A Willing Victim (31 page)

‘Can Harwood make tea?’ asked Stratton. ‘Or will he burn the place down? I could do with something to get rid of the taste of that food.’

‘That’s just about the only thing he can do,’ said Ballard, dialling.

‘Right you are, then.’

‘Bad news and good news, old son,’ Grove’s phlegmy rumble came down the line. ‘We’ve done a search of Jeremy Lloyd’s belongings, and we didn’t turn up any birth certificate.
But
…’ Grove paused, and Stratton could hear him spluttering into his handkerchief, ‘we did find a slip of paper rolled up with the spills for lighting the gas fire – a bit torn, but it’s got half of Mrs Aylett’s name on it, and her address. Bit of a coincidence if that’s nothing to do with it, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Definitely. What’s the rest?’

‘I’ve been to see your Mrs Astley. She says the Milburn woman was there, all right. The maid confirms it. Says Mrs M. spent most of the time in bed and she was up and down like a whore’s drawers, carrying trays.’

‘Was Mrs Milburn ill?’

‘Well, according to Mrs A., the poor dear was “all done up and needed a good rest,” and they didn’t go out anywhere, not even the pictures. She doesn’t take a newspaper, so she’d no idea we were looking for her guest.’

‘What was she like?’

‘Bit daffy, but all right otherwise. Wealthy widow, nice house, big garden. All above board, I’d say. Met Mrs M. when she – Mrs M., that is – was working in a dress shop up the road and they became friends after that.’

‘When was this?’

‘Just after the war, she said. She never saw Mrs M. with a child, or heard her mention one. She found the address for me, where Mrs M. was staying at the time – lodging house nearby. I spoke to the landlady, Mrs Harper, and she saw she didn’t know anything about a child, either.
However, s
he said Mrs M. was pregnant. Mrs M. didn’t tell her, though – Mrs Harper said she wouldn’t have known if she hadn’t walked in on Mrs M. by accident when she was in the bathroom. Mrs M. told Mrs H. that she was a widow, husband killed in the war. Mrs H. said she felt sorry for her – or at least she did until Mrs M. did a moonlight flit owing two months’ rent.’

‘Do you know the exact dates?’

‘Wait a minute … Here we are. Mrs M. arrived on September the twenty-fifth and left in the middle of November. Mrs H. had no idea where she’d gone, and never saw her again. Mrs Astley didn’t know where she’d gone either, and she didn’t see Mrs M. again until about a year afterwards, when Mrs M. suddenly popped up on her doorstep. She said Mrs M. never mentioned having a baby and told her she’d been ill and “living quietly in the country”, nothing else.’

‘Did she or Mrs Harper mention Mrs Milburn having any gentlemen friends while she was living in Wimbledon?’

‘Nope. Mrs A. is also under the impression that Mrs M. is a war widow. Says she can’t understand why she’s never remarried.’

‘So she walked out of Mrs Harper’s and disappeared.’

‘That’s about the size of it, I’m afraid.’

‘Bloody hell. Well, I’d better put you in the picture about what we’ve been up to …’

When he’d finished, Grove said wearily, ‘And I suppose you want me to relay all that to Lamb, do you?’

‘I say,’ Stratton put on a high voice and a lisp, ‘you are a sweetie.’

‘And you’re a cowardy custard who doesn’t want his dear ickle bollocks ripped off.’

‘Too right I am.’

‘Can’t say I blame you. Still, you weren’t to know about the kid, were you? Those weirdos are obviously playing silly buggers, and that Mrs Milburn sounds the most doolally of the lot.’

‘I think,’ said Stratton, ‘we’d better try another appeal to the public. After all, Mrs M. dumped Tom on the Wheelers, so there’s a chance she might have done the same with Billy somewhere else. Can you talk to Lamb about it? You’ll have to be careful with the wording, though. The Wheelers were definitely in two minds about contacting us – they thought we’d take Tom away.’

Grove heaved a sigh. ‘Fair enough. And I suppose you’d like me to stick a broom up my arse and sweep the floor at the same time?’

‘So Mrs Curtin was right about Mary/Ananda being pregnant,’ said Ballard, when Stratton had given him the gist of the telephone call to Grove. ‘Michael told us he was born in February 1946, didn’t he?’

‘Yes, so Mary/Ananda must have been only a couple of months gone when Mrs C. spotted it. But according to Mrs Astley and the landlady, there weren’t any men hanging around.’

