A Willing Victim (6 page)

‘Edward, I’m so sorry!’ Looking up, he saw Diana in front of him and jumped up, making the candle wobble precariously on the small table. As always, her beauty made him catch his breath. Tall and elegant, with shining blonde hair and huge, luminous eyes, she was graciously receiving the attentions of two waiters who were falling over themselves to help her off with her coat, pull out her chair and provide her with a drink. Penned in by furniture and knowing he was surplus to requirements, Stratton sat down again, feeling sheepish. He’d often noticed that people always rushed to Diana’s assistance, made allowances, and generally put themselves out. He did it himself, didn’t he? Watching her now, he found himself wondering whether she realised such solicitousness on the part of others was the exception rather than the rule – but then, he reasoned, to her it was entirely normal.

‘I’m afraid I got held up at work. It’s this film I told you about, with the alligator. It’s supposed to be a girl, but this afternoon we realised that the one we’ve got is rather
obviously
male at times. Apparently it’s impossible to tell unless they get, you know,
excited
, and I suppose it didn’t occur to anyone to ask the owner. The problem is, there are lots of close-ups with the leading man holding it and so on . . . They’re trying to find a female one from
a zoo or something, but it meant rescheduling everything and a lot of fuss about different costumes, and that’s why I’m late.’

Stratton raised an eyebrow. Since Diana had started working in the design department at Ashwood Studios, she’d come back with a few tales, but . . . ‘Well, as excuses go, it’s certainly original.’

‘You’re not angry, are you?’ Diana looked distressed. ‘I did my best, but—’

‘I’m joking! It’s almost the weirdest thing I’ve heard all day. Couldn’t you give it some bromide?’

‘I don’t suppose it works on alligators. So what’s the weirdest thing you’ve heard all day?’

Once they’d ordered and been served, Stratton told her about Mr Heddon and the message from outer space, and then a bit about Jeremy Lloyd. ‘We’ve found his aunt, the only next of kin, and he seems to have been friendly with Ambrose Tynan. Didn’t they make a film of one of his books at Ashwood a few years ago?’

Diana nodded. ‘
Such Men Are Dangerous
. But that was an early spy one, not one of those witchcraft things. I met him.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes, he came to the studio. Terribly
grand
. Went about handing out copies of his books. The one I got was some nonsense about flying saucers.’

‘When you say
grand
like that,’ said Stratton, ‘do you mean “common pretending to be upper class”? Not quite “one of us”?’ This came out with rather more of an edge than he’d intended, and Diana flushed.

‘It sounds horrible when you put it like that – snobbish. I suppose it’s true, though. I met someone who knows him in the country recently, and they said – oh, dear . . .’ Diana’s colour intensified and she looked down at her plate. ‘They said he’s been acting the part for so long that he’d probably be genuinely
horrified to find his name wasn’t in
Debrett’s
. His wife’s was, though – or her father, anyway, because she was the Honourable Dorothy Lambton before she married. Came to the studio with him – I got the impression she didn’t take him very seriously. I did wonder if the money mightn’t have played quite a part in it, because they got married quite late on, after he was successful, and her family was stony broke, but I rather liked her. She died a couple of years ago. Cancer, I think. But
anyway
,’ Diana rolled her eyes, still slightly embarrassed but trying to make a joke out of it, ‘what I was trying to say was that he seemed to me – and I could be wrong because I only spoke to him for about five minutes,’ she added hastily, ‘to be, well, sort of invented. By himself, I mean.’

‘Doesn’t everyone invent themselves as they go along?’

‘I don’t quite mean that. It was more . . . well, as if . . .’ Diana thought for a moment, toying with the stem of her glass, then said, ‘As if he’d decided at about sixteen what kind of person he was going to be. As if he’d written it all down or something, like a, a template, then set about forming himself into that. Oh, look, I’m probably talking rubbish. Take no notice. What is interesting, though, is that he knew Colonel Forbes-James. Worked for the Secret Service during the war.’

‘Surely he shouldn’t have told you that?’

‘He didn’t.’ Diana’s cheeks, which had returned to their usual colour, went pink again. ‘Claude Ventriss told me.’

‘Oh, yes?’ Stratton tried to quell the surge of aggression that welled, unbidden, inside him. Ventriss had been Diana’s lover during the war, when she’d been married to her first husband. Stratton had hated him on sight, a feeling which had intensified after the way he’d treated her later on, when she was all but destitute after her second husband had deserted her. ‘What did he say?’

