A Willing Victim

by Wilson, Laura

  ‘Do you think that’s how Reg sees it?’

  ‘God knows.’ Don laughed. ‘There, you see? It’s like any situation in life – illness, death . . . annihilation . . . somebody must know. They don’t, of course, so we’re stuck with God because if He doesn’t, we’re buggered.’

  ‘I think,’ said Stratton, nodding in the direction of the newspaper, ‘that we’re buggered anyway, so far as that goes.’

  ‘Yeah . . . the Empire on which the sun never sets. Famous last words.’

  ‘Pete’s going. Got a letter yesterday.’

  ‘You didn’t say.’ Don looked as if he were groping for words, then said, quietly, ‘Bit rough, that.’

  ‘He doesn’t think so.’ Stratton’s son, who’d decided to stay on in the army after National Service, had seemed, judging by his letter, to be relishing the prospect. ‘Says he can’t wait to get stuck in.’

  ‘Does Monica know?’

  ‘Yes, he telephoned her.’ Stratton wondered if, trains aside, not wanting to talk about it was why Monica hadn’t elected to stay. They’d discussed it briefly, before the meeting, and he knew she was worried about Pete, though she’d hidden it well.

  ‘Well,’ said Don grimly, ‘let’s hope he comes back in one piece.’

  ‘I just hope to God . . .’ Stratton stopped, unable to put his feelings into words. He and Pete may not have too much to say to each other, but the idea of losing his son as well as his wife was. . . well, unthinkable. Fortunately, the train pulled into Turnpike Lane station, so he was saved from having to try to explain. ‘Our stop,’ he said. ‘Come on.’

  To Stratton’s relief, Don didn’t mention Pete again. Instead, as they were walking to the bus stop, he said, ‘You do realise that being born again in Christ is pretty well guaranteed to make Reg even more irritating than he already is, don’t you?’

  Stratton nodded, gloomily. ‘I always thought that one thing you could say about Reg was that at least he was predictably awful.’

  ‘Insulting you and then saying “Can’t you take a joke?” you mean?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘That way of speaking he has, as if he’s got inside knowledge of the workings of the world that he can’t share with you because you’re too stupid to understand?’

  ‘That as well.’

  ‘Holding the telephone right away from his ear and shouting into the mouthpiece as if he’s encouraging a horse?’

  ‘Yup. And the way he always calls rice pudding “Chinese wedding cake” and every other bloody thing he says and does. But we expect him to be like that, and now . . .’

  ‘Now he’s wrong-footed us . . .’

  ‘And,’ concluded Stratton glumly, ‘he’ll probably start looking at us sorrowfully – “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” sort of thing. Secure in the knowledge that he’s been saved.’

  ‘Shriven,’ said Don. ‘Do you think that’s possible? Forgiveness of sins, no matter how bad they are?’

  Stratton thought about it for just a moment. ‘No,’ he said, shortly. ‘I don’t. Some things aren’t forgivable.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  I did not see anyone come in or go out of the house during that time, read Stratton, except for when Mrs Linder came back at just after eleven which I know she did because we had a word when I went to put the cat out and it was . . . Stratton turned the page. . . persistently impor-tuning men for an immoral purpose in Leicester Square, paying four visits to public lavatories in the area in the course of ninety minutes . . .

  ‘Quite a cat.’ Swearing quietly to himself, Stratton sifted through the jumble of statements on his desk, trying to find the right page. He and PC Canning and PC Standish had spent the morning doing the rounds of the neighbours in Flaxman Court and the adjoining streets but no one appeared to have seen anything out of the ordinary. No unusual visitors to Flaxman Court, no strangers hanging about the place, nobody fleeing into the night. Many of them knew Lloyd, or at least recognised the description, but nobody seemed to have seen him out and about with anyone except Mrs Linder or Father Shaw. He didn’t frequent the Nellie Dean or any of the other local pubs and generally seemed – Stratton sighed deeply – to have kept himself to himself. All of them thought him an oddball, if a kind one. There were a lot of mentions of carrying shopping and running errands and so on, but nothing above the level of mere acquaintance.

  They’d got soaked for their trouble, too – hats and coats steaming on the stand beside the paraffin heater which, despite much fiddling with the wick, smelt strongly. Stratton shivered – his feet were damp and the draught from the slightly open window (a necessary measure against asphyxiation) was blowing directly down his neck.

  ‘The man must have had some friends,’ he muttered, pawing the papers into a rough heap and putting anything that didn’t apply to the investigation on one side. He read through the statements again, double-checking that nothing interesting had slipped past him unnoticed – it hadn’t – then flipped disconsolately through his notebook. Two people – Mrs Linder and Father Shaw – had mentioned the writer Ambrose Tynan. Mrs Linder had told Canning that Lloyd had visited him, and the priest had said he’d ‘helped him a great deal and given him books’, one of which they’d seen in Lloyd’s room, and also that Tynan had ‘introduced him to like-minded people’. Stratton wondered who they were. Not anyone that Father Shaw would approve of, by the sound of it. A telephone call to Tynan’s publisher had elicited the information that their star author lived in a village called Lincott, in Suffolk. Stratton decided he’d better go and see the man. Given what Father Shaw had said, he suspected that the connection was more important to Lloyd than it was to Tynan, but – aside from the aunt, Mrs Prentice, who DI Grove had gone to Roehampton to interview – it was the only lead he had.

