hatred of jargon and verbiage, so said, ‘Sorry, sir. The dead man is called Andrew Norton. This is his home and a neighbour …’ The look on Wexford’s face stopped him. ‘You know him?’

  ‘What did you say the name is?’

  ‘Andrew Norton.’

  Wexford felt his heart pound. He could almost hear it. ‘He does – did – gardening for me.’

  ‘Someone put a rope round his neck and strangled him.’

  ‘I think we’ll wait to hear what Dr Mavrikian says before we make statements like that,’ said Wexford.

  He was very taken aback. Thank God he hadn’t mentioned that address to Dora. She had liked the man, they had had tea together when he took his break on Thursday afternoons. Damon Coleman had seen him come and go in his ancient Morris Minor. Wexford walked along to the living room where the body was lying on the floor between a sofa and the television set. Mavrikian got up from his knees and gave Wexford one of his impassive stares. He was a tall, thin, humourless man of Armenian origin with lined white skin and blond, very nearly white, hair. The only time he had been seen to be even slightly moved was when the news had been brought to him that his wife had given birth to a daughter.

  In Wexford’s estimation any faults he might have were compensated for by the swift (and accurate) assessment he made of the time of a victim’s death and the cause of that death.

  ‘He’s been dead since between seven and nine this morning, let’s say twelve hours ago. Someone put a rope round his neck and pulled it tight. All the details to come in my report. Good evening.’

  As he was leaving Hannah Goldsmith arrived. ‘He was my gardener, poor chap,’ Wexford said to her.

  ‘My God, guv.’

  ‘He was at my house yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘Your partner may know something relevant then.’

  ‘She’s my wife,’ said Wexford, annoyed.

  Andy Norton had been a good-looking man, his regular features and still smooth skin bloated by what had been done to him. His head of white hair was as thick and glossy as a wig but it wasn’t a wig. The scene-of-crimes officer was anxious to get on with his job so Wexford turned to Hannah and told her they would go next door to speak to the neighbour.

  ‘She’s a Mrs Catherine Lister, sir,’ said Barry Vine. ‘She’s a widow and she lives alone. Her and the dead chap, they seem to have been good friends.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. Only what I said, sir. She’s very upset.’

  Mrs Lister’s daughter opened the door. She was a woman of about forty, very thin, her dark hair drawn back into a ponytail.

  ‘I came over to Mum this afternoon,’ she said, ‘and I’ve been here ever since. I’d like to take her home with me tonight. Is that OK?’

  ‘Once we’ve had a word with her it will be quite OK,’ said Wexford.

  He had a strong sensation of déjà vu. He had been here before yet he knew he never had. For almost his whole life, while he had lived in the Kingsmarkham neighbourhood, he could never remember having even seen this terrace of cottages, tucked away in the hinterland of Pomfret. Yet the little hallway, the stairs going straight up opposite the front door, the single living room that had once been two, the garden with its door in the wall beyond … He forced himself back to speak to the older woman.

  She was rather like his own wife, the same type, the type that was his. Her figure was still shapely, her waist small and ankles fine. She had hair which had once bee
n very dark and was now iron grey, large dark eyes and the clear skin and good colour of a woman who has known very little illness. If she had cried her eyes were dry now and there was no puffiness in her face. She suddenly spoke without waiting for questions.

  ‘We were very close, Andy and I,’ she began. ‘We were more or less living together but these cottages are a bit small for that. I have a key to his house and he had one to mine.’ She looked down at the hands in her lap. ‘I spent last night with Andy, as I did two or three times a week, but I came back here at about seven this morning.’

  Her voice was steady and cool. The daughter took one of her hands but Catherine Lister didn’t press hers in return.

  ‘What time did you go back next door?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘Not till afternoon. I did some housework, cleaned the place, put my washing and Andy’s in the machine. He didn’t have a washing machine. I was going shopping for both of us later on …’Her voice broke and she shook herself, steadied herself. ‘It was about four. I went in to him to see if there was anything special he wanted.’Again her voice wavered but she kept on, ‘I let myself in and I – I found him on the floor. Dead. I could see he was dead.’

  ‘Did you touch him, Mrs Lister?’ Wexford asked.

  She turned her face away. ‘I lifted up his head. I – I kissed him.’

  The crying began then. Her daughter put her arms round her and Catherine Lister sobbed into her shoulder. Wexford and Hannah exchanged glances. They were silent for perhaps a minute. The only sound was the sobs and gulps from the weeping woman.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Lister,’ Wexford said. ‘I’m very sorry but I do have to ask you a few more questions.’