A Willing Victim

by Wilson, Laura

  ‘You must be Mr Ballard.’ The voice had a touch of huskiness to it – proper enough, but with a hint of mischief. ‘Sorry, I mean Inspector Ballard, don’t I?’

  As she spoke, Ballard felt the discreet snap of something closing in on him; as if, he thought, she had him in her sights. ‘At your service.’ Oh, Christ, why had he said that? And how the hell did she know his name? ‘How . . . I mean, I am, but—’

  ‘Pauline’s told me all about you.’

  ‘Has she?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ She flashed him a wide, happy smile. Her teeth were white and even. ‘I’m Ananda.’

  ‘Amanda?’

  ‘A-nan-da.’

  ‘That’s unusual.’

  ‘It means . . .’ She hesitated deliberately, as if waiting for a drum roll to finish, then said, triumphantly, ‘Bliss!’

  Pauline can’t have told me about her, thought Ballard. I’d have remembered that. He felt pleased if his wife had made a friend, though. Although she’d never complained, he knew she found it lonely at times. Not only were the locals wary of incomers, but they seemed to feel – understandably, Ballard supposed – that the wife of a policeman, even if he wasn’t actually the village bobby, needed to be kept at arm’s length. ‘How did you meet Pauline?’ he asked.

  ‘The same way I met you – out walking.’

  ‘Do you live nearby?’

  ‘Just the other side of Lincott. The Old Rectory.’

  ‘The Foundation?’

  ‘That’s right.’ She giggled. ‘Don’t look so surprised! We do come out sometimes, you know.’

  ‘Yes . . . I . . .’ Feeling more foolish than ever, Ballard finished, ‘Of course you do.’

  ‘Bless you.’ Ananda regarded him for a moment, head on one side, then leant forward and kissed him on the cheek. He caught a whiff of perfumed soap as her curls brushed against his face, and then she was gone, nipping between the graves. At the gate she turned and gave him a wave before disappearing down the road.

  Ballard stared after her. After a moment, the tentative beginnings of an erection gave way to a jolted, fearful feeling, as though he’d narrowly escaped being run down by a bus. It took some minutes of standing quite still, followed by the soothing powers of another cigarette, for it to dispel so that he could think clearly once more.

  In the two years he’d lived there Ballard had never, so far as he knew, actually met anyone from the Foundation for Spiritual Understanding, unless you counted Tynan, who had some connection with it, although he wasn’t quite clear what form it took. All Ballard knew about the Foundation was that it was home to a bunch of people who practised some sort of religion. The vicar, Reverend Sewell, had described it to him – with a disapproving sniff – as ‘esoteric’ and, when he’d looked the word up, he’d found that meant a philosophical doctrine that was ‘only for the initiated’ and ‘not generally intelligible’. In other words, secret and inward-looking. Certainly, the Foundation’s inhabitants could occasionally be glimpsed performing strange exercises in the grounds of the Old Rectory, but they never seemed to mix with the villagers. They were popular with the local shopkeepers because they placed large orders, and because they’d never been involved in any trouble Ballard had never had reason to step inside the gates.

  The Old Rectory itself, however, had long had a reputation. A series of newspaper accounts of ghostly sightings in the 1930s, illustrated by suspiciously blurry photographs, had earned it the title of ‘the most haunted house in England’. Even now, in the summer, more than a few trippers would ask for directions to the place. Ballard had no idea whether or not they were admitted. He had the impression that most of them didn’t wish to be, but were content to gawp and take photographs from the road. Gothic, looming, and reputed to be built on the site of an ancient nunnery, the house certainly looked the part but, unlike haunted houses in films, derelict with broken windows, banging shutters and cobwebs as thick as blankets, the Old Rectory – nowadays at least – was well maintained, with gleaming paint and a lovingly tended garden. Of course, there was no shortage of locals who, for the price of a pint, were willing to tell tales of tragic nuns, grey ladies and, for all he knew, headless horsemen as well.

