Wexford 22 - The Monster In The Box Read Online Free

Carrolls' garden by way of the lane and the gate in the rear wall. The back door had a glass panel in it and light was coming from the kitchen. That door was not, of course, locked. Dawn went in, calling out, "Hallo," and "Where are you, Elsie?" No one said "hi" then. When she got no answer she called out again and went through the kitchen into the hallway that everyone who lived in that terrace called "the passage". A light was on here too.
       'I'd never previously been in any of those houses, all identical in layout, but by the evening of the next day I knew this one well. There were two small living rooms on the ground floor that subsequent owners have converted into one through room. Upstairs were two bedrooms, a bathroom and a tiny boxroom, big enough for a small child to sleep in. The Carrolls had no children so Dawn had no reason to keep her voice down as she went upstairs calling Elsie. It was just after eight.'
       Wexford paused to drink some of his wine. 'Next day,' he went on, 'DC Miller, Cliff Miller, took a statement from Dawn Morrow and I sat in on it, learning the ropes. The next statement that was needed I'd have to do myself. Dawn said that a ceiling light was on in Mrs Carroll's bedroom and she went in there. At first she didn't see her. The bed was in a bit of a mess. It looked as if it hadn't been made. Pillows had been thrown about and the eiderdown had fallen half on to the floor. That was very unlike Elsie, leaving her bed unmade. Dawn walked round the bed and then she saw her lying on the floor between the bed and the window. "I thought she must have fainted," she said. "I went up to her and looked more closely but I didn't touch her. They told me afterwards that she was dead but I didn't know that. She was lying face downwards with her face turned into the rug so I couldn't see it."
       'That's more or less what she said, Mike. Maybe I'm not remembering precisely. And I'm stating it coldly, leaving out what she must have felt, shock, amazement, fear. She went next door to number 18 where some people called Johnson lived and the Johnsons both came back with her. They went upstairs together. Mrs Johnson had been a nurse before she married, she looked at Elsie Carroll and said she thought she was dead but to go out of the room while she tried to see if she had a pulse. A bit later she came out and she told her husband Elsie was dead and to phone the police and he did.'
       Elsie Carroll had been strangled with the belt of her dressing gown which had been lying across the bed. That was the opinion of Dr Crocker whom Wexford had never met before but who later became his friend. Crocker, who was there within not much more than half an hour, gave an approximate time of death as not more than an hour before and possibly as little as half an hour before. By this time Detective Sergeant Jim Ventura had arrived with DC Miller, DC Pendle and Wexford himself. Within a few minutes Detective Inspector Fulford had also joined them. This murder was something very out of the ordinary, a sensation, in that place and at that time.
       'We had no scene-of-crimes officer at that time. DC Pendle – Dennis was his name – and I went around the house, paying particular attention to the bedroom, taking fingerprints. DNA had been discovered but Watson, Crick and Wilkins had yet to win the Nobel Prize for their discovery. It would be a long time before it could be put to forensic use and it's not foolproof yet, is it? But fingerprint detection had been around for a long time. While we examined that bedroom, a pretty little room which Elsie Carroll had papered in pink patterned with silver leaves, Ventura and DI Fulford waited downstairs for Elsie's husband George to come home.
       'Almost the first thing Ventura had done was speak to Harold Johnson and Margaret, his wife, the former nurse. It was twenty minutes to nine. Johnson told him that George Carroll regularly attended the Stowerton whist club which met in