Playing for the Ashes (26 page)

“Complicated,” he said. “A cricketer. From the England team.”

“Cricket,” she murmured. “That ghastly game. Who can ever make sense of it?”

“Fortunately, that won’t be a requirement of the case.”

Her eyes drifted closed. “Come to bed, then. I miss you snoring in my ear.”

“Do I snore?”

“No one’s ever complained about it before?”

“No. And I should think…” He saw the trap when her lips slowly curved in a smile. “You’re supposed to be more than half asleep, Helen.”

“I am. I am. So should you be. Come to bed, darling.”

“Despite—”

“Your chequered past. Yes. I love you. Come to bed and keep me warm.”

“It’s not cold.”

“We’ll pretend.”

He lifted her hand, kissed the palm, curved the fingers round his. Her grasp was loose.

She was falling back asleep. “Can’t,” he said. “I’ve got to be up too early.”

“Pooh,” she murmured. “You can set the alarm.”

“I wouldn’t want to,” he said. “You distract me too much.”

“That doesn’t bode well for our future then, does it?”

“Have we a future?”

“You know we do.”

He kissed her fingers and slipped her hand beneath the covers. In a re
fle
x reaction, she turned on her side once again. “Sleep well,” he said.

“Hmmm. Will. Yes.”

He kissed her temple, rose, and headed for the door.

“Tommy?” It was little more than a mumble.

“Yes?”

“Why did you stop by?”

“I’ve left you something.”

“For breakfast?”

He smiled. “No. Not for breakfast. You’re on your own there.”

“Then what?”

“You’ll see.”

“What’s it for?”

A good question. He gave the most reasonable answer. “For love, I suppose.” And life, he thought, and all of its messy complications.

“That’s nice,” she said. “Thoughtful of you, darling.”

She rustled underneath the covers, burrowing for the optimum position. He stood in the doorway, waiting for the moment when her breathing deepened. He heard her sigh.

“Helen,” he whispered.

Her breathing came and went.

“I love you,” he said.

Her breathing came and went.

“Marry me,” he said.

Her breathing came and went.

Having managed to fulfill his obligation to himself by the week’s end as promised, he locked up and left her to dream her dreams.

CHAPTER
7

M
iriam Whitelaw didn’t speak until they had crossed the river, passing through the Elephant and Castle and making the turn into the New Kent Road. Then she stirred herself only to say faintly, “There’s never been a convenient way to get out to Kent from Kensington, has there?” as if she meant to apologise for the bother she was causing them.

Lynley glanced at her in the rearview mirror, but he didn’t respond. Next to him Sergeant Havers was hunched over, muttering into his car phone as she relayed the number plates and a description of Kenneth Fleming’s Lotus-7 back to Detective Constable Winston Nkata at New Scotland Yard. “Put it on the PNC,” she was saying. “And fax it to the district stations as well…. What?…Let me check.” She raised her head and said to Lynley, “Want the media to have it?” And when he nodded, she said, “Right. That’s okay. But nothing else for the moment. Got it?…Fine.” She replaced the phone and leaned back in her seat. She surveyed the congested street and sighed. “Where the dickens is everyone going?”

“Weekend,” Lynley said. “Decent weather.”

They were caught in a mass exodus from city to country, alternating between rolling along nicely and slowing to a sudden crawl. They had been on the road so far for forty minutes, weaving and inching their way
fir
st to the Embankment, then to Westminster Bridge, and from there to the continuously burgeoning urban mass that comprises south London. It promised to be a great deal more than forty additional minutes before they reached the Springburns in Kent.

They had spent the first hour of their day going through Kenneth Fleming’s papers. Some of these were mixed with Mrs. Whitelaw’s own, crammed into the drawers of a davenport in the morning room on the ground
flo
or of the house. Others were folded neatly into his bedside table. Still others were in a letter holder on the work top in the kitchen. Among them, they found his current contract with the Middlesex county side, his former contracts documenting his cricket career in Kent, half a dozen bids for jobs for Whitelaw Printworks, a brochure about boating in Greece, a three-week-old letter verifying an appointment with a solicitor in Maida Vale—which Havers pocketed—and the information they were looking for about his car.

Mrs. Whitelaw attempted to help them in their search, but it was clear that her thought processes were muzzy at best. She wore the same sheath, jacket, and jewellery that she’d had on the previous night. Her cheeks and lips were colourless. Her eyes and nose were red. Her hair was rumpled. If she’d been to bed at all in the past twelve hours, she didn’t appear to have reaped a single benefit from the experience.

Lynley gave her a second look in the mirror. He wondered how much longer she was going to hold up without a doctor’s intervention. She pressed a handkerchief to her mouth—like her clothing, it appeared to be last night’s as well—and with her elbow on the armrest, she kept her eyes closed for long periods. She had agreed to the trip to Kent immediately upon Lynley’s making the request of her. But looking at her now, he began to think it was one of his less inspired ideas.

Still, it couldn’t be helped. They needed her to examine the cottage. She would be able to tell them what, if anything, was missing, what was marginally odd, or what was altogether wrong. But her ability to produce that information for them depended upon her powers of observation. And visual acumen depended upon a mind that was clear.

“I don’t know about this, Inspector,” Sergeant Havers had muttered at him over the top of the Bentley in Staffordshire Terrace once they had tucked Mrs. Whitelaw into its back seat.

Neither did he. Less so now when in the mirror he watched the straining of cords in her neck and saw the glimmer of tears seep out like melting dreams beneath her eyes.

He wanted to say something to comfort the older woman. But he didn’t know the words or how to begin to say them because he didn’t altogether understand the nature of her grief. Her true relationship with Fleming was the great unknown that still had to be discussed, however delicately, between them.