  Ballard opted for the longer way back to his house, where – without mentioning either Stratton or the strangely named Ananda – he said goodbye to Pauline before making his way back to the police station. He spent the afternoon investigating a series of thefts of farming implements, but all the time she lingered at the back of his mind, saucily perched on the stile, smiling and flashing those gorgeous legs.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The asphalt on the platform at Lincott station was cracked like the top of a cake. Alighting, Stratton was about to tap on the smeary window of the stationmaster’s office and ask for a taxi when, to his surprise, a driver sent by Ballard appeared and put himself at Stratton’s disposal for the rest of the day. The man’s slightly resentful air made Stratton wonder how easy it had been for Ballard – a true Londoner, unlike himself, not to mention being CID – to fit in with the local force. Reverting to the accent of his childhood, he said, ‘I appreciate that – I’m afraid I don’t know these parts at all.’

  The man narrowed his eyes for a moment, suspecting mockery, and then, after looking up and down the empty platform, said, ‘You not from London, then?’

  ‘Not originally,’ said Stratton. ‘I grew up in Devon.’

  The man nodded, apparently satisfied. ‘Sergeant Adlard, sir. If you’ll follow me . . .’ Picking up Stratton’s suitcase, he led the way to the car.

  Adlard kept up a running commentary as they drove through the centre of Lincott village – self-contained and quiet, with cottages ranged around a green and along the road, and more, just visible, dotted about behind, a couple of shops, a church, a school fenced with hooped iron railings, and a pub – and into open country. ‘Hardly ever see that, now,’ he said, gesturing at a field where a man was ploughing with two horses. ‘Most of the farmers round here got tractors. Beautiful, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Stratton. He’d loved his father’s patient, majestic Shire horses, Blackie and Dora; how they smelt at the end of the day, when they were hot, and how he’d stood on an upturned bucket to brush the dried sweat from their necks as they’d mumbled hay from the rack in the stable . . . ‘I grew up on a farm.’ Remembering, too, the generations of labourers literally worked into the ground, their tiny, damp cottages teeming with lousy children and the old people with goitres from years of drinking pond water, he added, ‘A bit of modernisation’s no bad thing, though.’

  ‘I suppose so. New council houses over there, look.’ Adlard gestured at a group of raw, box-like brick buildings, exposed in the middle of a flattened, barren field at the top of a hill, their gardens marked with concrete posts and chain-link fencing, one with an H-shaped television aerial protruding from its chimney. ‘Just gone up, they have. London must have been quite a change for you, sir – don’t mind my saying.’

  ‘Well, I’ve been there a while, now, but it did take a bit of getting used to at first.’

  ‘Not surprised. Only been there a couple of times myself. You can taste it in your mouth, can’t you? All sooty and gritty. And city folk think you must be stupid if you sound like you’re from a village.’

  ‘Oh, they’re all right when you get to know them.’

  Adlard nodded, as if assenting to an unspoken request, then said, ‘You know what I’d miss if I lived in London? The stars. Just stand outside my back door and stare up at ’em, sometimes. You can’t imagine where they end, can you?’

  ‘I missed them, too. Mind you, it wasn’t till the blackout – you could see them sometimes, on a quiet night – that I realised it.’

  After this, both men, discomfited by this sudden and inexplicably lyrical outburst, retreated into silence for the next few minutes, until a high brick wall came into view, and Adlard said, ‘Mr Tynan’s place.’ They drove past what felt like, but couldn’t actually have
been, miles of wall, coming to a halt in front of impressively large wrought-iron gates flanked by posts on top of which animals of some unspecified heraldic species sat upright, as if begging for scraps.

  Ambrose Tynan’s house, situated at the end of a longish drive, was a big, square affair which Stratton thought was probably Georgian. It had obviously been built for some long-ago country squire with the dual aim of getting one over on the neighbours and putting the peasantry in their place. If his own reaction was anything to go by, Stratton reflected, then as far as the second bit was concerned, the bloke had definitely succeeded. Standing beneath the giant portico, he felt common as muck and about six inches high.

