A Willing Victim (27 page)

‘You bet. Do you think he was in love with her?’

‘Well, if he was, I’m pretty sure he isn’t now. You saw the way he was looking at her when we left.’

They passed beneath the magnificent archway, the moonlight shining on the fixed-back wrought-iron gates turning the spikes to a mixture of mercury and soot, and turned into the lane.

‘Tynan’s worried,’ said Ballard. ‘Not surprising, I suppose, given what he’s just heard. Couldn’t believe it, could he?’

‘I think a lot of them do take the business about Michael pretty seriously,’ said Stratton, remembering Miss Kirkland’s reaction to his flippant remark about immaculate conception. ‘But I’m sure,’ he added, ‘that they’ll find a way round it. That’s the thing with religions and what not,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘you can’t reason somebody
out
of something they haven’t been reasoned
into
in the first place.’

‘I suppose not. But Tynan wasn’t just worried, he was puzzled as well – it was written all over his face. Especially when Mary/Ananda was talking about after the war – the nervous breakdown and coming to the Foundation.’

‘Well, it was new to him, wasn’t it? And he’s a boy who likes to think he’s got all the answers, just like Roth.’

‘I did think there was something fishy about those dates,
though. That long gap before she came to the Foundation, when she said she had a nervous breakdown. I don’t think we got the real story.’

Stratton snorted. ‘She was probably living with some man who discovered what she was really like and threw her over, and she didn’t want to tell us in front of Tynan. Anyway, it’s not our problem.’

‘Think she killed her husband? A pillow over the face, if he wasn’t in a state to fight back … Easily done.’

‘Wouldn’t surprise me, but I don’t see what we can do about it now. We’ve got enough on our plate with Lloyd and Mrs Aylett. I’ll get onto Grove tomorrow, ask him to interview the Astley woman at Wimbledon and see if Mary/Ananda was where she said she was, and we’d better organise another search of Lloyd’s belongings – make sure that birth certificate wasn’t slipped inside a book or something.’

‘Meanwhile,’ said Ballard, ‘we’ll have to interview the whole bally lot of them again. I was thinking we should start with the students first, without mentioning the significance of the birth certificate – at least initially – and see if anyone gives anything away. After that, we can confront Roth with the whole shooting match, as it were.’

‘Good idea. I have to say I’ll be very interested to hear what Mr Roth has to say for himself.’

‘Me, too. What was that about Miss Kirkland, by the way?’

Stratton explained about the photograph on Tynan’s cabinet.

‘Interesting,’ said Ballard. ‘I wonder why she lied.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Stratton, ‘but I
do
know she’s not too keen on Mary/Ananda. I saw it when Roth was talking about her.’

‘Mary/Ananda didn’t mention her, though, did she? When you asked who might have taken the certificate.’

‘No, but something tells me she doesn’t worry too much about what other women think of her.’

‘You might be right, at that. She’s quite something, isn’t she, our Mrs Milburn?’

‘You can say that again. Easy to see how she could wind anyone – well, any
man
– around her little finger in no time.’ He’d hoped to avoid any discussion of Mary/Ananda. The mixture of arousal and revulsion he’d felt in her presence didn’t bear thinking about, let alone articulating.

‘She’s very odd, though, isn’t she?’

‘Odd how?’ asked Stratton, cautiously.

‘Well, she seems to be a mixture of very ruthless and manipulative – the sexy stuff, I mean – and completely off her rocker. If you want the truth, I felt pretty uncomfortable in there.’

‘Yes,’ said Stratton, ‘I know what you mean. Do you fancy a drink? It’s nearly closing time, but I’m sure Mr Denton won’t mind.’

Ballard held his watch up to the window and squinted at it. ‘Better not. Pauline … Don’t want to, you know … But if you wouldn’t mind running me home …’

‘Of course not.’

Turning the car round after he’d dropped Ballard off outside his house, Stratton felt relieved. He knew what Ballard meant about uncomfortable, all right. The whole business had been bloody unsettling, and he could definitely do with a bit of time by himself.

He let himself into the pub with keys provided earlier by George Denton. Hearing ‘Arseholes are cheap today, cheaper than yesterday,’ sung to an opera tune he recognised from the wireless, with plenty of accompanying bangs and thumps, he concluded that the landlord, having just called time, was now tidying up in the bar. Doubting he’d be able to get to sleep anytime soon and definitely in need of diversion, however gloomy, he poked his head round the door and asked if he could borrow a newspaper.