‘Perhaps he
was
immaculately conceived.’

Stratton lobbed a pencil at him. ‘Don’t
you
start.’

PC Parsons appeared, bearing two thick china mugs of tea. ‘Compliments of PC Harwood.’

‘All done?’ asked Ballard. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘I take it you didn’t find anything.’

‘No, sir.’

‘What were they up to when you left?’

‘Having a meeting, by the looks of it. The one in charge—’

‘Mr Roth?’

‘No, the lady. She came to see us off. That’s a strange old place, sir. I looked in a couple of the bedrooms while they were searching, and it was like a convent or something. I don’t know if any of them are married, but there’s no married quarters. And it’s all plain, no photographs or personal stuff. I hope you don’t mind, sir, but I brought Miss Wickstead back with me – that’s our policewoman, sir,’ he told Stratton. ‘There didn’t seem much point in her staying, and we need to make a start round the village with Mrs Aylett’s picture.’

‘That’s fine,’ said Ballard. ‘Anything else?’

‘I’ve got the copy of the birth certificate for Billy Aylett from records, sir.’

‘Well,’ said Ballard, ‘now we need you to get one for Michael Milburn, born on the twenty-eighth of February 1946.’

‘Do you know where he was born, sir?’

‘Haven’t the foggiest,’ said Ballard, wearily. ‘You might telephone Miss Kirkland at the Foundation and find out if anyone there knows.’

‘Better ask about his surname as well,’ said Stratton. ‘We don’t know that he’s actually called Michael Milburn, do we?’

‘Blimey,’ said Parsons, who looked less than enchanted at the prospect. ‘Nothing’s straightforward with this lot, is it?’

‘Did you get anything on the chap Mrs Milburn was supposed to be marrying in 1945?’ asked Ballard.

Parsons’ face brightened. ‘Yes, sir. There was one that matched.’ Licking a thumb and finger and grubbing through the pages of his notebook, he read, ‘
Michael John Carroll from Idaho, stationed at USAF Bentwaters as aircrew. Due to go home in the middle of September, but killed in an accident on the base on the twelfth. Accident thought to have been caused by his negligence – he was under the influence at the time, and had been disciplined for drunkenness several times.
Oh, and he was …’ Parsons scanned the rest of the page, ‘twenty-five years old and unmarried.’

‘Mary/Ananda moved into lodgings at Wimbledon on the twentieth, without Billy,’ said Stratton, when the constable had gone. ‘Couldn’t even tell the truth about Carroll’s death, could she? Car accident in Berlin my foot. She just lied to us for the hell of it.’

‘I don’t think she told the truth about
when
she found out about his death, either,’ said Ballard. ‘I reckon she heard about it a couple of days after it happened and high-tailed it down to London as soon as she could.’

‘Managing to lose Billy somehow in the process.’

‘How could any mother just
discard
her children like that?’ said Ballard. ‘Even if Billy was adopted. It’s not natural.’

‘Let’s just hope she discarded him
alive
,’ said Stratton, grimly.

Ballard leant back and stared up at the yellowing paint on the ceiling. ‘You know, I keep thinking about that room in Rosemary Aylett’s house, all the things she’d bought for him when she thought he was coming back.
That’s
how a mother behaves, not …’

He shook his head and they stared at each other in grim intimacy, leaving a wealth of unsayable things unsaid.

‘Parsons said Michael Carroll was twenty-five,’ said Stratton. ‘In 1945, Mary/Ananda would have been in her late twenties, wouldn’t she?’

‘I don’t imagine she looked it,’ said Ballard. ‘I’ll bet she picked on him because he
was
younger. First time away from home, off some farm …’

‘And it sounds like he had a bit of a problem with the sauce. Easy to wind him round her little finger, and that was her ticket out, all the way to Idaho.’

‘Far from all the horrible people saying nasty things about how she’d done away with her husband and had it off with the doctor,’ concluded Ballard.

‘Exactly. Now, I haven’t mentioned this to Grove yet, but I think we ought to get them to hawk a photograph of Miss Kirkland around Flaxman Court.’

‘God!’ Ballard slapped his notebook on the edge of the desk in frustration. ‘I’d forgotten about that, what with everything else.’

‘Of course,’ said Stratton, ‘we don’t know that it’s her. It might be one of the others. Or,’ he added despondently, ‘it might be someone else entirely.’

‘I don’t fancy trying to get hold of, what, twenty-odd photographs,
and telling Grove he’s got to go house-to-house with them, do you?’