She opened her eyes. She caught him watching her, turned her head to the window, and made a pretence of noting the view.

When they got beyond Lewisham and traffic loosened up, Lynley finally interrupted her thoughts. “Are you all right, Mrs. Whitelaw?” he asked. “Would you like to stop for a coffee somewhere?”

Without turning from the window, she shook her head. He gunned the Bentley into the right lane and passed an antique Morris with an ageing hippie at the wheel.

They drove on in silence. The car phone rang once. Havers answered it. She had a brief conversation with someone, consisting of “Yes?…What?…Who the hell wants to know?… No. You tell him we’re not confirming at this end. He’ll have to get his reliable source somewhere else.” She hung up and said, “Newspapers. They’re putting two and two together.”

Lynley said, “Which paper?”

“
Daily Mirror
at the moment.”

“Christ.” And with a nod at the phone, “Who was that?”

“Dee Harriman.”

A blessing, Lynley thought. No one was better at fending off journalists than the chief superintendent’s secretary, who always diverted them with rapt questions about the state of one royal marriage or another royal divorce.

“What are they asking?”

“If the police would care to con
fir
m the fact that Kenneth Fleming—who died as a result of a smouldering cigarette—wasn’t a smoker in the first place. And if he wasn’t a smoker, are we trying to suggest that the cigarette in the armchair was left there by someone else? And if so, who?…etc., etc. You know how it goes.”

They passed a pantechnicon, a hearse, and an army lorry with soldiers riding on benches in the back. They passed a horse trailer and three caravans that crept along, snail-paced and snail-shaped. As they slowed for an upcoming traffic light, Mrs. Whitelaw spoke.

“They’ve been phoning me as well.”

“The newspapers?” Lynley gave a look in the mirror. She’d turned away from the window. She’d switched from her spectacles to a pair of dark glasses. “When?”

“This morning. I had two calls before yours. Three afterwards.”

“About the cigarette smoking?”

“About anything I might be willing to tell them. Truth or lie. I’m not certain they care. Just so long as it was something about Ken.”

“You don’t have to talk to them.”

“I haven’t talked to anyone.” She went back to looking through the side window, saying, more to herself than to them, “What would be the point? Who could understand?”

“Understand?” Lynley fed her the question casually, all his attention ostensibly given to his driving.

Mrs. Whitelaw didn’t immediately offer an answer. When she replied, her voice was quiet. “Who would have thought it,” she said. “A young man of thirty-two—vital, virile, athletic, energetic—actually choosing to live not with some young creature firm of
fle
sh and smooth of skin but with a dried-up old woman. A woman thirty-four years his senior. Old enough to be his mother. Ten years older, in fact, than his actual mother. It’s an obscenity, isn’t it?”

“More a curiosity, I should say. The situation’s unusual. You see that, no doubt.”

“I’ve heard the whispers and the titters. I’ve read the gossip. Oedipal relationship. Inability to break away from any primal tie, evidenced in his choice of living arrangements and his unwillingness to end his marriage. Failure to resolve childhood issues with his mother and consequently seeking another. Or on my part: Unwillingness to accept the realities of old age. Seeking a notoriety denied to me in my youth. Longing to prove myself through gaining control of a younger man. Everyone has an opinion. No one accepts the truth.”

Sergeant Havers pivoted in her seat so that she could see Mrs. Whitelaw. “We’d be interested in hearing the truth,” she said. “We need to hear it, in fact.”

“What does the sort of relationship I shared with Ken have to do with his death?”

“The sort of relationship Fleming had with every woman may have had a great deal to do with his death,” Lynley answered.

She took up her handkerchief and watched her hands folding it over and over until it was a long, thin strip. She said, “I’ve known him since he was fifteen years old. He was a pupil of mine.”

“You’re a teacher?”

“Not any longer. Then. On the Isle of Dogs. He was a pupil in one of my English classes. I came to know him because he was…” She cleared her throat. “He was terribly clever. A real crack hand, the other children called him, and they liked him because he was easy with them, easy with himself, easy to be around. Right from the start, he was the sort of boy who knew who he was and didn’t feel the need to pretend he was something else. Nor did he feel the need to rub other children’s noses in the fact that he was more talented than they. I liked him for that enormously. For other things as well. He had dreams. I admired that. It was an unusual quality for a teenager to possess in the East End at that time. We struck up a pupil-teacher friendship. I encouraged him, tried to point him in the right direction.”

“Which was?”

“Sixth Form College. Then university.”

“Did he attend?”

“He did only a lower sixth year, in Sussex on a governor’s scholarship. After that he came home and went to work for my husband at the printworks. Shortly after that, he married.”

“Young.”

“Yes.” She unfolded the handkerchief, spread it against her lap, smoothed it out. “Yes. Ken was young.”

“You knew the girl he married?”

“I wasn’t surprised when he
fin
ally made the decision to separate. Jean’s a good girl at heart, but she isn’t what Ken should have ended up with.”

“And Gabriella Patten?”

“Time would have told.”

Lynley met the blank gaze of her dark glasses in the rearview mirror. “But you know her, don’t you? You knew him. What do you think?”

“I think Gabriella is Jean,” she said quietly, “with a great deal more money and a Knights-bridge wardrobe. She isn’t…wasn’t Ken’s equal. But that’s not strange, is it? Don’t you find that most men rarely at heart want to marry an equal? It puts a strain on their strength of ego.”

“You haven’t described a man who appeared to be struggling with weakness of ego.”

“He wasn’t. He was struggling with man’s propensity for recognising the familiar and repeating the past.”

“And the past was what?”

“Marrying a woman on the strength of his physical passion for her. Honestly and naively believing that physical passion and the emotional rapture engendered by physical passion are both lasting states.”