A Willing Victim (16 page)

‘Forgive my saying this,’ said Stratton, ‘but I thought you’d be more … well, receptive to this sort of thing.’

Thorley wagged a portly finger at him. ‘The society holds no collective opinions, Inspector. Some of our members are sympathetic to spiritualism, claimed mystical connections and the like, others are more sceptical, not to say hostile … and others, of whom I hope I am one, are dispassionate and committed only to scientific investigation.’

‘Did you investigate the hauntings at Lincott Rectory?’

‘Twice, as a matter of fact. I,’ he added, with a modest dip of the head, ‘was one of those chosen to direct the second investigation, which took place in 1946.’

‘As late as that?’

‘It was just before Roth’s Foundation for Spiritual Understanding purchased the rectory. When I heard about it I thought that perhaps they might try to capitalise on the hauntings. Even when they were no longer what you might call hot news, there was still quite a lot of interest. I have to say,’ he added, ‘that there’s no evidence that this happened.’

‘Did you meet Mary Milburn?’

Regretfully, Thorley shook his head. ‘We were unable to find
her. The Reverend Milburn was dead, of course – as, unfortunately, was Maurice Hill, the original investigator—’

‘Who must,’ Stratton interrupted, ‘have made a fair packet out of all those newspaper reports.’

‘Oh, undoubtedly. And there was the book, too, in 1940 –
The Most Haunted House in England
. Came out before paper rationing started and sold thousands … Money could have been the sole reason, and Hill was a journalist so of course he wanted sensational copy, but motives in these cases can be surprisingly mixed, you know. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’d been keen on Mary Milburn.’

‘Did you speak to people who’d known Mary before she’d left Lincott?’

‘Oh, yes. But no one knew where she’d gone. I only received a couple of pieces of new information about her.’ Levering himself out of his chair with difficulty, because he was a tight fit, Thorley turned his back on Stratton, almost sweeping the contents off his desk with his backside as he did so, and began rummaging in one of the filing cabinets. After some minutes he surfaced, waving a folder and then, seating himself once more, began to leaf through the pages. ‘Here we are. It was a Mrs Dixon. She told me that Mary Milburn’s involvement with her brother – a Dr Slater – left him a physical and emotional wreck. Complete mental breakdown, by all accounts. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to speak to him directly, but Mrs Dixon said Mrs Milburn had made him believe that she was a medium and could give him messages from his dead wife. She also,’ here, Thorley’s eyebrows raised so far above his round glasses that they almost disappeared into his hair, ‘appears to believe that Mrs Milburn murdered Reverend Milburn, her husband. There’s a letter here, with the details …’

‘May I?’ Stratton took the letter, and, skimming it, saw the name ‘Dr James Slater’ halfway down the page. The death certificate, he thought. Had Mrs Dixon’s brother, Dr Slater, been Mary’s
unwitting accomplice? ‘Did you show this to the police at the time?’

Thorley shook his head. ‘Perhaps I ought to have done, but her claims are unsubstantiated and the tone of the thing is – as I’m sure you can see – rather wild …’

‘Fair enough. I’d like to keep this for the time being.’

‘Of course, Inspector. Mrs Dixon also told me – this was on the telephone – that she’d heard that Mrs Milburn had become a GI bride just after the war ended, and was living in America.’

Remembering that the Reverend Milburn’s death certificate had been dated some time in mid-May, Stratton said, ‘Well, if that’s the case, she can’t have wasted much time … What conclusion did you reach about the Lincott hauntings?’

‘Quite bogus. We decided that the phenomena were either faked by one of the occupants of the house – possibly with the connivance of Hill, who, as you pointed out, stood to make quite a bit of money – or were due to natural causes: rats, acoustic effects and the like.’

‘And your conclusion about Mrs Milburn?’

‘That she was behind a lot of it, certainly. We were by no means the only people who thought so. It’s hard to say, never having met the woman, but, judging by what people who
did
know her had to say, she wasn’t reliable and had difficulty in separating truth from fantasy. Whether this was sheer mischief or evidence of a hysterical need for attention, I couldn’t say. Mrs Dixon certainly believed it to be something more sinister, but she was influenced by Mrs Milburn’s bad treatment of her brother.’ Nodding at Stratton’s coat pocket, where he’d stowed the letter, Thorley added, ‘She does become rather …
emotional
on the subject.’

