Playing for the Ashes (100 page)

When she had eaten, we took her back into the morning room. I told Chris where to
fin
d blankets and pillows, and we made a bed for her on the chesterfield. The phone began ringing as we worked. Chris picked it up, listened, said, “Unavailable, I’m afraid,” and left it off the hook. I found the cricket ball where I had thrown it, and when Mother lay on the chesterfield and let Chris cover her, I handed her the ball. She clutched it just beneath her chin. She started to speak, but I said, “You rest. I’ll sit right here.” Her eyes closed. I wondered when it was that she’d last slept.

Chris left. I stayed. I sat on the velvet settee. I watched my mother. I counted the quarter hours as the grandfather clock chimed them. The sun slowly moved the shadows across the room. I tried to think what to do.

She must have needed the insurance money, I thought. My surmises scattered like birdshot from there: She hadn’t run the print-works as well as she might have done. Things were getting tight. She didn’t want to tell Kenneth because she didn’t want to worry him or to distract him from his career. Things were getting tight for him. He was supporting his family. The children were getting older. There were more demands placed upon him
fin
ancially. He was in debt. He had creditors hounding him. They decided to throw convention to the wind and to marry but Jean was demanding a single time payment of so much cash before she’d allow a divorce. The oldest son wanted to go to Winchester. Kenneth couldn’t afford it at the same time as he paid Jean off. Mother wanted to help so that they could be married. She had cancer. One of the children had cancer. He had cancer. The money was needed for a special cure. Blackmail. Someone knew something and was making her pay….

I leaned my head against the back of the settee. I couldn’t think what to do because I couldn’t understand what had been done. The sleeplessness of the previous nights began to take its toll on me. I couldn’t make a decision about anything. I couldn’t plan. I couldn’t think. I slept.

When I awoke, the light had faded. I lifted my head and winced with the pain of the position I’d been in. I looked at the chesterfield. Mother was gone. My mind leapt into action. Where was she? Why? What had she done? Could she possibly be…

“You’ve had a good sleep, darling.” I swung my head to the doorway.

She’d bathed. She’d dressed in a long black tunic and matching trousers. She’d put on lipstick. She’d seen to her hair. She wore a plaster on her forehead where she’d cut herself.

“Are you hungry?” she asked. I shook my head. She came into the room. She went to the chesterfield and folded the blankets we’d used to cover her. She smoothed them down neatly and stacked them. She folded the stained antimacassar into a square. This she placed in the centre of the stacked blankets. Then she sat exactly where she had sat in the early hours of Thursday morning, in the corner of the chesterfield that was nearest my place on the settee.

Her gaze didn’t falter as she looked at me. She said, “I am in your hands, Olivia,” and I saw that the power had come to me fully at last.

How odd it felt. There was no triumph in the knowledge, only dread, fear, and responsibility. I wanted none of those sensations, least of all the last.

“Why?” I asked her. “Tell me that much. I need to understand.”

Her eyes flickered off mine for an instant, moving to the Flemish painting on the wall above me. Then they returned to my face. “How ironic I find it,” she said.

“What?”

“To think that, after all the anguish you and I have caused each other through the years, at the end of both our lives it’s come down to need.” She gazed at me steadily. Her expression didn’t change. She looked perfectly calm, not resigned but ready.

“It’s come down to someone being dead,” I said. “And if there’s need involved, it’s going to come from the police. They need answers. What’re you going to tell them?”

“We’ve come to need each other,” she said. “You and I, Olivia. That’s where it stands. Here. At the end of things.”

I was held by her gaze like a mouse gets held by the gaze of a snake just before he becomes the snake’s dinner. I forced my eyes to the fireplace, to the massive ebony chimneypiece whose centre clock had been stopped forever the night Queen Victoria died. It had been my great-grandfather’s symbolic act of mourning the end of an era. For me, it had long served as a demonstration of the hold the past maintains upon us.

