The Monster in the Box Read online

  ‘I had until a few years later when the stalking began again.’

  Burden was giving him the sort of look he would have given his wife when she raised once again the subject of Tamima Rahman. It was compounded of those two opposites, patience and exasperation.

  ‘You aren’t going to want to hear any more of this, are you?’

  ‘There’s more?’

  ‘Oh, yes, lots more, but I’m not suggesting telling you now.’

  They had left the restaurant and walked across to the Broadbridge Botanical Gardens. There on a seat along the main central path which led to the arboretum and the subtropical house, they sat down and contemplated the artificial lake with its island, its ducks and its two black swans. A squirrel ran down one tree, sat up on its haunches for a moment on the grass, before running up the trunk of another. A dog began to bark at the foot while the squirrel stared at it with loathing, making angry chattering sounds.

  ‘I’ve got to go back,’ Burden said. ‘It’s gone two and I’m due in court at half past when Scott Molloy comes up for perverting the course of justice. See you.’

  Wexford watched him go, then got up himself. He seldom visited the botanical gardens these days but once he had been a frequent visitor. They had been designed and built to the specifications of a local philanthropist, who had died and left several of his millions to the town on condition they spent them on his dream gardens and called them after him, Samuel V. Broadbridge. A tropical house was to be included on the site, an absolute facsimile of the one on the campus of his alma mater, a fabulously wealthy Californian university, as well as an alpine garden, a miniature Red Rocks (in the Rockies) and a small Yosemite-like ravine.

  That was in the late seventies and before that the acres had been open fields. Wexford had been all prepared to despise the place but once it began to mature and the fine trees to grow, the magnolias, locusts, cottonwoods and live oaks, all of which liked the mild south-of-England climate, he had begun to appreciate it. It was different, but difference need not mean worse. He should walk in here more often, he thought. He should walk anywhere more often. But where else could he find himself transported to a square mile of the western United States while no more than a mile from his own home?

  After all, the open fields hadn’t been very attractive, nor had the farm buildings on them. If Samuel V. Broadbridge hadn’t stepped in with his dazzling millions, one of the several new housing estates would have been built on those fields. He watched a green woodpecker alight on the lawn which matched its feathers and begin pulling prey out of the grass. That was only one of the species of relatively rare birds which Sam V.B. (as he was known quite affectionately round here) had saved from expulsion if not destruction. Of course, there had been a worm in the bud and not the kind of worm the woodpecker would have appreciated. And Targo had been responsible for that too …

  What was it Burden had said? ‘There’s absolutely no motive. Finding a motive’s not necessary but you have to admit it helps. There’s no evidence.’

  All true and as true of what happened in Sam V.B.’s gardens twenty years later. His eyes went involuntarily towards the Red Rocks garden, though from here it was out of sight. It was time to go back. But he lingered, sat on a seat by the gate and gave himself to thinking about Kingsmarkham as it was now and had been then.

  No council estates – or social housing as you were supposed to call them. No flats with fitted kitchens and bathrooms but cottages with outside privies huddled together along damp lanes, the like of which you only saw these days as a background to peasant appearances in costume dramas on television. The streets where his own house was were meadows then and at the end of his road the little wood, which some law decreed must remain in spite of the developers, had been the haunt of nightingales. The nightingales were all gone now. The high street was longer now than then with new buildings alternating with the Georgian frontages. And the police station was the first of these new buildings, assessed when it first went up as the dernier cri of modernity.

  The Kingsbrook Precinct was yet to be built and Samuel V. Broadbridge was still at college in California. The open fields and woods were all the botanical gardens the citizens of Kingsmarkham needed. Apparently they didn’t need cars either. Or they hadn’t had them. Driving had been a pleasure, not a chore and a test of one’s self-control and staying power. But that was common to the county and the country, not just Kingsmarkham. Such a small place then. No car parks encircling the town for they hadn’t been needed. So was it better today? Were things better? The answer was always the same, some better, some worse. He got up and walked back to the police station, a building which had begun to look old and shabby, where the lifts went wrong and there wasn’t an automatic door in the place.

  He meant to leave early for home. A grandson was coming round to teach him how to use his CD Walkman. Do it for him more likely, Wexford thought, thinking too that he was certainly the only music lover his grandson had ever encountered whose CDs were all of Purcell and Handel.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A striking-looking woman with blue-green eyes, almost fanatically devoted to her job as a history teacher, Jenny Burden was a lot like Burden’s first wife in appearance if not in character. Wexford found this rather satisfying. He was a great believer in men and women having a ‘type’ they adhered to in changing partners. Jean, who had been married to Burden when he came to Kingsmarkham and who had lived with him at 36 Glebe Road, he had first met when their children were small. She had died young of cancer and her widower had been devastated, to use a cliché word which no one used in that sense then. Within a few years he had married this pretty young woman with golden-brown hair who, seen from a distance, might have been Jean’s twin; close to and when she spoke, the illusion was broken.

  Wexford was thinking of his own type: hour-glass figure, dark hair, invitingly pretty rather than beautiful, the kind of woman of which his wife was the quintessence, when two things happened within moments of each other. Firstly, Hannah Goldsmith came into his office. Then, a call announced the arrival of Jenny Burden for her appointment which he had forgotten all about. In the interim Hannah gave him a rundown on her activities with the small Muslim community in Kingsmarkham. As a detective sergeant, she had more or less appointed herself the ethnic minorities officer, something to which Wexford had no objection. She made a principle of being intensely anti-racist, political correctness personified, a role which sometimes tied her in knots.

