Wexford 22 - The Monster In The Box (21 page)

   She took him into a living room and offered him coffee. 'I won't, thanks. Things are a bit rushed at present.' He remembered the child in the pushchair. 'How's Philippi?'

   'Just qualified as a doctor. Working all hours but you have to, don't you, your first year or two?'

   'You must be proud of her.'

   'No doubt of that. I'm a very lucky woman, Mr Wexford. All my children have done well for themselves. I've got my health and strength and I've had two good husbands after starting off with a rotter. I can't complain and I don't.'

   She invited him to sit down. Photographs of her children were on the mantelpiece, tables, the top of an upright piano, and alone, on what looked like an old-fashioned music console, one of her as a bride for the second time. He wondered how he would have felt if Dora had been married before and kept a photograph of her earlier wedding in the living room. He would have hated it but then he and Dora had been young and in love, not like this couple marrying for companionship in impending old age.

   'You're no longer Mrs Varney,' he said, 'so what do I call you?'

   'I'm Mrs Jones now but you call me Kathleen.'

   'Your first husband is missing.'

   That made her laugh. 'A good miss, I should think. If he's disappeared you can bet your life it's on purpose.'

   'I don't suppose you know where he is.'

   'You don't suppose right. I don't know where he is. He'd go to any one of his women before he'd come to me. Left Mavis, has he? They weren't getting on, I know that. Joanne tells me. Alan won't have a word said against his dad, God knows why not, but you've got to hand it to him.'

   Strange and interesting, Wexford thought, how grown-up children can be devoted to a bad parent – more devoted often than to a good one. Because they still hoped to please them, even so late in the day, and thus at last win their love? 'He's left his wife only in the sense that he's gone away somewhere. Do you have a name and address for the woman he was living with in Birmingham?'

   'Tracy something. Wait a minute. Tracy Cole. After I threw him out, he was with his mum in Glebe Road for a bit and then he went to her. I've got the address she was living at then. Well, I've got it somewhere. I'm one of those people who never throw anything away so I reckon I can find it.'

   'I think I will have that coffee,' said Wexford, 'if it's not too much trouble.'

   'No trouble at all.'

   Did this propensity of hers extend to never forgetting anything? Perhaps. People who hoard, people who save every useless scrap and fragment, the anal ones, as psychologists call them, usually have good memories, he had noticed. He would ask her. Those hard times – hard in more ways than one – in Jewel Road, Stowerton, might not be lost in the mists of time. In his mind's eye, as in a dream, he saw Targo sitting by the appliance everyone in those days called 'an electric fire', the little boy Alan, who was loyal to him still, going up to him, kissing him goodnight and then stroking the spaniel's silky head . . .

   She came back with coffee and two cups on a tray. Also on the tray was a yellowing sheet of paper on which, long ago, someone had printed an address. 'He wouldn't write me a proper letter. Wouldn't even buy a stamp and stamps weren't the price then they are now. He put this bit of paper through my front door without even an envelope to show me where he was living. He knew I'd see the address was in the best part of Birmingham. That Tracy Cole was loaded. Her dad had died and left her the house and wads of money. Her and him, Eric, I mean, it was one of those cases of a couple who never really get away from each other, one or other of them will always go back.'

   If she still lived there, Wexford thought, if she did after so long, could Targo have taken refuge with her?

   'Kathleen,' he said, feeling a little awkward as everyone does when using a given name for the first time, 'do you remember the evening I came to talk to Mr Targo when you were living in Jewel Road? It was in connection with the murder of Mrs Elsie Carroll. Do you remember that?'

   'Of course I do. I remembered you, didn't I? And that was the only time we met till we ran into each other in the precinct, apart from me being rude to you on the doorstep.'

   He laughed. 'You weren't rude, just a bit sharp,' he said. 'This is very good coffee. Do you also remember that I asked your husband where he was on the night Mrs Carroll was killed and he said he was babysitting Alan?'

   'I'd been giving Alan his bath,' she said, and incredibly to Wexford, so excellent was her memory, 'and I wasn't there when you asked that. I came in and heard him say that bit about me being at my dressmaking class. I didn't say anything when he said he'd been here all the time doing press-ups and all that rubbish. I didn't because I was scared of him. You could tell that, couldn't you?'

