Wexford 22 - The Monster In The Box (16 page)

   What was to be done? He could hardly send a PC to keep an eye on the street outside his house. In the eyes of everyone but himself, Targo had done no wrong. Perhaps he should start again on proving that the man was not the innocent he looked to be. It was Friday afternoon, a mild day in October. The trees were turning brown and their leaves had begun to fall. The sunshine was rather thin and the pale blue sky streaked with strings of cloud.

   The walk to Glebe Road constituted half his daily exercise but he was held up – almost swept up – by the crowd of Muslim men returning home or to their work from Stowerton mosque. They seemed remarkably happy, laughing and joking with each other, though not rowdily, and he thought how different a group of home-going church attendees would have been. Be careful not to be an inverted racist, he told himself, you're just as much a racist as Hannah if you favour immigrants over indigenous people. Letting the crowd go ahead of him, he fell in behind them. Most lived in this neighborhood but by the time he was halfway up Glebe Road only two young men remained and an older man. Outside Webb and Cobb the older man paused to look between the boards which covered what had been a shop window and, apparently satisfied, passed on. They all turned into number 34. Mohammed Rahman and his sons, they must be, Tamima's father and brothers. He waited until they were inside before ringing the bell.

   The door was opened by the son with the beard, the older one, Hannah had told him.

   'Chief Inspector Wexford, Kingsmarkham Crime Management.' Wexford produced his warrant card. He had nearly said 'Kingsmarkham CID', for old habits died hard and to him the new title sounded like a mafioso managing a bunch of gangsters.

   'You want my dad? He's inside with my brother. I'm off to work.'

   Wexford walked in and was met in the narrow passage by a man of about fifty with black hair but a grey beard. He seemed to recognise Wexford, though Wexford had no recollection of ever having seen him before.

   'Mohammed Rahman,' he said, held out his hand, and indicating the young man behind him, 'This is my son Ahmed.'

   If the father seemed calm but wary, the son looked rather tense. He was a handsome man of perhaps twenty-five, pale-skinned with coal-black eyes and black hair. He had the face of a young Mogul emperor. They were absurdly crowded together in that narrow space, three tall men so close to each other that father and son had to shrink back to avoid touching Wexford while Wexford pressed himself against the wall.

   'Come into the lounge,' said Mohammed Rahman.

   A ridiculous word for a living room at any time, owing its provenance, Wexford thought, to early-twentieth-century Hollywood and luxury liners. Here it was less absurd than it might have been, for the room was unexpectedly spacious with ample light coming in through the conservatory. A large fireplace of stone blocks with a mantelpiece of polished granite held on its grate a bowl of dried flowers. Kali rugs covered the floor and the conservatory was full of plants, a pale blue lumbago, a rose-pink oleander, which, had they been outside, would by now have been killed by frost. Apart from the rugs, not a single object was what Wexford would have called 'oriental'. He was rather ashamed to confess to himself that he had expected the decor of an Indian restaurant.

   He was shown to a black leather armchair. The two Rahmans waited expectantly, the father managing a smile, the son still ill at ease. 'Do you know a man called Eric Targo?' he asked them.

   The tension slackened. It was interesting to watch this lightening in each of them. Had they expected him to talk about Tamima? Ahmed spoke for the first time. 'He's a client,' he said.

   'Your client? You're a computer consultant, aren't you?'

   The young man nodded. 'I work from home. I have an office upstairs.'

   'You look after Mr Targo's computer? Service it? Mend it if it goes wrong?' He was aware he was using the wrong terminology.

   Evidently Ahmed was also aware of it for he smiled. 'Mr Targo has three PCs. If he has a problem I talk him through it or I call at his house.'

   'He has sometimes brought a computer here, Ahmed,' his father reminded him.

   'That's right. So he did. His Toshiba, his laptop, that was. Look, let me explain. Some of my clients – well, they're not exactly computer-illiterate, I wouldn't say that. But they get a bit nervous. They don't quite understand that when something's wrong I can put it right if we're – well, both of us get online. That's when I can talk him through what's bothering him.' He looked searchingly into Wexford's face, in case the Chief Inspector failed to follow him. 'Anyway, that's how it is but a lot of clients think I have to have the PC here to look at. And that's when he brings the Toshiba in for me to deal with it.'

