Wexford 22 - The Monster In The Box by Ruth Rendell

him.
       'But I love you,' she said. 'You're everything I want.'
       Had any other woman ever said that to him? Had Dora, his wife? He thought not but he had broken with Helen just the same and he had never seen her again. Never seen her but occasionally heard of her. She lived in the village of Stoke Stringfield now with her husband and grown-up children, the village next to Stringfield where Targo had Wymondham Lodge. He knew of her and knew her married name was Conway. You should have been ashamed, he told himself, ashamed of treating the poor girl like that and even more of romantic fantasies which were bound to have a disastrous outcome.
       He shook himself back into the present. 'You have to remember that there was a solution,' he said to Burden when their drinks came. 'Arresting and charging George Carroll with the murder of his wife was the solution. And it didn't cease to be the solution – that is in Fulford's and Ventura's and a lot of other people's eyes – when Carroll got off because the judge gave some direction to the jury he shouldn't have. The difference between them and me was that I had never believed Carroll guilty and believed him neither more nor less guilty after he was acquitted whereas Fulford and Ventura were pretty sure he was guilty and absolutely believed he was guilty after he was convicted. His acquittal made no difference to their belief but they were both very angry. That expression "hopping mad" describes them well. Ventura was positively jumping up and down with rage.
       'He kept saying over and over, "This villain is to go free because some old fool in a wig doesn't know his job!"'
       'So there were no other suspects?'
       'Only in my mind. Targo was always there. While I was living in Hove I thought a lot about him and the wife he'd beaten up and the little boy Alan and the new baby. I knew they'd left Jewel Road and that they'd divorced but I wondered if he was paying her maintenance and the child support as he should have been. One day I bumped into Tina Malcolm, walking along with a baby and some man she may have married. Probably had as people rather shied away from having babies without benefit of wedlock in those days – as you'll remember. She didn't recognise me or didn't appear to. I used to wonder what she must have felt when her lover came up in court on a murder charge.'
       'You mean he really was with her that night?'
       'Oh, yes, I think so, don't you? He was with her and when he heard she had denied what he said – betrayed him, you might say, never mind the revocation he wouldn't have known about anyway – I imagine his world went to pieces. Perhaps he had loved her. Who knows?'
       'You reckon he'd have got off the first time if she'd said he was with her?'
       'I suppose so. It was an absolute alibi if she'd said he was with her for three hours. You see, although on Ventura's orders I questioned those neighbours who were at home, no one went back later and questioned the ones who hadn't been at home earlier. One of them might have seen Carroll go in there. But Ventura wasn't interested. Once Tina had said Carroll wasn't with her that only confirmed what he'd made up his mind to, that Carroll was guilty. But they were never asked, not after she denied it. Carroll couldn't have been in two places at once and he was never in 16 Jewel Road after 6.30 p.m.'
       'Chambers says Carroll went up north somewhere. No one seemed to know what he did for a living, but he fell ill and died of pancreatic cancer about a year after his acquittal. What happened to Targo?'
       Wexford shrugged. 'He started a driving school in Birmingham. He'd met a woman there who had quite a lot of money. Her name was Tracy Something. She was very young then, she'd been left the money by her father and she had a big house in Edgartown. But he never married her and he came back here when his mother died and he inherited her little house in Glebe Road.'
       'How do you know