4.Little Victim

The Little Victim

Also by R. T. Raichev

THE LITTLE VICTIM

Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com

First published in the UK by Constable,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2009

First US edition published by SohoConstable,
an imprint of Soho Press, 2009

Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
www.sohopress.com

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition
that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold,
hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication
Data is available from the British Library

UK ISBN: 978-1-84529••••

US ISBN: 978-1-56947••••

US Library of Congress number: 20070•••••

Printed and bound in the EU

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

To Michael

in gratitude for the Gulf

Author’s Note

Contents

1 Lady Macbeth of Noon’s Folly

2 The Most Dangerous Game

3 Flowers for the Judge

4 The Bone Collector

5 Another Country

6 Belle de Jour

7 The Shadow

8 When a Stranger Calls

9 The Mysterious Commission

10 The Garden Party

11 Murder is Easy

12 The Public Enemy

13 Witness for the Prosecution

14 Never Come Back

15 Evil Under the Sun

16 The Knight’s Tale

17 Journey Into Fear

18 The Mirror Cracked

19 Indo-Chine

20 A Man Lay Dead

21 Murder as a Fine Art

22 The Holy Innocent

23 The Snow Queen

24 The Wrong Man

25 The Case of the Discontented Wife

26 The Science of Deduction

27 A Talent To Deceive

28 A Taste For Death

29 At Brown’s Hotel

30 Thou Art the Man

31 The Veiled One

Alas, regardless of their doom,

The little victims play!

No sense have they of ills to come,

Nor care beyond today . . .

1

Lady Macbeth Of Noon’s Folly

‘He kisses her bedroom door each time he passes it. He thinks about her
all
the time.’ Lucasta Leighton made a despairing gesture. ‘He keeps talking about her. I do tell him to forget her. She’s gone. She’s made her choice, appalling as it is. She is no longer a
child.
She’s never going to return, she said so. He can’t do anything about it. She’s thousands of miles away. Well, he says he can’t give her up, not just like that, not his only daughter. He still believes she might be persuaded to come back, you see. When I tell him she won’t, he gets angry. He snaps at me.’

Lucasta’s voice was steady but her eyes were red, as though she had been crying. ‘Do have some more coffee, Iris,’ she urged her sister-in-law as she picked up the silver pot.

‘Thank you . . . Where’s Toby now?’ Iris Mason-Stubbs turned her mild bespectacled face apprehensively towards the door that led into her brother’s study. Toby had always made her nervous.

‘He went for a walk. He said he’d be back soon. He left forty-five minutes ago. He should have come back by now, really. I hope he’s all right.’

Noon’s Folly Cottage overlooked the woods. It was half past eleven in the morning but the sky outside was so overcast, it felt like late afternoon or early evening. The streetlights were on. It was always darker by the woods. Not the best day for a walk, Iris thought. She sat facing the french window. The chill mist had caught the back of her throat and made her cough the moment she had got out of the car and started walking towards the house. Swirls of mist – floating and clearing and rolling sluggishly back – like the tentacles of some fantastical creature from the very depths of the ocean – exploring – looking for prey? Something mesmeric about it.
Below the thunders of
the upper deep, Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea – His ancient,
dreamless, uninvaded sleep – The Kraken sleepeth
. Did people still read Tennyson? The trees and giant ferns were obscured into shadowy silhouettes – everything outside appeared submerged – the streetlights were turning into blurs of watery, acid-green phosphorescence. So quiet too.

Toby would never come back. Toby had been snapped up by the monstrous Kraken. Iris felt at once disturbed and oddly comforted by the fanciful idea.

‘This is better, isn’t it?’ Lucasta had turned on the two table lamps. ‘Shall I put another log on the fire? Are you warm enough?’

‘I’m fine. Thank you.’

‘Are you sure? You look pinched.’