Mother spoke again. Her voice was quiet. “Had you not been here when I got home, had I not been made aware of your…” She faltered, apparently looking for a euphemism. “Had I not seen your condition—what this disease is doing to you and going to do to you—I would have taken my life. I would have done it on Friday evening without the slightest hesitation when I was told that Ken was dead in the cottage. I had the razors here. I
fil
led the bathtub to make the bleeding easier. I sat in the water and held the razor to my wrist. But I couldn’t cut. Because to leave you now, to force you to face this horrible death without me here to help even in the smallest way…” She shook her head. “How the gods must be laughing at both of us, Olivia. For years I wanted my daughter to come home.”

“And I came,” I said.

“You did.”

I ran my hand back and forth on the old velvet upholstery, feeling the rise and fall of its worn nap. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Timing,” I said. “God, what a mess I’ve made of things.” She didn’t respond. She appeared to be waiting for something more. She sat perfectly still in the dying light of the afternoon, and she watched me as I formulated the question and gathered the resources to ask it again. “Why? Mother, why did you do it? Have you…. Do you need money or something? Were you thinking of the insurance on the cottage?”

Her right hand sought the wedding ring on her left. Her fingers closed on it. “No,” she said.

“Then what?”

She rose. She walked to the bay window where she replaced the telephone receiver into its cradle. She stood there for a moment with her head bent, with the tips of her
fin
gers resting on the table-top. She said, “I must sweep up this broken glass.”

I said, “Mother. Tell me the truth.”

“The truth?” She raised her head. She didn’t turn back to me. “Love, Olivia. That’s always the beginning of things, isn’t it? What I didn’t understand is that it’s also the end.”

OLIVIA

I
’ve learned two lessons. First, there is the truth. Second, neither admitting nor acknowledging truth makes you free.

I’ve also learned that no matter what I do, someone is going to suffer at my hands.

At first, I thought I could bury knowledge. All the loose ends surrounding that Wednesday night-Thursday morning affair didn’t exactly tie up, and Mother wouldn’t clarify what she meant about love other than to say she’d done it for him, and I didn’t know—and I didn’t want to know—who the
she
was that Mother had been referring to in conjunction with Kenneth. All I knew for certain was that it was an accident that Kenneth Fleming had died in the cottage that night. It
was
an accident. And Mother’s punishment, if punishment was required, would be having to live with the knowledge that she had started the fire that killed the man she loved. Wouldn’t that be punishment enough? Yes, it would, I concluded. It would.

I decided to keep what I knew to myself. I wouldn’t tell Chris. What would be the point?

But then, the investigation heightened. I followed what I could of it in the newspapers and on the radio news. A deliberate
fir
e had been started by an incendiary device the nature of which the police wouldn’t reveal. But it was the nature of the device, apparently, and not solely its presence that encouraged the authorities to begin using the words
arson
and
murder
. Once those words were employed, their companions began making appearances in the media:
suspect, killer, victim, motive
. Interest grew. Speculation
flo
urished. Then Jimmy Cooper confessed.

I waited for Mother to phone me. She’s a woman of conscience, I told myself. She’ll come forward now. Any minute. Any hour. Because this is Kenneth Fleming’s son we’re talking about. This is Kenneth’s son.

I tried to label the turn of events convenient for all of us. He’s only a boy, I thought.

If he stands trial and is found guilty, what can the criminal justice system do with a sixteen-year-old convicted killer? Wouldn’t they just send him to a place like Borstal for a few years’ useful rehabilitation? And couldn’t that be seen as a social advantage? He’d be cared for there, he’d be educated, he’d be given employment skills that he no doubt needed desperately. He’d probably end up all the better for having had the experience.

Then I saw his photograph, when he was taken from his comprehensive by the police. He was walking between two constables, trying his best to look like he didn’t give a fig for what was happening to him. He was trying to seem like he couldn’t be touched. He was playing it tough and taking himself to a place where his answer to every question would be a sneer. Oh, I know that look Jimmy had on his face. It said, “I’ve got armour,” and “I don’t care about nothing.” It communicated the fact that the past didn’t matter because he had no future.

