Wexford 22 - The Monster In The Box (7 page)

   'Do you think I should go and see them? The Rahmans, I mean. Talk to the parents?'

   Hannah didn't care for this suggestion. It was all right for her to go as a police officer but she saw a teacher's visit as on a par with a social worker's snooping or an old-time lady bountiful's condescending to a peasant family. 'So long as you remember they're intelligent people, educated people – well, Mohammed Rahman and his sons are. I hope you don't mind me saying this but Mohammed wouldn't take kindly to being lectured.'

   Mildly for her, Jenny said, 'I won't lecture him. I'll only say it's such a waste that a bright girl like Tamima isn't to go on to higher education. I mean, what's she going to do with her life? Work in some dead-end job until she can be a full-time housewife like her mother?'

   The position of women in Islam was in conflict with Hannah's feminist views and this gave her a hard time. Still, she couldn't let that pass. She gave Jenny a pleasant smile. 'In the case of Tamima's mum I'm sure it's her choice to be a housewife. She's a very excellent one and absolutely the rock of that family. Can I get you another cup of coffee?'

After Kevin Styles, self-styled gang leader, aged twenty and of no fixed address, had been committed for trial on charges of breaking and entering and causing actual bodily harm, Burden went off to meet Wexford for lunch at the Kashmiri restaurant they currently favoured. On his way to the Dal Lake he had had an experience he could hardly wait to tell Wexford about. The Chief Inspector was already there, sitting at a table reading the menu.

   'I can't see any difference between this food and Indian at the Indus down the road,' he said, looking up. 'Of course this may not be authentic Kashmiri. We wouldn't know one way or the other, would we?'

   'I've seen him,' Burden said, sitting down.

   'Seen who?'

   'Your stalker.'

   'How could you know?'

   'Well, let's say your description was so detailed, not to mention the white van, that it was pretty obvious. The bushy white hair, piercing blue eyes, his height or lack of it, the way he walks or struts.'

   'Scarf or no scarf ?'

   'No scarf. But close to you can sort of see where the naevus was. When you know there was a naevus, that is. The skin's paler than the rest and smoother.'

   'You must have been very close to. Where was this?'

   'Outside the police station. Well, outside the court which is more or less the same thing. The van was parked on a meter, all perfectly as it should be. I saw him put a coin into the meter and then he walked up to our forecourt and stood there, looking up at the windows. I went over to him. He didn't speak and nor did I. God knows what he was doing.'

   'And not only God,' said Wexford. 'He was looking for me.'

   'What, still?'

   'Why not? He doesn't know whether I'm still here or retired or maybe I've died. He wants to find out.'

Soon after George Carroll had been released, Wexford was transferred from Kingsmarkham to a division on the south coast. He thought it was permanent but it turned out to be only temporary, lasting just two years, part of the preliminaries to his being made sergeant. It was a time of shifting change; everyone, it seemed to him, moving away.

   That George Carroll should leave Stowerton was no surprise. He might have been acquitted but not because some startling piece of eleventh-hour evidence revealed him to be beyond doubt innocent. People were saying he got off on a technicality, just because some old judge who was probably senile had fallen down on the job. Carroll returned home for a while because he had nowhere else to go. In the present climate of social conduct, Wexford thought, his neighbours would at best have catcalled him and daubed abuse on his garden wall, at the more likely worst, smashed his windows and perhaps even stoned him. Then, all those years ago, he was treated with coolness and a few people turned away from him without a word or a nod. His house was put up for sale. Wexford had seen it advertised in an estate agent's window for two thousand, five hundred pounds. Its reputation had reduced its price but not, he thought, by more than, say, three hundred pounds. Now that same house would fetch two hundred thousand.

   Targo moved too. He waited to see George Carroll come home, be ostracised and excluded, and then he and his family disappeared. Or that was the way Wexford had seen it. That was the way it looked. It might, of course, have been only coincidence that when George Carroll returned to Jewel Road after the trial, an estate agent's board appeared outside number 32 advertising it for rent. Wexford had gone down there to look at the empty house and the board himself, though for what purpose he couldn't have said. He enquired of a neighbour and was told the Targo family had gone away, no one knew where, but Kathleen and her children had gone to one destination and Targo to another. Soon after that Wexford himself was leaving.