   'I was very young, Kathleen. I didn't know about domestic violence. Well, no one did much then. It was talked about as a private thing in a marriage, not to be interfered with by outsiders.'

   'That suited men all right, didn't it? Eric didn't knock me about much in those days but I didn't want him hitting me at all when I was so near my time. I mean, I didn't want to fall over. What I'm trying to say is that night you were asking about, I came back early from my class because the teacher was taken ill. Oh, I remember all this even though it was so long ago. When I came back Eric wasn't there, he'd left Alan alone. Only for ten minutes maybe but he had left him and it was that made me think I'm not putting up with this, him leaving his kid alone at night, him hitting me if I step out of line and making more fuss about that dog than he ever would about the baby I was expecting.'

   His belief needed no confirmation but she had made assurance doubly sure.

   'I did put up with it a bit longer,' she said. 'Joanne was born two weeks later. You stayed in hospital a lot longer then that they do now but he came to see me just the once. Once in ten days when I'd just had his child. He wasn't at home looking after Alan. He was at home looking after the dog while Alan stopped with my mum. I did put up with it for nearly two years more. Alan was six and Joanne was getting on for two. He hit me then, a punch in the breast. They thought punching a woman's breast brought on cancer – it doesn't, they know that now, but I believed it then and I said to him, that's it, what you've done is going to kill me anyway but this is the end. Next day me and the neighbours threw him out and he went to his mum and to Tracy who was another mum to him.'

Wexford's next call was to an old people's home. It might still have been called that but political correctness had renamed it the Seniors' Sanctuary. He had been directed there by the woman who had lived next door to Eileen Kenyon on the Muriel Camden Estate.

   'Alzheimer's is what it is,' she said to Wexford on her doorstep. 'She's only in her sixties but that's what it is. You won't get any sense out of her. I know, I've tried, and you'll just be wasting your time.'

   He didn't get anything out of her and he was wasting his time. It wasn't the first time he had visited such a place and this one depressed him anew. The decor, the smell, the half-circle of chairs in front of the television set in which sat the elderly inmates, all dressed in a jumble of ill-fitting bizarrely coloured clothes, not one of which looked as if it had originally been bought for its wearer. But perhaps the worst thing was the programme which was showing on the screen, a display of acrobatic dancing by beautiful teenagers in tight-fitting sequined costumes, their lustrous hair flowing, their skin like a new-picked peach.

   Like half the spectators, Eileen Kenyon was in a wheelchair, sitting in that characteristic pose of the sick elderly, her shoulders slumped, her back rounded almost to a hump and her head lolling to one side. Like most of them, she seemed to be staring at something, but not the screen. The sequined young people cavorted and performed impossible leaps and gyrations while the old sat, twisted and sunken, not watching them.
Golden lads and girls all must
, thought Wexford,
as chimney sweepers come to dust
. A career whispered to him that he would get nothing out of Eileen Kenyon. She no longer knew who she was or where she was. And when the career moved her wheelchair away from the semicircle of viewers over to the window where he was, he realised she was right. Eileen Kenyon was now only dimly recognizable as the woman she had been. It was as if a hand, dipped in some viscous grayish matter, had passed over her head, whitening and thinning her hair, dimming her eyes and slurring her features.

   'Do you remember me, Mrs Kenyon?'

   No response at all. The eyes which had gazed at the wall some ten feet away from the television, now stared at the floor.

   Inspiration led him to ask, 'Do you remember your dog, the dog you got from Mr Targo?'

   One of her eyelids flickered. He tried to remember the dog's name. It was maddening that he remembered the names of Targo's own dogs, Buster, Princess, Brave heart, but not the one Eileen Kenyon had had when Billy was killed. But then it was true that he had almost total recall of the things Targo had said to him.

   'Dust's puppy,' he said. 'Do you remember Dust's puppy? Dusty was Mr Targo's.'

   She lifted her head a little. The eyes opened. 'Snake,' she said quite clearly, and mumbling, 'Snake he had. Scary snake, don't like snake.' Then, 'He asked . . .'

   'What did he ask?'

