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

murderer, call his dog 'honey' and 'sweetie'. He walked on through the lonely dark. There was no one about.
       At home, his house was in darkness but for a glow from the front-bedroom window. He went upstairs. Dora was sitting up, reading in bed.
       'Sylvia says she can get us a gardener,' she said, looking up from The Way of All Flesh which she was reading for the third time. 'He's the uncle of a friend of hers and he's an Old Etonian who's just retired from some government department.'
       'Do Eton and the Civil Service qualify him to do our garden?'
       'Probably not but she says his own garden's lovely, so that's a good recommendation.'
       'We'll give him a go and I won't send off my ad,' Wexford said. He touched the cover of her book. 'I might read that again when you've done with it.'
       His mind was too full of the past for immediate sleep. He lay in the dark and a picture of Targo appeared before his eyes: short, stocky, in those days wearing what looked like the trousers of a shabby old suit with an equally shabby raincoat. Every day when he passed Wexford's window he wore the same scarf, a brown wool thing with a fringe at each end. He walked stiffly, strutted really, and after the first few times he began whistling. The tunes he whistled were old, years and years old, 'It's a Long Way to Tipperary', 'Pack Up Your Troubles' and 'If You were the Only Girl in the World'. Wexford moved his bowl of water and his shaving things to another part of the room but still something compelled him to watch Targo and the spaniel walk by. The whistling would alert him and he would cross to the window, never moving the curtain.
       No Internet in those days, none of the records which were kept today. The electoral register was on paper, kept in post offices and of course police stations. He decided to find out as much as he could about Eric Targo without letting it be known he was searching and, necessarily, without letting it interfere with his work and his duties. Soon he had discovered that Kathleen Targo, who had given birth to a girl, was in the process of divorcing her husband. He learnt this from a woman he interviewed in connection with the robbery of the shop on the corner of Jewel and Oval Roads – she was one of those to whom nothing is irrelevant. He didn't try to stem the tide and soon she had told him, without his asking a single a question about the Targos, that Kathleen had thrown her husband out after he blacked her eye and broke her arm.
       'Mind you, he's strong,' he remembered her saying. 'She had to get help. It took three big strapping fellows from down here to get him out of the place and make sure he never went back.'
       Those were the days when the police never interfered in a 'domestic', when violence towards women was generally regarded as all part of married life and private to the couple in question. Kathleen had apparently taken the law into her own hands while Targo, Wexford discovered, was back living with his widowed mother at 8 Glebe Road. According to what records he could find, Targo had been born in Kingsmarkham, the only child of Albert Targo and his wife Winifred, a woman who had come from Birmingham. Since leaving school at the age of fourteen he had worked for a market gardener in Stowerton, for two years in refuse collection for Kingsmarkham Borough Council and as soon as he had passed a driving test, become a van driver for a hardware firm.
       Inescapable was the feeling that Targo was proud of what he had done, knew that Wexford knew it and was teasing him, defying him to come out with it to his superiors, knowing that without a shred of evidence against him he was safe. Wexford had an aunt who sometimes used the expression 'I wouldn't give her the satisfaction' and he steadily ignored the homicidal dog walker, refusing to give him the satisfaction. Ignored him, as far as Targo knew. But Wexford watched him proceeding towards the footpath, knowing that as soon as