The Monster in the Box Page 2

  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 hosp
ital 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 neighour, 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.

  ‘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.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  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.
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br />   ‘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.’