A Willing Victim (23 page)

‘I got the curse. I was so positive, this time. I even
felt
pregnant. The teacher at the Foundation was telling us how the mind affects everything – the subtle world, she called it – she said it governs the physical world and if we think the right thoughts we’ll be in tune with nature and know our true selves. I’ve never heard anyone say anything like that before, and it made so much sense, but …’ The next few words were lost as Pauline blew her nose violently and turned to look at him with damp, red-rimmed eyes.

Ballard, who had managed to follow some, if not all, of this, said, as gently as he could, ‘I don’t think mind over matter is quite as simple as that.’

‘You think I’m being stupid, don’t you?’ Pauline glared at him. ‘About wanting another baby. You don’t understand it.’

‘No,’ said Ballard. ‘I don’t. I mean, it would be nice … lovely … if we had another child, but it won’t be the end of the world if it doesn’t happen. And if you want a positive thought, what about Katy? We’re lucky to have her – some couples can’t have children at all.’

‘Yes,’ snapped Pauline, ‘I know that. And of course I love Katy. I just … I can’t help it, Ben. I think about it all the time.’

‘You know,’ said Ballard, thinking about what Pauline had just said about the lectures she’d attended, ‘that business about people having the wrong ideas about themselves … Well, perhaps your idea of yourself having to be the mother of more than one child is wrong?’

‘So I’ve failed myself as well as everyone else, you mean?’

‘No, I don’t mean that at all.’ Ballard who a second before had been feeling rather pleased with himself, gave up trying to extricate himself and settled for a vehement shake of the head.

‘I have, though. You’ – here, Pauline held up a hand to forestall any argument – ‘and Katy as well. She was asking me the other day why she didn’t have brothers and sisters like the other children in her class.’

Ballard held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘I
am
sorry, Pauline. It’s hard for me to know what to say …’

Why was it
so
hard, he asked himself later. The rest of the evening had been spent circling each other at a wary distance, only volunteering the most anodyne of comments. He sat on in his armchair after Pauline had gone to bed, not wanting the proximity just yet. Part of it, he knew, was being ashamed – ashamed of not being more supportive to Pauline, ashamed of not being bothered about another baby; ashamed, too, of wishing the whole problem would just
go away
.

He knew he’d been distant and uncommunicative; knew, too, that Pauline felt isolated, which made it all the more unforgivable. No wonder she’d turned to the people at the Foundation. Although he’d worried about Pauline being lonely, it hadn’t occurred to him that she’d want to make new friendships – not deep ones, anyway. After you were married, he’d reasoned, you didn’t need them. You had each other, didn’t you? Or you were supposed to … Perhaps that wasn’t how it worked, after all.

He found himself wondering why Mary/Ananda had told him she’d met Pauline while out walking, and not at the Foundation. Perhaps it was just an example of the mysteriousness they all seemed to go in for, or perhaps Pauline had asked her not to tell him – or perhaps Mary/Ananda, a compulsive liar, was simply acting true to form.

Driving away, by an almighty effort of will, a vivid and astonishingly arousing image of Mary/Ananda, skirt hiked up and straddling the stile, Ballard levered himself out of his armchair and, guilty and sheepish, went upstairs to join his wife.

Unable to sleep, and tired of staring into the dark and listening to Pauline’s breathing, Ballard went downstairs, made himself a pot of tea, and, thinking he might as well do something useful, sat at the kitchen table and began writing down the sequence of Mary/Ananda’s doings that he’d managed to piece together so far. At the end of half an hour, he had:

20
^th
December 1943 – Mary/Ananda gives birth to Tom (assuming T is her child!)

