The Monster in the Box

by Ruth Rendell

  Wexford said drily, ‘We sometimes believe what people tell us. It’s more difficult to believe when those same people try to cover up an offence by concealing a body and going to considerable lengths to deceive as you did. I refer to the little games you played with Mr Targo’s car. What did you do? Drive it up to the place in Essex where some cousin of yours lives to make it look as if Mr Targo had left the country through Stansted airport?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what we did. As soon as we knew he was dead we took the body next door into the shop. There’s a door in our living room that leads into the room where we hid him. We had it put in when we had the conversion done. Then we waited till it got late and there was no one about. I drove Targo’s Mercedes and my mother followed, driving our car. It was a piece of luck that my father was ill with an infectious illness, so my mother was sleeping in Tamima’s room and my father didn’t notice she wasn’t there.’

  ‘Why not go to Gatwick?’

  ‘It was too near,’ Ahmed said. ‘The car would have been found next day.’

  ‘Who worked on the cupboard in the shop next door? You, I suppose.’

  ‘I wrapped the body up, made a sort of parcel of it and put it in the back of the cupboard. Then I sort of boarded it up. I used some sheets of hardboard, screwed them in place and painted over the lot.’

  Wexford sat back in his chair, silent. It was Hannah who said, ‘Where is your sister, Ahmed?’

  ‘I don’t know. I only wish I knew. He didn’t kill her, I know that. At least I prevented that.’

  Unless he did it before he spoke to you, Wexford thought. ‘It was you who phoned Mrs Targo with a message allegedly coming from her husband?’ The strangely familiar voice, he thought. The voice of someone who had worked in the house as Ahmed had when he set up the computer.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Ahmed said wearily. ‘That was me.’

  Later that night Yasmin Rahman was released on police bail but her son remained in one of the station’s two cells for further questioning in the morning.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Manslaughter would be the charge, or perhaps unlawful killing, consistent with Dr Mavrikian’s findings when he examined Targo’s body. Death had resulted from that single deep wound to the skull which corresponded to the sharp corner of the granite mantelpiece at 34 Glebe Road. There was also bruising to the left-hand side of Targo’s jaw – incidentally in the centre of where the naevus had been – where right-handed Ahmed Rahman had struck him. Yasmin Rahman would be charged only with assisting an offender in a death and would probably, Wexford thought, receive a suspended sentence. He hoped Ahmed would serve no more than two or three years in prison and if it were less he wouldn’t be sorry. The man had rid the world of a monster who, though old, had been strong, and might have lived another twenty years of natural life. This, of course, was no way for a detective chief inspector to think.

  He himself took to Mavis Targo the details of her husband’s death and as much of an explanation as he thought good for her to hear. Sentimentality would have it that Ming the Tibetan spaniel should die of grief but it seemed to have got over missing its master and when Wexford called was helping Sweetheart eat the Chinese carpet. Mavis may have been equally indifferent to Targo’s passing. At any rate, she showed no emotion but spoke only of her worries as to how to dispose of the menagerie. Although Targo had left most of his properties and his stock to his children, the house was hers and as soon as she could she intended to sell it and buy a flat in central London.

  ‘You asked me if my marriage was happy,’ she said to Wexford, ‘and of course I wasn’t going to say it wasn’t, was I? The fact is we were going to split up. What I say is, thank God we never got around to it. Once we’d done that he’d have changed his will.’

  ‘What I can’t understand,’ Burden said later, ‘is how he got all those women to marry him. Ugly little chap with that birthmark before he had it taken off, it’s beyond comprehension.’

  ‘Anthony Powell,’ said Wexford, the reader, ‘says somewhere that while women are rather choosy about whom they sleep with, they will marry anyone. Women are said to like power in a man and Targo exuded that.’

  They were on their way to pay a first visit to Rectangle Road, Stowerton, and the Hanif family. It was four thirty in the afternoon and Rashid was due home from Carisbrooke Sixth Form College and his formidable A-level programme of maths, biology and physics. After they had listened for about fifteen minutes to Fata Hanif’s highly laudatory curriculum vitae of her eldest son while she spooned puréed apple into the mouth of her youngest, Rashid hobbled in on a single crutch, his leg in plaster up to the knee.

