Wexford 22 - The Monster In The Box (3 page)

   'Dawn rang the the Carrolls' front door bell and when she got no answer went back into her own house, out by the back way and into the Carrolls' garden by way of the lane and the gate in the rear wall. The back door had a glass panel in it and light was coming from the kitchen. That door was not, of course, locked. Dawn went in, calling out, "Hallo," and "Where are you, Elsie?" No one said "hi" then. When she got no answer she called out again and went through the kitchen into the hallway that everyone who lived in that terrace called "the passage". A light was on here too.

   'I'd never previously been in any of those houses, all identical in layout, but by the evening of the next day I knew this one well. There were two small living rooms on the ground floor that subsequent owners have converted into one through room. Upstairs were two bedrooms, a bathroom and a tiny boxroom, big enough for a small child to sleep in. The Carrolls had no children so Dawn had no reason to keep her voice down as she went upstairs calling Elsie. It was just after eight.'

   Wexford paused to drink some of his wine. 'Next day,' he went on, 'DC Miller, Cliff Miller, took a statement from Dawn Morrow and I sat in on it, learning the ropes. The next statement that was needed I'd have to do myself. Dawn said that a ceiling light was on in Mrs Carroll's bedroom and she went in there. At first she didn't see her. The bed was in a bit of a mess. It looked as if it hadn't been made. Pillows had been thrown about and the eiderdown had fallen half on to the floor. That was very unlike Elsie, leaving her bed unmade. Dawn walked round the bed and then she saw her lying on the floor between the bed and the window. "I thought she must have fainted," she said. "I went up to her and looked more closely but I didn't touch her. They told me afterwards that she was dead but I didn't know that. She was lying face downwards with her face turned into the rug so I couldn't see it."

   'That's more or less what she said, Mike. Maybe I'm not remembering precisely. And I'm stating it coldly, leaving out what she must have felt, shock, amazement, fear. She went next door to number 18 where some people called Johnson lived and the Johnsons both came back with her. They went upstairs together. Mrs Johnson had been a nurse before she married, she looked at Elsie Carroll and said she thought she was dead but to go out of the room while she tried to see if she had a pulse. A bit later she came out and she told her husband Elsie was dead and to phone the police and he did.'

   Elsie Carroll had been strangled with the belt of her dressing gown which had been lying across the bed. That was the opinion of Dr Crocker whom Wexford had never met before but who later became his friend. Crocker, who was there within not much more than half an hour, gave an approximate time of death as not more than an hour before and possibly as little as half an hour before. By this time Detective Sergeant Jim Ventura had arrived with DC Miller, DC Pendle and Wexford himself. Within a few minutes Detective Inspector Fulford had also joined them. This murder was something very out of the ordinary, a sensation, in that place and at that time.

   'We had no scene-of-crimes officer at that time. DC Pendle – Dennis was his name – and I went around the house, paying particular attention to the bedroom, taking fingerprints. DNA had been discovered but Watson, Crick and Wilkins had yet to win the Nobel Prize for their discovery. It would be a long time before it could be put to forensic use and it's not foolproof yet, is it? But fingerprint detection had been around for a long time. While we examined that bedroom, a pretty little room which Elsie Carroll had papered in pink patterned with silver leaves, Ventura and DI Fulford waited downstairs for Elsie's husband George to come home.

   'Almost the first thing Ventura had done was speak to Harold Johnson and Margaret, his wife, the former nurse. It was twenty minutes to nine. Johnson told him that George Carroll regularly attended the Stowerton whist club which met in St Mary's church hall and he would be there now. The church hall was no more than a mile away, if that, and George Carroll had gone there, as usual, on his bicycle. Margaret Johnson said he was usually home by nine thirty, though sometimes it was after ten. Ventura sent DC Miller – Cliff Miller – to St Mary's to find George Carroll, tell him what had happened and bring him home.'

   'Things would be a bit different today, wouldn't they?' Burden said. 'The church hall would have a landline which it certainly hadn't then and all those whist players would have mobiles.'

   'Elsie Carroll wouldn't have left her back door unlocked or the gate in the wall unbolted. There would be more street lights.'

