The Monster in the Box

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘Surely you can leave Mum in peace for now!’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not. Did you hear anything from this house during the morning?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, her voice hoarse from crying. ‘I heard nothing and I didn’t see anyone.’

  ‘Did Mr Norton have any enemies?’ This was Hannah. ‘I mean people he disliked or who disliked him?’

  ‘Everyone loved him,’ said Catherine Lister.

  But she rubbed the tears from her eyes and gave them all the information about Andy Norton that they wanted. Wexford left her then. The clocks had gone back and it was dark but light from the French windows of number 6 showed him Andy Norton’s garden, beautifully tended, with still a few chrysanthemums and Michaelmas daisies remaining in bloom. The grass exemplified the phrase ‘a manicured lawn’. He walked down the path past the shed in the right-hand corner to the green-painted door in the rear wall. It had no lock or bolts. He opened it and stepped out into the cobbled lane at the back. Now he knew what this house reminded him of, what this terrace of houses reminded him of.

  These cottages were the same as the row of houses in Jewel Road, Stowerton. This house had the same structure as the Carrolls’ at number 16, from the narrow hallway to the shed in the garden and the door in the rear wall leading to a lane outside. Or they had once been the same when they were first built. When would that have been? 1870? 1880? Something like that. Probably there were other terraces in Kingsmarkham and Stowerton and Pomfret of the same vintage. Much had been done to these and no doubt by now to those in Jewel Road since he had first been in the Carrolls’ house. A pair of single rooms had been turned into one double room, French windows had been put in, as had central heating and new kitchens and bathrooms. But if you had known one of these houses forty years before, if you had lived in one of these houses, you would know the configuration of all of them wherever they might be.

  He went back into Andy Norton’s garden and shut the door in the wall. The moon was rising, a red ball, streaked with bands of dark cloud. With the coming of the moon the air seemed to grow colder. He closed his eyes momentarily and was back in Jewel Road where a man opened the door to him and showed, for a few brief seconds, a birthmark like a crimson crab climbing down his cheek and his neck, before he snatched up a woman’s scarf and covered himself.

  There was no more for Wexford to do tonight. DS Vine and DC Coleman were busy interviewing the neighbours. The scene-of-crimes officer had finished. He walked out through the blue-and-white tent that covered most of the front of the house and opened the gate. A man was walking his dog in the direction of the cross street. He was an elderly man, well above medium height, not wearing a scarf and the dog he had on a lead was a boxer. But it made his spine tingle.

  He half expected cold blue eyes to stare into his. The man looked curiously at the tent and the police tape and passed on.

  Wexford went home to tell Dora before anyone else did or she saw it on the news, and when he turned into his garage drive and switched off the engine, saw an image of Targo opening that door in the wall in the dark and seeking a hiding place in the shed until the time was ripe. He was a man of such self-confidence that he would see no need to bring the instrument of death with him. The world was full of strips of cloth, rope cut-offs, pieces of cord, scarves, ties, straps and belts. Such a thing would be waiting in Andy Norton’s house or garden for him to lay his hands on.

  Andy Norton was a widower. He had three children from his marriage, only one of which, a daughter, was living in England. Of his sons, one was in the United States, the other in Italy. Prior to his retirement he had been an official – with one of those permanent or private secretary titles – in the Department of Social Security. His wife had died fifteen years before. He and she had lived in a south London suburb but he had sold the house when he retired and bought this Pomfret cottage. Mrs Lister, a widow, was already living next door.

  Mary Norton, a teacher whose home was in Leicester, arrived next morning. Talking to her in his office, Wexford found himself with a not uncommon dilemma, how to avoid asking her when had she last seen her father. He slightly changed it.

  ‘When did you last see your dad, Miss Norton?’

  She had a hard crisp voice, was a thin fair-haired woman. No one could be less like Mrs Lister. ‘He came up to stay with me the weekend before last. That often happened. Or I came down to stay with him.’ Her tone remained the same, steady, clear and calm, when she said, ‘We were very close, father and daughter the way a father and daughter should be.

