A Willing Victim (34 page)

‘At least let me make you a cup of tea, Edward.’

‘All right.’ Realising that this sounded churlish and ungrateful, and unable to think of anything to do or say that wouldn’t compound this impression, Stratton left the room and went and stood outside the tiny front door, blowing smoke into the cold
grey dawn, until Diana rapped on the window to signal that the tea was ready.

He tried to focus his mind on the day ahead, but couldn’t remember what he was supposed to be doing in any sort of useful detail. Instead, his mind seemed to be juddering with echoes of what Diana had said, like a series of mental aftershocks. He pulled out his notebook and stared at what he’d written, but none of it seemed to make sense.

In the kitchen, he said, in a rush, ‘I know … I realise … that I’m not glamorous like those other chaps, that I’m …’ That he was what? What the hell was he trying to say? ‘I’m sorry, Diana. I’m just so … so …’

‘Confused, I should think.’ Diana handed him a cup of tea, her eyes large and dark with concern.

‘I was just thinking – or trying to think – about everything you said up there, not just about Monica, and I suppose I don’t really know what you want, or why you … why we are … what we’re doing. I’m sorry, that sounds … I don’t mean …’ Baffled, Stratton gave up and stared at her for a long moment. ‘Help me,’ he said, finally.

Diana, who’d been frowning into her tea as though she feared there might be a fly in it, raised her head and looked at him. ‘That bit of it’s simple,’ she said. ‘We enjoy each other’s company, don’t we? Well, I enjoy yours, anyway. And we like each other. Not just for …’ she glanced upwards, ‘
that
, but generally speaking.’

‘Yes,’ said Stratton hopelessly. ‘Of course we do.’

‘And you like women, don’t you? I mean, other than wanting to go to bed with them. At least, you seem to.’

Stratton was about to tell her it was a silly question and of course he did, but pulled himself back. Did he? He’d never really thought about it. Suddenly, an image of Albertine, the jolly kid from the coffee bar, popped up in his mind. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I like women. And girls. The nice ones, anyway.’

‘And I’m a nice one, am I?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Monica’s a nice one, too, isn’t she?’

‘Of course she is, but I don’t understand what you’re getting at.’

‘Just that you must be able to see, if you like women – I mean, as opposed to just fancying some of them – that there can sometimes be a bit of a gap between what they want and what they’re expected to want. You expect Monica to want one thing, and she wants another and, now you know that, it might be a good idea to try to understand it a bit. I know,’ she added, after a moment, ‘that it probably won’t be very easy, but all the same …’

‘I’ll do my best. I can’t let her down again.’

‘You haven’t let anyone down. You can’t be responsible for someone else’s happiness, Edward. No one can. All you can do is make sure that you’re not helping to make them miserable.’

This was so much the kind of thing that Jenny used to tell him, delivered with the same totality of honesty and compassion, that Stratton felt a lump form in his throat. While he was trying to collect himself, Diana said, ‘I think I should probably go back to London today, rather than staying on. All this …’ she gestured at the range, ‘is a bit too primitive to be comfortable for long, and I was only planning on staying one more night anyway, so …’

‘It’s probably best,’ said Stratton, relieved to be led onto the safe ground of practicalities.

Diana nodded. ‘I know you’ve got heaps of work to do, and I think you need some distance – space, really. It’s a lot to think about.’

Backing his car into the overgrown and rutted drive, Stratton spotted an MG Roadster parked beside the house. He hadn’t noticed it in the darkness the night before. He wondered, vaguely, if the
colleague Diana had borrowed it from was the Barbara woman who owned the house, or someone else. Why did it matter, anyway? Despite the revelations of the previous night, there was a lot he didn’t know and had never asked about Diana’s life. He’d known, as he’d kissed her goodbye, that the balance of their relationship had changed irrevocably. What this meant for the future, he had absolutely no idea, and now wasn’t the time to start speculating, especially about unimportant stuff like whose car she’d borrowed.

Without a conscious decision, or even a thought, Stratton turned his car in the direction of the burnt house. Coming round the corner, he saw that the circular front lawn was choked with brambles, which were beginning to encroach on the building itself. What was left of the once-white facade was scorched and cracked, and the great front door hung open, lopsided and forlorn. Stratton left his car and, skirting the brambles, made his way up the steps to look inside. He saw, amidst the mess of blackened rafters and rubble on the hall floor, a smashed pillar, which had clearly fallen from a height, crashing through the delicate iron balustrade at the top of the main staircase on its way down. He imagined it, hurled through the flames as if by some unseen infernal power, and felt a shiver down his spine. Beside it, a ray of sunlight pointed an accusing finger at the broken and twisted frame of an iron bedspread: a tortured skeleton.