   'In other words,' said Burden, 'you could say, contrary to what one is always hearing, that life was actually safer then.'

   'In some ways.'

   'So are you going to tell me George Carroll couldn't be found?'

   'Don't be so impatient. Let's say he couldn't be found immediately. D'you want another drink?'

   'I'll get them.'

   When he came back he found Wexford scrutinising the photocopy he had made in preparation for this meeting of the chapter on the Carroll murder in W. J. Chambers'
Unsolved Crimes and Some Solutions
. Looking up, he said, 'You didn't think I could remember all that after so long, did you?'

   Burden laughed. 'Your memory is pretty good.'

   'I'm giving you all this preamble because it's necessary but what I really want to talk about is the man I suspect committed the crime. No, not suspect. I know he did it as I know he did at least one other. His name is Eric Targo and we'll come to him in a minute.' Wexford said, almost humbly, 'You're happy for me to carry on?'

   'Sure I am, Reg. Of course I am.'

'Miller came back to Jewel Road, having been unable to find Carroll, and we waited there for him, that is Fulford, Ventura and I. Elsie's body had been taken away. By our present-day standards, they were a bit cavalier about taking measurements and photographs, but I dare say what they did was adequate. The bedroom was sealed off as a crime scene. It was then that Harold Johnson dropped what Ventura called his bombshell. He asked if he could speak to Ventura, found him less intimidating than Fulford, I suppose. Fulford was more like an old-time army officer, a sort of Colonel Blimp, than a policeman.

   'Johnson and his wife had been at home all the evening, watching television. Of all the residents of Jewel Road, they were one of the few families who had television and it sounded as if they were enthralled by it, glued to it every night. There were all sorts of rules and restrictions about television-watching at that time. For one thing, you were supposed to sit as many feet away from the set as there were inches in its diagonal, never sit without lights on and various other stuff that turned out to be nonsense. Still, the Johnsons wanted to do it properly and they believed they should draw the curtains and switch on what Margaret Johnson called "soft lighting". But I suspect and thought so then, I remember, that although they would have denied this vehemently, they wanted to leave their curtains open as long as possible so that anyone passing could see the glow of the cathode tube and recognise it for what it was. Something I forgot to mention – the Johnsons were also among the few residents who had converted their two living rooms into one so that they had windows back and front with curtains to be drawn.

   'It was about seven, he told Ventura, when he got up off the sofa to draw the curtains, he couldn't be sure of the time but he knew it was a bit after seven because the programme they wanted to watch had started. First he drew the curtains at the front bay window, then he moved to the back. These were French windows and the curtains floor-length and rather heavy. He pulled the curtains but the right-hand one got caught up on something, the back of a chair, and when he went back to free it he looked out into the darkness and saw the figure of a man coming away from the back door of number 16 and making for the gate in the rear wall. At the time he thought it was George Carroll who went out that way if he was going on his bicycle which he kept in the shed by the gate. But now he was less sure.

   'He thought the man he had seen was short, no more than five feet four while George Carroll was five feet seven. But it was dark and Harold Johnson said he wouldn't be able to take his oath – that was his expression "take his oath" – on its being Carroll. The time he could be sure of: just after seven. Elsie, of course, couldn't say what time her husband had left the house but Dawn Morrow told Ventura next day that he usually left before seven, maybe as much as ten minutes before.'

   'So when did Carroll come home?'

   'A good deal later than was expected. About ten forty-five. It looked to me as if it was a terrible shock for him but as Pendle said to me afterwards, whether he'd killed her or not finding the place a blaze of light and his home full of cops would have been a shock anyway. Fulford told him he could see his wife's body if he wanted to but Carroll refused and began to cry. Fulford wasn't sympathetic. He said brusquely that he'd like to ask him some questions and he wanted to do it now, that was unavoidable. He and Ventura questioned the man and Pendle and I were sent home.

   'If you're interested you can read what Carroll said in Chambers' book. You can have this photocopy I made for you. But the real thing of importance is that Carroll told Fulford he had spent the evening with a woman called Tina Malcolm. The term "girlfriend" wasn't used so much then and Carroll told Fulford he was the woman's "lover". That put Fulford against him from the start. He was exceptionally strait-laced and puritanical – worse than you.'