It was an attractive room done in silver-blue and maroon – Laura Ashley and Liberty’s – everything in its appointed place – the glass-top coffee table gleamed – not a speck of dust anywhere –
quite
unlike the cosy chaos that reigned in Iris’s drawing room. Iris didn’t really see any point in keeping her drawing room tidy. No matter how often they had it tidied up, it was a mess again in no time. Lucasta blamed the dogs and she kept telling her to get rid of them. Once Iris admitted she actually found muddy paws endearing and Lucasta stared at her as though she thought her completely off her head. They were
so
different. Henry said he could well imagine old Lucasta blowing off Fido’s head with a shotgun and not batting an eyelid.

Iris glanced at the books that lay on the coffee table.
An Englishman’s Garden
and
An Englishwoman’s Home.
Shouldn’t it have been the other way round? A novel by someone called Antonia Darcy – a detective story, judging by the cover – a gloomy Victorian Gothic mansion and
such
a sinister-looking tree. Iris thought she might enjoy it. Were the man with the pipe and the woman in the mink coat the detectives? Heaven knew what kind of danger awaited them inside, what fearful mystery, what tangles in need of tackling.

‘I am sure exercise is good for Toby,’ Iris said brightly and she raised her cup to her lips.

‘Maybe, but
not
in this damp weather.’ Lucasta’s face assumed a severe magisterial expression. ‘Yesterday he complained of chest pains. He sat slumped in his chair for what seemed like ages, his hand pressed against his heart. I was terribly worried. I wanted to ring for an ambulance but he wouldn’t hear of it. He refuses to go to the doctor, you see. He tells me not to fuss. Oh – that girl! That girl! It’s all her fault!’

‘I did think Toby looked ill the other day.’

‘He
is
ill. Hardly eats anything. Broods. Sleeps badly. Talks in his sleep. Keeps calling out her name. He gets up in the middle of the night and walks about the house . . . I pretend I’m asleep,’ Lucasta went on, ‘but I get up too and follow him. He has no idea I have been watching him. Please, Iris – not a word!’

‘My lips are sealed.’

‘He sits at his desk and writes letters to her. He always tears up the first draft and starts again. I’ve read all his letters. I piece them together, you see – in the morning. He holds conversations with her – imagines she is in the room with him – begs her to come back – promises her things – tells her how much he loves her – addresses her as his “dearest girl”. Then his mood changes and he gets angry and starts calling her names – oh, such dreadful names. Last night he started reminding her about the fire, when he saved her life and was nearly killed in the process.’

‘Ah, the fire.’ Iris nodded.

The fire had taken place sixteen years before. There had been an explosion – the mightiest of bangs followed by a ball of flame that had been seen from miles. Swaylands – her brother’s holiday cottage – had burnt to the ground. Imogen – Toby’s first wife – had suffered her first nervous breakdown as a result. Poor Toby had lost part of his little finger. There had been the suspicion that it was her niece who started the fire, after being refused something she’d set her heart on, ballet shoes or a pony, Iris couldn’t remember which.

‘D’you know what he said? He said he wouldn’t mind having
all
of his fingers chopped off, if that was the price he had to pay to have her back! I am afraid he’s losing his mind. He’s had the absurd idea of going and bringing her back.’ Lucasta shook her head. ‘Flying thousands and thousands of miles to the subcontinent, can you imagine?As though she’d listen to him! He’s going mad. Well, I do believe that’s her intention.
She wants to drive him mad
. That’s her revenge. She is a wicked, wicked girl!’

There was a waft of Hermes perfume as Lucasta rose from her armchair and crossed to the window. A tall, stately woman with a Roman nose and neatly arranged ghost-grey hair, she was wearing a high-collared purple dress and a brooch in the shape of what looked like a triton. She held her torso erect and, though clearly agitated, clasped her hands firmly before her. There was a hint of the monarch about Lucasta, a demeanour that was
plus
royaliste que la reine
. She had kept her figure through gardening and good genes – she was a Furness – and of course she had never had any children.

