Wexford 22 - The Monster In The Box by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online

pretty certain that he would be found guilty and condemned to life imprisonment – if no longer to death. That made him shiver a bit. Was it cowardice then that stopped him speaking to Ventura or even Fulford? There was a difference between courage and foolhardiness. If he had had some evidence, a shred of evidence . . . But he had not. Forget it, he thought again. Put it behind you.
       It hadn't occurred to him then that Carroll might appeal and on appeal be freed – not on the evidence or lack of it but due to the judge's misdirection of the jury. But that was a long way in the future, after many life-changing things had happened to him. In the present was St Joan to which he went alone. Even if he had wanted to take a girl he didn't really know any girls but Alison. He hadn't developed any critical faculty then and couldn't tell if the production was good or not, though he had thought that the Maid's (assumed) accent was a bit over the top and the Dauphin a bit too foolish and effeminate. At the interval he went out to buy himself a beer and when he came back, making for his seat at the rear of the stalls, he looked across the rows ahead and there, just taking their seats next to an older woman, were two girls, one fairish and plump, the other dark with fine brown eyes and a perfect figure in her red dress. And he thought, she is the woman for me, that's my type. I didn't know that till now but she is setting my type for me.
     
    The room Wexford was renting was on the first floor of a house in Queen's Lane. Conditions were primitive by present-day standards. Using the bathroom was difficult because he shared it with two other tenants and he often used to go home to his parents' house for baths, taking his washing with him. His mother was the rare owner of a washing machine. He had a gas ring in his room and a kettle in which he heated up enough water to shave in. Shaving was carried out from a bowl on a little table by the window and one morning, as he was splashing water over his face, he saw Targo pass by.
       Queen's Lane was the easiest route to the footpath across the meadows which led to the Kingsbrook Bridge. Dog walkers naturally chose it. Wexford thought very little more about it, though he did wonder why a man who lived in Stowerton would come all this way to find some open land when he could have reached woods and fields nearer home. But when it happened again the next day and again the day after that, always between seven thirty and eight in the morning, he began to suspect some other reason. The second time, Targo paused outside – apparently giving the dog the chance to sniff around the base of a lamp post and then relieve itself against it – but instead of watching the dog, he turned his eyes upwards and stared at Wexford's window. After that, this happened regularly. In today's parlance, Targo was stalking him.
     
    The route he was now taking home from Burden's house under the stars, under a sky where now the moon, a three-quarters-Queen's full oval, had climbed above the trees, passed across Lane by way of York Passage. The whole place had changed beyond recognition. Not uglified (Wexford used Lewis Carroll's word to himself) because the few small shops had been given eighteenth century-style fronts, the late-Victorian houses pulled down and handsome new ones built and trees planted in the pavements. These trees were now big and shady and it struck Wexford, trying to locate exactly where, on the facade of the chalet-style house which now faced him, his window had been, that as things now were Targo's spaniel would have had to lift its leg against the trunk of an ash rather than against a lamp post. What had that spaniel been called? He couldn't remember, though he had often heard Targo speak to it as he reached the footpath and let it off the lead. It hardly mattered. Targo didn't always use a name but sometimes a term of endearment. It had been chilling to hear this sinister creature, this