   He said goodbye to Alison and gave a half-hearted promise to come back to Kingsmarkham at weekends when he was able to, fairly certain that he would hardly ever be able to. She was half-hearted too. She had gradually become so since their row over his intellectual pretensions and he could tell, to his relief, that the matter would be taken out of his hands, that she would soon break off their engagement. Strange that this made him fonder of her. Not fond enough to want them to be as they had been when they first met, but rather with a feeling of what might have been and what a pity it was that it could never come back.

   As to the girl in the red dress, it had been only a glimpse he had had of her, not enough to make him go searching Sussex, just enough to make him think that one day he would like to marry a girl like her. Now he had his career to think of, his future. The breach with Alison came in a letter from her, the first letter he ever received in his new home, a room over a tobacconist's shop in Brighton. As he had thought, she had met another man, the one who had taken her to the pictures that night he went to
St Joan
. They were getting married almost at once. He wrote back, wished her happy and to keep the ring, hoping she wouldn't because he could do with the money he would sell it for, but she did keep it. Now, someone had told him, she had several grandchildren and no longer lived in this country.

   One day, walking down the high street on his way to interview a man about the disappearance of a sackful of stolen goods, he passed Tina Malcolm. George Carroll's former girlfriend was with a man who wasn't Carroll and pushing a baby in a buggy. As people were always monotonously telling him, it was a small world, so it wasn't very surprising perhaps to see, on another occasion, Harold and Margaret Johnson, window-shopping in the Brighton Lanes. His friends he had left behind in Kingsmarkham and had so far made no new ones. Sometimes he went out to the pub in the evenings with DC Roger Phillips, but mostly he stayed in and read. Public libraries were in their heyday then, no nonsense about incorporating coffee shops and what technology there was, but lots and lots of good books. He read them, poetry and plays and novels. Worlds opened for him and far from distracting him from his duties (as Alison would have suggested) they seemed to make him a better policeman.

Considered kind and polite, the way to refer to black or Asian immigrants in those days was as 'coloured' people. Not that there were many of them. Wexford remembered a carpet seller who went from door to door with his wares. He wore a turban and must have been a Sikh but no one knew about that kind of thing then. A black man who swept the streets was probably from Africa but no one knew what brought him here or what misfortune made pushing a cart and plying a broom a preferable existence to any other he might find. After he hadn't been seen for several weeks Wexford heard that he had died, had been found dead of natural causes in the tiny squalid room he rented not far from where Targo had lived.

   Years and years had passed before more immigrants came and now it was becoming unusual to walk along any Kingsmarkham road without seeing one Indian or Chinese face. The way some people, particularly politicians, talked about the situation, integration versus multiculturalism, it would appear to be simple, a straightforward matter of not being racist. But Wexford's experience had taught him what deep waters one struggles to swim in when plunging into the traditions of another culture. He had been told he was too sensitive to these issues and perhaps he was. Oversensitivity was likely to be Hannah's problem too, notably her propensity to bend over backwards to avoid uttering the slightest word that might be construed as criticism of some nasty (Wexford's word) custom. He had even heard her taking great care not to condemn, in a Chinese restaurateur's presence, the process of foot-binding which had ceased to be performed in China some forty years before the man was born. Useless to tell her that the restaurateur, who was no more than thirty, might not even know that women of his great-grandmother's generation had had their feet deliberately distorted and crippled from childhood.

   She walked in now. Anyone ignorant of her profession might far more easily have taken her for a model or perhaps popular TV presenter than a police officer. He wondered how acceptable it had been for a middle-aged Muslim like Mohammed Rahman to be questioned by a young woman in jeans and a rather too low-cut top. Hannah was sensitive only in patches.