‘Christ, no. But we should try with Miss K.’s picture first. I think our best bet would be to ask Tynan.’

‘Our only bet, you mean,’ said Ballard. ‘You heard what Parsons said about them not being keen on photographs at the Foundation. And they won’t be too keen on us, either. Parsons said they had a meeting, and you can bet Roth’s told them to close ranks against the Forces of Darkness, so I don’t suppose we’ll be able to get anything more out of any of them.’ He shook his head dejectedly.

‘Well, it’s our best hope, so why don’t we collect the photograph from Tynan, drop it back here to be sent to Grove and then call it a day? I don’t know about you, but I could do with a drink.’

‘God, what a complete balls-up.’

It was a quarter past six, and the only other customers in the George and Dragon were a sliver of a man with a grimly head-scarfed wife. Stratton and Ballard chose a table as far away from them as possible and sat gloomily, nursing their pints.

‘What do think will happen to him?’ asked Ballard.

‘Michael? Well, if he is Mary/Ananda’s child and she’s given him into Roth’s care – legally, I mean – then he’ll have to stay at the Foundation, won’t he? He’ll be a freak.’

‘I suppose,’ said Ballard, ‘he won’t know any different, will he? The adults in the place have chosen to be there. They’ve found the outside world wanting, so they’ve stepped out of that world and into Roth’s, and they’ve invested a lot in it – spiritually and emotionally—’

‘Not to mention financially,’ put in Stratton.

‘That, too. But Michael’s there because he was
put
there. D’you know, I’d be surprised if he knows anyone of his own age.’

‘Must be pretty lonely.’

‘How do you think he’d manage outside?’

Stratton took a thoughtful pull on his pint. ‘He’d have a lot of adjusting to do, that’s for sure. Other kids would be bound to rag him something rotten if he went about telling them he was Jesus or something. And if he carried on doing it as an adult – well, he might end up getting put away. I’d say the longer he stays at the Foundation, the greater his chances of ending up in a loony-bin. But we can’t do anything about that until we talk to Mary/Ananda.’

Ballard groaned. ‘Wherever
she’s
got to. Before we left the station I checked with Harwood in case there’d been any sightings and he’d forgotten to tell us, but there hasn’t been a dicky bird.’ He stared at Stratton for a moment, then passed his hand over his face in a gesture of unutterable weariness. ‘Listen, if it’s all right with you, I ought to be getting home.’

Stratton sat on by himself for a while after Ballard had left, watching the farm workers troop in and hunch down, monkey-like, over their pints. He tried to summon up the energy to trudge upstairs and run himself a bath, but even that felt like too much effort. After about ten minutes, during which the pub had gone from nearly empty to three-quarters full, Maisie Denton appeared to help her husband behind the bar.

Stratton watched her for a moment and then remembered, with a sudden pang of apprehension, that he was supposed to be meeting Diana at her friend’s cottage.

Driving through the potholed country lanes in the moonlight, it took Stratton the best part of half an hour, including several wrong turnings and quite a lot of swearing, to arrive at the address Diana had given him in the village of Halstead Wyse. He supposed that, if he played his cards right, there was no need for Ballard – or indeed anyone else – to find out about Diana. Quite why this was so important, he wasn’t sure; after all, neither of them was married. It was just the image he had of himself rushing back from a rendezvous, lipstick-smeared and fly buttons undone, having to explain himself to his incredulous former sergeant, that seemed furtive and indecent.

Telling himself that really, he
wanted
to see Diana – which he supposed he would have, if he hadn’t felt so bloody tired – and that he was bound to perk up when he got there and actually
did
see her didn’t seem to help much, and by the time he arrived he was in a thoroughly bad temper.

The heart of the village, being a jumble of Tudor and Victorian cottages around a small green, a general store and a church, alarmed him – far too many people to keep tabs on the comings and goings of a pair of strangers – but, enquiring at the pub, he discovered that the Lodge, which was the address Diana had
given him, lay some way away from the centre. On being told it was hard by the ‘burnt old hall’ he began to feel that he had somehow got into the beginning of a very bad ghost story. This sensation was intensified as he drove out of the village and up to the top of the hill as indicated, where, by the feeble beams of his headlamps, he could make out an enormous pair of rusted wrought-iron gates hanging drunkenly open, with, in front of them, an overgrown and rutted track leading, presumably, to the burnt house that had, he supposed, once been the area’s largest and swankiest property.