  Before either of them could say a word, he had plunged into a defence of himself, his mother backing him up as soon as he drew breath.

  ‘I haven’t seen her for weeks, not for months. I don’t know where she is so it’s no good asking me.’

  ‘Of course he hasn’t. My son’s a good boy. He’s obedient, he respects his parents.’

  ‘All right,’ Wexford said. ‘Wait a minute. Tamima is missing. Her parents have no idea where she is. None of her relatives have any idea where she may be. Now, I must tell you that we have witnesses who have seen you about with her, at one time if not recently. They may not be reliable, I don’t know. Certainly, Tamima has been seen about with a white man or boy and you are white, Rashid.’

  Mrs Hanif set down the apple-purée spoon, wiped the child’s face and said, almost spitting the words, ‘The police are institutionally racist, that’s a well-known fact.’

  ‘And you,’ said Burden, ‘are a British citizen, a white woman from a family in the former Yugoslavia. Where’s the racism?’

  ‘My husband’s Asian.’

  ‘Maybe. But Rashid is pale-skinned and blue-eyed,’ said Wexford. ‘If witnesses say they’ve seen Tamima with a white boy the chances are it’s Rashid but he says no and for the present we must take his word for it. You would like Tamima to be found, wouldn’t you, Rashid?’

  ‘He doesn’t care!’ Mrs Hanif shouted.

  Equally loudly, Rashid forgot respect and said, ‘Oh, do shut up, Mum!’

  The baby began to cry, drumming his heels on the footrest of the high chair. ‘See what you’ve done.’ But Mrs Hanif spoke in a low petulant tone, subdued by Rashid’s unaccustomed defiance.

  ‘Tamima has to be found,’ Wexford said. ‘I think you’d like to help us, Rashid, I want you to come down to the station and make a statement.’

  Rashid’s mouth fell open. ‘What about?’

  ‘The last time you saw Tamima, what she said to you, any phone calls you’ve had from her, that sort of thing. You can come with us now. No need for you to walk anywhere.’

  Wexford considered asking Mohammed and Yasmin Rahman to go on television and appeal to the public to find their lost daughter – considered and rejected it. Clever gentle Mohammed might make a good impression but his wife would not. Viewers would tend to be set against her by her stern features, steady eyes and rigidity of expression. She reminded him of a bust he had once seen in Greece of Athene and he thought that the helmet the goddess had been wearing would have become her. Besides, she was associated with her son in the unlawful killing of Targo. Better to send out photographs of Tamima, which the Rahmans were happy to provide. She was a good-looking girl if rather too like her mother ever to be called pretty, yet with her dark skin and black eyes and the hijab she often if not invariably wore, a big percentage of the public would fail to distinguish her from any other Asian girl.

  Rashid said in his statement that he and Tamima had once been good friends but ‘nothing more’. The last time he saw her had been a month ago when he talked to her in her uncle’s shop, the Raj Emporium. That had been just before she went to London to stay with her aunt, Mrs Qasi.

  The newspaper photographs had no effect or none of the kind Wexford wanted. A great many people claimed to have seen Tamima but in every case it was a different Asian girl they had seen. He began to wonder ag
ain if it was possible Targo had murdered Tamima before he made his offer to Ahmed and he recalled what Osman had said. ‘You think he killed her just the same?’ It was possible and in a strange way it would have been just like Targo. Suppose he had found Tamima, had strangled her – what had he done with her body? – and then gone to Ahmed to ask if he wanted his sister killed. If the answer had been yes, he would have said the deed was already done. Wexford could almost hear him saying, ‘It’s all done. I don’t want payment. Glad to be of service.’

  It made him shiver because it seemed possible. Then he thought of the menagerie, the carnivorous animals, and began to feel sick. No, he was imagining too much … When he was younger he had never felt like this. He had been tougher. Banish ugly and dreadful images, he thought, put them in a box and send the box to the deep recesses of his psyche – but this faculty seemed to be deserting him now.

