Wexford 22 - The Monster In The Box (2 page)

   'Good for Mike,' said Wexford. 'He's better than I am at being firm with people who want to waste his time. Now, how about this gardener? Shall I put an ad in the
Courier?
'

He couldn't get Targo out of his head. Incapable of doing much on a computer himself, he hesitated over asking DC Coleman or DS Goldsmith to find where the man was now living, his marital status, his means of livelihood. He had no real reason to know these things, only hunches, suspicions, speculations, built up over the years. Instead, he asked one of his grandsons and he, like all bright children, came up with the answers in a few minutes. Eric William Targo was now married to Mavis Jean Targo, née Sebright, and they lived at Wymondham Lodge, formerly the old vicarage of Stringfield.

   Wexford knew the house, as he knew most of the big houses in the environs of Kingsmarkham. No vicar had lived in the place for many years. The Reverend James Neame, incumbent of the parish of Stringfield, now had four churches in his care, each one attended by no more than ten people at Sunday-morning service, that service itself taken by a lay reader when Mr Neame was preaching elsewhere. His home was a small red-brick house between the (now closed) village shop and the parish hall. Several families had occupied the vicarage since the last vicar left it for good but it was only dignified with its present name when a rich man from London bought it in the early nineties and gave it a rigorous makeover. It was now Wymondham Lodge with extensive grounds, sculpted gardens, two garages, three bathrooms and a guest suite when Targo bought it perhaps less than a year before.

   The next day was Sunday and Wexford decide to drive over to Stringfield and – what? Spy out the land? The chances of seeing Targo just because he had his house in his sights were slim but he felt he couldn't rest until he at least went there and tried. Incongruously, he wondered how many animals and of what kind the man was keeping within the old stone walls of the vicarage garden. The day was fine, hazy and mild. Leaves were still a long way off falling but they had grown dark and tired-looking. Everywhere had that late-summer appearance of untidiness, grass long and brownish, flowers gone to seed, windfall plums lying rotting at the foot of trees. He took the bridge across the River Brede and was in Stringfield within ten minutes. There was very little traffic. The heart of the village had its usual neglected, even abandoned, look, the church tower in urgent need of repair, gravestones leaning over at angles, several of the once sought-after cottages with For Sale notices in their front gardens. He turned down the lane which led to Wymondham Lodge, a narrow byway in which it was impossible for two cars to pass each other. It widened a little when the edge of the stone-walled grounds was reached.

   The land rose a little beyond the wall, giving Wexford a view of a pair of llamas grazing. He did a double take when he saw a Bambi-like creature, a miniature deer, nearby. He pulled the car onto the grass verge, thinking that he wouldn't be surprised to see a leopard or even an elephant. But there was nothing like that, though he caught a glimpse of tall wire fences, like the kind enclosing a tennis court, in the distance. The roar he heard he decided he must have imagined. Driving on towards the house itself, there was less to be seen. Not Targo or his wife, that was too much to expect. But the white van he had seen in Glebe Road was parked on the gravel drive with a silver Mercedes beside it. The old vicarage looked as a dwelling only can when its owners are wealthy and able to spend money constantly on it. The brickwork had been repointed, the white trim recently repainted, the slate roof glossy and sleek, free of moss. There was no sound – but what sound could there be in this remote spot unless it might be a cry from some animal?

   He moved the car along the road out of sight of Wymondham Lodge's windows. It was a former home of Targo's that he was thinking of, not the medium-sized detached place in Myringham where the kennels was, not old Mrs Targo's cottage in Glebe Road from which he had made himself a stalker, but the little place in Jewel Road, Stowerton, not much more than a cottage itself, where he had started out. Very young but a married man with a child and another one on the way and, of course, a dog, a spaniel.

   Number 32 his had been and the Carrolls lived at 16. Wexford remembered perfectly now. They were all the same, those houses, a row of them, two tiny living rooms and a kitchen, two bedrooms upstairs. Some of them had a bathroom but most didn't. The gardens were small rectangles with a gate at the end, opening into a lane where dustbins were put out and deliveries made. Everyone had coal and coke delivered in those days.