Back in the car he felt foolish, although, he told himself, to proceed would have been equally foolish. Diana had told him it was unsafe, hadn’t she, and in any case, what was there to see? Turning round, he drove back to the road, imagining the blackened horror of the rooms inside. He wondered if anyone had been killed in the fire. Presumably, if they had, Diana would have said so … If anyone had told me that
that
house was haunted, he thought, I’d believe it. Suppressing a sudden impulse to stop at the Lodge and tell Diana on no account to go anywhere near the place, he drove back through Halstead Wyse and on to Lincott.

As Stratton drove, he found himself struck by the resounding ordinariness of what he heard and saw, and his fear – because that’s what it had been, no two ways about it – of the ruined house seemed not merely foolish, but idiotic. The mail van outside the village post office, the housewife in carpet slippers at her gate, the motorbike with a sidecar, the man and his dog glimpsed across a field, the distant lowing of cows … everything was as it should be. The burnt house had made him suggestible, that was all, and his imagination had reacted accordingly. There was quite enough, he thought grimly, to bother him in real life – Monica, Pete, this flaming investigation to name but three – without getting het up about stuff that didn’t actually exist.

It was just gone half past seven when he pulled up outside the George and Dragon, where any hopes of making an unobtrusive entrance were scuppered by the landlord, who was hauling dustbins about and hailed him with a sort of jovial menace.

Cursing himself for leaving it so late, Stratton said ‘Morning,’ in a businesslike fashion.

Clapping a lid on the nearest bin with a metallic clang, Denton said, ‘Thought I hadn’t seen you go up to your room last night.’ Before Stratton had time to gather his thoughts enough to
stammer out an excuse, the landlord tapped the side of his nose and said, ‘Don’t worry, squire. Don’t ask, don’t tell, that’s my motto.’

Deciding that saying anything at all would only compound the situation, Stratton smiled weakly and went inside as quickly as he could without actually giving the appearance of hurrying.

After a wash and shave, he changed and, pausing only to ruffle up the bedclothes – knowing, as he did so, that it was shutting the stable door after the horse had gone, because Denton would undoubtedly tell Maisie – walked down to the police station to meet Ballard.

They spent an unedifying morning at the Foundation, re-interviewing all the students about everyone’s movements on the night that Lloyd had died and the day that Mrs Aylett had been shot. As Ballard had predicted, they’d closed ranks. Now, their smiles were cold and invincible, the merest veneer of politeness overlaying outright hostility, as, one by one, they all claimed that,
as far as they knew
, nobody, bar Mary/Ananda, had been absent from the place during those periods. When asked if they’d seen Mary/Ananda or Tynan’s Vauxhall Velox in the past twenty-four hours, they denied that, too.

If Tynan had told Miss Kirkland that they’d asked him for a photograph with her in it, she gave no sign of it. When at the end of four fruitless hours they asked to see Roth, she told him frostily that he and Michael had gone out, chauffeured by the man McCardle.

‘Well,’ said Ballard, as they left, ‘even if one of them did know somebody’d been absent, they weren’t going to tell us, were they?’

‘No chance,’ said Stratton. He was immensely relieved when Ballard made an offer of lunch at his house, because he’d been fearful that Denton, on seeing him again, would deploy his –
undoubtedly full – repertoire of verbal nudges and winks, which were bound to be impossible for his erstwhile sergeant to miss.

Pauline, who seemed a bit distant, said she’d already eaten but dished up bread, cheese and some extremely good soup and left them to their own devices, and afterwards they went to stretch their legs in the churchyard, smoking and enjoying the weak winter sun. Stratton wandered about by himself, peering at the names on the graves. Judging from the preponderance of Pooles, Lamberts and Warrens, these were the three main local families, although there were a fair few Leggetts and Buckleys as well. Some were hard to read, obliterated by lichen and centuries of rain on stones that were listing and neglected, but others – less appealing, he thought – had the rawness of new stone, with plainer lettering, name and dates only. An elderly woman, her blueish/grey hair in frozen waves and a basket on her arm, appeared from the church and nodded to him as he skirted the railed tomb of some landowning family and stopped in front of a grave that was blanketed with bunches of flowers, some brand new, others wilting and apologetic. It belonged to a child – Thomas Martin, who’d died, aged eighteen months, in 1912, and, according to the stone, been ‘taken to the Lord’.