   'I felt I should call on the Rahmans,' she began. 'Their house is very nice inside, guv. It's small but they've built a beautiful extension and it's very tastefully decorated. Mr Rahman was eating his dinner. He'd just got in from work. I must say, it smelt fantastic. I suppose Yasmin Rahman had been preparing it all day and she didn't sit down with him, just stood behind his chair and waited on him.' Wexford waited to see how she would get out of that one. She smiled airily. 'Still, it's their tradition, of course, and you couldn't see her as in any way a victim. She seems a strong, even domineering sort of woman. I told Mohammed not to mind me but carry on with his meal, he must be hungry. I didn't think I'd find it awkward asking about Tamima and school and all that but strangely enough I did.'

   'Not so strange considering the knots you tie yourself up in. What did you say?'

   'Pretended not to know Tamima was leaving – well, had left, said we were a bit concerned that Asian girls with very good GCSEs weren't going on to higher education as they should be. He gave me a sceptical sort of look, guv – he's no fool – and I remembered a bit late in the day that he's a social worker. "Leaving school is Tamima's own choice," he said. "Maybe she will resume her education later, who knows? But children have their own way these days, don't they, Miss . . . ?" I said to call me Hannah. His wife hadn't said a word and I thought she might have no English when suddenly she spoke and very fluently. Not all girls were intellectuals, she said and she actually used that word. Some were homemakers as she had been and as Tamima was. She didn't want a career. It was only interfering people like her teacher, that Mrs Burden, who wanted it for her, and she would, having a career herself. Maybe she needed to earn money, but Tamima would not, her husband would do that.'

   Wexford nearly laughed. 'You must have found yourself torn in two, Hannah, what with your adherence to militant feminism and your well-known defence of the multicultural society.'

   To his delight, Hannah really did laugh, if in rather a shamefaced way. 'You've got to admit it's hard, guv. While Yasmin was going on about the virtues of being a housewife, Tamima came in. Yasmin said something to her in Urdu, I suppose it was, and whatever it was she looked mutinous – well, resentful. I couldn't help wondering if it had been something about the boyfriend they don't approve of . . .'

   'Come on, Hannah, that's pure guesswork or else your Urdu's come on a lot.'

   'OK, you're right, of course. I couldn't say anything to Tamima in her parents' presence, though I will. As soon as the chance comes along I will. Anyway, one of the brothers arrived and Yasmin started busying herself getting his food – I noticed she didn't get Tamima's, suppose she had to wait till the men were done. Oh, I know, but you can't excuse everything in every culture. So I left. It wasn't exactly satisfactory, was it, guv?'

   He was preoccupied because he had been thinking, before she came in, of times long past. He asked himself how astonished he would have been if, when he was young, some soothsayer had told him forced marriage would one day be an issue in England. The answer was simple – he wouldn't have believed it.

   But Hannah's visit hadn't been exactly satisfactory. It hadn't been satisfactory at all. It seemed to him that she and Jenny had manufactured a serious problem out of nothing. A girl had chosen to leave school at sixteen as the law said she could. No doubt she wanted to earn some money, the way they did. That same girl had been seen walking with a schoolmate who happened to be male. Out of this, those two had composed a tragic romance. The girl was in love with a boy but snatched away from him into a forced marriage with a cousin. Perhaps she resisted, ran away with the boy, the result of which was that the two of them were murdered in horrible circumstances by one of the girl's brothers. It was a good thing neither of them knew of his sighting of Eric Targo, otherwise they would have hauled him into the plot, as the hired assassin employed by the brother.

   He believed none of it. It was more than ever a pleasure to go home now work had begun on his garden. Andy Norton had done two afternoons' work on the flower-beds and twice mowed the lawn. No one had got around to pruning the roses the requisite six weeks prior to blooming so this year they were a failure. But red and yellow begonias were out in the tubs and purple and red salvias in the borders, now freed from weeds. Dora told him the names, otherwise he would have had no idea. It was enough for him to look, admire and be soothed. To forget for half an hour Targo the stalker, the murderer, the dog lover with the birthmark. The birthmark which was now gone. He'd like to know, he thought, when that naevus was removed and why, considering, to say the least, the man was no longer young.