‘Then …’ Michael hesitated, his mouth still open.
‘If you stand like that for much longer,’ said Stratton, ‘you’ll catch a fly, like the old lady.’
‘Which old lady?’
‘In the song.’ Feeling foolish, Stratton stumbled through the barely remembered tune. ‘There was an old lady who swallowed a fly, I don’t know why she swallowed a fly. Perhaps she’ll die.’
Michael gave a yelp of laughter. ‘That’s not how it goes. You’re not very good at singing, are you?’
‘Not very. Do you know it?’
‘Yes. Miss Banting used to sing it to me when I was little. She used to put me to bed when my mother …’ A flicker of wistfulness, almost entreaty, crossed his face, swiftly replaced with a hard, closed expression. ‘When she was too busy, which was mostly. Miss Banting,’ he brightened again, ‘knows lots of songs.’
‘Well, let’s try it now, shall we? Even though I’m not very good. Let’s get your shoes off, and then you can lie down.’
Michael sat on the bed and allowed Stratton to kneel down and undo his laces. ‘Why don’t you get under the eiderdown? It’s a bit nippy in here.’
‘I suppose it will be all right, will it? I mean, I’m supposed to be having lessons and things.’
‘I don’t think anyone’s going to worry too much about that,’ said Stratton.
‘All right, then.’ The boy lay down and, as Stratton covered him over, said, ‘You will stay with me, won’t you?’
‘Yes, until you’re asleep. Now, close your eyes. You might want to close your ears, too, once I get going.’ Michael giggled, but did as he was told.
Stratton began to sing quietly, staring out of the window at the almost darkness and dredging his mind to reconstruct the words from dim memories of when Monica and Pete were small. Somewhere around swallowing the cow to catch the dog, he got muddled and stopped, expecting Michael to prompt him. When he looked over at the boy, he saw that he was fast asleep. There was something about the depth of it that reminded him of the way Monica and Pete had slept when they’d been feverish as children and how, in slumber, they had seemed to be healing themselves in front of his eyes.
If he’d ever had a stranger conversation, he was damned if he could remember it. As he looked at the boy’s beautiful, peaceful face, he thought of the first time they’d met. Michael had told him he was carrying a heavy burden, but it was nothing to the one on his own slender shoulders, the one he would have to try and make sense of – and escape from, if that were possible – in the years to come. And, unlike Stratton’s, it had been deliberately placed there. With the best of intentions, but intended, all the same. What would his future be?
Children are resilient, he told himself. People are. But all the same … ‘Poor old lady,’ he murmured. ‘She swallowed a horse. She died of course.’
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Jaws clenched, Ballard shot round a narrow corner too wide, narrowly missing a baker’s van that was coming in the opposite direction, barrelling past him with the bray of a horn and an inarticulate shout. Swearing, he ground the unfamiliar gears, praying that the thing wouldn’t stall. So far, he’d seen a couple of lorries, a petrol tanker and three cars, none of which was a Vauxhall Velox, and he was nearly at the London Road. Where the hell was she? Most of the turn-offs he’d passed had been farm tracks or lanes that led to villages. Reasoning that the fastest means of escape would be to stay on the larger roads, he’d ignored them, but what if he’d been wrong?
He stamped his foot on the accelerator and shot round another bend, spotting fresh manure and hoping like hell that he wasn’t about to run into a herd of cows. A blindingly vivid flash of himself slumped forward, the steering column embedded in his chest and the buckled wreck of the car surrounded by steaming, flailing, bellowing bovine flesh, made him squeeze his eyes shut. When he opened them again, a second later, it was just in time – Fuck! – to swerve around the last black-and-white rump as it disappeared through a gate in the hedge. Sweating with relief, he hurtled on down the road and through a village, spraying gravel where the road was being mended, and, wincing at the imagined impact of an unsuspecting lorry ploughing into his side, straight across a junction. The road was wider now, and straight, with detached cottages dotted amongst the fields on either side. The engine’s whine turned to a scream as he flogged the car up a hill at sixty-five miles an hour, eyes popping with adrenalin as he crowned the ridge and scanned the countryside below. As he shot down the other side – seventy – seventy-five – the whole car rattling like buggery and his teeth with it, foot jamming the accelerator against the floor – he saw the boot of a black car disappear round a bend about a quarter of a mile away. If it was the Velox, it would certainly be faster than Stratton’s Ford Pop., even assuming that it had been serviced recently which, by the sound of things, wasn’t the case. Crouched rigidly over the steering wheel, he shot after it, blind across another junction and onwards, narrowly missing a kid on a bicycle and swerving round one bend, then another, too close to the edge of the road – no ditch, thank God, but the bare branches of the hedge clawed at the side of the car as he struggled to keep it on course. The car was now rattling so much that it felt as if it might break apart like something in a circus, the vibrations juddering his entire body so that he kept his mouth tight shut, fearful of biting his tongue.
