“Robertson? Nothing more? Did you hear another name, perhaps?”
“No, Miss Dobbs. I found it incongruous that it was not Payton, that’s all. And I’m telling you this hoping you won’t be back. In any case, my wife and I are considering taking up missionary work again—you get more thanks for it, and that’s the truth.”
“One more question, Mr. Paige—did you think this boy might be older than the others?”
“Well, he was a fair bit taller. His hair needed a good cut as well, but you can’t expect the Reverend Griffith to do everything, can you?”
“No, not at all. He does enough as it is. Thank you for your telephone call, Mr. Paige. I appreciate that you had a bit of a walk to the telephone kiosk.”
“Like I said, we just want to be left alone now.”
“I’ll do my best, Mr. Paige. My regards to Mrs. Paige.”
A sound amounting to a “hmmmph” was Paige’s parting comment.
“Miss? Miss, is everything all right?”
Maisie looked towards Sandra, the secretary’s furrowed brow testament to her concern.
“Yes, sorry, Sandra. I was just thinking.” She realized she was still holding the receiver. “Look, I want to go back to Addington Square, to see the Reverend Griffith. Also—” Maisie clicked the bar on the top of the telephone to clear the line. “I’d better place a call to Caldwell.” She dialed Scotland Yard but put down the receiver before it was answered.
“Sandra, here’s what I would like you to do, as I need to have some evidence to support my train of thought—and I’m hoping the Reverend Griffith can throw light on my suspicions. I want you to go along to Somerset House.”
“What shall I search for?”
“A birth, approximately fourteen years ago—and I pray it wasn’t in India, or it might not be registered here. Try the name Robert Payton. And a marriage—Jesmond Martin.”
“Robert Payton?”
“Yes.” Maisie scribbled a note on a piece of paper. “If you find any connection between these names, please telephone Caldwell at Scotland Yard, tell him what I asked of you, and then tell him where I’ve gone. I don’t want to call in the troops, so to speak, unless there is good cause. So help me, if I’m wrong anyway, I will never hear the last of it, but it’s a chance I’m willing to take.”
Sandra left her desk and reached for her coat. “Very well, Miss Dobbs. I’ll go straightaway. I shan’t take long. You can depend on me.”
“I know I can.”
Maisie left the distinctive MG motor car parked on a road several streets away from the home of the Reverend Griffith. At the front door of the terraced house, she looked both ways, then knocked. There was no answer, so she knocked again, but this time, in the distance, she could hear the Reverend Griffith shouting, “All right, all right, I’m on my way.”
The door opened, and the vicar—of a church that seemed to be of his own creation—stood in front of Maisie. His eyes seemed to register both shock and dismay at seeing Maisie.
“Oh, it’s you.”
“That’s more or less what your devoted parishioner, Mr. Paige, said when he last saw me darken his doorstep. Reverend Griffith, I believe we must speak as a matter of some urgency.”
Griffith sighed. “Come in. You know where my rooms are.”
He allowed Maisie to lead the way to the room that doubled as a sitting room and study, where she took a seat without invitation.
Griffith sat in the chair in front of her, swiveled it back and forth, and sighed. “What do you want to know?”
“I think you know very well what I want to know. I’d like you to start at the beginning, so I might get a measure of exactly how volatile a certain Robert Payton is. I have a feeling that I could already make an educated guess regarding the young man’s state of mind, and how it might have become so unbalanced—but I want to hear it from you. Because you know, don’t you?”
Griffith held his hands to his face, as if to shut out the truth, then drew them down across his cheeks and rested them on his knees. “Oh, God, I have been blind and stupid.”
“You thought you could control the outcome, didn’t you? And you thought you could protect a boy you believe to be blameless—and he is an innocent in so many ways, isn’t he? If I have guessed correctly, he might be what is termed an innocent victim.”
“Of war, Miss Dobbs. An innocent victim of war.”
“You’d better explain. Now. Before I go in search of him.”