21
^st
December 1944 – Rosemary Aylett gives birth to Billy

17
^th
May 1945 – Death of Revd Milburn

Around 22
^nd
May 1945 – Mary/Ananda leaves Tom with Mrs Wheeler

Around 17
^th
August 1945 – Mary/Ananda ‘adopts’ Billy, saying she’s married to an American serviceman called Carroll

Some time in early 1948 – Mary/Ananda and Billy arrive at the Foundation (B. would have been 3 years old)

5
^th
November 1956 – Rosemary Aylett comes to find Billy and is killed

If Mary/Ananda had become desperate for a baby three months
after she’d abandoned her own, why not simply go back and get him? Why go to the bother of finding another one? Unless, he thought, looking at Tom and Billy’s respective birth dates, it was to do with the
age
of the child … If Mary/Ananda was worried that somebody might find out she’d done away with Milburn (or caused his death by neglecting him), then she might well target an American serviceman in the hope of becoming a GI bride – America was nicely far away from gossip and suspicion (not to mention Dr Slater) after all … And what better way to ensure a hasty marriage than claiming to be pregnant? Presumably she was having an affair with this Carroll while Milburn was still alive – Stratton had said the neighbours in Woodbridge had told him how she was always going to the American dances …

If Carroll had gone away to fight in Europe, he wouldn’t have realised that she’d never been pregnant, and it was hard to tell the age of a baby just by looking at it. He might have accepted a one-year-old baby – Billy – as being younger, but by almost two, which was Tom’s age in November ’45, they were beginning to stagger about and say things, weren’t they? Mrs Curtin had said she thought Mary/Ananda was pregnant, although she hadn’t looked it. She must have been mistaken, thought Ballard, because, as she’d said herself, it made no sense at all.

Perhaps Mary/Ananda had married Carroll and gone to America with him but the marriage had failed and she’d returned home with the child. What had Stratton told him after he’d been to see the chap at the Psychical Research place? Thumbing through his notebook, he found:
Thorley unable to find Mary M. when reinvestigating Lincott Rectory haunting in ’46. Slater’s sister said MM was GI bride
. Mary/Ananda arriving at the Foundation in early ’48 would make sense if she’d been to the States and then returned.

Ballard went into the hall and took the photograph of Rosemary Aylett that Jennifer Allardyce had given to him out of his coat pocket. It showed an attractive woman posed in front
of a rail on a promenade somewhere, the sea behind her and the wind ruffling dark hair about a smiling face. Rosemary, who’d been married to grumpy old Bert, and who’d liked romances and Frankie Howerd. Who’d salted away bits of the housekeeping for years to buy a boy’s treasure trove for her long-lost son. He thought of Katy, snuggled asleep upstairs with her golliwogs Sammy and Topsy beside her, and remembered when she was born, Pauline’s fierce, protective love for her. He’d felt the same, but not, he knew, with the same intensity. Ballard studied the photograph again.
It broke her heart, having to give him away
… Such love, he thought. All this belief, Mrs Curtin had said. All this hope. Everything she must have felt as she’d set out, armed with an anonymous letter, a photograph and a birth certificate, to try to reclaim her Billy. She and Lloyd were linked by the Foundation, and – if Lloyd were the writer of the letter, by Mary/Ananda and Billy/Michael, too. It was possible, Ballard reasoned, that Rosemary Aylett’s death was an accident, but, if so, why had whoever killed her taken her handbag and gone through her pockets? Robbery could be a motive, he supposed, but it seemed equally, if not more, likely that whoever killed her had wanted to conceal her identity. Was that to make sure that there was no possible link to the Foundation? And if Lloyd had written the letter, might the two of them not have been killed by the same person – someone who was desperate for Michael’s true origins not to be revealed? The obvious candidate was Mary/Ananda who – according to Dr Slater, anyway – had killed once before … And, judging from all he’d heard about her, she was ruthless enough … The one good thing about it, he supposed, was that if she were the murderer, she wasn’t likely to attack Michael, because that would be killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.

He’d talk to Stratton first thing tomorrow: there was a definite case, he thought, for making the two murders into a single
inquiry. If only they could find the bloody woman … Thumbing through his notebook once more, he wrote:

1947 – Lloyd arrives at the Foundation

April 1956 – Lloyd leaves the Foundation

30
^th
/31
^st
October 1956 – Lloyd killed

He stared at this for a while, then put the tea things in the sink and went back to bed. The rigidity of Pauline’s body as he climbed in beside her told him that she was not only awake, but still upset. Excusing himself on the grounds that talking to her would only lead to another argument, he affected not to notice and, turning away from her, closed his eyes and tried to sleep.