  It was while she was telling him of her concerns at the possibility of forced marriages taking place locally when the call came. ‘I think I’ve a job for you coming up in the lift at this moment, Hannah.’

  Hannah turned round as Jenny came in. ‘We’ve met before.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’Jenny shook hands. ‘At some school function, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Jenny, I’m going to ask you to talk to Hannah about this problem of yours. She’ll be a lot better than I can be at dealing with it.’ If there is a problem, he thought, but he didn’t say it aloud. ‘Hannah knows all the Muslim families in Kingsmarkham. She’s also one of the few people I know who has actually read the Koran.’

  Wexford remembered all too well a period of time, some year before, when Hannah had electrified (and embarrassed) his morning round-up of tasks meetings by breaking any short silences there might be with quotations she thought appropriate from this holy book. Smiling with relief, doing his best not to show too much haste, he sent Hannah away with Jenny in tow, and settled down to the mountain of paperwork which was just one day’s accumulation.

  Hannah shared office space with DC Damon Coleman and DC Lynn Fancourt. Both were there at their computers. ‘Let’s go up to the canteen,’ she said, ‘and we can talk over a coffee. Or a cup of tea which is marginally better. School not back yet?’

  ‘We start on Thursday.’ Jenny had never before been in the police canteen, though she had heard her husband condemn the standard of its cooking, the service and its dismal appea
rance. ‘I hope,’ she said in the sort of meek tone she would never have used to a man, ‘you won’t think I’m wasting your time.’

  ‘Oh God, no,’ Hannah said, returning with two cups of coffee on a tray and two chocolate biscuits. ‘I don’t mind an excuse to come up here and have a break. I expect you eat biscuits, don’t you? You’re like me and don’t have to worry about your weight.’

  Jenny smiled. ‘I’ll go ahead then, shall I? A bit more has happened since I first talked to Reg – I mean Mr Wexford – about it. The girl’s called Tamima Rahman –’

  ‘I know the Rahmans,’ Hannah interrupted. ‘House in Glebe Road. They’ve done absolute wonders with that place. Extended it, had a new kitchen and added another bathroom. And Yasmin Rahman keeps it spotless. I just wish some of these people who condemn Muslims out of hand could see it.’

  ‘Yes, well, Tamima was in my class at school. She was expected to do very well in her GCSEs. And she did. Very well. She told me immediately she got her results, even before I saw them for myself. Then, about a week after that, I met her in the street. I had the impression she tried to avoid me. She saw me coming and turned to look into a shop window. But I spoke to her and of course she had to turn round. We talked about her results and I told her how well she had done, I was very pleased with her. Then I asked her if her parents had applied to sixth-form colleges – you know what they are?’

  ‘Sure. They’re really what used to be called the sixth form in schools only they’re a separate building. Kids go there from sixteen to eighteen, prior to doing their A levels. Right?’

  Like experts in any field, Jenny was unwilling to take anyone else’s estimate of that discipline without adding minor corrections. ‘Well, more or less. They take their AS levels at the end of the first year. I was hoping Tamima would decide to do history – that’s my subject – English and Spanish to AS and then go on to As. Of the sixth-form colleges available, I knew Carisbrooke was her favourite. But she said no, she wouldn’t be going back to school next week. I thought she’d misunderstood me. I said of course she wouldn’t be going back to our school, I meant had she applied to Carisbrooke because I thought she’d a very good chance of getting there with her exam results.

  ‘You know how they say people can give you a stony look? Well, that was exactly the way she looked at me – stonily. I meant I’d be leaving school for good, she said. Any sort of school. That’s a great pity, Tamima, I said. She looked down and muttered that she didn’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘You think this is her family’s doing? Her dad’s?’

  Just as she disliked children being called ‘kids’, so Jenny disapproved of the current trend to call parents ‘mums’ and ‘dads’, but she let it pass. ‘I’d heard her father was so progressive. He’s got a degree himself, hasn’t he? Why would he stop her going on to do A levels? It’s not going to cost him anything. There’s no reason to think he’s against education for women, is there?’

  Hannah almost gushed in her defence of Tamima’s father. ‘Oh, no, Mohammed Rahman is a lovely man. He’s a social worker with Myringham Social Services and – a coincidence, I suppose – he has a special responsibility for teenagers in the borough. Of course, her going to a sixth-form college will cost him more than if she leaves and gets a job. That way she’d bring money into the household but I can’t believe he’d let that weigh with him.’

  ‘She’s got a boyfriend,’ said Jenny, making a face at her coffee, ‘but he’s half Pakistani. Would Mr Rahman object to that?’

  ‘We don’t know that he does.’ As often happened, Hannah was now torn between militant feminism and anti-racism. But the Koran was not the only guide to Muslim ways she had read and she was never backward in showing off her knowledge. ‘He isn’t a relative, though, is he? The Rahmans may favour cousin marriage. He wouldn’t be the right man for her because his parents came from Karachi, say, or Islamabad. They might want a family member for her.’

  ‘Not at all a healthy thing,’ said Jenny briskly.

  Hannah was trapped again. ‘The marriage of first cousins sometimes seems to result in children with disabilities, though it’s a very controversial subject.’

  ‘It’s a well-known fact,’ Jenny said sharply.

  Hannah ignored this. ‘I can’t quite see how this can be a police matter. The school-leaving age is sixteen and she’s sixteen. No one’s breaking any laws. There’s nothing to show the Rahmans are arranging a marriage for her and while forced marriage is against the law, arranged marriage isn’t.’

  ‘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. P
eople 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.