‘There you go.’ Denton, who’d been rearranging the chairs in the snug with the dramatic violence of a lion-tamer, ambled over to the bar and produced a battered copy of the Mirror from somewhere underneath it. ‘Afraid it’s yesterday’s. Fancy a pint to go with it? Don’t mind my saying, but you look as if you could do with one. Take it up with you if you like.’
Stratton settled himself as comfortably as he could in the doll-sized, chintz-covered armchair in the small bedroom beneath the eaves. Placing both pint and ashtray within easy reach, he lit a cigarette and began reading the paper with fierce concentration.
ISMAILA FALLS: ALL-ALONG-CANAL RACE – AND THEN IT’S CEASEFIRE AT MIDNIGHT was the headline, with the triumphant tone of this first item – Allies have fulfilled their mission, says French communiqué – tempered halfway down by the heading, in smaller type, Nasser calls in tanks and some stuff about the first British casualties to be evacuated from the battle zone. At least, thought Stratton, wondering what Pete was doing and if he was all right, they were talking about casualties and not fatalities, which was something to be grateful for. In his mind’s eye he saw the photograph of his son, proud in his new uniform, that stood on the mantelpiece at home. Millions of people had photographs like that, above the fire, except that Pete was – for the present, at any rate – still alive, and the vast majority of those sons, and husbands, and fathers, were dead. Was that photograph going to be all he was left with? That and a couple of snaps in the album, Pete grinning with his pals, mugs of tea in one hand and thumbs up for the camera in the other, looking out eternally from November 1956?
Remembering his last chat with his son made Stratton think of something he’d neglected: Reg. He’d not troubled to find out if there was anything wrong with him – because Pete had definitely been right, and Reg was looking under the weather. Still, nothing he could do about it right now, so …
Turning back to the paper, he thumbed through the rest and read items headed, Garages will ‘ration’ petrol – supplies only for essential users; Women with rifles help in Hungary’s last-ditch fight, which was accompanied by a murky photograph of housewives with guns facing down a Russian tank amidst the ruins of Budapest, and then a couple of paragraphs about how Eisenhower was beating Adlai Stevenson in the US presidential election. Presumably, he thought, the people at the Foundation didn’t take newspapers. He didn’t recall seeing any there, or, for that matter, any wireless or television. This, he thought, was all of a piece with their notion of retreat from the modern world. Apart from seeing the expression on Roth’s face when he told him about Michael, he wasn’t looking forward to going there tomorrow. Christ, he thought suddenly, one of us is going to have to tell the boy. He hadn’t thought of that before – too much else going on – and nor, he was pretty sure, had Ballard. Stratton groaned and reached for his beer. Having to tell a child that its mother wasn’t its mother was bad enough, but this … ‘Sorry, kid,’ Stratton murmured, ‘but you’re not the Son of God after all.’
He threw down the paper, wishing he’d brought along his book. He wasn’t a great reader of fiction, but he’d been enjoying Lucky Jim, borrowed from Don. Not that he knew anything about universities, but it was funny and he could sympathise with the bloke’s attitude to life – getting drunk, making faces and the rest. Besides, it was a nice change from books about aristocratic types with superior sensibilities and grand passions and all the rest of it. Lucky Jim would have kept his mind off things, all right, or if he’d had some jazz to listen to … Anything really, to block out the barrage of thoughts and emotions that assailed his tired mind. Pete, Reg, Michael, Ananda, Tynan, Roth … Not to mention the fact that Diana would be here tomorrow night, waiting for him at her friend’s cottage in the village of Wherever-it-was.
‘Oh, hell.’ Feeling too weary and dispirited to undress, he drained his pint and stubbed out his fag before wrenching off his shoes and tie, lying down full length on the bed and closing his eyes. After a while, he drifted into sleep. He dreamt that Diana was there on the bed, and that he was making love to her, and she was responding, and it was all as it should be, but when she propped herself up on one elbow and looked down at him, she’d changed into Mary/Ananda, and then she was pulling something soft and heavy over his face, so that he couldn’t breathe … He awoke, gasping, at a quarter-past three, to find that the light was still on and he’d somehow managed to pull the eiderdown over his top half, so that it had tangled around his head and neck. He clawed himself free and sat up, sweaty and shivering at the same time.