‘We don’t yet have a statement from anyone who saw Mary/Ananda returning to the Foundation after seeing that film on the night of the thirtieth. I haven’t talked to Tynan about it, either.’ Stratton, who’d relayed the information about Rosemary Aylett that Ballard had given him straight away, fully expected that owning up to these omissions would earn him a top-class bollocking, and thought he was about to get one when his superior gave a snort of disgust. ‘The woman must be deranged,’ he said.

‘She certainly seems to be pretty strange,’ said Stratton, feeling relieved.

Lamb raised his eyebrows, which had the effect of making him look even more like a man reflected in a tap, then said, ‘Sounds as if “strange” is the least of it. But I agree that it makes sense to treat the two deaths as a single inquiry, so I’ll be speaking to DI Ballard’s superior officer. Meanwhile, it looks as if you’re going to do more good up there than down here, so you’d better get straight back home to pack. Grove can manage things at this end. Just make sure you report back.’

Stratton folded a couple of shirts on top of the things in his suitcase, closed it, and took it downstairs to put in his car. Then he
made himself a cup of tea, and, taking it into the sitting room, sat listening to
Mrs Dale’s Diary
while he drank it, knowing as he did so that he was simply putting off the moment. If he didn’t phone Diana to say he was going to be in Suffolk for a few days, she might find out from Monica at the studio, and be hurt that he hadn’t told her. He’d had to tell Doris that he’d be away for a few days, to stop her and his other sister-in-law, Lilian, bringing his dinner round. He could hardly ask Doris not to tell Monica he was going, and as for telling Monica not to mention it to Diana – what on earth would she think if he were to say that? No, it was impossible. Stratton stood up, cut off Ellis Powell in the middle of being rather worried about Jim, and, striding purposefully into the hall, picked up the phone and dialled, all the while hoping that Diana would say she was too busy to join him.

She wasn’t. They’d arranged to meet at the cottage she’d borrowed in a place called Halstead Wyse, which, when Stratton consulted his map, proved to be not too far from Lincott but far enough, or so he hoped, for his daytime and night-time activities to remain entirely separate. When he’d raised questions about the logistics of the thing, in a weak bid to put her off the idea, Diana had told him she’d arrange to borrow a car from one of her colleagues, and would arrive the following day with groceries and the like. All he needed to do was to turn up.

He wanted to see her, of course he did. He just wasn’t happy about it being like this. The problem, he thought, as he drove through drizzle down a stretch of dual carriageway, was the idea that one’s life should be divided, as far as possible, into watertight compartments, so that one thing (in this case, Diana) did not encroach on another (such as work or family). Sensing a possible breakdown of the system gave him an unpleasant feeling of lack of control. While he knew that, ordinarily, the success of
the watertight business depended on the leakiness, or otherwise, of the person concerned, he didn’t like matters being taken out of his hands in this way … Just then, the new lights overhead, which were being tested, flickered then switched themselves on, bathing the dull grey day in an eerie yellow glow. Stratton wondered briefly if radiation might not be that colour – hard to tell if you’d only ever seen the mushroom cloud in black and white. Of course, his worries would be meaningless if they all got blown to buggery …

Thinking of the newsreels he’d seen – the mysterious explosions that unfolded themselves above Pacific atolls while he sat watching in the dark, Stratton thought that the carnage they’d all seen during the war had been only a preview before the main feature. At least, he supposed, fumbling in his coat pocket for a cigarette, that sort of thing put everything else well and truly into perspective.

‘There’s a message for you,’ said Maisie Denton, when Stratton arrived at the George and Dragon. ‘DI Ballard said I was to ask you to telephone as soon as you got here.’ She dug a hand into the pocket of her cretonne overall. ‘He said he was just on his way home – I’ve written down the number for you here.’

Stratton followed her down the passage that led from the bar. The phone was fixed halfway down, and a vast sneeze like a distant trombone told him that George Denton was situated in the room – a kitchen, judging from what he could see through the half-open door – at the end.

‘She’s turned up!’

‘What?’ The line crackled and Stratton held the receiver hard against his ear, trying to block out the parping crescendo issuing from the kitchen.

‘Mary or Ananda, or whatever her bloody name is! She’s here!’