‘There you go.’ Denton, who’d been rearranging the chairs in the snug with the dramatic violence of a lion-tamer, ambled over to the bar and produced a battered copy of the
Mirror
from somewhere underneath it. ‘Afraid it’s yesterday’s. Fancy a pint to go with it? Don’t mind my saying, but you look as if you could do with one. Take it up with you if you like.’

Stratton settled himself as comfortably as he could in the doll-sized, chintz-covered armchair in the small bedroom beneath the eaves. Placing both pint and ashtray within easy reach, he lit a cigarette and began reading the paper with fierce concentration.

ISMAILA FALLS: ALL-ALONG-CANAL RACE – AND THEN IT’S CEASEFIRE AT MIDNIGHT
was the headline, with the triumphant tone of this first item –
Allies have fulfilled their mission, says French communiqué
– tempered halfway down by the heading, in smaller type,
Nasser calls in tanks
and some stuff about the first British casualties to be evacuated from the battle zone. At least, thought Stratton, wondering what Pete was doing and if he was all right, they were talking about casualties and not fatalities, which was something to be grateful for. In his mind’s eye he saw the photograph of his son, proud in his new uniform, that stood on the mantelpiece at home. Millions of people had photographs like that, above the fire, except that Pete was – for the present, at any rate – still alive, and the vast majority of those sons, and husbands, and fathers, were dead. Was that photograph going to be all he was left with? That and a couple of snaps in the album, Pete grinning with his pals, mugs of tea in one hand and thumbs up for the camera in the other, looking out eternally from November 1956?

Remembering his last chat with his son made Stratton think of something he’d neglected: Reg. He’d not troubled to find out if there was anything wrong with him – because Pete had definitely been right, and Reg was looking under the weather. Still, nothing he could do about it right now, so …

Turning back to the paper, he thumbed through the rest and read items headed,
Garages will ‘ration’ petrol – supplies only for essential users; Women with rifles help in Hungary’s last-ditch fight
, which was accompanied by a murky photograph of housewives with guns facing down a Russian tank amidst the ruins of Budapest, and then a couple of paragraphs about how Eisenhower was beating Adlai Stevenson in the US presidential election. Presumably, he thought, the people at the Foundation didn’t take newspapers. He didn’t recall seeing any there, or, for that matter, any wireless or television. This, he thought, was all of a piece with their notion of retreat from the modern world. Apart from seeing the expression on Roth’s face when he told him about Michael, he wasn’t looking forward to going there tomorrow. Christ, he thought suddenly, one of us is going to have to tell the boy. He hadn’t thought of that before – too much else going on – and nor, he was pretty sure, had Ballard. Stratton groaned and reached for his beer. Having to tell a child that its mother wasn’t its mother was bad enough, but this … ‘Sorry, kid,’ Stratton murmured, ‘but you’re not the Son of God after all.’

He threw down the paper, wishing he’d brought along his book. He wasn’t a great reader of fiction, but he’d been enjoying
Lucky Jim
, borrowed from Don. Not that he knew anything about universities, but it was funny and he could sympathise with the bloke’s attitude to life – getting drunk, making faces and the rest. Besides, it was a nice change from books about aristocratic types with superior sensibilities and grand passions and all the rest of it.
Lucky Jim
would have kept his mind off things, all right, or if he’d had some jazz to listen to … Anything really, to block out the barrage of thoughts and emotions that assailed his tired mind. Pete, Reg, Michael, Ananda, Tynan, Roth … Not to mention the fact that Diana would be here tomorrow night, waiting for him at her friend’s cottage in the village of Wherever-it-was.

‘Oh, hell.’ Feeling too weary and dispirited to undress, he drained his pint and stubbed out his fag before wrenching off his shoes and tie, lying down full length on the bed and closing his eyes. After a while, he drifted into sleep. He dreamt that Diana was there on the bed, and that he was making love to her, and she was responding, and it was all as it should be, but when she propped herself up on one elbow and looked down at him, she’d changed into Mary/Ananda, and then she was pulling something soft and heavy over his face, so that he couldn’t breathe … He awoke, gasping, at a quarter-past three, to find that the light was still on and he’d somehow managed to pull the eiderdown over his top half, so that it had tangled around his head and neck. He clawed himself free and sat up, sweaty and shivering at the same time.