I phoned Mother then. I asked her did she know about Jimmy. She said the police were merely talking to him. I asked what was she going to do. She said that she was in my hands.

“Olivia,” she said, “I’ll understand your decision, whatever it is.”

“What’ll they do to him? Mother, what’ll they do?”

“I don’t know. I’ve already arranged for a solicitor. He’s been talking to the boy.”

“Does the solicitor know? What really…I mean…”

“I can’t think they’ll put him on trial, Olivia. He may have been in the vicinity that night, but he wasn’t in the cottage. They’ve no proof of that.”

“What happened?” I asked her. “That night. Mother, at least tell me what happened.”

“Olivia. Darling. You don’t want to know. You don’t want to be burdened this way.”

Her voice was soft, so reasonable. Not the voice of the Miriam Whitelaw who once vigourously pursued good works around London, but the voice of a woman altered forever.

“I need to know,” I told her. “You need to tell me.” So that I would know how to act, what to do, what to think, how to be from this moment forward.

So she told me. So simple it all was, really. The house left to look occupied—lights on, music playing, and both on timers to wear the guise of the inhabitant’s logical movements that night. Slipping out through the back garden and down the mews under cover of darkness, careful to make no sound and not taking the car because the car wouldn’t be needed at all.

“But how?” I asked. “How did you get out there? How did you manage?”

It was more than simple. An underground ride to Victoria Station, where the trains run twenty-four hours a day to Gatwick, where the car hire agencies are open twenty-four hours as well, where without any difficulty a blue Cavalier can be hired for a drive—not a terribly long drive, really—out to Kent, where the key to the cottage can be easily nicked shortly after midnight, when the lights are out and the cottage’s sole inhabitant is asleep so that she doesn’t hear an intruder who takes less than two minutes to fade into the cottage, to plant in an armchair a cigarette bound with matches, a cigarette taken from a packet bought from any tobacconist, anywhere, a common cigarette really, the most common cigarette imaginable. And then back through the kitchen—pausing only to scoop up two kittens because the kittens are innocent, they haven’t chosen to be there, they aren’t meant to die in a fire with her, a great con
fla
gration in which the cottage is sacrificed but that doesn’t matter, she doesn’t matter, nothing matters except Kenneth and putting an end to the pain that she causes him.

“You meant to…Then it wasn’t an accident.” What was there left to hold on to, I wondered.

Accident? No. It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t an accident at all. An accident couldn’t be this carefully planned, drifting back into the night, driving back to the airport, where the trains still make the return trip into London, where outside Victoria Station a cab from the rank will take a lone woman to a darkened house midway up Argyll Road from which the trip to Phillips Walk isn’t far and a silent return in the early hours of the morning—no car’s engine to attract any notice— will go unregarded. So simple really. Because who would think that Victoria Station and Gatwick Airport and a car hired for the evening would ever be connected to a fire in Kent?

But I am in your hands, Olivia.

What’s it to me, I thought, but more shakily now, and with less conviction. I don’t know this kid. I don’t know his mother. I don’t know his siblings. I never met his father. If he was dim enough to take himself to Kent on the very night that his father died, wasn’t that his problem? Wasn’t it?
Wasn’t
it?

And then you came to the barge, Inspector.

ARM, I tried to tell myself at
fir
st. You were asking about Kenneth Fleming, but the real reason you’d come was to do a recce. No one had ever before associated us with the movement, but there was always a chance. Chris had taken up with Amanda in violation of the rules, hadn’t he? Perhaps she was a copper’s nark. She’d gathered information, passed it along to her superiors, and here you were to suss things out. It seemed logical enough. Never mind your talk about a murder investigation, you were here to look for evidence to connect us to ARM.

Which I’ve given you. Here. In this document. Are you wondering why, Inspector? You, so determined that I should commit an act of betrayal…. Would you like to know?