‘Only that Tynan wrote papers about defence and things like
that. I remember Claude saying that he’d never seen one, but if they were anything like his conversation they must be quite mad. Claude said he was always talking to F-J about mind control and astral projection and things like that.’

Stratton wanted to ask Diana if she thought that Colonel Forbes-James, the section head to whom he’d been seconded during the war to work on a sensitive murder case, believed in such things, but he didn’t fancy hearing ‘Claude said this’ and ‘Claude said that’ again and again. In any case, Forbes-James wasn’t an easy topic of conversation. Stratton was fairly certain that he’d committed suicide, and pretty sure that Diana knew far more about the circumstances than he did, but as she’d never alluded to it he’d judged it best not to ask. One way or another, he reflected, there were a hell of a lot of things between them that were off-limits. Not just the stuff about Forbes-James and that bastard Ventriss, but the fact that, three years before, he’d seen Diana at her lowest ebb, distressed, dishevelled and homeless, and he was careful never to say anything that would remind her of it. It wasn’t only that he hated to think she went on seeing him because she felt indebted, but he also knew that someone seeing you like that made you vulnerable, which could lead to your resenting them, and—

‘What is it, Edward?’ Diana had put down her knife and fork and was looking at him in consternation.

‘What is what?’

‘You’ve been glaring at me for the last two minutes.’

‘I’m sorry. It’s not you, it’s just this case . . . I’ve got a horrible feeling it isn’t going to be at all straightforward.’

‘I suppose you’ll have to interview Tynan, will you?’

‘’Fraid so. Still, it means a change of scenery – he lives in Suffolk.’

‘In quite a . . .’ Diana laughed, ‘
grand
house, I believe. I remember his telling me about it. He collects all sorts of art. Quite a wine cellar, too, judging by what he said.’

‘Got to be better than this stuff.’ Stratton grimaced at his glass. ‘Still, I shan’t be offered any. Or asked my opinion of his collection.’

Diana, looking anxious, said, ‘Oh, I didn’t tell you. I saw Monica today. She’s working on the stage next to the alligator film.’

It was an obvious change of subject, but Stratton, who adored his daughter, was quite happy to be drawn. ‘A comedy, she said.’

Diana nodded. ‘
The Cabbage Patch
. It’s set on a farm. They’re doing the interiors at the moment – barns and what not. At least,’ she added, ‘our alligator hasn’t scoffed any of the props.’

Stratton laughed. ‘Monica’d like that – the animals, I mean. She and Pete were evacuated to a place with a farm, and they loved helping out. That was in Suffolk, come to think of it.’

‘I don’t suppose she has that much to do with the animals – I mean, they don’t need make-up – but she certainly looked happy.’

‘Oh, she is. At work, anyway.’

As if guessing what was in his mind, Diana said, ‘You needn’t worry, you know. She’s doing fine.’

They finished their dinner and sat talking about nothing in particular over cups of coffee – only marginally nicer than the wine – until it was time for him to find Diana a taxi and catch the bus home. Dozing off in the warm fug, he found himself in a half-memory, half-dream of himself and Jenny walking arm in arm down the pier at Brighton with the sea pounding beneath their feet so that they could feel it through the soles of their shoes. When they reached the end of the pier, the sea had calmed, and they stood watching the sunset, the scudding pink clouds . . .

The revving of the engine woke him, and he sat up quickly, self-conscious and feeling dizzy and disconcerted, as if he’d suddenly found himself in the middle of a tightrope walk, a long, long way from the ground.

*

This sensation, or at least its uneasy aftermath, returned the following morning, when, on the way to the station to catch the train to Suffolk, he encountered a solemn-looking elderly bloke with a soup-strainer moustache who was wearing a sandwich board reading, ‘The End is Nigh’. On the back it said, ‘God Wants You’, which made Stratton think of Kitchener. The old boy was being followed by a tramp with a beard so densely matted that it looked like felt, and whose lack of teeth and missing shoelaces made him, with the tongues lolling out of his boots, appear to have come undone at both ends. ‘How can I find Him, then?’ he was shouting. ‘Has He got a telephone number? You got His number, have you? Eh? Eh?’ The God bloke, clearly embarrassed by the noisy attention, was hampered in his efforts to escape by the board, which hung down to his knees. After watching for a moment, Stratton intervened, identified himself, and sent the tramp on his way, much to the relief of the God chap, who shook his hand repeatedly and started talking about Billy Graham.