  ‘I don’t know how much you know about him. He had been a civil servant – that is, an official in a government department. Dad retired eight years ago and came to live here. He had an excellent pension but he liked to keep himself busy and he went out gardening. He was a good gardener and he loved it. He enjoyed the chats he had with elderly housewives over a cup of tea.’

  Though he knew it was unreasonable, Wexford resented her patronising words. When she had finished he kept silent for a while, moved a pen on his desk, straightened the blotter. ‘And Mrs Lister,’ he said quietly, ‘how did you feel about her?’

  Mary Norton plainly resented the question. She had calculated, Wexford thought, that she would have everything her own way in this interview. She would fix the time of it, organise the structure of it, pass on the information she thought the police should have, deliver her planned speech and then terminate it. Though she wasn’t in the least like him, the way she stared, her blue gaze steady and unblinking, reminded him of Eric Targo.

  ‘What’s that got to do with Dad’s death?’

  ‘I ask the questions, Miss Norton.’ The words were harsh but the tone was gentle. ‘Would you answer the one I asked you?’

  ‘If you must know, she’s a pleasant enough woman. It was good for him to have companionship.’

  It was more than that, Wexford thought, much more. He asked her if her father had made a will and, if so, what was in it.

  Incredibly, she answered him in lawyer’s jargon. ‘His testamentary dispositions divided everything he left between my brothers and myself. There was this cottage and his savings, not a great deal.’ She hesitated, then softened a little. ‘My father gave away most of what he had to his children. He sold his house and got a good price which enabled him to leave quite large sums to each of us under the seven-year rule. You know what that is? The beneficiaries get a tax concession if the donor lives for seven years. He did, in fact. Just.’

  ‘Very well, Miss Norton. That will be all for now.’

  Even though he hadn’t yet received Mavrikian’s report, he knew Andy Norton had been strangled. What he had at first thought to be a length of rope, but which turned out to be a window-sash cord, had been used.

  ‘All the sash cords were in place, sir,’ DS Vine said to him.

  ‘This one wasn’t new. It had been in a window somewhere, it was a bit worn and frayed at one end, and my guess is it was lying in a kitchen drawer or cupboard.’

  ‘Your guess?’

  ‘I realise we’re going to have to find precisely where it came from, sir. They’re doing a house-to-house in Cambridge Road now.’

  ‘Yes, well, don’t let me hear of any more guesswork, right?’

  He went back to Pomfret. The house-to-house, which he could see going on, reminded him of Jewel Road all those years ago. How many house-to-house inquiries had he instigated since then? Yet the procedure taking place again brought Targo to mind. Andy Norton had been strangled and Targo was the arch-strangler. It was absurd. Why should Targo kill the harmless and innocent Andy Norton? Come to that, why had he killed Elsie Carroll and Billy Kenyon? They also had been harmless and innocent.

  Damon Coleman and Lynn Fancourt were doing the house-to-house at this end of Cambridge Road. He went up to meet them when Damon came away from the doorstep of number 18 and Lynn from number 20.

  ‘Any luck?’

  ‘A woman opposite, sir, at number 5, seems to have kept the house under sur
veillance, especially in the early mornings and late evenings.’ Lynn Fancourt smiled. ‘She disapproves of Andy Norton’s relationship with Mrs Lister. She watched their comings and goings.’

  ‘She’ll have to look elsewhere for her kicks now,’ said Wexford.

  ‘Yes, sir. She swears no one went into the house this morning. She was watching from the moment it got light and that’s at about seven. She saw Mrs Lister come out and go into her own house next door at seven fifteen.’

  Wexford went back to number 6 and made his way in through the blue-and-white-striped awning. Barry Vine was inside with a PC from the uniformed branch.

  ‘Suppose,’ he said to Vine, ‘the perpetrator came into the back garden here while it was still dark. Say at five. Come with me.’

  They went out by way of the back door into Andy Norton’s garden. There was something particularly dreadful about looking at this trim and lovely place, the small lawn weed-less and neatly mown, the borders rich with autumn flowers, the four sculpted stone tubs still holding their cargos of red and apricot and pink begonias. From the moment the cultivator of this garden had died – it too had begun to die, gradually withering, abandoned to its untended state. Tomorrow it would be a little drier, the grass a little longer, or a little wetter, nearer to drowning, the dying petals starting to fall.