Moments later, he saw the black boot of the car disappearing around another corner. He sped after it and caught sight of the letters BFY on the registration plate before it went round another corner. Then, on the straight, he saw the whole registration number and, inside the car, dark hair and then a flash of wild, white profile as the driver looked round, and knew that it must be Ananda. Closing on her, Ballard leant forward and switched his headlights on and off a couple of times to indicate that she should stop, before both cars careered round another corner, the Ford Pop. almost riding on her bumper. They rounded another corner, then another, and then the Velox jinked suddenly left and swerved across the road. Ballard just had time to realise that one of the tyres must have burst when, with an almighty metallic bang, the car went straight into the sharp corner of a large white house. Caught by surprise – he was so intent on the Velox that he hadn’t even registered the building – Ballard wrenched the wheel round and stamped on the brake pedal, fighting to control his car as it skidded past the crash and embedded itself, in the last, frantic seconds of a high-speed nightmare, some yards up the road in the opposite hedge.
Ballard heard the tinkle of falling glass and opened his eyes to see, through the crazed glass of the windscreen, the stabbing branches and the buckled, steaming bonnet rising up in front of him. Not dead, then. His body, in its own collision with the steering wheel and instrument panel, felt not his own. He raised his head, inched himself back slightly in the seat and stared down stupidly at his chest, groin and knees. What were they doing there? What was he doing?
Hearing tapping on the window of the passenger door, Ballard turned his head and saw a man in an apron and shirtsleeves tugging at the handle, and, behind him, a dozen silent faces staring at him with the closed intensity of mourners looking into a coffin. A sudden absurd impulse to wave to them made him lift his hand, and then the air inside the car seemed to break apart as everything – sense, memory, pain – rushed back on the high, piercing clarity of a scream from across the road.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Tugged and manipulated by willing hands, Ballard managed to extract his legs from under the dashboard and crawl across the passenger seat. He shook his head at attempts to help him stand up, and, lowering himself gingerly onto the muddy verge on his hands and knees, struggled into a sitting position, leaning against the back wheel of the car. The aproned man squatted down in front of him, and a pair of liver-spotted claws draped a tartan blanket round his shoulders. Looking up, he saw a lizard-skinned grandmother with a fox fur round her shoulders, and next to her a barrel-shaped woman – or possibly a middle-aged, middle-weight
wrestler impersonating a woman – in a too-small hat, with a fat, tightly buttoned child goggling puggily at him from behind her skirt. Now they’d seen that he was alive and – to some extent at least – mobile, all three adults looked censorious.
Ballard’s chest hurt. He ran a tongue over dry lips and tried to work some saliva into his mouth. ‘What’s happened to her?’
‘Your girlfriend?’ said the aproned man. ‘Well, she’s not too clever.’
‘Having a race, were you?’ said the barrel-shaped woman, who sounded, utterly incongruously, a great deal like Ron’s girlfriend Eth from Take It From Here.
Ballard shook his head. ‘Policeman.’
‘You?’ The woman wagged her head in disbelief.
‘Get away,’ said the aproned man. ‘That’s not a police car.’
‘It was an emergency. She’s a suspect.’
‘Well,’ said the man, unconvinced, ‘the manager’s called the police, just now. And,’ he added in a triumphant tone, as if it was conclusive proof of wrongdoing, ‘you’ve got a cut on your forehead.’