  He went to London to see Jacqueline Clarke and Clare Cooper and learnt more from them than Hannah had. It seemed that though Tamima had come to their flat intending to get a job and stay there for some weeks, even until Christmas, she had in fact left after a week, saying she was going home to Kingsmarkham.

  ‘Did she ever mention a man called Eric Targo, an old man?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Clare said. ‘She didn’t mention anyone much when she first came and then after a day or two she was always on her mobile, answering calls more than making them, I think.’

  ‘Were any of those calls from Rashid Hanif?’

  ‘I don’t know who they were from. We didn’t like to ask.’

  Jacqueline Clarke said, as if she had just remembered, ‘There was a man came here once to call for her. He wouldn’t come in, I don’t know why not. Tamima went down to answer the door and came back upstairs for something. She left him standing on the doorstep. I looked out of the window and saw him. It was dark, though.’

  ‘What was he like?’ Wexford asked quickly.

  ‘Young. Quite tall. I think his hair was brown, not very dark. I couldn’t tell you the colour of his eyes.’

  Definitely not Targo, he thought. Rashid Hanif? Quite possibly. But wherever she was, if she was alive, she wasn’t with Rashid now. But it was impossible. The timing was wrong. But why would he go at that stage? He could only have killed her if he could have been absolutely confident that Ahmed would leap at his offer and not go to the police.

  Every day he had got into the habit of calling on the Rahmans. It was unorthodox behaviour, though not against the rules. Released on police bail, Yasmin was at home but he never saw her. She seemed to know it was wise to keep out of the way when he called and not to speak to him. She made tea or coffee and sent it in by one of her menfolk. Mohammed and Osman had both gone back to work, so he called on his way home in the early evening. Nothing much was said – nothing at all, that is, about the killing of Targo and the concealment of the body. When they talked it was about Tamima. Sometimes Hannah came too and then they would ask questions as to all the people the missing girl had ever known right back into her early childhood, trying to find out who she might now be with and where she might have gone, always supposing she was still alive.

  Webb and Cobb was no longer a crime scene and Mohammed’s plan was to decorate the shop area and try to let it, to paint the exterior at the same time after replacing the windows in the top flat. This was necessarily delayed and Sharon Scott moved out, leaving the tenancy to the husband she was divorcing, Ian Scott.

  Yasmin Rahman’s strict morality made her disapprove of Scott’s bringing to live there with him a woman he wasn’t married to. In Yasmin’s absence one evening, this was a topic of conversation between Wexford, Hannah, Mohammed and Osman. The Rahman men were more easy-going. Osman took the robust view that Scott’s morals were no concern of theirs so long as he paid the rent. Mohammed was against sitting in judgement. Besides, times had changed and we must change with them, but he didn’t know how to talk his wife round. Not for the first time, Wexford marvelled at people’s selective morality. Presumably, it was all right for Yasmin to help her son conceal the body of a man he had killed and attempt to deceive the police by taking part in a plan to hide that dead man’s car, while all wrong to rent out her property to a cohabiting couple.

  He had no intention of visiting Mavis Targo again but one day, a week or so before Christmas, he met her in Kingsmarkham High Street. With two full shopping bags on the pavement beside her, she was contemplating the Mercedes, recently returned to her, and the yellow-painted metal clamp fastened to its rear nearside wheel. Ming and Sweetheart, bouncing about on the back seat, were both barking hysterically.

  ‘Do something, can’t you?’ she said to Wexford.

  ‘Nothing to do with me, Mrs Targo.’ Resisting the temptation to tell her he was not a traffic cop, he took a little pity on her. ‘Just phone the number they give and pay the fine and they’ll release you in no time.’

  ‘I knew it was a mistake to drive that bloody car. It’s always brought me bad luck.’

  He said nothing about the menagerie or the house. The sight of her reminded him of his failure. Targo might be dead but he had died in what was an accident, no more retributive or judicial than if he had met his death in a road crash. And now, even if they ultimately found Tamima’s body concealed somewhere, buried or at the bottom of a lake or river or butchered and therefore more easily hidden, Targo could not be responsible. Yet he felt he must find the girl, dead or alive, he must find her. It was terrible to him that the police forces of the whole country had searched for her, her picture had been all over the media, but she remained missing. He tried to comfort himself with the knowledge that it is much easier to hide a living person or for that living person to hide herself, than to conceal a corpse. The dead body cannot move, cannot pick itself up and find a new hiding place. Inert, it lies where it has been left or placed, but that place may be deep under the earth.

