Wexford 22 - The Monster In The Box (30 page)

   'You can forget that stuff about the home management device and forget too about Targo driving off but coming back before six thirty. Inspector Burden is questioning your mother next door and I don't think your mother will lie, will she?'

   'No, she won't lie,' said Ahmed.

   'So tell me.'

   'I shall have to, I suppose. Will I go to prison?'

   'Probably. That depends on what you did.'

   'I killed him,' said Ahmed, 'but I didn't mean to. It was an accident.'

   Hannah said, 'Begin with what he said when he made the offer to kill Tamima.'

   Ahmed nodded. He pushed away his half-empty teacup. 'My mother was there. She was sewing something. I think Targo wanted me to send her away but I couldn't do that in her own home. Then he sort of shrugged as if he was saying, "OK then, if that's what you want. Let her stay." After that he asked about this office-manager thing and I showed him some pictures in a brochure I had. "Get one for me, will you?" he said and I said I'd send off for it and it'd be about ten days. Well, what I said was, five to ten working days. Then he said, quite pleasantly, in the same sort of voice, "Your sister's going about with a white man, isn't she?"

   'I was so surprised I just stared. My mother laid down her sewing but she didn't say anything, not then. Targo said, "You people don't like that kind of thing, do you? It's bad for your family honor or whatever." Those were his words, "honor or whatever". My mother spoke then. She said, "We can't discuss that with you." He took no notice. He said, "You'll want her out of the way, won't you? Dead and gone and no questions asked. I'll see to that and it won't cost you a penny."'

   'What did you say to that?' Wexford asked.

   'I said I thought he should go. My mother got up. She was wearing the hijab, of course, and a shawl round her shoulders. But when she looked at him she pulled the shawl over her head as well and held it in front of her face. I think she wanted to hide herself from him, he was such a monster.'

   Yes, thought Wexford, that is what he was, a monster. A chimera, an abomination. 'Go on,' he said.

   'He didn't go. He laughed. He said, "I know that's what you want. I've seen them kissing – that's not the way a good little Muslim girl behaves, is it? You won't want her in your home again and you need not. Just leave things to me. I'll find her wherever she is."

   'I hit him then. He was an old man and shorter than me and I know I shouldn't have done that but I was so angry. I saw red, I really did, red in front of my eyes. I hit him on the jaw and he fell backwards.' Ahmed was speaking now at great speed. 'He fell backwards and crashed against the fireplace and hit the back of his head on that marble shelf, the what-d'you-call-it.'

   'The mantelpiece,' said Wexford.

   In Interview Room 1 Yasmin Rahman had reached much the same point in her account. She was heavily veiled, much as she had been when Ahmed described her, the shawl on top of the hijab pulled down to form a peak over her forehead. Her strong handsome face, with the long straight nose and dark liquid eyes, was almost hidden but for the mouth.

   'My son Ahmed hit him. He asked for it – isn't that what you say in this country? He asked for it. That man – Targo – he fell down and there was blood coming from his head. I thought he was dead – how would I know? I went to the kitchen to get water and something to wipe away the blood and when I came back Ahmed was feeling his heart and listening to his heart and he said he was dead.'

   'While this was going on,' Burden said, 'where were your husband and your other son?'

   'Oman was at work. My husband was upstairs in bed. He was ill with flu. He heard that man fall and he called out to me to ask what the sound was. I went up and told him it was something out in the street. It was ten minutes to four and Ahmed said we must hide the man's body while we thought what to do next. We had to put it somewhere Oman wouldn't see it. We carried it through into the place next door.'

   She was very cool and calm. Burden thought this was probably the way she had been when Ahmed hit Targo and later found he had killed him. He had noticed her extraordinary dignity before, the way she could sit still for long periods without fidgeting, without even moving her eyes. 'So what did you do next?' he asked.

   'Took the car away,' she said calmly. 'We waited till the night-time. Took it a long way to where my cousin Mr Manor who is the postmaster lives. It is a place called Melstead. Mr Manor knows nothing. He wasn't even there, he was at his home in Taxed.'

   In the next room Wexford was saying, 'If he wasn't dead when he fell on the floor why didn't you call an ambulance? You say it was an accident, it wasn't your fault.'