“You?”
“Yes. Tell me when this all began.”
Griffith began to speak slowly, stuttering at first. “I knew Arthur Payton and family—his wife and baby son—just before they went to India; this must have been in 1921, I believe. I met them at a function for staff and their families going out to India. Arthur had been wounded in the war and was desperately shell-shocked—I recognized it straightaway, because of my work at the hospital in Richmond. He tried his best, but it was as if he had sustained a violence that lingered within him, and it had to come out—it was a demon that sucked on his soul.”
Maisie saw Griffith falter, and urged him on in his recounting of the life of Arthur Payton. It was as if the bare outline of a person was beginning to take shape and form before her, and she felt a terrible dread as she anticipated the outcome of the vicar’s story.
“Go on, please.”
“In India we saw each other occasionally, and I was invited to supper, that sort of thing. I realized soon enough that he was miserably cruel to his wife. On the face of it, he put on a good show, and his wife hid her distress. But the boy was only a toddler when they arrived in the country, yet as he grew his behavior demonstrated a deep disturbance. If his father had to go up to one of the hill towns, he calmed down, became lighter and cheery. But when his father was at home, he was morose, fearful—and both mother and son had unaccountable bruising. The boy took off his shirt once—all the young boys were playing on the lawns of the club and rolling around, and they’d decided to remove their shirts and run into an ornamental pond, much to their mothers’ consternation. But Mrs. Payton was horrified, because at once everyone saw the bruising to the boy’s arms and back. I am sure they both suffered physically. Mrs. Payton, especially, experienced dreadful headaches, and would languish in the house for hours and hours, and the boy would have no one. I understand he would be found by his ayah weeping outside his mother’s door, afraid she might leave him.”
“But she didn’t, did she? It was the father who left.”
Griffith nodded. “Those dark demons ate his soul, and it all became too much for him. He took his own life.”
“And then Jesmond Martin came along.”
“He was a man thwarted in love, and—”
“Usha Pramal. He had fallen in love with Usha Pramal,” said Maisie. “He was the newcomer to India who had made a foolish error in making known his love for her before she could ever explain to her family.”
“Ah, so you know,” said Griffith.
“I guessed it might be him,” said Maisie. “But go on.”
“After a brief courtship, he married Payton’s widow and took her son as his own. He immersed himself into being a good father to his stepson, and in an endeavor to extinguish the past—the loss of his great love—he gave the boy his name, so they were a family complete. The boy became more settled, and it seemed as if the darkness had lifted.”
“Then they came home, to England,” offered Maisie.
“Yes. I understand Jesmond’s adoption of Robert was registered soon after their arrival on British soil. In any case, we lost touch. I believe the return was in an effort to find doctors who might treat the dreadful headaches that tormented his wife. There were those who thought her former husband’s brutality might have contributed to an injury in the brain.”
“It’s entirely possible, if there were repeated concussions,” said Maisie. “In any case, it seems that by chance Usha Pramal—who had already traveled to England in a bid to forget Jesmond
Martin—crossed paths with the family while she was living in St. John’s Wood.”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“She and Jesmond both felt the spark that had ignited their love, and Usha left her employers, to avoid further chance meetings. But I believe it was you who unwittingly helped Martin find Usha again—rather like the prince finding his Cinderella,” said Maisie.
Griffith nodded. “We met again, at a sort of gathering for men who had worked in India during the years I happened to be there, and he came to my house here—obviously, my circumstances were very different from his at that point. He was having some difficulty with his son and called upon me for advice. He passed Usha as she was leaving after Bible study. He visited me again and said he needed someone to help with his wife, so I put forward Usha’s name.”
“Yet you knew how they had once loved each other?”
“He was a broken man, and Usha was such a light soul, and a helpful woman, I thought that their time of love had passed and that she would be a support to his ill wife.” He put his hands together in front of his lips and drew them away again. “Of course, I knew he wanted to see Usha, he wanted to have her close to him, if only in his house doing menial work.”