‘I’ve been,’ said Stratton, attempting to free his fingers.

‘Ah,’ said the man, ‘then you
know
.’

‘You’ve got the wrong bloke, mate,’ Stratton muttered, as he walked away.

As the train pulled out of the station and picked up speed, Stratton stared out at the dirty backs of houses, gapped with bomb sites where the past had been knocked down and the future hadn’t yet arrived. That’s assuming that there’s going to be a future, he thought. Who knows?

As the tunnels of blackened bricks and the backs of houses gave way to flat-roofed asbestos prefabs and finally to countryside, spooling past him through the carriage window, Stratton reflected that the more you thought about religion, the less sense it made. That stuff about having ‘sure and certain hope of the Resurrection’, for example. It simply wasn’t possible – hope, by
its very nature, was neither sure nor certain . . . Still, if you puzzled over that sort of thing too much, you’d probably end up as barmy as Lloyd had evidently been. It was all far too bloody complicated. Shame about the weather, he thought, looking out at muddy fields and waterlogged thatch, but it’s nice to get out into the country – and he wasn’t half pleased at the prospect of a drink and a chat with Ballard. He’d telephoned his former sergeant before he’d left, and, behind the ribbing about Stratton’s encroaching on his patch, he’d sensed that Ballard was looking forward to their reunion as much as he was.

Soothed by the rhythm of the train, he leant back in his seat and closed his eyes.

Standing in his back garden, Detective Inspector Ballard could see, over the wall, a large stone angel on a pedestal, her head bowed low in prayer, and, on the far side, brown fields, some still dotted with pillboxes, vanishing over the horizon. His wife Pauline hadn’t liked the idea of living so near a graveyard, but as Ballard had pointed out, at least their neighbours were quiet, and Katy, their daughter, enjoyed playing in there.

There was no doubt that moving to Suffolk had done her good. Now a sturdy six-year-old, there were roses in her cheeks and – thank God – her breathing had improved no end. Pauline, although she’d missed her family badly at first, seemed to like it here too, and so, on balance, did he. Of course, there were things he missed about West End Central – and, come to that, about Putney, where they’d lived – the people, the busyness of the place, the feeling of being at the epicentre . . . But, set against the biggest thing of all, they seemed trifling.

In the aftermath of the Davies and Backhouse cases, the suffocating weight of ‘if onlys’ had made him doubt his thoughts and instincts to the point where he seemed to be suffering from a sort of creeping mental paralysis which all too often gave rise to a jeering inner chorus of self-disgust. Geographical distance was,
he knew, no substitute for mental distance, but it had certainly helped not to be seeing the same people – DI Stratton, DCI Lamb and the rest – every day. The constant I-know-you-know of guilty knowledge and the horror of 10 Paradise Street that lurked, unacknowledged and never discussed, at the corner of the station’s collective eye, had proved in the end too much. When he was offered the chance of transferring to the country, he’d accepted immediately, without waiting to consult Pauline. This, he realised afterwards, was wrong, but he’d done it unthinkingly, as a drowning man would grab at a lifebelt. Presenting it to her as a fait accompli, he’d argued that promotion meant more pay, which had gone down well, and the point about Katy’s welfare had gone down even better. When Pauline had advanced an argument of her own, that the healthier air of the countryside might help her conceive the second child she so desperately wanted, Ballard felt he was home and dry. The matter of a sister or brother for Katy didn’t bother him one way or the other, but as long as it remained at two children (still affordable) and didn’t become three or – God forbid – four, he didn’t really mind. He’d been sorry when Pauline’s second pregnancy, back in 1953, had ended in a miscarriage, but if he were honest his feelings had been more to do with concern for his wife’s grief than anything else. Since then, each month had brought more disappointment, and, as Pauline had made it clear that his attempts at reassurance were pathetically inadequate, he had for the sake of sanity closed his mind to the problem, reasoning that either they would have another baby, or they wouldn’t, and there was nothing – apart from the obvious – that he could do about it. And that was quite bad enough, thanks to the pamphlet Pauline had sent off for, with its helpful diagrams and instructions which had to be followed to the letter and made him feel more as if he were carrying out a medical procedure than participating in sexual activity.