  The windows at Webb and Cobb had been replaced and the exterior painted before Ian Scott moved in. Apparently, his private life no longer concerned Yasmin Rahman. She had other things to worry about. Her son Ahmed would come up for trial in February and she had no reason to think that her daughter Tamima would be found before that – if found she ever was.

  Christmas came and went. Mavis Targo sold Wymondham Lodge and moved. Dora Wexford got flu and had to stay in bed while her daughter Sylvia came in to look after her. While he manfully limped to his sixth-form college, Rashid Hanif’s broken ankle refused to mend and required an operation. A vast overhaul of the police station started with builders and decorators moving in and the working lives of a dozen officers disrupted. Then at the end of January when the weather had turned very cold, the trees were silvered with hoar frost and the pavements disappeared under a light covering of snow, Wexford met Yasmin Rahman crossing the high street from Glebe Road.

  He was on his way to meet Burden for lunch at the Dal Lake when he saw her. He had spotted her on the other side of the road, noticed the thick black scarf she wore wound round her head and the unflattering floor-length belted black coat, buttoned from neck to foot and just exposing clumping black brogues. In spite of all this, how beautiful she must have been when young, he thought, reflecting at the same time that this was a truly dreadful thing to say of a woman, as if beauty were necessarily and invariably confined to youth.

  She crossed the street when the light turned red and advanced on him. He could see something in her face he couldn’t at first define. Her first words gave an explanation.

  ‘I’ve had a shock. I don’t know what to do.’ She frowned, shifting blame on to him as was her way. ‘If you are going out, I suppose I shall have to go back home.’

  He had no idea what could have happened. They were outside a small cafe that specialised in ‘natural’ foods but also served coffee and tea. ‘Let me buy you a cup of coffee, Mrs Rahman. You’ve made enough for me in recent months.’

  If she had refused it would have come as no surprise. Negativity seeme
d to be something she enjoyed. But she accepted with a reluctant nod. ‘I think perhaps I shouldn’t be talking to you,’ she said. ‘I am a convict now, aren’t I?’

  If she meant she would soon have a criminal record, he was bound to agree with her, but all he said was, ‘That’s all right. Don’t worry about it,’ and pulled out a chair for her close to the window.

  There were only two other people in the cafe but still she looked to either side of her and over her shoulder to make sure she wasn’t overheard. Wexford ordered two coffees which the waitress insisted on calling ‘Americanos’. Yasmin Rahman preserved silence until she had gone, then said in a steady determined voice, ‘I’ve seen my daughter. I’ve seen Tamima.’

  He said nothing, looked at her.

  ‘I saw her yesterday but I couldn’t quite believe my eyes.’ She spoke slowly and deliberately. ‘I thought I was having a delusion, I’ve been so worried, you see.’

  ‘Of course you have,’ he said.

  ‘But I saw her again this morning. At the window. She was half behind the curtain but I saw her, I knew her. Of course I know my own child.’

  As others had disbelieved him, so he gave this no credence. ‘Are you quite sure, Mrs Rahman?’

  ‘I’m sure. I know my child. It was Tamima.’

  ‘Which window was this? Where did you see her?’

  The waitress chose this moment to arrive with their coffee. As soon as she appeared Yasmin Rahman clamped her lips together, sat statue-still, staring at the roadworks outside the window. The waitress seemed to be purposely taking her time, setting out milk and sugar, then recalling that the bowl of packet sweeteners was still on her tray. Yasmin continued to watch the man with the mechanical digger and the man with the pneumatic drill.

  ‘Which window was this?’ Wexford repeated once the waitress had finally gone.

  Yasmin expelled a heavy sigh as she turned her head back. ‘One of the new ones. In the top flat, Mr Scott’s flat.’