Free A Willing Victim by Laura Wilson

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 Russianicons, 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