  ‘Lincott in Suffolk?’ said Grove, round his pipe. With his pouched eyes and increasingly pendulous chops, the older copper’s appearance was becoming, in Stratton’s opinion, more and more like that of a friendly bloodhound. Now, he wore the expression of a dog that had got a scent. ‘Let’s have a butcher’s at that map.’

  When he’d shambled round to Stratton’s side of the desk, he said, ‘I thought it sounded familiar. That’s where Ballard went when he left us. Round there, anyway.’ He jabbed a finger at the string of little dots on the green background. ‘Cambridgeshire borders, I remember him saying.’

  ‘Is it?’ Stratton had regretted his former sergeant’s departure, two years ago, from West End Central, but he’d understood it all right. The ostensible reason was Ballard’s little girl . . . Kitty? Katy? . . . who had weak lungs and needed clean air. Must be five or six now, he thought. Time flies . . . And there was Ballard’s promotion, of course, to DI, but Stratton knew there’d been more to it than that. The hanging of Davies, for a crime he almost certainly had not committed, had taken its toll in self-reproach and a loss of confidence, both in his ability as a copper and in the institution as a whole. Stratton had experienced it too, but it had been worse for the younger man, and he could see why he’d welcomed the chance of a fresh start in a different place. He felt that he should have remembered where Ballard had gone. Grove, kindly and avuncular, always remembered things like that. ‘Yup,’ he said now. ‘You could give him a call.’

  ‘I certainly shall. What was Mrs Prentice like?’

  ‘Very respectable, and smart with it. Had the Radio Times in an embossed leather cover. Nothing peculiar about her.’ Grove nodded in agreement with himself. ‘She confirmed what your priest said: the parents were pretty cut up when Lloyd went AWOL from the sanatorium they’d put him in – well, you can imagine – and of course the poor souls died without knowing where he was or what had happened to him. He was their only child – born in . . .’ here, Grove flicked through his notebook, ‘1928. There was a sister – born two years later – but she died when she was a baby. Mrs P. said he’d had a difficult personality since he was a boy. “Awkward” was the word she used.’

 
‘Sounds about right, from what I can gather.’

  ‘The parents spent all their savings paying for him to learn the piano.’ Grove glanced down at the page again. ‘They felt that his religious obsession had taken him away from it, so there was a fair degree of bitterness towards the church, which they saw as having encouraged him to give up on the music.’

  ‘But presumably,’ said Stratton, remembering Father Shaw’s words, ‘Lloyd must have been a bit potty to get so wrapped up in the church in the first place. I mean, they couldn’t have turned him into a religious nutcase without something to work on, could they?’

  ‘Shouldn’t think so. Anyway, Mrs Prentice thought it was more a case of his not having enough musical talent – which was what that priest said, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Pretty much. Was she aware of the contents of the parents’ wills?’

  ‘Yes. She told me they’d left £200 to her, and the rest of the money and the house to him in the first instance, and in the event of his death to the RSPCA. Solicitor confirmed it – the total estate, minus the aunt’s money, came to . . .’ Grove consulted his notebook, ‘£7,217. So, nothing there unless you believe the RSPCA makes a practice of bumping people off.’

  ‘He didn’t have paid employment,’ said Stratton. ‘At least, not as far as I know, so I wonder how he got by? There was no evidence that he had a bank account, and the only money I found in his room was a bit of loose change, but the landlady told Canning he was always paid up with the rent.’

  ‘No idea . . . Oh, before I forget, she gave me a couple of photographs. That one’ – Grove proffered a photo of a serious-looking kid in flannels and a school blazer – ‘probably won’t be much use, because he’s only sixteen or thereabouts, but this,’ he laid another photograph, clearly recognisable as Lloyd the man, on the desk, ‘might come in handy.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Stratton, gazing at them abstractedly. ‘I suppose,’ he added, ‘that too much self-belief is as bad as none at all. Mind you, you could say that about belief in anything. There must be some sort of decent middle ground.’

  ‘Still,’ said Grove, ‘it’s normal to want to make sense of the world, isn’t it? I mean, old son, you could say that’s what we do.’ Seeing Stratton’s confusion, he added, ‘Our job, I mean. Finding answers to questions.’

  Both men considered this for a moment before making a silent, mutual decision that there was nothing more that could sensibly be said on the subject, and beating a hasty retreat to the altogether less taxing topic of Mr Heddon. ‘Barmy,’ said Grove. ‘Mad as a hatter. Still, it could be a lot worse. Remember that chap we had in March who was so frightened of living under the Russians that he clobbered his wife with a claw hammer and stuck his head in the gas oven?’