Ballard came up beside him, looked at the name, and shook his head. ‘Billy wasn’t even that when he disappeared.’

‘She might,’ said Stratton, who’d been thinking along the same lines, ‘have just left him somewhere, of course. Hoped he’d be found.’

‘Like Moses in the bulrushes?’

‘She’s certainly fanciful enough. God …’ Veering away from the subject, Stratton said, ‘This little chap’s pretty popular, isn’t he?’

‘I think that might be my Katy’s doing. She’s always trotting about redistributing the flowers so that everybody’s got at least
one bunch, but I’ve noticed that it’s the children’s graves who get the most attention.’

Stratton looked down the rows of gravestones and saw that indeed, everybody had at least one bunch. ‘Obviously democratically minded, your daughter. There’s one down there that looks as if it says Tynan – at the end.’

Following his gaze, Ballard said, ‘Think it’s his wife?’

They ambled across, past a row of Pooles and Warrens, and read:
The Hon. Dorothy Tynan, 27
^th
January 1904–17
^th
March, 1954
.

‘Never noticed that before,’ said Ballard. ‘Not that I spend much time in here. Fifty years old – bit rough, that.’

Cancer, thought Stratton, remembering what Diana had told him. ‘Did they have children?’

‘Don’t think so. Never heard of any, if they did. Wonder what she thought of it all.’

‘The Foundation, you mean?’

‘I was thinking more of Mary/Ananda.’

‘I think I saw a photograph of her at Tynan’s house. If it was her, she didn’t really look the type for all the navel-gazing malarkey. As to the other thing, who knows? She’s not around to tell us, and Tynan sure as hell isn’t going to.’

‘I’ve managed to locate the birth certificate for the boy at the Old Rectory,’ said Parsons, when they returned to the station. ‘The Kirkland woman confirmed that his surname is Milburn. I don’t have the actual copy yet, but I got them to read out the details.’ He pushed a slip of paper across the counter, and Stratton read,
Michael James Milburn, Date of Birth: 28
^th
February, 1946; Father: Reverend Edward Granville Milburn; Mother: Mary Ann Milburn, formerly Hamilton; Father’s Occupation: Clergyman; Informant: M. Milburn, Mother, address given as 32, Dale Road, West Ham. Registration District: West Ham, Birth in the sub-district of West Ham North East (Forest Gate Hospital)
.

‘Literally a father in heaven,’ said Ballard, ‘given that Michael can’t have been conceived earlier than the end of May and Milburn died in the middle of the month, didn’t he?’

Stratton flipped through his notebook. ‘Yes, the seventeenth. Unless the baby was late in coming and the Revd Milburn managed to impregnate Mary/Ananda on his deathbed.’

‘Doesn’t sound very likely, according to what Dr Slater said about his condition.’ Ballard consulted his notebook and read out, ‘
Bedridden, crippled with arthritis, difficulty feeding himself …
He was quite positive about all that.’

‘Mary had an affair with Slater about that time, didn’t she?’

‘Yes, if you can call it that.’

‘So
he
could be Michael’s father.’

‘We’ll probably never know the answer to that,’ said Ballard. ‘And from what we know of her, I’m beginning to wonder if she knows herself.’ Turning back to the policeman, he said, ‘Did you get anything else?’

‘Nothing’s come in on the car Mrs Milburn was driving, sir, but we have two sightings of Mrs Aylett getting off the bus at around three o’clock on the fifth of November. One said he saw her consult a piece of paper and walk off down Long Lane.’

‘That’s the way to the Foundation,’ said Ballard. ‘Presumably the paper was directions on how to get there. Lloyd – if it was him – must have put them in the letter. Did you manage to get round everybody, Parsons?’

‘Pretty well. We haven’t managed to talk to John Dunning yet. He’s our local poacher,’ Parsons told Stratton, ‘so it’s quite likely he was in the wood emptying his traps and what not. Adlard went round there – said his wife was cagey about his whereabouts.’