   Elsie Carroll had been found dead in her bedroom one evening while her husband was out at his whist club. Did anyone play whist any more? The police had come, Wexford with them, a very young policeman then, excited and a bit overawed. He hadn't seen the woman's body, only seen it carried out, covered in a sheet, after the pathologist had been. Leaving the house later, sent home by Ventura when George Carroll, the husband, had been found, he had encountered Targo exercising his spaniel in the street. At midnight on a damp cold night. That had been his first sight, his very first, of the man who now lived in some grandeur behind those stone walls.

   Of course he was wearing a scarf. A thick waterproof jacket, wellington boots and a scarf wound round his neck. The scarf had been brown wool with a lighter check pattern. The man looked at him, met his eyes, stared. He had the dog on a lead. While he stood still and stared, the dog was lifting its leg against a tree in the pavement. The stare was absurd, sinister, it went on so long. Wexford found himself making an impatient gesture, turned away towards the car which would take him home. Once he looked back and saw the man still there, still gazing at him. And he remembered saying to himself, that man, he did it. Whoever he is, he killed Elsie Carroll, and then he said, don't be ridiculous, don't talk – don't even think – such nonsense.

   Driving home half a lifetime later, he thought, I've never told anyone but I'm going to. I'm going to tell Mike. I'll have my Sunday lunch with Dora and Sylvia and the kids, I'll contemplate my awful garden and I'll draft an ad to put in the
Courier
for a gardener. Then, after all that, I'll phone Mike and ask him to come out for a drink. Now Targo is back and I've seen him, the time has come to tell someone – and who but Mike?

'If it's about that Rahman girl, I'd rather not,' Burden said. Wexford had almost forgotten her, so full his mind had been of Targo. 'Who?'

   'That schoolgirl Jenny seems to think is being victimised in some way. The one from the Asian family that live next door to my old house.'

   'It's not about that, Mike. It's got nothing to do with that. This is something quite different. I've never told anyone about it but it's not new, it's been going on for more years than I care to remember, and now I think it's going to start again. Doesn't that whet your appetite?'

   'D'you mean you're going to tell me?'

   'If you'll listen,' Wexford said.

   They chose the Olive and Dove, the little room called the snug which over the years they had made almost their own private sanctum. Of course others used it, as the yellow-stained ceiling and lingering smell of a million cigarettes bore witness. In a few years' time a smoking ban would come in, the walls and ceiling be redecorated, new curtains hung at the clouded windows and ashtrays banished, but in the late nineties there was no hint of that. Outside the window it was mostly young people who could be seen sitting at tables under coloured umbrellas on the Olive's veranda, for the evening was as mild as the day had been, while their elders crowded into the saloon bar. All those people or those who succeeded them would ten years in the future be obliged to huddle on that veranda, rain or shine, snow or fog, if they wanted to smoke.

   Wexford asked for his usual red wine, Burden for a half of lager. He was no big drinker, though he had a large appetite, and Wexford would have been surprised if he had eaten less before coming out than a two-course dinner with bread that he himself had given up and potatoes that he was forbidden. For all that, the inspector kept his slim elegant figure. To Wexford it was almost indecent that a man of Burden's age had no discernible belly and could still wear jeans without looking ridiculous.

   Having said earlier that he wasn't coming if the conversation was about Tamima Rahman, Burden nevertheless plunged straight into the subject.

   'I hope I'm not being disloyal but I sometimes think that people who are as intensely anti-racist as Jenny is, actually discover examples of Asian or black people being ill-treated where no ill-treatment exists. Moreover, I'm afraid I think, and I told her what I think, that if this Tamima was a white girl who seemed a bit depressed and, well, unable to concentrate, Jenny wouldn't take a blind bit of notice. There you are, I suppose that is a bit disloyal.'

   'It's politically incorrect, Mike. I don't know about disloyal. As for this girl, I only know what Dora passed on to me from what Jenny said.'

   'There isn't any more to know, as far as I can see.' Burden tasted his drink and gave a small approving nod. 'So what was it you wanted to tell me?'