He undressed quickly, tearing at his clothes as if they were contaminated, trying to distance himself from what had just happened in his unconscious with the respectable safety of pyjamas. He stood for a moment, staring at the treacherous bed, before flinging open the casement window and thrusting his head out, hoping that the cold night air might blow away the ineffable compound of shame and failure, coupled with a sudden, and all the more powerful for being utterly illogical, wave of fear about the future.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
After a long telephone call to West End Central, followed by several telegrams which were taken down with agonising slowness by PC Harwood, Stratton arrived at the Foundation to find Ballard standing on the porch, looking irritable and weary. ‘You look like I feel,’ he said. ‘How’s it going?’
‘It’s not. I’ve got three men searching the place – my guv’nor organised a warrant first thing and sent them over with it – but so far they’ve come up with bugger all. Nobody I’ve spoken to seems to have a clue about a birth certificate taken from Mary/Ananda’s room, and Parsons isn’t getting anywhere either.’
‘Genuine, do you think?’
‘Everyone I’ve spoken to so far, yes, and Parsons agrees with me. Did you talk to Grove?’
‘Yes, and DCI Lamb. They’ve got all the information, and they’re going to go through all of Lloyd’s belongings with a tooth-comb. Grove’s on his way to Wimbledon to talk to Mrs Astley. How far have you got?’
‘Five to go, including Miss Kirkland, and then there’s Roth. And the boy, of course. I’m not looking forward to that at all.’
‘Me neither,’ said Stratton, who, after waking from his dream, had spent a fair proportion of his sleepless hours dreading it. ‘He is here, I take it?’
‘Yes, I checked with Miss Kirkland when we arrived. I suppose we do have to tell him, do we? I mean, there’s no getting round it?’
‘I’ve been thinking about that, and I don’t see how. It’ll all have to come out in the end, and if we don’t tell him now, he’ll only get some mumbo-jumbo version of the story from Roth, and that’ll only make it worse for him. The poor little sod’s going to be confused enough as it is.’
Ballard, who’d been staring intently at an apparently featureless patch of gravel during this, raised his head and said, ‘You’re right, of course. But at least he’s got somewhere to go to.’
‘Mrs Curtin, you mean?’
‘Yes, although …’ Ballard shook his head. ‘God, I don’t envy whoever gets the job of sorting out all that. Incidentally, hadn’t we better get a policewoman up here?’
‘Definitely,’ said Stratton.
‘I’ll get Parsons to organise someone. You know what really browns me off,’ Ballard added, sotto voce, as they went into the house, ‘is that under all the pretence of being helpful – we’ve been offered three cups of tea in the last half-hour – what this lot are really saying is “Fuck you, Jack, we’re all right. We’ve got the answer to life itself and your petty concerns don’t matter.”’
‘We’ll see about that,’ said Stratton, grimly.
Inside the large hall, the air had the same eerie stillness that Stratton had noticed before, with no sound from anywhere. At first he thought the place was empty, but then he spotted a man kneeling behind one of the chairs, mouth rigid and eyes narrowed in concentration, piling logs into a basket by the grate with as much delicacy and precision as if they had been live hand grenad
es.
Quelling a surprisingly strong urge to jump up and down and shout ‘Boo!’, Stratton murmured, ‘Talked to him, have you?’
‘Yes.’ Ballard jerked his head towards one of the doors. ‘We’re down the corridor, same as before.’
As he opened the door, Stratton saw that, as before, the earnest young chap was positioned outside the door of the room designated for their use. Bolt upright and staring straight ahead, he didn’t turn to look at them as they came towards him, or even when Stratton stopped within a couple of feet of his chair. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to ask you to move, sir.’
The man turned to them, his face pleasant, but firm. ‘I must stay here,’ he said. ‘I am on duty.’
Stratton leant forward and put one foot on the crossbar on the side of the chair. ‘So are we, sir,’ he said quietly. ‘Hop it.’