  ‘He could have come through the gate from the lane. And suppose he came in before it got light. That means before seven. Let’s say he waited out here, with his sash cord. He could have hidden in the shed. He would have seen a light go on in the house and taken that as a signal. Did he know about Mrs Lister? It doesn’t really matter. If she had been there would he have killed her too? But she wasn’t. She had gone.’

  ‘You sound as if you know the perpetrator, sir?’

  ‘Do I, Barry?’ Wexford shook his head. ‘What happened next? He went up to the back door and knocked. There’s a knocker but no bell. When he heard someone knock at his back door Andy Norton went to answer it and admitted him. Why? We don’t know. Perhaps because it’s natural for older people, brought up in a safer age, to open their doors to whoever knocks. Maybe it wasn’t like that and the back door had been left unlocked overnight. Maybe it always was. We shall know more than that when I get the pathologist’s report.’

  It was Targo’s murder of Elsie Carroll all over again. So many small properties in these towns had lanes running at the backs of houses. So many gardens were impossible of entry except over or through those walls if the doors were locked or bolted. All the houses had back doors. Many householders still left theirs unlocked. Wexford thought of 32 Jewel Road where Targo had once lived, of 8 Glebe Road where he had lived later on in his stalking days. He would know the layout, he would know which moves were feasible.

  He rang Mrs Lister’s doorbell. Her daughter let him in, explaining that instead of taking her mother away, she had stayed the night.

  ‘Mum’s lying down.’

  ‘I’d like you to go up to your mother and ask her two questions: whether Mr Norton’s back door was left unlocked overnight and whether there was a piece of sash cord in Mr Norton’s house. You know what sash cord is?’

  ‘A kind of rope that opens and shuts windows.’

  ‘That’s right. Now your mother will probably guess what this cord was used for if she didn’t actually see it when she found the body. I hope she didn’t see it and won’t guess but if she does that can’t be helped. Is all this clear?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I suppose it was used to strangle the poor man.’

  ‘What I want to know is, did this sash cord belong in the house or was it – well, brought there?’

  She went upstairs. Wexford sat there, thinking about Targo. This was more than obsession, this was paranoia. It was impossible Targo was responsible for this; wild imaginings, fixation, a kind of madness. The daughter came back into the room.

  ‘Mum did see it when she – found him. She recognised it. It was a piece of sash cord that had been rolled up and put in the garden shed along with balls of string and a length of rope. She says she’s glad to help. She wants whoever did this caught.’

  ‘And the back door? Was in left unlocked?’

  ‘She doesn’t know. She says it often was and she told Andy she thought that wasn’t a good idea but he said this was the country and there wasn’t much crime in the country.’

  Wexford sighed.

  The box had burst open and Targo come out of it, strutting, staring, defying him. His dilemma was the same one, the old one. How to interview – interrogate – a man lacking even a tenuous connection with the murder victim whose death he was investigating.

  ‘This woman,’ said Burden, ‘the one who lives at number 5, she saw no one but Catherine Lister when she left just after seven?’

  ‘She wouldn’t have seen Targo if he came into the garden from the lane. If he came the same way as he came when he killed Elsie Carroll all those years ago.’

  ‘A man who came into the garden, Reg. A man or a woman but not Eric Targo. He’s old now. If he did in fact kill Elsie Carroll – and I have my doubts about that and about Billy Kenyon – would he have the strength to strangle a man a head taller than him? Would he have the strength to strangle anyone?’

  He would,’ said Wexford. ‘What excuse can I have for going to talk to him?’

  ‘A white van parked outside Andy Norton’s house on two occasions – how about that? Or a silver Mercedes?’

  ‘They weren’t, though. Not so far as we know. And no, Mike, we’re not going in for fictitious scenarios because the fact is we don’t need them. We don’t need an excuse. What’s to stop us questioning anyone we choose about any crime committed on our patch?’