‘Were you aware that Mary Milburn had returned to Lincott Rectory?’

Thorley sat up as sharply as if he’d been jabbed with a compass, and his eyes grew even rounder than before, so that he looked
more Billy Bunterish than ever. Stratton half expected him to yelp ‘Yarooh!’

‘She lives there with her son,’ said Stratton. ‘Or at least she did until a couple of days ago. We’re very keen to speak to her, but at the moment we don’t know where she is.’

‘Well, if I hear anything I shall let you know immediately, of course. Her son, you said. The child of the GI, presumably?’

‘At the moment, we’re not sure. The general consensus seems to be that he’s unlikely to be Reverend Milburn’s son.’

‘Yes …’ Thorley coughed and a spot of hard colour appeared on each cheek. ‘I’m afraid she was described to me several times as a nymphomaniac. Constantly trying to seduce men, and very often succeeding.’ He said this with a mystified air which made Stratton think that, in his world, there was little place for sex. ‘Dear, oh dear …’

‘In fact,’ said Stratton, ‘I was told at the Foundation that there’s an idea going round that the boy’s conception was, er … divinely aided. The students – some of them, at least – appear to be believe that he is one of these great masters, or whatever they’re called.’

‘Really?’ Thorley chuckled. ‘Dear oh dear. It never ceases to amaze me what people will believe. It’s like Blavatsky’s lot, grooming boys as future saviours and making claims as to who the students had been in their previous lives … It was all written up in the
Theosophist
magazine, a series of articles called “Rents in the Veil of Time”, and then it was issued as a book. Really set the cat amongst the pigeons, because of course some people had been written up as more important – nearer to the leader – in their former incarnations than others.’ Thorley chuckled. ‘A sort of spiritual
Debrett’s
, if you like. It’s quite extraordinary – people will strain at a gnat, but they’ll swallow a camel without a second thought …’

Afterwards, waiting for a tube train to take him back to the West End, Stratton reflected that he couldn’t have put it better himself.

Ballard was frankly delighted when Stratton’s call came, because it gave him an excuse to avoid – or at least put off – dealing with a case involving a family in a village some miles from Lincott, of the type which always made his heart sink. They were a bony, unkempt bunch, with a look of ingrained malnourishment that Ballard imagined would take generations of roast beef to eradicate. The mother had died and the eldest daughter had taken her place in all senses of the word, an arrangement the rest of the family seemed to consider perfectly normal and which would have gone on indefinitely but for the intervention of a neighbour, concerned that the girl would become pregnant. Ballard had dealt with several cases like it and wasn’t relishing the task of explaining why the arrangement was illegal, immoral and couldn’t go on to a man who was only fractionally less animal than the beasts he tended. Stratton’s Dr Slater, driven by Mary/ Ananda to a nervous breakdown according to his sister, Mrs Dixon, was a far more interesting – as well as a far less revolting – prospect.

Ballard’s first impression on seeing him was of an elderly bulldog dismayed by the sudden removal of its bone. Rheumy-eyed, jowly
and grey-faced, he sat, surrounded by other leftover Victorians, in the sanatorium’s enormous conservatory. Swathed in rugs, Slater’s face was turned upwards to the weak winter sunlight that was struggling to penetrate the murky skylight and windows. He was positioned between a woman whose face, impossibly wizened and puckered by age, was grouted with thick powder, and another, equally ancient, whose long grey hair was incongruously plaited into two childish pigtails. Ballard would have preferred privacy, but the matron had assured him that while neither lady had sufficient mental capacity left to understand anything of his conversation with the doctor, their presence was necessary for his peace of mind. They remained silent throughout, but took turns in glaring at Ballard and patting Slater’s knees and stroking his hands when he became emotional, which, in the course of the interview, was often enough to make Ballard feel a complete bastard for asking the questions in the first place.

Using the information given him by Stratton, he’d run the old boy to earth in a genteel but rundown establishment on the coast, just outside Aldeburgh, about sixty miles – all of them on narrow, twisting country roads – from Lincott. Mrs Dixon, who’d reluctantly given the address, had seemed to think he was long past talking to anybody about anything, but the matron, when applied to, had been more optimistic and, thus far, she’d been proved right.