   But there was to be no more. He had been given nothing to make him think Eileen Kenyon would have finished her sentence with the words 'if she wanted Billy killed.' Asking her if she knew where Targo might be now seemed ludicrous. He thanked the career and made his way out along a gloomy corridor to the stained-glass double doors which were the entrance to this place. There must be more places in Kingsmarkham he might have gone to. Something Kathleen Jones had said had briefly alerted him. But what was it?

   Of course she had told him, not what he came for, but what was almost more important, that Targo hadn't stayed in babysitting that evening so long ago. What else was it? Philippi becoming a doctor? No. Tracy Cole? Yes, definitely, but that could wait. Glebe Road, he thought, she had mentioned Glebe Road. That was where the Rahmans lived. Nothing had happened to make him think it possible except the knowledge that Targo had visited Ahmed several times in the past. So suppose he had called at the Rahmans after he had killed Andy Norton?

He took Hannah with him. They knew her and, if she was to be believed, they hadn't resented her suspiciousness. Hannah was honest and quite openly confessed that Mohammed Rahman had firmly but amiably put her down. He was, she told Wexford, a master of the smiling snub. Wexford expected Mohammed to be at work but Yasmin told him that her husband was ill in bed with flu. He had come down with a virus a couple of days before.

   Ahmed was upstairs, taking his father a hot drink, but he came down after a few minutes. On the previous occasion that he had seen him, when he and his brother had just come back from the mosque, he had been struck by Ahmed's good looks and air of health, perhaps too of contentment. All that had changed. Both sons had pale skin while Tamima's was a dark gold, but today Ahmed was white with a sickly pallor. Under his eyes were dark shadows and there was a day's growth of beard on his chin. This of course was becoming a fashionable way for a young man to look but Ahmed's seemed the result of indifference to his appearance, as if something more important than trends and style brought about that careworn look. Probably he had picked up the virus that had laid his father low.

   'Yes, Mr Targo came here in the afternoon,' he said in answer to Wexford's inquiry.

   'You were expecting him?'

   'No, we weren't. When the doorbell rang I thought it was the doctor for Dad.' Ahmed hesitated, then said, 'I was surprised to see Mr Targo. He wanted to order some software.'

   Aware that this left Wexford in the dark, Hannah said, 'He didn't do that himself ? He asked you to do it for him?'

   'Oh, yes.'

   Ahmed looked at his mother. She was sitting very stiffly in a straight-backed chair, no jeweler but for her rings to be seen this morning, her head covered in Wexford's presence. Her expression was rather stern, her hands clasped together, but she got up at Ahmed's glance and said she would make coffee.

   'What kind of software?' Hannah asked.

   'Some floppy disks and a home manager CD.'

   'What exactly is that?'

   'A home manager CD?' Ahmed suddenly seemed on surer ground. 'Put simply, you plug it into your PC and you can control your lights and electrical appliances by sending a signal from your PC to the switch modules. It goes via the electrical circuit of your home. It turns on the radio if that's what you want. It even sticks the kettle on.'

   'And that's what Mr Targo wanted?'

   'So he said. He'd read about it somewhere.'

   'You could get it for him?' Wexford asked.

   'Oh, yes,' Ahmed said confidently. 'The point is I know where to get it and how to order it, that sort of thing. You can buy the floppies anywhere but he always likes me to do that stuff.'

   Yasmin came back with the coffee. When she had handed the cups to them, Wexford noticed her eyes go to the polished granite mantelpiece. She looked at it as if she detected something not quite right about it and then she looked sharply away. As she sat down again, picked up the sugar basin to pass to them, her hands were shaking. Not strongly but the merest tremor which she conquered by stiffening the fingers and holding them out straight.

   'Do you know where Mr Targo went when he left here?'

   'Home, I suppose. I didn't ask him.'

   'Were you surprised,' Wexford asked, 'that he didn't have a dog with him?'

   'I wouldn't allow a dog in my house,' Yasmin said.

   How would Targo have reacted to that? Her remark caused a silence. Hannah broke it. 'Is Tamima still working at the Raja Emporium?'

   The sternness of Jasmine's expression concentrated itself on two deeply cut parallel lines between her dark eyes. 'My daughter has gone away to stay with her auntie. We have told you she was going many times before. Now she has gone. My son Oman had the day off work and drove her there.'