“But they fell in love all over again—was that it?”
Griffith sighed. “How could they not fall in love?”
“And how could Usha not fail to help his wife, and how could the son not fail to be at once in thrall to Usha and yet at the same time feel hatred of her, for what his father saw in her,” added Maisie.
“The son—Robert—came home for school holidays and occasional exeats, and it seemed that he fell under Usha’s spell—and she helped his mother, whom he loved.” Griffith pressed his hands to his eyes. “Oh dear Lord, forgive me. I was so unthinking.”
“No, you were not unthinking, but you were thinking only of the man, of Jesmond Martin.”
He nodded. “I suppose I was. I don’t know how I could not have seen the outcome.”
“And what was the outcome?” asked Maisie.
Griffith looked at her. “Oh, please, Miss Dobbs—you know very well what it was.”
“Yes, I suppose I do. Jesmond Martin had already indulged his son—his stepson—and tried to channel his energies into various outdoor sports and activities. Was it surprising that he ran away from school and came here? Though Jesmond Martin went through the motions of wanting us to find his son, he knew in his heart where he was because at some point you’d met Robert and he’d liked you. Robert Payton—Robert Martin, or ‘Martin Robertson’ was an accomplished archer, an excellent shot, and a boy who knew how to look after himself. As he crossed the boundary between youthful insolence and the beginning of an aggressive manhood, the realization that the father he had come to trust and love might also abandon him led him to lose all sense of reality. He could not take the life of Jesmond Martin, but he could take the life of Usha Pramal. And then, having seen her with her dear friend, Maya Patel—for I am sure he stalked her as if he were on the hunt for a stag—he had to ensure that Miss Patel never uttered the secret shared by Usha Pramal, that she was again in contact with the man she had loved so long ago.”
“Yes, I am afraid events unfolded in much the way you’ve described.”
“With just the odd detail out of place, perhaps? That sending Usha on her way in such an angry manner was part of the smoke and mirrors—it was to appease Robert and allow him to think his father was true to his mother, but instead, Robert had followed his father on at least one occasion—he seems to have absconded from school with ease—and knew that Jesmond Martin had no intention of giving up Usha Pramal, no matter what he had to say about her. And it seemed that Jesmond had little regard this time for the fact that Usha was drawing back again, perhaps ashamed and dismayed that her love for him had led her to such a point. Her happy mood had changed because she wanted to be free of him, of her shame. Am I right?”
Griffith nodded.
“This is surely a tragedy—a story of love thwarted, a son estranged, and ill-wrought decisions affecting a daisy chain of people. But there’s something that still seems amiss to me—your willingness to put Usha Pramal in such a difficult position. You knew of her goodness and you also knew she had loved Jesmond Martin. You knew he was married—not happily, granted—and yet despite being a man of God you almost deliberately tempted two people to flaunt the Commandments. I have to ask myself what else moved you to treat Usha Pramal as if she were a commodity—almost as if she were something to be sold.” Maisie paused, watching Griffith. “Were you offered money by Jesmond Martin?”
The vicar began to speak, but could barely form words through his sobs. “It wasn’t quite like that. He helped me out—there were arrears on my rent and on the church rooms—he settled my debts to help me and asked nothing in return. He showed such goodness in his gesture.”
“So you persuaded yourself that nothing untoward would happen between Jesmond Martin and Usha.” Maisie stopped speaking until Griffith could meet her eyes. “You know, I remember reading an old legend—it may indeed have been a Hindu myth, now that I think of it. The story went that before God sent the souls to earth, he divided each one in two, so forever those divided souls would be in search of their mate. Some were never fortunate and wandered this earth alone. Some did not find their soul mate, but were happy with the love they found. Others were joined but lived unhappily. But there were those touched by destiny, who found their soul mates and experienced earthly lives of bliss and contentment.” She paused as Griffith nodded his understanding. “I have wondered, as we’ve been talking here, whether indeed Jesmond and Usha were divided souls. Perhaps you saw this, but weren’t to know theirs would be such a sad and damaging destiny.”