Ballard put his hand up and felt the wetness of blood. ‘What manager?’ he asked.
‘’s a hotel.’ The man stood up, waving the onlookers back. ‘See?’
Ballard looked up at the white building across the road. Box-shaped, with a square, pillared porch, on top of which were two poorly executed stone lions, it had a green pantiled roof on which, painted in large white capital letters in order to be visible from far off, were the words ‘Car Park’. Milling around in the road in front, bewildered at stepping into the chaos of someone else’s life from the safety of their morning coffee, were the guests. Most of them were of a similar age to the beefy woman, who now stood slightly to one side of him. She was looking down at him with her lips pursed, her disbelief even more obvious than the man’s.
Over to the left, the bonnet of the Velox was concertinaed against the corner of the hotel, steam hissing from the broken radiator. The front wheel Ballard could see was buckled inwards at a crazy angle, the headlamp smashed and hanging to one side like a detached silver eyeball, and the windscreen completely gone. A humped shape bowed over the steering wheel told him that Ananda was still in there, and he struggled to get to his feet, batting away the hands that reached out to restrain him. Weaving slightly, he approached the car, pushing away two other men in aprons who tried to intercept him, but as he got to within a few feet, the driver’s door swung open and, as if detaching itself by its own agency, clattered onto the oil-stained tarmac. Ananda, hair falling over her face, stockings laddered, coat open, staggered out and performed a strange half pirouette before sinking to her knees in the road. Despite her obvious state of shock, the movement seemed to Ballard to be self-conscious and knowing – like the flourish of a dancer at the end of a performance. For a moment, her head was thrown back, and he saw the fragments of the shattered windscreen glinting in her forehead, and a tracery of blood on her cheek and neck. Then she collapsed onto her back and lay still, clothes twisted about her thighs and legs splayed so that Ballard caught a glimpse of one stocking-top and the darkness beyond. Behind her, in the car, the front seats and the footwell were covered in glass. She turned her head and stared at them as if she’d left something – part of herself, perhaps – inside the car.
He approached hesitantly, hearing agitated murmurs behind him, aware of people backing away, and knelt down beside her head. Her eyes, which had been closed, now opened wide and stared straight at him, engulfing him in a brown velvet gaze. Her smile seemed – no, it actually was – sexual, inviting. For God’s sake, said a disgusted inner voice in Ballard’s ear, the woman’s hurt. Stop it. Then he saw her lips part and pucker and, for an appalled split-second, he thought she was blowing him a kiss but instead she said, ‘Oh, it’s you.’
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Hearing a tentative knock on the door, Stratton tiptoed across Michael’s room, opened it a fraction, and sidled into the corridor. Miss Kirkland was standing there, eyes lowered. Putting a finger to his lips and miming sleep with his hands palms together against his cheek, he motioned her to follow him onto the landing.
‘We had a telephone call from the police station. They’d like you to call them at once.’
‘I see.’ Stratton glanced over the banisters at the hall below and saw Mr Roth sitting in an armchair by the chimney breast. No one else was present and he was staring into the fire. Stratton, who had a good view of three-quarters of his face, saw that his features were settled in a broad, expressionless mask. Wondering what – or possibly who – was hiding behind it, he said, ‘I’ll need to talk to Roth, too, afterwards. Did the ambulance come for Miss Banting?’
‘Yes, they’ve gone. Miss Mills is with her.’
‘Good. Then,’ he added, ‘you’d better find PC Briggs and tell him to station himself outside Michael’s door and not to move until I tell him otherwise.’
Miss Kirkland nodded meekly.
‘Where’s the telephone?’
‘Downstairs, in the office.’
‘Right. If you’d take me … And you need to make it clear to Briggs that no one – and I do mean no one – is to disturb Michael.’
‘… a pity about your car, sir,’ said Parsons, evenly. ‘We’re sending a truck to tow it back.’
‘Never mind that,’ snapped Stratton. ‘What about DI Ballard? Was he hurt?’
‘Just bumps and bruises as far as we know, sir. There was a doctor present – one of the hotel guests, apparently – and he was able to confirm that there was nothing serious.’