   'Thanks a bunch.'

   Wexford laughed. 'This woman, Carroll said, would confirm that he had been with her from seven thirty until ten and he was glad it had "all come out", it was better this way with his wife knowing. Then he remembered his wife was dead and began crying again.'

   'My God,' said Burden. 'That's a bit grim.'

   'Well, it was. I was glad to get out in the fresh air. The car we'd come in was parked outside. Pendle got into the driving seat – he lived fairly near me in Kingsmarkham High Street – and I went round to the passenger door. No remote opening of car doors then, of course . . .'

   'I had been born, you know – I even remember the moon landings.'

   'Sorry,' said Wexford. 'Though why I should apologise to a man for treating him as if he were younger than he is I don't know. Pendle had to reach across and lift up the thing – don't know what it was called – that locked the door, and while he was doing that I noticed a man standing outside number 16. He had a dog with him on a lead and he was waiting while the dog took a pee up against a tree in the pavement. His name was Targo, Eric Targo, though I didn't know it then. Mostly someone you encounter like that will immediately look away when he knows you've seen him. Especially when you've been watching his dog foul the pavement. Targo didn't look away. He stared at me. You'll think I'm exaggerating but I'm not. You know how you sometimes read that someone's eyes pierced into your very soul?' Burden plainly hadn't read that and didn't know it. 'Well, never mind, but that's what Targo's did. He stared at me – it was under a street lamp – and then he nodded slightly. Oh, it was a very faint nod, not much more than a tremor, and as he turned away I saw the birthmark. He had a scarf round his neck – he always wears a scarf or he did – but it slipped a little because he turned his head. At first I thought it was some sort of shadow, a trick of the light, but when he moved I saw it for what it was. Cancer the crab crawling across his neck, shaped like a crab with pincers or an island with promontories.' Wexford shrugged. 'Take your pick.'

   They had been alone for the hour and a half it had taken to narrate all this but now three people came into the snug, a woman and two men. Although the room was small, it contained three tables, any one of which the newcomers might have chosen but they picked the one nearest to the policemen. Burden said quietly to Wexford, 'Shall we go back to my place and you can go on with the story there?'

   Burden's house was nearer to the Olive than his. The difficulty was that Jenny would be there, unable to leave her young son on his own, but as it happened she said nothing to Wexford beyond, 'Can I come and see you about something, Reg? To the police station?'

   He named a day and a time more to keep her quiet for the present than because he wanted to hear what she had to say. He knew it already. Burden and he went into a little room the Burdens called the study, though as is so often the case, nothing was studied there but it was a place where one of them could watch a different television programme from that showing in the living room. Burden left him there while he went to fetch drinks and the snack he could eat but Wexford must not.

   Alone for a while, he reflected on that midnight so long ago. He had never forgotten that look, the light from the street lamp falling on the man's thick fair hair and his rather rugged coarse face with the scarf not quite hiding the dark stain mantling his neck. Then, the faint nod, as if to say, 'We know each other now. We are bound together now.' Of course that was nonsense, a nod couldn't mean all that.

   Next day had been his day off. He would have preferred to go in, he didn't want to miss the next steps in the proceedings, but nor did he want to say that to Ventura. It sounded a bit – not overkeen but maybe
presumptuous
. He was too new in the job and too low down the scale to attract that sort of attention to himself. He spent the day with Alison instead, going for a drive (in her father's car) and the evening in his room. That was the time when he'd been doing the next best thing to going to university: reading, reading, reading. It was Chaucer that evening, 'The Squire's Tale'. But later on he lay awake a long while and his mind went back to the old worry, how he could marry a woman he didn't love and would soon, he was afraid, cease even to like any more.

   Burden reappeared with a bottle of sparkling water and for Wexford a glass of red wine, the last of his self-imposed ration for that day. He poured himself a tumbler of water. From the array of bowls of nuts and cheese biscuits, he took a handful of salted almonds.