The man moved slightly away from Stratton’s upraised knee, but his expression remained unaltered. ‘I am here should you need—’
‘We shan’t need anything.’ Stratton smiled, baring his teeth. ‘We’re happy all by ourselves.’ He gave the chair a shove with his foot. ‘On your way.’
Rising with as much dignity as he could muster, the man walked slowly away down the long corridor, stopping to glance back at the corner and, finding the pair of them still staring at him, vanished as abruptly as if he had been yanked by a rope.
The little room was arranged just as before, with a table, chairs, and a delicate vase bearing a spray of berried ivy and late autumn leaves. Parsons had just finished talking to the clumsy, moonfaced woman Stratton remembered from their first round of interviews, who’d spilt the tea on his crotch. Skirting them carefully, as if on the other side of an invisible cordon, she scurried off, leaving the policeman shaking his head. ‘Hopeless,’ he said. ‘Not a dicky bird.’
‘We’ll take it from here,’ said Ballard, pulling a sheet of paper out of his pocket. ‘I’ve crossed off all the ones we’ve spoken to, so if you can find this lot – we’ll have Miss Kirkland at the end, and Mr Roth last – and we’re going to need a policewoman up here as soon as you can.’
‘Right you are, sir.’
Parsons departed, returning a couple of minutes later with Mr Longley, who Stratton remembered as the chap who’d told them how Roth had cured his drink problem. He obviously had no clue about the birth certificate, and neither did Miss Mills, who followed him, or Mrs Welch. Stratton was hoping that Miss Banting, who arrived in the same arty, wooden-beaded get-up as last time, might prove more forthcoming, but after several questions both men decided that her puzzlement was genuine and allowed her to rattle off down the corridor.
As instructed, Parsons brought Miss Kirkland in last. The joyful smile, Stratton thought, had a slightly fixed quality about it this time. Asked to sit down, she perched herself on the extreme edge of one of the chairs, hands palm down on either side of her thighs and arms braced as if she were intending to launch herself from the room at the earliest possible opportunity.
‘As you may be aware,’ said Stratton, the formalities being concluded, ‘we have been asking questions about an item which went missing from Mrs Milburn’s room.’
‘Then I am unable to help you. I know nothing about it.’
‘Do you know what “it” is?’
‘I gather,’ Miss Kirkland said stiffly, ‘that you have been asking about a birth certificate, but I am afraid, gentlemen, that I cannot shed any light upon the matter.’
Despite her precision of hair and dress she seemed, compared to the last time Stratton had seen her, to be somehow ragged about the edges, and he could see dark troughs of exhaustion beneath her eyes. ‘Have you ever been in Mrs Milburn’s room while she’s been away?’ he asked.
‘Certainly not.’ Miss Kirkland drew herself up. ‘I do not make a practice of snooping.’
‘No? But you didn’t like her, did you?’
‘I …’ A deep blush suffused Miss Kirkland’s pale face. ‘I tried not to show it – not to think it. I knew it was wrong, what I was feeling, that it was just an idea – something I had to get rid of … give up.’
‘Pretty difficult, I’d have thought,’ said Stratton, ‘to make yourself like somebody.’
‘It wasn’t easy. Quite apart from anything, it was the way she behaved with the men – she caused a lot of disturbance.’ Remembering something he’d read somewhere – H.G. Wells, he thought – about moral indignation often being jealousy with a halo, Stratton imagined Miss Kirkland’s initial assessment of Ananda’s face and the contours of her body, and her dawning realisation that her own devotion would not, by itself, be enough to keep her in pole position. Miss Kirkland was staring down her tweed-covered knees. ‘Sometimes …’ her voice had dropped to a whisper, ‘it was agonising.’
‘You told us,’ said Stratton, ‘that you arrived at the Foundation after Mrs Milburn, but that wasn’t true, was it?’
Another whisper. ‘No.’
‘You’d known Mr Roth for some time before she came along, hadn’t you?’
‘Yes. I met him in 1946. I was in London, working for the civil service, and I saw an advertisement for a talk he was giving and went along. And it was quite marvellous.’ Miss Kirkland may have been tired, but as she said this her face was radiant.
‘So,’ said Stratton, ‘you came here when?’