  The door was answered by a manservant with a bearing so stiff that he might have had a tray stuffed down the back of his jacket. Although Stratton was expected – and had readjusted his accent – the chap’s tone as he repeated the word ‘Inspector’ suggested that he was holding some particularly unpleasant article between his finger and thumb, just before dropping it in the dustbin. He ushered Stratton into a vast hall, decorated with wine-red flock wallpaper and heavy mahogany mouldings, and left him to contemplate the grand, curved staircase, hung, as far up as the eye could see, with gilt-framed oils of Tynan’s – or somebody’s – ancestors. Unless they were his wife’s family, Stratton supposed he must have bought them as a job lot and then adopted them, as it were, backwards.

  After about five minutes, the man returned and led him past a series of half-open doors through which he could see glimpses of bronzes and marble busts and what he thought were Russian icons, cheek-by-jowl with paintings and framed maps as well as the usual furniture. Stratton remembered that, besides all the cigars and brandy and what-have-you, Tynan’s books were full of descriptions of fine things of just this type. He also remembered what Diana had said about the man’s art collection, and the particular way she’d described both him and his house as ‘grand’. Stratton could see what she’d meant. It did all seem a bit, well, staged, somehow.

  Tynan was waiting in his library, a large, high-ceilinged room at the back of the house with tall windows that looked out onto a terrace. Below it was a geometrical arrangement of low hedges that Stratton thought was called a parterre. As they entered, he rose from behind an enormous desk, a large man with a fleshy face and thick white hair swept dramatically off his brow, tweed-suited and wearing a tie that Stratton would have bet his last penny had some educational or military significance. The desk, like the rest of the furniture, was heavy, dark, and looked to be Victorian. Despite the fact that Tynan couldn’t have been more than ten years older than he was, the room, with its rows of leather-covered books stamped in gold and a plum-coloured smoking jacket hanging behind the door, had the air of belonging to someone from another age.

  ‘How do you do?’ said Tynan. At least, Stratton guessed that was what he’d said, and replied accordingly. Not only did his heavily jowled face have the sort of peering, disgruntled expression that indicated a member of a privileged social group having to deal with a troublesome underling, but he spoke in a sort of fluctuating whinny with half the words swallowed back in just as they were coming out.

  ‘I’ve asked my man to bring us some tea,’ said Tynan, indicating that Stratton should take a seat. Settling himself on the opposite side of the desk (in a considerably higher and more comfortable chair), Tynan leant forward and, steepling his fingers, closed his eyes for a moment and inhaled deeply. As he did so, his hands twitched slightly, as if an electric current was passing between the tips of his fingers. This performance over, he opened his eyes wide in an expression of almost malevolent intensity and said, ‘I understand you wish to ask questions about poor Jeremy Lloyd. We met on a number of occasions. Not socially, of course.’

  Heaven forbid, thought Stratton. ‘How did you meet him?’

  ‘At the Foundation.’

  ‘The Foundation?’

  ‘The Foundation for Spiritual Understanding. A group of individuals who are, shall we say, Seekers After Truth.’ He pronounced the last three words in audible capitals.

  Must be the ‘like-minded people’ mentioned by Father Shaw, thought Stratton. ‘When you say “truth” . . .?’

  Tynan laughed indulgently. ‘What is truth, said jesting Pilot, and would not stay for an answer. As most of us don’t these days, I’m afraid. They are based near here. In fact, I was instrumental in acquiring a house for them. I admire their work enormously.’

  ‘And their work is . . . ?’

  ‘Their aims,’ said Tynan, with the air of one imparting a revelation, ‘are to discover and put into practice a precise system of knowledge about man’s place in the universe and his spiritual evolution. There is no reason why an ordinary man should not develop spiritually. One does not need to be a yogi or a monk in order to do so . . .’ Bloody good job for you, mate, thought Stratton, eyeing the fine-grained luxury around him. ‘However,’ continued Tynan, raising his voice in a clear rebuke to Stratton’s waning attention, ‘some form of guidance is needed. The vast inheritance of spiritual wealth from the East has – until comparatively recently – been ignored by the West.’ His speech, with its authoritarian rhythms and occasional startling emphases, reminded Stratton of DCI Lamb at his most dictatorial and bullying. Clearly, being a successful and revered novelist, Tynan was well used to being listened to unchallenged. It was only, Stratton thought, the stroke of good fortune that made his stuff popular that separated him from the fate of being – as Lloyd, he felt, undoubtedly had been – not only a crank but a bore as well. ‘The ancient sages of the East,’ Tynan continued, ‘have much to teach us, if only we will listen.’

