The Monster in the Box

by Ruth Rendell

  Wexford’s next call was to an old people’s home. It might still have been called that but political correctness had renamed it the Seniors’ Sanctuary. He had been directed there by the woman who had lived next door to Eileen Kenyon on the Muriel Campden Estate.

  ‘Alzheimer’s is what it is,’ she said to Wexford on her doorstep. ‘She’s only in her sixties but that’s what it is. You won’t get any sense out of her. I know, I’ve tried, and you’ll just be wasting your time.’

  He didn’t get anything out of her and he was wasting his time. It wasn’t the first time he had visited such a place and this one depressed him anew. The decor, the smell, the half-circle of chairs in front of the television set in which sat the elderly inmates, all dressed in a jumble of ill-fitting bizarrely coloured clothes, not one of which looked as if it had originally been bought for its wearer. But perhaps the worst thing was the programme which was showing on the screen, a display of acrobatic dancing by beautiful teenagers in tight-fitting sequinned costumes, their lustrous hair flowing, their skin like a new-picked peach.

  Like half the spectators, Eileen Kenyon was in a wheelchair, sitting in that characteristic pose of the sick elderly, her shoulders slumped, her back rounded almost to a hump and her head lolling to one side. Like most of them, she seemed to be staring at something, but not the screen. The sequinned young people cavorted and performed impossible leaps and gyrations while the old sat, twisted and sunken, not watching them. Golden lads and girls all must, thought Wexford, as chimney sweepers come to dust. A carer whispered to him that he would get nothing out of Eileen Kenyon. She no longer knew who she was or where she was. And when the carer moved her wheelchair away from the semicircle of viewers over to the window where he was, he realised she was right. Eileen Kenyon was now only dimly recognisable as the woman she had been. It was as if a hand, dipped in some viscous greyish matter, had passed over her head, whitening and thinning her hair, dimming her eyes and slurring her features.

  ‘Do you remember me, Mrs Kenyon?’

  No response at all. The eyes which had gazed at the wall some ten feet away from the television, now stared at the floor.

  Inspiration led him to ask, ‘Do you remember your dog, the dog you got from Mr Targo?’

  One of her eyelids flickered. He tried to remember the dog’s name. It was maddening that he remembered the names of Targo’s own dogs, Buster, Princess, Braveheart, but not the one Eileen Kenyon had had when Billy was killed. But then it was true that he had almost total recall of the things Targo had said to him.

  ‘Dusty’s puppy,’ he said. ‘Do you remember Dusty’s puppy? Dusty was Mr Targo’s.’

  She lifted her head a little. The eyes opened. ‘Snake,’ she said quite clearly, and mumbling, ‘Snake he had. Scary snake, don’t like snake.’ Then, ‘He asked …’

  ‘What did he ask?’

  But there was to be no more. He had been given nothing to make him think Eileen Kenyon would have finished her sentence with the words ‘if she wanted Billy killed.’ Asking her if she knew where Targo might be now seemed ludicrous. He thanked the carer and made his way out along a gloomy corridor to the stained-glass double doors which were the entrance to this place. There must be more places in Kingsmarkham he might have gone to. Something Kathleen Jones had said had briefly alerted him. But what was it?

  Of course she had told him, not what he came for, but what was almost more important, that Targo hadn’t stayed in babysitting that evening so long ago. What else was it? Philippa becoming a doctor? No. Tracy Cole? Yes, definitely, but that could wait. Glebe Road, he thought, she had mentioned Glebe Road. That was where the Rahmans lived. Nothing had happened to make him think it possible except the knowledge that Targo had visited Ahmed several times in the past. So suppose he had called at the Rahmans after he had killed Andy Norton?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  He took Hannah with him. They knew her and, if she was to be believed, they hadn’t resented her suspiciousness. Hannah was honest and quite openly confessed that Mohammed Rahman had firmly but amiably put her down. He was, she told Wexford, a master of the smiling snub. Wexford expected Mohammed to be at work but Yasmin told him that her husband was ill in bed with flu. He had come down with a virus a couple of days before.

  Ahmed was upstairs, taking his father a hot drink, but he came down after a few minutes. On the previous occasion that he had seen him, when he and his brother had just come back from the mosque, he had been struck by Ahmed’s good looks and air of health, perhaps too of contentment. All that had changed. Both sons had pale skin while Tamima’s was a dark gold, but today Ahmed was white with a sickly pallor. Under his eyes were dark shadows and there was a day’s growth of beard on his chin. This of course was becoming a fashionable way for a young man to look but Ahmed’s seemed the result of indifference to his appearance, as if something more important than trends and style brought about that careworn look. Probably he had picked up the virus that had laid his father low.

  ‘Yes, Mr Targo came here in the afternoon,’ he said in answer to Wexford’s inquiry.

  ‘You were expecting him?’

  ‘No, we weren’t. When the doorbell rang I thought it was the doctor for Dad.’Ahmed hesitated, then said, ‘I was surprised to see Mr Targo. He wanted to order some software.’

  Aware that this left Wexford in the dark, Hannah said, ‘He didn’t do that himself? He asked you to do it for him?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  Ahmed looked at his mother. She was sitting very stiffly in a straight-backed chair, no jewellery but for her rings to be seen this morning, her head covered in Wexford’s presence. Her expression was rather stern, her hands clasped together, but she got up at Ahmed’s glance and said she would make coffee.

  ‘What kind of software?’ Hannah asked. ‘Some floppy disks and a home manager CD.’

  ‘What exactly is that?’

  ‘A home manager CD?’ Ahmed suddenly seemed on surer ground. ‘Put simply, you plug it into your PC and you can control your lights and electrical appliances by sending a signal from your PC to the switch modules. It goes via the electrical circuit of your home. It turns on the radio if that’s what you want. It even sticks the kettle on.’

  ‘And that’s what Mr Targo wanted?’

  ‘So he said. He’d read about it somewhere.’

  ‘You could get it for him?’ Wexford asked.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Ahmed said confidently. ‘The point is I know where to get it and how to order it, that sort of thing. You can buy the floppies anywhere but he always likes me to do that stuff.’

  Yasmin came back with the coffee. When she had handed the cups to them, Wexford noticed her eyes go to the polished granite mantelpiece. She looked at it as if she detected something not quite right about it and then she looked sharply away. As she sat down again, picked up the sugar basin to pass to them, her hands were shaking. Not strongly but the merest tremor which she conquered by stiffening the fingers and holding them out straight.

  ‘Do you know where Mr Targo went when he left here?’

  ‘Home, I suppose. I didn’t ask him.’

  ‘Were you surprised,’ Wexford asked, ‘that he didn’t have a dog with him?’

  ‘I wouldn’t allow a dog in my house,’ Yasmin said.

  How would Targo have reacted to that? Her remark caused a silence. Hannah broke it. ‘Is Tamima still working at the Raj Emporium?’

  The sternness of Yasmin’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 Osman 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 indrawing of breath from Ahmed, turned away with a polite smile. Mrs Rahman’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 Qasi and she lives in Farmstead Way, Kingsbury, London NW9. 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 Edgbaston, still does for all I know. That’s the poshest 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 realisation 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. How 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 criss-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 Havisham’s abode it was Satis 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.