He undressed quickly, tearing at his clothes as if they were contaminated, trying to distance himself from what had just happened in his unconscious with the respectable safety of pyjamas. He stood for a moment, staring at the treacherous bed, before flinging open the casement window and thrusting his head out, hoping that the cold night air might blow away the ineffable compound of shame and failure, coupled with a sudden, and all the more powerful for being utterly illogical, wave of fear about the future.

After a long telephone call to West End Central, followed by several telegrams which were taken down with agonising slowness by PC Harwood, Stratton arrived at the Foundation to find Ballard standing on the porch, looking irritable and weary. ‘You look like I feel,’ he said. ‘How’s it going?’

‘It’s not. I’ve got three men searching the place – my guv’nor organised a warrant first thing and sent them over with it – but so far they’ve come up with bugger all. Nobody I’ve spoken to seems to have a clue about a birth certificate taken from Mary/Ananda’s room, and Parsons isn’t getting anywhere either.’

‘Genuine, do you think?’

‘Everyone I’ve spoken to so far, yes, and Parsons agrees with me. Did you talk to Grove?’

‘Yes, and DCI Lamb. They’ve got all the information, and they’re going to go through all of Lloyd’s belongings with a tooth-comb. Grove’s on his way to Wimbledon to talk to Mrs Astley. How far have you got?’

‘Five to go, including Miss Kirkland, and then there’s Roth. And the boy, of course. I’m not looking forward to
that
at all.’

‘Me neither,’ said Stratton, who, after waking from his dream,
had spent a fair proportion of his sleepless hours dreading it. ‘He is here, I take it?’

‘Yes, I checked with Miss Kirkland when we arrived. I suppose we do have to tell him, do we? I mean, there’s no getting round it?’

‘I’ve been thinking about that, and I don’t see how. It’ll all have to come out in the end, and if we don’t tell him now, he’ll only get some mumbo-jumbo version of the story from Roth, and that’ll only make it worse for him. The poor little sod’s going to be confused enough as it is.’

Ballard, who’d been staring intently at an apparently featureless patch of gravel during this, raised his head and said, ‘You’re right, of course. But at least he’s got somewhere to go to.’

‘Mrs Curtin, you mean?’

‘Yes, although …’ Ballard shook his head. ‘God, I don’t envy whoever gets the job of sorting out all that. Incidentally, hadn’t we better get a policewoman up here?’

‘Definitely,’ said Stratton.

‘I’ll get Parsons to organise someone. You know what really browns me off,’ Ballard added, sotto voce, as they went into the house, ‘is that under all the pretence of being helpful – we’ve been offered three cups of tea in the last half-hour – what this lot are really saying is “Fuck you, Jack, we’re all right. We’ve got the answer to life itself and your petty concerns don’t matter.”’

‘We’ll see about that,’ said Stratton, grimly.

Inside the large hall, the air had the same eerie stillness that Stratton had noticed before, with no sound from anywhere. At first he thought the place was empty, but then he spotted a man kneeling behind one of the chairs, mouth rigid and eyes narrowed in concentration, piling logs into a basket by the grate with as much delicacy and precision as if they had been live hand grenades.

Quelling a surprisingly strong urge to jump up and down and shout ‘Boo!’, Stratton murmured, ‘Talked to him, have you?’

‘Yes.’ Ballard jerked his head towards one of the doors. ‘We’re down the corridor, same as before.’

As he opened the door, Stratton saw that, as before, the earnest young chap was positioned outside the door of the room designated for their use. Bolt upright and staring straight ahead, he didn’t turn to look at them as they came towards him, or even when Stratton stopped within a couple of feet of his chair. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to ask you to move, sir.’

The man turned to them, his face pleasant, but firm. ‘I must stay here,’ he said. ‘I am on duty.’

Stratton leant forward and put one foot on the crossbar on the side of the chair. ‘So are we, sir,’ he said quietly. ‘Hop it.’

The man moved slightly away from Stratton’s upraised knee, but his expression remained unaltered. ‘I am here should you need—’

‘We shan’t need anything.’ Stratton smiled, baring his teeth. ‘We’re happy all by ourselves.’ He gave the chair a shove with his foot. ‘On your way.’

Rising with as much dignity as he could muster, the man walked slowly away down the long corridor, stopping to glance back at the corner and, finding the pair of them still staring at him, vanished as abruptly as if he had been yanked by a rope.