  ‘Vividly, thanks,’ said Stratton, picturing the dead woman’s caved-in face and punctured eyes. ‘But as fears go, that was a bit more realistic, wasn’t it? I mean, the Soviets actually exist. Unlike the little green men.’

  ‘Ambrose Tynan probably thinks they do.’

  ‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ said Stratton gloomily, thinking of the regularity with which articles about evil cults and threats from outer space by the author appeared in the newspapers. ‘More bollocks.’

  ‘I’m not at all happy about having you chasing round all over the country, but seeing as you don’t have anything else, you’d better get up to this Lincott place tomorrow and find out who these people are,’ said Lamb, when Stratton had explained the situation.

  ‘Suffolk’s not far, sir, and Lincott’s on the Cambridge border.’

  Lamb grunted. ‘I suppose I ought to be grateful that you’re not proposing to go traipsing up to Norfolk.’ He made it sound as though Stratton had chosen the destination by blindfolding himself and sticking a pin in a map.

  ‘I understand from DI Grove that Lincott may be on DI Ballard’s patch, sir.’

  ‘Good officer, Ballard.’ Lamb looked fractionally more approving. ‘I was sorry to lose him,’ he added, in obituary tones.

  ‘So was I, sir.’

  ‘If that’s the case, you might have a chat with him while you’re there – he’ll know the lie of the land. I’ll give his superior a call – fill him in about it.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Thank you.’

  ‘Off you go, then. Stay overnight if it’s necessary. And try to make some sort of progress, won’t you?’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Seated in the corner of a small Italian restaurant on the edge of Soho, Stratton sipped gingerly at a glass of vinegary red wine and contemplated the Alpine scene, rendered in smeary oil paint, which stretched the length of the adjacent wall. What he really wanted was a decent pint of beer, but that wasn’t available. The choice of edible food – edible, that was, without risking a lot of spilling and mopping and making a fool of oneself – was limited too, which was a shame because it wasn’t half bad once you actually managed to get it into your mouth. However, Diana seemed to like the place, so it was where they came. He thought wistfully of the Lyons Corner House where he’d taken Jenny when they were courting – meat, two veg and a nice fruit pie afterwards – but, try as he might, he couldn’t imagine doing the same with Diana. He and Jenny had been comfortable with each other, right from the start. Their differences – the fact that she was a Londoner and he’d grown up on a farm – had been a source of amusement. Her mimicry of his (then much stronger) Devon accent and his pretending to think she believed milk came from tins had been fun. Safe. He’d always known where he was with Jenny, what to expect, how to be. But he supposed, when she’d died, that the self he was with her had died as well . . .

  And Jenny’s family had welcomed him, hadn’t they? He’d never met any of Diana’s family, but he knew bloody well that, had they been alive and her ancestral home not sold off for next to nothing, it would have been strictly tradesmen’s entrance only for the likes of him. And, but for the war, he’d never have met Diana in the first place. Besides, he and Diana weren’t courting, were they? Quite what they were doing, he wasn’t sure, but since they’d begun doing it – a little over two years ago – he’d schooled himself not to examine it too closely.

  Gradually, in the years after Jenny had died, ‘we’ and ‘us’ had been replaced in his mind by ‘I’ and ‘me’, but he couldn’t think of himself and Diana as ‘we’ and ‘us’. The chasm between them was too great. He couldn’t have existed in her world, nor she in his – the idea of her standing in the scullery of his home in Tottenham, washing up at the sink, was preposterous. They both pretended, when together, not to be aware of such things, but often – although he was, frankly, still dazedly proud to be with someone who looked and spoke as she did – he had a sense that they were inside a bubble which might burst at any moment.

  He lit a cigarette, remembering the vertiginous feeling he’d had the first time they’d kissed. Astounded by his daring, he couldn’t believe that she was allowing him – encouraging him, even – to put his lips on hers, and as for the rest . . . The first time he’d seen her naked had been wonderful, of course, but at the same time rather frightening, because of the almost impossibility of it. Taking another sip of the nasty wine, Stratton remembered his dry mouth and sweaty hands, as though she were his first. He pushed his chair back, resting his head against the wall and staring up at the ceiling, where the muralist had continued the view as a blue sky clotted with improbably solid-looking clouds, and wishing he’d brought a paper with him. Waiting for Diana to arrive – he always took care to be at least a quarter of an hour early, so that she would never be forced to sit alone – made him feel ungallant, a heel, but she refused to let him meet her in public and escort her there. They’d argued about it, and she’d told him, sharply, that she wasn’t going to hang around for him on a street corner or in a tube station as though she were a prostitute. He’d protested, in vain, that he’d never keep her waiting, but she wouldn’t have it. In any case there was, he knew, a more important reason: theirs was, by unspoken mutual agreement, a
clandestine arrangement. He hated this, too, but he’d never spoken of Diana to his family, just as she, he was sure, had never told her friends about him.

  ‘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—’