Although adamant that he’d never met, or even heard of, Jeremy Lloyd, the mention of Mary Milburn’s name had, to Ballard’s consternation, caused Dr Slater to burst into noisy tears. When his sobs finally subsided, he said, ‘I’ve never told my sister everything that happened. I couldn’t bring myself to … It was because of Daphne.’

‘Daphne?’

‘My wife. When she died, I was … I missed her so much. All the time we’d been married, I couldn’t believe my luck. She was
lovely and we were so happy that when it came to an end – Daphne had cancer, you see – it was as if the world, my world, had ended. I could see no logic in the fact that I was still alive, when she …’ Dr Slater shook his head in slow bewilderment. ‘I thought, if I could contact her somehow … I wanted a sign that she was still with me, because I was so lonely without her. I wanted her to stay with me …’ Slater buried his head in his hands.

‘I am sorry to distress you.’ Ballard was aware, as he said this, that it was a hopelessly inadequate response, but he couldn’t think of anything better. ‘When was this?’

‘January 1944, she died.’

‘And were you acquainted with Mrs Milburn at that time?’

‘Not until about a year later, when I began attending her husband – as his doctor, of course. He was bedridden by that time, crippled with arthritis. One can try to alleviate the pain, but in Reverend Milburn’s case the condition was pretty well advanced, so that he had difficulty in feeding himself and so forth, and the treatment is fairly limited.’

As he spoke, Ballard caught a glimpse of the professional man he’d once been. ‘And this was at Lincott Rectory, was it?’

‘No. The Reverend Milburn had retired by then – he would have been quite unable to continue his duties – and they’d moved to Woodbridge. I knew of their connection to Lincott Rectory, of course, and that was why …’ The watery eyes were full of anguish. ‘All I wanted was to feel that Daphne was near me. I didn’t want anything else.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Well, I knew that Mary Milburn was a medium, you see, because I’d read the book about the hauntings at Lincott, so I asked if she could help me to contact Daphne. She wasn’t keen at first, but I didn’t want to let it go, if there was a chance … And I suppose I was quite … Well, she was rather attractive. The most
beautiful eyes … Not that I … I mean, she gave me the impression of being devoted to her husband and there wasn’t any idea in my mind of anything …
untoward
… I do hope you understand that.’

‘Of course.’ Ballard, who, despite his appreciation of Mary/ Ananda’s undeniable charm and good looks, now felt nothing but sympathy for the man, nodded solemnly. ‘I do understand. When did the seance take place?’

‘I don’t remember exactly, but sometime in the spring. Before the Reverend Milburn died, certainly. Mary came to my house – I was also living in Woodbridge at the time – and during the seance she said she had a message – messages – from Daphne. Then she embraced me. She said it was Daphne, that Daphne’s spirit was coming through her and wanted to kiss me … I let her, and it really did seem … I mean, I thought I felt Daphne, that she was there with me …’ Mouth agape, Slater stared at him through woebegone, red-rimmed eyes.

‘Through the medium of Mary, you mean?’

‘Yes. This happened on several occasions, and each time, there was more …’

‘You had intercourse with her?’ Ballard glanced uneasily at the two women, but neither seemed to register what he was asking.

‘Yes … But it was with Daphne. I mean … that’s what she told me, and … I believed her. I felt that she – that
they
– had rescued me. I’d felt as if I was drowning, and they’d rescued me together. I suppose you could say I was in love with Mary, but it was only because of Daphne. Daphne came back to me through her, or so I thought … She made me believe it and I wanted to believe it, Inspector. I wanted my wife …’ Slater broke down in deep, racking sobs, and his two attendants pawed at him with soothing whimpers, as a dog might place its comforting head on the knee of a crying child.

‘How often did you … did this happen?’

‘Several times. Five or six, I think. I lived for those meetings, Inspector. It was all I had, that connection … It meant everything to me.’

‘I understand. What happened next?’

‘She – Mary – hadn’t contacted me for two or three weeks. I tried to speak to her. They didn’t have a telephone, and when I went to the house, no one came … Several times, I thought she must be there – I heard noises, but she didn’t answer the door, and I was desperate … Then she came to see me. She said that her husband was dead, he’d died in the night. She told me that his condition had deteriorated, and that she’d been busy nursing him. When I asked her why she hadn’t contacted me – about Reverend Milburn, I mean – she said I’d told her there was nothing I could do for him and she hadn’t wanted to trouble me.’