“I was a fool, Miss Dobbs.”
“Yes, I think you were, and you’ve woven yourself a very tangled web. Beyond a naive, misguided trust that all would be well in the end, I know why you offered the boy a place of safety; why you failed to go to the police. Not only did Jesmond Martin help you with your debts.” She looked around the room. “But I think he kept quiet about something he’d guessed—you have no credentials, do you? You are a man of the cloth in name only. There was no study of theology, no ordination. You invented your church and concluded that protection of your transgression was more important than justice itself, which is why you did not go to the police when you should have. You have committed fraud on at least two counts, and have withheld information of interest to the police.”
“You make it sound so very easy,” said Griffith.
“Truth should always prevail, Mr.—and I do mean Mr.—Griffith. The way events have unfolded should tell you that what I say is right—Truth should always prevail. Eventually.”
“I . . . I don’t know what to do,” said Griffith.
Maisie sighed. “Where is Robert?”
“Hiding, over on the common,” he replied.
Maisie nodded and stood up, then turned to leave.
“Where are you going?” said Griffith.
“To speak to Robert Martin.”
“But he might—”
“He might,” said Maisie. “I know he’s armed, and I know what he might do. But he is a boy who has had his heart broken by a man who was torn apart by war. Someone has to be a true advocate, don’t they?”
Maisie walked away, leaving Griffith slumped in chair, weeping.
A bright afternoon sunshine cast shadows across the golden grasses of the common behind Addington Square. Maisie shielded her eyes with her hand as she walked towards the trees where Robert Payton, now Martin, had made a camp. Though her step was resolute, she felt fear rising as she approached the lair of a boy on the cusp of manhood; a young soul deeply damaged by a father who had sustained psychological wounds that took away all sense of right and wrong. How would she speak to him? How could she calm his temper? She pressed her hand to the center of her body and uttered simple words that came easily. May we know peace. May we all know peac
e.
Her quiet entreaty was shattered by the weeping of a child and the plea of an older girl.
“Please don’t hurt her. Please don’t hurt her. She’s my little sister,” said the girl.
“And my dad will come and get your dad, just you see,” said a boy.
Maisie crept closer, bending to the ground. As quietly as she could, she rounded the trees to better view the scene. She held her hand to her mouth.
Robert Martin, stepson of the man Usha Pramal had loved, was holding a gun to the head of the smallest girl in the family she’d met on the common days earlier. The eldest boy held their golden-haired dog by the old leather collar that seemed too large for his neck. The dog growled, and the children wailed as fear overtook them—the younger boy’s darned and patched trousers bore the damp stain of terror.
“You’re all sissies, that’s what you are. This is my camp, my territory, and I live here—it’s not yours,” said Martin, his finger on the already cocked trigger.
Maisie put her hand to her mouth as thoughts swept through her mind. At once memories seemed to collide with the present and it seemed she had been in this place so many times—in a clearing in a quarry facing down a madman who threatened the lives of men who had been disfigured in the war; challenging a young politician with a secret he wanted to protect; disarming a broken soldier bent upon killing half of London; bringing an army officer to justice who had killed one of his men. Images from the past seemed to taunt her, but now she faced the insanity of war writ large upon childhood, and she knew that here, in this field, under a cluster of trees, the young were at risk of paying the ultimate price.
Maisie knew she must act now or the children—children whose mother would soon be calling them from the attic window of a house overlooking the common land—would be dead. For she had no doubt that the boy who now held his father’s gun could kill every one of them. Far better she gave them the chance of freedom. She stood up, brushed down her skirt, and walked forward towards the center of the group.
“Oh, it’s that lovely dog again,” said Maisie, holding out her hand, palm up. “Hello, Nelson.”