The Monster in the Box

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘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, Osman 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 Osman 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 ‘So was I. We are not the kind of ignorant cruel people who would want a daughter killed for the sake of some outdated honour.’ The last word she came dangerously near to spitting out. ‘Honour!’

  Incongruously, a line from Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, came into Wexford’s head from that little book he had given to the now dead Medora: The pale, the fall’n, th’huntimely sacrifice / To your mistaken shrine, to your false idol Honour!’ 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?’ Osman 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 Osman 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 dishonoured 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 kerb 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 honour 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 mushroomy 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 spoutless 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 trayful 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 Brighton, 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.

  While Moyle cut the ropes and he and Damon started to remove the mummy-like wrappings, Wexford examined the inside of the cupboard. But it was totally empty. The thing inside its shroud of man-made materials had left nothing of itself behind. The foul smell of corruption assailed him as he stepped back into the room and the corpse was exposed.

  He found himself looking into the contorted face and the staring eyes no one had bothered to close of Eric Targo.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  It was almost the middle of the night. The police station car park was empty but for Wexford’s own car and Hannah Goldsmith’s. Ahmed Rahman would not be going home that night.

  Walking down the stairs to Interview Room 2, Wexford thought how he had been thwarted of the great coup he had hoped for most of his life to bring about. No longer a creator of victims, Targo had become a victim himself. He would soon be remembered as a respected citizen and no doubt whatever obituary he earned would dwell on his successes as a self-made man, his ‘beautiful home’, his menagerie, his dogs, and his love of animals.

  Ahmed sat on one side of the table with a cup of tea in front of him. Standing behind him beside the recording equipment was PC Moyle, keeping an eye. Wexford thought of the days when everyone questioned in this room or the one next to it – where Yasmin Rahman would soon be questioned by Burden and Damon – smoked like furnaces, chain-smoked, and had to be supplied with Rothman’s King Size or Player’s as well as tea and, sooner or later, sandwiches. As a non-smoker himself, he had suffered, had coughed and grown hoarse. But there was nothing to be done about it until now when they had a comprehensive smoking ban throughout the police station.

  Hannah came in, sat down opposite Ahmed and, rather slowly and deliberately, Wexford joined them. It had been a shock for Hannah, finding dead Targo encased and swathed like a mummy. She had been sure the unwrapping would reveal the slender pathetic body of Tamima and now her hunt had to begin again. Wexford hoped what she said was true, that she was enormously relieved, but knowing her need always to be right, her often unjustified certainties, he wondered.

  Having told Ahmed that the interview would be recorded, that they were Detective Chief Inspector Wexford and Detective Sergeant Goldsmith and that the time was 11.37 p.m., he began by asking Ahmed to tell him what had really happened at 34 Glebe Road that afternoon when Targo called.

  ‘You can forget that stuff about the home management device and forget too about Targo driving off but coming back before six thirty. Inspector Burden is questioning your mother next door and I don’t think your mother will lie, will she?’

  ‘No, she won’t lie,’ said Ahmed.

  ‘So tell me.’

  ‘I shall have to, I suppose. Will I go to prison?’

  ‘Probably. That depends on what you did.’

  ‘I killed him,’ said Ahmed, ‘but I didn’t mean to. It was an accident.’

  Hannah said, ‘Begin with what he said when he made the offer to kill Tamima.’

  Ahmed nodded. He pushed away his half-empty teacup. ‘My mother was there. She was sewing something. I think Targo wanted me to send her away but I couldn’t do that in her own home. Then he sort of shrugged as if he was saying, “OK then, if that’s what you want. Let her stay.” After that he asked about this office-manager thing and I showed him some pictures in a brochure I had. “Get one for me, will you?” he said and I said I’d send off for it and it’d be about ten days. Well, what I said was, five to ten working days. Then he said, quite pleasantly, in the same sort of voice, “Your sister’s going about with a white man, isn’t she?”

  ‘I was so surprised I just stared. My mother laid down her sewing but she didn’t say anything, not then. Targo said, “You people don’t like that kind of thing, do you? It’s bad for your family honour or whatever.” Those were his words, “honour or whatever”. My mother spoke then. She said, “We can’t discuss that with you.” He took no notice. He said, “You’ll want her out of the way, won’t you? Dead and gone and no questions asked. I’ll see to that and it won’t cost you a penny.”’

  ‘What did you say to that?’ Wexford asked.

  ‘I said I thought he should go. My mother got up. She was wearing the hijab, of course, and a shawl round her shoulders. But when she looked at him she pulled the shawl over her head as well and held it in front of her face. I think she wanted to hide herself from him, he was such a monster.’

  Yes, thought Wexford, that is what he was, a monster. A chimera, an abomination. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘He didn’t go. He laughed. He said, “I know that’s what you want. I’ve seen them kissing – that’s not the way a good little Muslim girl behaves, is it? You won’t want her in your home again and you need not. Just leave things to me. I’ll find her wherever she is.”

  ‘I hit him then. He was an old man and shorter than me and I know I shouldn’t have done that but I was so angry. I saw red, I really did, red in front of my eyes. I hit him on the jaw and he fell backwards.’ Ahmed was speaking now at great speed. ‘He fell backwards and crashed against the fireplace and hit the back of his head on that marble shelf, the what-d’you-call-it.’

  ‘The mantelpiece,’ said Wexford.

  In Interview Room 1 Yasmin Rahman had reached much the same point in her account. She was heavily veiled, much as she had been when Ahmed described her, the shawl on top of the hijab pulled down to form a peak over her forehead. Her strong handsome face, with the long straight nose and dark
liquid eyes, was almost hidden but for the mouth.

  ‘My son Ahmed hit him. He asked for it – isn’t that what you say in this country? He asked for it. That man – Targo – he fell down and there was blood coming from his head. I thought he was dead – how would I know? I went to the kitchen to get water and something to wipe away the blood and when I came back Ahmed was feeling his heart and listening to his heart and he said he was dead.’

  ‘While this was going on,’ Burden said, ‘where were your husband and your other son?’

  ‘Osman was at work. My husband was upstairs in bed. He was ill with flu. He heard that man fall and he called out to me to ask what the sound was. I went up and told him it was something out in the street. It was ten minutes to four and Ahmed said we must hide the man’s body while we thought what to do next. We had to put it somewhere Osman wouldn’t see it. We carried it through into the place next door.’

  She was very cool and calm. Burden thought this was probably the way she had been when Ahmed hit Targo and later found he had killed him. He had noticed her extraordinary dignity before, the way she could sit still for long periods without fidgeting, without even moving her eyes. ‘So what did you do next?’ he asked.

  ‘Took the car away,’ she said calmly. ‘We waited till the night-time. Took it a long way to where my cousin Mr Mansoor who is the postmaster lives. It is a place called Melstead. Mr Mansoor knows nothing. He wasn’t even there, he was at his home in Thaxted.’

  In the next room Wexford was saying, ‘If he wasn’t dead when he fell on the floor why didn’t you call an ambulance? You say it was an accident, it wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘I don’t know if he was dead then but he soon was. I knew that because the blood stopped flowing. That means a person is dead, doesn’t it?’ Ahmed didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I thought no one would believe me if I said it was an accident.’