   'I don't know if he was dead then but he soon was. I knew that because the blood stopped flowing. That means a person is dead, doesn't it?' Ahmed didn't wait for an answer. 'I thought no one would believe me if I said it was an accident.'

   Wexford said dryly, 'We sometimes believe what people tell us. It's more difficult to believe when those same people try to cover up an offence by concealing a body and going to considerable lengths to deceive as you did. I refer to the little games you played with Mr Targo's car. What did you do? Drive it up to the place in Essex where some cousin of yours lives to make it look as if Mr Targo had left the country through Stinted airport?'

   'I'll tell you what we did. As soon as we knew he was dead we took the body next door into the shop. There's a door in our living room that leads into the room where we hid him. We had it put in when we had the conversion done. Then we waited till it got late and there was no one about. I drove Targo's Mercedes and my mother followed, driving our car. It was a piece of luck that my father was ill with an infectious illness, so my mother was sleeping in Tamima's room and my father didn't notice she wasn't there.'

   'Why not go to Gatwick?'

   'It was too near,' Ahmed said. 'The car would have been found next day.'

   'Who worked on the cupboard in the shop next door? You, I suppose.'

   'I wrapped the body up, made a sort of parcel of it and put it in the back of the cupboard. Then I sort of boarded it up. I used some sheets of hardboard, screwed them in place and painted over the lot.'

   Wexford sat back in his chair, silent. It was Hannah who said, 'Where is your sister, Ahmed?'

   'I don't know. I only wish I knew. He didn't kill her, I know that. At least I prevented that.'

   Unless he did it before he spoke to you, Wexford thought. 'It was you who phoned Mrs Targo with a message allegedly coming from her husband?' The strangely familiar voice, he thought. The voice of someone who had worked in the house as Ahmed had when he set up the computer.

   'Oh, yes,' Ahmed said wearily. 'That was me.'

   Later that night Yasmin Rahman was released on police bail but her son remained in one of the station's two cells for further questioning in the morning.

Manslaughter would be the charge, or perhaps unlawful killing, consistent with Dr Meridian's findings when he examined Targo's body. Death had resulted from that single deep wound to the skull which corresponded to the sharp corner of the granite mantelpiece at 34 Glebe Road. There was also bruising to the left-hand side of Targo's jaw – incidentally in the centre of where the naevus had been – where right-handed Ahmed Rahman had struck him. Yasmin Rahman would be charged only with assisting an offender in a death and would probably, Wexford thought, receive a suspended sentence. He hoped Ahmed would serve no more than two or three years in prison and if it were less he wouldn't be sorry. The man had rid the world of a monster who, though old, had been strong, and might have lived another twenty years of natural life. This, of course, was no way for a detective chief inspector to think.

   He himself took to Mavis Targo the details of her husband's death and as much of an explanation as he thought good for her to hear. Sentimentality would have it that Ming the Tibetan spaniel should die of grief but it seemed to have got over missing its master and when Wexford called was helping Sweetheart eat the Chinese carpet. Mavis may have been equally indifferent to Targo's passing. At any rate, she showed no emotion but spoke only of her worries as to how to dispose of the menagerie. Although Targo had left most of his properties and his stock to his children, the house was hers and as soon as she could she intended to sell it and buy a flat in central London.

   'You asked me if my marriage was happy,' she said to Wexford, 'and of course I wasn't going to say it wasn't, was I? The fact is we were going to split up. What I say is, thank God we never got around to it. Once we'd done that he'd have changed his will.'

   'What I can't understand,' Burden said later, 'is how he got all those women to marry him. Ugly little chap with that birthmark before he had it taken off, it's beyond comprehension.'

   'Anthony Powell,' said Wexford, the reader, 'says somewhere that while women are rather choosy about whom they sleep with, they will marry anyone. Women are said to like power in a man and Targo exuded that.'

   They were on their way to pay a first visit to Rectangle Road, Stowerton, and the Hanif family. It was four thirty in the afternoon and Rashid was due home from Carisbrooke Sixth Form College and his formidable A-level programme of moths, biology and physics. After they had listened for about fifteen minutes to Fata Hanif 's highly laudatory curriculum vitae of her eldest son while she spooned puréed apple into the mouth of her youngest, Rashid hobbled in on a single crutch, his leg in plaster up to the knee.