   'It will take quite a long time,' Wexford said reflectively. 'It can't all be told tonight.' He paused, then went on. 'You have to understand that I've never told anyone, I've kept it entirely to myself, and I thought I never would tell anyone. That was in part because the man in question had gone away. That wasn't the first time, he'd gone away before, but he'd never stayed away so long. I was beginning to think – no, I'd decided – that it was all over. Now he's come back. I've seen him.'

   'What did you mean by "in part"?'

   'Because I could think of no one to tell who would believe me,' Wexford said simply.

   'And I will?'

   'Probably not. No, I doubt if you'll believe me. But I know you'll listen and you'll keep it to yourself.'

   'If that's what you want I will.'

   The story he was going to tell started when he was very young, living at home with his mother and father as he couldn't really afford to live anywhere else. He got on with his parents, there were no difficulties there, but he moved away for two reasons: it wasn't 'grown-up' to live at home and, besides that, he was engaged. At twenty-one he was engaged. But he wouldn't tell any of that. He wouldn't talk about the sexual revolution which was coming but hadn't yet arrived, and how it was out of the question for his parents to let Alison stay the night. Even when he had found himself a room with a Baby Belling stove and use of the bathroom down the passage, he couldn't have had Alison to stay the night. Her parents would have expected her home by eleven at the latest. His landlady would have turned her out and him too probably. There would have been gossip. Girls still had a reputation to keep, girls still knew what the word meant and if they tried to forget it were still told by their fathers – never dads in those days – what would become of them if they lost it.

   But he and Alison had their evenings. Mrs Brunton, his landlady, was one of those who believed that sexual intercourse only ever took place after ten at night. He was young and probably thought the way magazines were beginning to say men thought, that is about sex every six minutes. He had known Alison since they were sixteen and he liked the sex but not as much as he had thought he would. There must be more to it or what were all these people on about?

   He tried not to think about it. He was
engaged
, and he had old-fashioned ideas about engagements. Not that he was quite back in the days when defaulting men got sued for breach of promise but still he would have thought it dishonourable for the man to break an engagement when the woman obviously wanted to keep it. Or did she? She said she loved him. He tried not to think about it but to think about his work instead.

   And it was about that work that he would talk to Burden. The inspector waited, watching him and helping himself to the nuts Wexford was not allowed to eat.

   'It was mostly taking statements,' he began, 'from people who had been receiving stolen goods or knew someone who had or had broken into a house and stolen five pounds from a wallet. And making house-to-house calls and once, rather more excitingly, taking my turn in sitting beside a hospital bed in which lay a man who had been stabbed in the street. A very rare event in Kingsmarkham in those days. And then Elsie Carroll was murdered.'

   It was the first murder in their area of mid Sussex for two years and the previous one hadn't really been murder at all but manslaughter. This one was murder all right. She was found by a next-door neighbour. The neighbour, Mrs Dawn Morrow, had been expecting Elsie Carroll to come in and have a cup of coffee with her and a chat.

   'Those were the days when a couple of women would never have met for a drink, that is wine or beer or spirits. No one drank wine, anyway, except French people or the sort that went to posh restaurants. Dawn had two children, three and one, her husband went to see his widowed mother on a Tuesday evening and she couldn't leave the house except perhaps to "pop next door". Elsie was invited for seven thirty one February evening and when she hadn't come by eight Dawn went to find her, leaving her children alone for a couple of minutes, as she put it. Both couples were on the phone but both believed it was wrong, absurdly extravagant, almost immoral to make a phone call to the house next door.'

   At this point, Burden broke in. 'Where exactly was this?'

   'Didn't I say? It was Jewel Road, Stowerton.'

   'I know it. Smart cottages with different-coloured front doors, very popular with commuters to London.'

   'It wasn't like that then. It was – it is – a terrace. Some people had outside lights either in the porch or on an exterior wall. The Carrolls at number 16 didn't. The back gardens were small and all of them had a gate in the rear wall leading into the lane where dustmen collected the rubbish and deliveries were made. No one locked these gates and everyone left their back doors unlocked. Nothing ever happened, it was neurotic to be afraid of some intruder coming in.