   'I see.'

   What Wexford really meant was that he didn't see – it amounted to mending a machine without touching it or even seeing it – but he accepted it and was satisfied. He hardly knew what he had suspected, for, whatever Targo's murderous propensities, he must have constant contact in business and his personal life with people whom he knew in honesty and innocence.

   The trees in Glebe Road had begun to shed their leaves. Wexford started the walk back to the police station, recalling how when he was a child he always made a point of treading on a fallen leaf, enjoying the crunching sensation underneath his feet. He tried it now, crushing a dried crinkled plane leaf, and was pleased to find it gave him much the same feeling. But back to the Rahmans. There was nothing sinister about the Targo–Rahman connection, he thought. Nevertheless, the fact remained that Targo had resumed his stalking of him or, rather, begun stalking his wife. It came to him then that, in accordance with the old marriage service, a married couple used to be called 'one flesh' and, thinking of that, he felt a pang, as if what seemed a threatened hurt were being done to himself. The first thing he did when he was in his office was to send for DC Damon Coleman and, wondering if he might be doing something indefensible, considering that in everyone's eyes but his own Targo was an innocent man, set him to keep his own house under surveillance. The stalker stalked, he thought.

   Some years before, when his daughter Sylvia had been taking a course in psychotherapeutic counseling, she had taught him about the 'box' as a means of dealing with anxieties.

   'If you've a problem weighing on your mind, Dad, you have to visualize a box – maybe quite small, the size of a matchbox. You open it and put your worry inside – now don't start laughing. It works. Close the box with the worry inside and put it away somewhere, inside a drawer, say.'

   'Why not throw it in the sea?'

   'That's a bit final. You may want to take it out again one day.'

   'And this is going to take all problems away?'

   'I don't say that, Dad, but it might help. If you find yourself thinking of the worry you also think it's locked away in the box so you can't touch it.'

   He had scoffed. But still he tried it. Several times since then he had put Targo in a box and sometimes it had worked well. He tried it again now, carefully placing Targo and the white van and a bunch of dogs and his own fear into the box and hiding it in a drawer of the desk in his office. And the white van failed to reappear. No silver Mercedes was parked in Wexford's street and no man with cropped white hair walking a Tibetan spaniel had been seen. It had, of course, no longer been possible to tell Damon Coleman of the distinguishing mark, the naevus on the neck. That was gone.

   Damon had seen Dora Wexford leave the house twice on foot and twice in her car but he was sure she hadn't seen him. Damon was an expert in the role of the invisible watcher. A woman he recognised as Wexford's daughter Sylvia came once and stayed about an hour. Jenny Burden called with her son. Apart from these, the only caller he had seen was a man in his sixties who arrived on Thursday at three in the afternoon in an ancient Morris Minor. Damon finished his surveillance at five by which time the visitor had not come out.

   This wasn't quite what Wexford had wanted. His wife and her callers were not to be watched but, rather, whoever might be watching her. Damon's report reminded him of the kind of thing a private detective might produce for a husband who believed himself deceived. That made Wexford smile. The idea of Dora's infidelity was absurd, even the mildest disloyalty out of the question.

   But his fear was in the box and the box was shut up inside the top left-hand drawer of his desk. As often, when he used the box – the invisible container created by his own mind – the apprehensiveness or anxiety locked inside it had faded away. Just as the box had no real existence so it seemed that the fear had none either.

Rashid Hanif had just come out of the gates of his sixth-form college on the Kingsmarkham bypass when Hannah spoke to him. If she had simply walked up to him he might not have been so obviously taken aback, but he had seen her car draw up and park ahead of him and this very good-looking young woman he recognised from the Raja Emporium step out of it, flourishing a warrant card. He was good-looking himself, a tall handsome boy with pale skin, brown hair and grey-blue eyes.

   Hannah could tell he was frightened and she wondered why. After all, he might be only seventeen but he was a man and most men – at any rate the innocent ones – were happy to speak to her. 'I'd like to ask you about Tamima,' she said. 'We could talk in my car. I could give you a lift home.'