  ‘Such as?’ enquired Stratton in his blandest tone.

  ‘Philosophy. That is the love of wisdom. One can find wisdom through self-knowledge, but first one must free oneself from illusory constraints such as character, likes and dislikes, joy, sadness, pain. One can live unaffected by the world, yet play one’s part in it. The secret is,’ Tynan leant forward conspiratorially, ‘to see that it is all a play. When you see that your own life is a play and the whole work of society is a play, you gain independence from it because you can step away from it. It cannot touch you.’

  Stratton felt that was a bit much coming from someone who was so keen on this ‘play’ that he had, as Diana had said, very obviously designed an impressive part for himself in it. ‘And Lloyd was a student of this philosophy, was he?’

  ‘Very much so. He was one of the first.’

  ‘So he would have come to the Foundation when?’

  ‘Nineteen forty-seven, I should think. Around that time.’

  ‘Presumably there’s a religious component to this . . . way of thinking.’

  ‘Religion?’ Tynan threw his hands in the air in a ‘what can you do?’ gesture. ‘Religion is based on duality. Me down here,’ he gestured at the parquet floor, ‘God hovering around somewhere,’ he jabbed a finger at the elaborate cornicing, ‘up there.’ No wonder Lloyd didn’t elaborate on any of this to Father Shaw, thought Stratton.

  ‘The philosophy,’ continued Tynan, ‘is the way of unity. We are separated from our true selves not only by our ideas of God, but by the distractions of the world.’

  Bit rich coming from a man with a mansion full of worldly distractions, thought Stratton, wondering when the tea was going to arrive. ‘So this takes the form of lectures, does it?’

  ‘Yes, and study. There are exercises, too, and coming under discipline through a measured programme of physical and spiritual activities, early rising, segregation of the sexes, obedience, and so forth . . . but those are only for initiates.’

  ‘Initiates?’ This, Stratton thought, sounded suspiciously like one of Tynan’s own books, with robed people walking round in circles intoning things before waving their hands over sacred flames. ‘So they have ceremonies, do they?’

  Tynan smiled indulgently. ‘It’s really very simple,’ he said. ‘The exercises and activities help people to gain understanding �
�� to connect them to their true selves.’

  ‘And this is a community, is it? I mean, the initiates live at the Foundation?’

  ‘About twenty of them. Others visit on a regular basis.’

  ‘And the finances? Upkeep and so forth?’

  ‘The students pay modest fees, of course, and gifts are given by those, such as myself, who are able to afford it. I can assure you that no one is asked to contribute beyond their means.’

  ‘Did Lloyd pay fees?’ asked Stratton, wondering how he could have afforded to have done so.

  Tynan shook his head. ‘In some cases, we are able to make provision.’

  ‘And what about when he left? Did the Foundation pay for his lodgings in London?’

  ‘I don’t believe so.’

  ‘A benefactor, perhaps?’

  Tynan gave a dismissive shrug. ‘I have no idea, Inspector.’

  ‘I see.’ Stratton produced the photograph Wintle had given him and slid it across the desk. ‘What about this lady? Is she a student, too?’

  The novelist looked down at the photograph and Stratton saw the beginnings of what looked like a dreamy smile – a memory of carnality, perhaps? – quickly replaced by a more serious expression. ‘Yes, she’s a student.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Ananda.’

  ‘An—? Could you spell it, please?’

  ‘A, N, A, N, D, A,’ said Tynan, as Stratton wrote. ‘It’s a Sanskrit word – means “bliss”. Sanskrit is the most ancient of languages. It’s not only the root of Hindi, but of all—’

  ‘She doesn’t look Indian,’ said Stratton.

  ‘She’s as English as you or me,’ snapped Tynan, clearly irritated at being cut off in full flow. Hardly surprising, thought Stratton, as he obviously wasn’t used to it. ‘It was the leader, Theodore Roth, who called her Ananda. He said it reflected her true nature.’

  ‘Do you know her original name?’