  The day after Andy Norton’s death, Donaldson, who was Wexford’s driver, took him and DC Lynn Fancourt to Stringfield. Passing through Stoke Stringfield village, Wexford thought briefly of Helen Rushford, his girlfriend of a few months when he lived in Brighton, she who had told him she loved him and that he was everything she wanted. She lived here somewhere, a grandmother no doubt, and he would long have ceased to be what she wanted. In that house by the green or down that lane? In one of those pretty cottages? If she came out of one of those houses, would he recognise her? Probably not.

  They drew up outside Wymondham Lodge. No cars were on the driveway but the big garage had space for two vehicles so they might have been hidden from view.

  ‘Look, sir,’ Lynn said, ‘those animals. Aren’t they lovely? Are they llamas or alpacas?’

  ‘No idea,’ Wexford said, smiling at the benign-looking creatures who came up to the fence in quest perhaps of treats. ‘Targo’s got some big felines too, I think. Only they’re behind bars.’

  When he rang the doorbell a dog started to bark. It sounded, as Lynn remarked, like two dogs, and so it was, the Tibetan spaniel and a Staffordshire bull terrier puppy, the latter on a lead held by a woman in late-middle age with the brightest red hair Wexford had ever seen. He had seen geraniums that colour but, not previously, hair. It was woven into a helmet shape that fitted over a large head and a face not resembling the terrier’s or the spaniel’s but with its squashed features and a turned-up nose, perhaps a Pekinese’s. Thickset and stocky, she was expensively dressed in a beaded brocade jacket and black trousers. She looked impassively at their warrant cards. Her eyes, prominent and very blue like Targo’s, met Wexford’s.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘I’ve heard him mention you.’

  This was unexpected. ‘Mrs Targo?’

  ‘I’m Mavis Targo, yes.’

  Her manner was charmless, her voice gruff. ‘We’d like to speak to your husband.’

  She unfastened the lead on the bull terrier and it immediately jumped up at Wexford. She gave it an indulgent smile which she switched off when she spoke. ‘He’s not in.’

  He gave the dog a push. It was unexpectedly strong. ‘When do you expect him home?’

  ‘I don’t. He comes when he’s ready. He pleases himself.’

&nbs
p; ‘May we come in, please?’

  Wexford put his foot over the threshold and she had no choice but to let him in. Lynn followed quickly to avoid the door being slammed in her face. The old house had a graciousness its furnishings did their best to diminish. They found themselves in a big hall out of which an elegant curved staircase climbed, but it was furnished with gilded tables and chairs of the imitation eighteenth-century French variety, set about on a pink-and-white Chinese carpet. A large chandelier, a glittering waterfall of prisms, was suspended from the ceiling. The puppy jumped on one of the tables and stood there, wagging its tail.

  ‘Get down, sweetheart,’ said Mrs Targo in a half-hearted way.

  ‘I don’t know what you want to come in for,’ she said to Wexford. ‘I said he’s not here and I don’t know when he will be. I haven’t seen him since yesterday morning.’

  ‘Sixty per cent of the population of this country has a mobile phone,’ said Wexford. ‘I think that’s the correct figure. I’m sure your husband is one of them. Would you like to call him and let me speak to him?’

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘Now.’

  ‘You’d better come through.’

  ‘Coming through’ meant entering a large living room, furnished in much the same style as the hall but with a blue carpet. A blue, white and pink silk rug, spread across quite a big area of this carpet, had been extensively chewed and most of its fringe was missing. The puppy homed in at once on the rug and, applying its teeth to the edge where the fringe had been, began gnawing at it with gusto.

  ‘Leave it, sweetheart,’ said Mrs Targo, unperturbed when the dog took no notice. She picked up a pink-and-silver mobile phone from one of the tables and dialled a number in a lethargic, vaguely depressed way. Her fingernails were the same colour as her hair.

  When there appeared to be no reply she dialled a second number, beginning to shake her head. Targo stared at Wexford from a silver-framed photograph standing on a piano. It had been taken not long ago and after the treatment to remove the birthmark. Targo was smiling – smiling – proud, no doubt, of his new unblemished appearance. In anyone but this monster it would have been pathetic, even touching. For the one of him, there were four of his wife, taken when she was younger and slimmer, in one of the photographs wearing a wedding dress embroidered in sequins.