Wexford 22 - The Monster In The Box Read Online Free PDF Page A

neck, shaped like a crab with pincers or an island with promontories.' Wexford shrugged. 'Take your pick.'
       They had been alone for the hour and a half it had taken to narrate all this but now three people came into the snug, a woman and two men. Although the room was small, it contained three tables, any one of which the newcomers might have chosen but they picked the one nearest to the policemen. Burden said quietly to Wexford, 'Shall we go back to my place and you can go on with the story there?'
       Burden's house was nearer to the Olive than his. The difficulty was that Jenny would be there, unable to leave her young son on his own, but as it happened she said nothing to Wexford beyond, 'Can I come and see you about something, Reg? To the police station?'
       He named a day and a time more to keep her quiet for the present than because he wanted to hear what she had to say. He knew it already. Burden and he went into a little room the Burdens called the study, though as is so often the case, nothing was studied there but it was a place where one of them could watch a different television programme from that showing in the living room. Burden left him there while he went to fetch drinks and the snack he could eat but Wexford must not.
       Alone for a while, he reflected on that midnight so long ago. He had never forgotten that look, the light from the street lamp falling on the man's thick fair hair and his rather rugged coarse face with the scarf not quite hiding the dark stain mantling his neck. Then, the faint nod, as if to say, 'We know each other now. We are bound together now.' Of course that was nonsense, a nod couldn't mean all that.
       Next day had been his day off. He would have preferred to go in, he didn't want to miss the next steps in the proceedings, but nor did he want to say that to Ventura. It sounded a bit – not overkeen but maybe presumptuous . He was too new in the job and too low down the scale to attract that sort of attention to himself. He spent the day with Alison instead, going for a drive (in her father's car) and the evening in his room. That was the time when he'd been doing the next best thing to going to university: reading, reading, reading. It was Chaucer that evening, 'The Squire's Tale'. But later on he lay awake a long while and his mind went back to the old worry, how he could marry a woman he didn't love and would soon, he was afraid, cease even to like any more.
       Burden reappeared with a bottle of sparkling water and for Wexford a glass of red wine, the last of his self-imposed ration for that day. He poured himself a tumbler of water. From the array of bowls of nuts and cheese biscuits, he took a handful of salted almonds.
       'You'd got to the bit where you and this Targo were staring at each other,' he said, his tone sceptical if not exactly scathing.
       Wexford chose to ignore it. 'The following morning,' he began, 'at what Fulford called his tasks-for-the-day round-up, Ventura said he wanted me to come with him to interview Tina Malcolm, girlfriend or "lover" of George Carroll. Back at the mortuary the pathologist was carrying out a post-mortem on his murdered wife. Ventura and I went to Powys Road. This woman Tina Malcolm lived in a two-room flat with kitchen. No bathroom but that wasn't unusual in those days. There was a bath in the kitchen with a cover over it to make a table. It was neither shabby nor smart, just ordinary. It would have been interesting to a young person going in there today because, although the bedroom was quite a generous size, she slept in a single bed.'
       'Have some more nuts.'
       'You know I'd better not.' Wexford sighed but inaudibly.
       'Tina Malcolm was about thirty-five, dyed blonde hair, heavily made up. Women wore much heavier make-up then than now. Lots of girls wouldn't let themselves be seen outdoors without it. More of it on the lips than on the eyes, though. Her heels were so high that they made you