‘I was here right from the beginning. The place was such a mess, you wouldn’t believe … So much work to do.’
‘And you looked after Mr Roth?’
‘Yes. It was my particular duty at that time.’
‘Until Mrs Milburn came.’
‘Yes. Mr Roth said I was needed to look after the ladies here. He said they needed particular guidance, and that I could supply it. That was to be my work.’
‘But you resented Mrs Milburn for supplanting you?’
‘That wasn’t important,’ said Miss Kirkland, sharply. ‘Only the Foundation is important. The work. The rest is,’ she lifted a hand from the seat of the chair and waved it dismissively, ‘irrelevant.’
‘But all the same, you resented Mrs Milburn,’ said Stratton, flatly. ‘Just as Mr Lloyd must have resented Michael.’
‘He never said so.’
‘But he did, didn’t he? The pair of you,’ here, he saw her flinch at the bracketing, ‘felt pushed out.’
‘What are you suggesting, Inspector?’ The voice was still fluting and the tones well-modulated, but the blush, Stratton saw, had concentrated into a hard spot of colour on each cheek.
‘I wasn’t suggesting anything,’ he said mildly, ‘but I am wondering why you lied to us. You may, of course, have decided it was your business to find out a bit more about Mrs Milburn, who she was, where she came from, and the … provenance, shall we say, of her son Michael?’
‘I did no such thing. There was – and is – no reason for me to question Mr Roth’s teaching on that matter, whatever I may think about his mother.’
No pretence now, Stratton noted, that she’d come to terms with her feelings towards Mary/Ananda. ‘Actually,’ he said, leaning forward and resting his arms on the table, ‘there was a reason to question it, although perhaps – and I’m prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt, at least for the moment – you did not know it. Michael is not Mrs Milburn’s son, and he certainly isn’t the product of immaculate conception.’
Stratton wasn’t sure if he’d expected Miss Kirkland to be shocked by this, but if she was she gave no sign of it. He gave her a brief summary of what they’d discovered about Michael’s parentage and the reasons that Mary/Ananda had ‘adopted’ him, then said, ‘The woman whose body was found in the woods is Rosemary Aylett, Michael’s real mother. She’d received an anonymous note from someone in London to say that the boy was here at the Foundation, along with a photograph of Michael – so there was no chance of any mistake about which boy – and she was on her way to claim him back when she was killed. That is the reason we’re asking about the birth certificate. It’s Michael’s �
�� or, to use his real name, Billy’s – and when we interviewed Mrs Milburn last night she told us she’d hidden it in a suitcase in her room. It isn’t there now, and we think that somebody here took it and tracked down Mrs Aylett, in order to make trouble for the Foundation – and that somebody else,’ he gave her a penetrating stare, ‘apprehended her and killed her before she could turn up and put the cat amongst the pigeons by claiming her son. What do you have to say to that?’
‘Well …’ Miss Kirkland’s beam was now so set that it looked as if some unlikely form of muscular paralysis had crept up on her. ‘Who Michael is is not important, Inspector. What matters is what he is.’
Interesting, thought Stratton. She didn’t deny anything he’d said, or attempt to argue with it. A mental adjustment was being – or had already been? – made. The recipe was being altered retrospectively, but the outcome, and its utter desirability – remained the same. ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘that the whole business about him being the Son of God was just window dressing?’
The corners of Miss Kirkland’s mouth turned slightly upwards in the superior and impenetrable smile of one who knows. ‘Things can be understood on different levels, Inspector. Not all knowledge is acquired through facts, you know.’
‘I can assure you that ours is.’ Stratton couldn’t stop himself.
‘Some knowledge,’ Miss Kirkland continued as if he hadn’t spoken, ‘comes direct from the heart. And the scriptures have many levels of meaning, you know – from the coarsest to the finest and most subtle.’
‘But we’re not talking about something written hundreds of years ago. We’re talking about a bunch of people here and now.’
‘Yes, indeed.’ Miss Kirkland looked at him with compassion – the way, he imagined, that she might look at a student who wasn’t ‘getting it’. ‘And Michael is a very special young man. He was sent to us as a … gift, if you like. The rest is unimportant.’
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