Lucasta stood beside the french window, gazing intently into the gathering darkness. Like some faithful old dog, Iris thought. Iris knew everything about dogs – she had five. Such comedians! She could sit and watch their antics for
hours
. Iris had eaten a dog biscuit once and declared it actually tasted quite nice. She was also a voracious reader of books about dogs. Her favourite story came from the annals of 1930s Hollywood and concerned a male dog named Pat, a sort of canine drag artist. Pat had played Lassie in one of those marvellous old films and had become famous around the film studios as ‘the only star who could play a bitch better than Bette Davis’.

Would a story about a transvestite mutt lighten Lucasta’s mood? Of course it wouldn’t. Now, wasn’t it peculiar that Lucasta should detest dogs and yet dote on Toby, the most difficult of men? Her brother was impossibly opinionated, unutterably insensitive to anybody’s feelings but his own, given to the highest dudgeons imaginable, overbearing, short-tempered – the list was endless.

Lucasta and Toby had got married a year before, only two months after Imogen’s death. Lucasta had known Toby for more than thirty years. As it happened, she and Imogen had been childhood friends. Lucasta had nursed Imogen during the latter’s short illness and she had been there when the end had come. It was Lucasta who had made all the arrangements for the funeral, hired caterers for the baked meats, paid the nurse’s wages and provided her with references, had the house cleaned from top to bottom and despatched Imogen’s clothes to various charities, all neatly labelled. Lucasta had taken care of – well, of everything. She was that sort of woman. Fearsomely efficient. She makes me nervous, Iris thought.

Lucasta was fifty-seven or -eight and she had never been married before. Everybody had been surprised at the match, but in all fairness it had to be said that Lucasta and Toby actually had a lot in common – a fondness for country walks, the diaries of James Lee-Milne, gardens, the local Conservative club, the theatre. They also did the
Times
crossword and Sudoku together. Toby let Lucasta ‘manage’ him – he actually
listened
to her the way he did to no other woman. Well, they would have been leading a happy life together – a comfortable, quiet, mildly eccentric, pleasantly autumnal sort of life – but for this dreadful business of Toby’s daughter.

(How curious – not once so far had they referred to her niece by name! So far it had been ‘she’, ‘her’, ‘Toby’s daughter’ or ‘that girl’. Beyond the pale – that was where, by unspoken consent, they seemed to have relegated her niece.)

‘I don’t understand her. I really don’t,’ Lucasta was saying. ‘Personally I’ve never had any problems with her, mind. She’s always been perfectly civil to me. She never cast me in the role of the wicked stepmother or anything like that. She used to ask me questions about the garden.’

‘I don’t suppose Toby lets you read her letters?’

‘No. He’s extremely sensitive about them. With good reason!’

‘Oh? You mean . . .?’

‘
Yes
. I’ve read all of the letters. Toby has no idea. I know where he keeps them – inside Volume 5 of
Famous Trials.
You won’t breathe a word, will you, Iris? Toby would be furious if he knew.’

‘Haven’t you tried to intercept them – stop them from getting through to him?’

‘As a matter of fact I did try a couple of times, but he always manages to get them before me. He seems to have developed a sixth sense, so he is always up particularly early on the day they arrive. I even considered bribing the postman but we keep getting different ones.’ Lucasta sighed. ‘Toby stands in the hall in his dressing gown, perfectly still, staring at the door, waiting for the letter to hit the mat.’

‘How dreadful.’

‘He then takes the letter to his study, reads it several times, makes notes, and starts writing his reply.’

‘So she’s given him her address?’

‘She has. You seem surprised. That’s part of her game, don’t you see? It’s clear she
expects
him to write back, so that she can laugh at him and gloat over his misery and frustration. Each time a letter arrives Toby hopes – believes – she’ll tell him she’s coming back!’

‘What – what does she write about?’ Iris hoped her sister-in-law wouldn’t think her too ghoulish.

Two very bright red spots appeared on Lucasta’s cheekbones, but she spoke in a composed enough voice. ‘Well, she tells him in some detail about the kind of things she does.’