   Making that offer was a mistake. 'Oh, no. No, thanks. I don't need a lift home. I can walk.'

   'I know you can walk,' Hannah said. 'I don't have to take you to your house, just to the corner of the street. Come on. Those books you're carrying must be heavy.'

   He allowed her to shepherd him into the passenger seat of the car. Hannah had no intention of driving off immediately. She sat in the driving seat and turned to face him. 'I've seen you talking to Tamima in the Raja Emporium, Rashid. I've seen you quite a few times. She's your girlfriend, isn't she?'

   He shook his head, said in a low voice, 'I wish.'

   'But she's not? Why is that? Because your parents are against it or hers are?'

   There was a long pause during which his fingers tightened on the handle of the heavy bag. 'Both,' he said, and then, 'Look, I mustn't talk to you about that. I'll get into trouble. My dad's told me not to see her again. But I'm not to talk about it, OK?'

   Hannah started the car, said nothing for a moment or two and then, when they were in Hartwell Lane heading for the Hart Estate, said, 'You can only see her in the shop, is that right?'

   'I'm not to talk about it.' He immediately did so. 'They took her to Pakistan to keep her away from me but she missed me and she wanted to come back. Now they'll send her to her auntie in London.'

   'Did she tell you this?'

   'She didn't tell me but it's what I think. I told you, I'm not supposed to talk about it. Can I get out now? I can walk from here.'

   'I'm sure you can,' said Hannah. 'If you'll tell me her auntie's name and where she lives I'll drive to the end of Hartwell Lane and drop you off.'

   The boy shifted in his seat. Now he was clutching the bag of books. 'It's Kingsbury. But she's not gone yet. Maybe she won't go, I don't know.'

   'And the name, Rashid?'

   The house where his family lived was in sight. Hannah pulled over, leaving the engine running. 'The auntie's name, Rashid?'

   The two words came out in a choked rush, 'Mrs Asia,' and he flung open the car door and ran.

   Hannah knew she must bide her time. It was true that Tamima might not go to London. If, for instance, she agreed to give Rashid up she might remain here. But that was unlikely. The Rahman parents wouldn't trust her to keep any promise she might make, especially if she were working in that shop where anyone might come in and have access to her. Besides, their aim was not only to divide her from Rashid but to marry her to someone else.

   'It would be hard to force marriage on a girl here. In a place like this where everyone knows everyone else,' she said to Wexford.

   'Used to,' said Wexford, thinking of the village town of his youth.

   'Still does,' Hannah persisted. 'Especially if you're an immigrant. People are always on the watch for them to do something
un-English
, something bizarre or something
they
wouldn't do. Think of the drama there'd be if Tamima ran away on the steps of the mosque or the register office or wherever. In London she couldn't do that, she wouldn't know where she was or where to go. Think about it, guv.'

   'Hannah,' he said, 'what I'm thinking about is the drama you're making out of a young girl's visit to London. To go shopping, no doubt. Maybe see a film or a show.' Smiling at Hannah's mutinous expression, 'She hasn't gone yet. But I've met those Rahmans and they impressed me as intelligent enlightened people, the last to force ancient traditions on a beloved daughter. I'll be very surprised if Tamima doesn't go away for a couple of weeks, have a good time and come back to take a better sort of job somewhere.'

   On the way home he wondered if he had been rather rash in saying that. Was Hannah's theory so far-fetched? Perhaps what provoked his pacifying rejoinder was her vehement determination to prove that a forced marriage was intended without any evidence for it. But that was not so different from his certainty that Targo was at least twice a murderer. He had no evidence either. Yet he constantly said to himself that he knew it for a fact. Hannah, too, probably was even now telling herself the same: that, though she had no evidence, she was still convinced that the Rahmans were planning Tamima's marriage to some old man she had never seen before. If Hannah's theory was a fantasy, wasn't his just as likely to be one too?

   For once, very few cars were parked along his street. No white van or silver Mercedes was numbered among them. Of the few that were there, not one had a dog sitting on the passenger seat, the driver's window a few inches open to give it air. He let himself into his house, called out, 'It's me,' as if others existed who had keys.