   Before either of them could say a word, he had plunged into a defence of himself, his mother backing him up as soon as he drew breath.

   'I haven't seen her for weeks, not for months. I don't know where she is so it's no good asking me.'

   'Of course he hasn't. My son's a good boy. He's obedient, he respects his parents.'

   'All right,' Wexford said. 'Wait a minute. Tamima is missing. Her parents have no idea where she is. None of her relatives have any idea where she may be. Now, I must tell you that we have witnesses who have seen you about with her, at one time if not recently. They may not be reliable, I don't know. Certainly, Tamima has been seen about with a white man or boy and you are white, Rashid.'

  Mrs Hanif set down the apple-purée spoon, wiped the child's face and said, almost spitting the words, 'The police are institutionally racist, that's a well-known fact.'

   'And you,' said Burden, 'are a British citizen, a white woman from a family in the former Yugoslavia. Where's the racism?'

   'My husband's Asian.'

   'Maybe. But Rashid is pale-skinned and blue-eyed,' said Wexford. 'If witnesses say they've seen Tamima with a white boy the chances are it's Rashid but he says no and for the present we must take his word for it. You would like Tamima to be found, wouldn't you, Rashid?'

   'He doesn't care!' Mrs Hanif shouted.

   Equally loudly, Rashid forgot respect and said, 'Oh, do shut up, Mum!'

   The baby began to cry, drumming his heels on the footrest of the high chair. 'See what you've done.' But Mrs Hanif spoke in a low petulant tone, subdued by Rashid's unaccustomed defiance.

   'Tamima has to be found,' Wexford said. 'I think you'd like to help us, Rashid, I want you to come down to the station and make a statement.'

   Rashid's mouth fell open. 'What about?'

   'The last time you saw Tamima, what she said to you, any phone calls you've had from her, that sort of thing. You can come with us now. No need for you to walk anywhere.'

Wexford considered asking Mohammed and Yasmin Rahman to go on television and appeal to the public to find their lost daughter – considered and rejected it. Clever gentle Mohammed might make a good impression but his wife would not. Viewers would tend to be set against her by her stern features, steady eyes and rigidity of expression. She reminded him of a bust he had once seen in Greece of Athena and he thought that the helmet the goddess had been wearing would have become her. Besides, she was associated with her son in the unlawful killing of Targo. Better to send out photographs of Tamima, which the Rahmans were happy to provide. She was a good-looking girl if rather too like her mother ever to be called pretty, yet with her dark skin and black eyes and the hijab she often if not invariably wore, a big percentage of the public would fail to distinguish her from any other Asian girl.

   Rashid said in his statement that he and Tamima had once been good friends but 'nothing more'. The last time he saw her had been a month ago when he talked to her in her uncle's shop, the Raja Emporium. That had been just before she went to London to stay with her aunt, Mrs Qasi.

   The newspaper photographs had no effect or none of the kind Wexford wanted. A great many people claimed to have seen Tamima but in every case it was a different Asian girl they had seen. He began to wonder again if it was possible Targo had murdered Tamima before he made his offer to Ahmed and he recalled what Oman had said. 'You think he killed her just the same?' It was possible and in a strange way it would have been just like Targo. Suppose he had found Tamima, had strangled her – what had he done with her body? – and then gone to Ahmed to ask if he wanted his sister killed. If the answer had been yes, he would have said the deed was already done. Wexford could almost hear him saying, 'It's all done. I don't want payment. Glad to be of service.'

   It made him shiver because it seemed possible. Then he thought of the menagerie, the carnivorous animals, and began to feel sick. No, he was imagining too much . . . When he was younger he had never felt like this. He had been tougher. Banish ugly and dreadful images, he thought, put them in a box and send the box to the deep recesses of his psyche – but this faculty seemed to be deserting him now.

   He went to London to see Jacqueline Clarke and Clare Cooper and learnt more from them than Hannah had. It seemed that though Tamima had come to their flat intending to get a job and stay there for some weeks, even until Christmas, she had in fact left after a week, saying she was going home to Kingsmarkham.