‘Thank God for that.’
‘He was very lucky, by the sound of things. The chap who telephoned us said it was a miracle neither of them was killed – Mrs Milburn’s car ran straight into a wall. They’ve taken them both to hospital, so we’ll have a report soon, I daresay.’
‘How bad is she? Do you know?’
‘Not sure, sir. There may be injuries, but she was conscious. She’s been charged with the attempted murder of the boy, but apparently she didn’t respond.’
‘There’s someone with her, is there? Apart from Ballard, I mean?’
‘Of course, sir.’ Parsons sounded reproachful. ‘A police guard.’
‘Well, let’s hope he’s a bit more efficient than Briggs was,’ said Stratton. ‘I’ve got a couple more things to do here, and then I’ll be straight down to see her. Adlard can take me in the car. Send that policewoman back here, will you? I’m concerned about the boy, and I don’t see Briggs being a lot of use … Oh, and we’ve another job for you, Parsons. Can you find out if there’s a William or Billy Milburn – or possibly Carroll – buried in the churchyard at Hasketon? He’d be about ten months old.’
‘Right you are, sir.’
Stratton put the telephone back on its hooks and let out a long, ragged breath of relief, then went down the corridor to see if Roth was still in the hall.
He was. In fact, he did not appear to have changed position at all in the last few minutes. He was attended by Miss Kirkland, who sat beside him, her hands demurely folded on her now clean tweed skirt.
‘How is the boy?’ Roth’s tone, kindly but remote, suggested that he might have been enquiring after a distant relative or a missing cat.
‘Still asleep, I hope.’ Stratton turned to Miss Kirkland. ‘You fetched PC Briggs, did you, and told him what I said?’
‘Yes. He’s up there now.’
Stratton acknowledged this with a curt nod, and turned his attention back to Roth. ‘You may like to know,’ he said, savagely, ‘that DI Ballard managed to catch up with Ananda. Her attempts to evade him resulted in her crashing Mr Tynan’s car, and she’s been taken to hospital.’
‘Do you know her condition?’ asked Roth. The impassive, leonine mask was still in place but Stratton thought that the man’s face looked greyer now, with a rubbery quality, as though it might be possible, by touching the flesh, to mould it into something other than it was. ‘Not as yet,’ he said. ‘A
pparently she was conscious, but it’s very likely she’s been injured.’
Roth’s sunken eyes did not change their expression, but his mouth curved upwards, prompted, Stratton thought, by some inner joke. ‘Conscious,’ he repeated quietly, nodding his head in approval. ‘That’s good.’
‘I should like to speak to you alone.’
Miss Kirkland looked as though she were about to say something, but Roth said sharply, ‘Leave us.’ Stratton took the vacated seat, and both men sat in silence as she crossed the hall and stepped through the vestibule doors, shutting them behind her with a snap. Roth did not speak but stared after her, cloudy-eyed and mouth slightly agape. In spite of the prominent belly, his body had the slack, shrunken look of a deflating balloon.
‘I know that Ananda came here to see you early this morning.’
‘I imagine Miss Kirkland told you that,’ said Roth, his eyes still fixed on the doors. He gave a half smile. ‘I thought she might.’
‘You didn’t see fit to tell me yourself?’
‘No,’ said Roth, judiciously. ‘Not then.’
‘But you knew Miss Kirkland was listening when you spoke to Ananda?’
‘Yes. What has she told you?’
‘I’m not here to answer questions. I want to hear what you have to say.’
Roth uttered a long sigh, like a child resigned to having to recount a series of events it considers wholly unimportant and has half forgotten. ‘Ananda told me about the boy.’
‘Which boy?’
‘The boy who died.’
‘What did she say about him?’
‘She explained the circumstances of his … adoption, shall we say – which of course I knew, thanks to you.’ Roth inclined his head graciously. ‘She then told me that he had died several weeks later.’
‘And you believed her?’
‘You may think it surprising,’ Roth wagged his head at Stratton, ‘but yes, I did.’
‘You believed her when she said she had no idea she was pregnant until Billy died?’
A Willing Victim Page 30