Playing for the Ashes (55 page)

“So when I got to London, I phoned her,” Gabriella said. “She’d spent so much time trying to break us apart, I thought she’d like to know she was
fin
ally successful.”

“How long did this conversation last?”

“Just long enough for me to tell the bitch she’d got what she wanted.”

“And the time?”

“I’ve already said. Around midnight. I didn’t check, but I’d driven in from Kent directly so it couldn’t have been any later than half past twelve.”

Which also, Lynley knew, could be verified by checking with Mrs. Whitelaw. He took another drink of his coffee, grimaced, and poured the remaining contents into the gutter where it formed a suspiciously pinguid pool. He tossed the cup into a litter bin and returned to the car.

“Well?” Havers said. “So, if Gabriella’s out of it, who’s looking good now?”

“Inspector Ardery’s got something for us,” Lynley replied. “We need to talk to her.”

He got into the car. Havers followed, leaving a trail of muffin crumbs like Hansel’s sister. She slung the door closed and balanced both coffee and muffin on her knees as she fastened her seat belt, saying, “One thing’s cleared up, for me at least.”

“What’s that?”

“What I’ve been thinking about since Friday night. What, I reckon, you meant when you said Fleming’s death wasn’t a suicide, a murder, or an accident: Gabriella Patten as potential murder victim. She’s out of the picture. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Lynley didn’t answer at once. He pondered the question, idly watching as a well-coiffed woman in a suspiciously body-clinging black dress passed the Bentley and took up a casual stance against a street lamp not far from Ye Grapes. She arranged her face into a mask that managed to convey sensuality, ennui, and hardened indifference simultaneously.

Havers followed the direction of Lynley’s gaze. She sighed. “Oh hell. Shall I telephone vice?”

Lynley shook his head and turned the ignition key, although he didn’t put the car in gear. “It’s early in the day. I doubt she’ll get much custom.”

“She must be desperate.”

“I dare say she is.” He rested his hand on the gear stick thoughtfully. “Perhaps desperation’s the key in all this.”

“To Fleming’s death, you mean? And it’s Fleming’s death—premeditated and all—that we’re onto, isn’t it, sir? It’s not Gabriella’s.” Havers took a gulp of coffee and warmed to her subject before he had a chance to disagree. “Here’s how it works. There were only three people who may have wanted her dead and who also knew where Gabriella was on Wednesday night. But the problem is that all three potential killers have iron-clad alibis.”

“Hugh Patten,” Lynley said meditatively.

“Who from all accounts was exactly where he said he was, at the gaming tables in the Cherbourg Club.”

“Miriam Whitelaw.”

“Whose alibi was unconsciously corroborated by Gabriella Patten not ten minutes ago.”

“And the last?” Lynley asked.

“Fleming himself, broken on the wheel of his discoveries about her unsavoury past. And he happens to have the best alibi of all.”

“So you’re discounting Jean Cooper. And the boy. Jimmy.”

“For Gabriella’s potential death? They didn’t know where she was. But if Fleming was our intended victim from the first, we’ve a whole new cricket match, haven’t we? Because Jimmy
must
have known his father intended to push forward with the divorce. And he spoke to his father that same afternoon. He may have known where Fleming was headed. The way I see it, Fleming had hurt the boy’s mother, he’d hurt the boy himself, he’d hurt the boy’s brother and sister, he’d made promises he wasn’t willing to keep—”

“You’re not suggesting Jimmy murdered his father because of a cancelled boat trip, are you?”

“The cancelled boat trip was just a symptom. It wasn’t the disease. Jimmy decided they’d all had enough exposure to it, so he took himself out to Kent on Wednesday night and administered the only medicine he knew that would cure it. He even fell back on a past behaviour at the same time. He set a
fir
e.”

“Rather a sophisticated means of murder for a sixteen-year-old, wouldn’t you say?”

“Not at all. He’s set
fir
es before—”

“One.”

“One that we know of. And the fact that the cottage fire was so obviously set suggests a lack of sophistication, not the opposite. Sir, we need to get our hands on that kid.”

“We need something to work with
fir
st.”

“Like what?”

“Like a single piece of hard evidence. Like a witness who can place the boy at the scene on Wednesday.”

“Inspector…”

“Havers, I see your point, but I’m not going to play an early hand in this. Your reasoning about Gabriella is sound: The people who may have wanted her dead and knew where she was all have alibis while the people with motives but without alibis didn’t know where she was. I accept all that.”

“Then—”

“There are other points you’re not considering.”

“Such as?”

“The bruises on her neck. Did Fleming inflict them? Did she inflict them herself to support her story?”

“But someone—that bloke out for a walk, that farmer—he heard the row. So there’s corroboration for her story. And she herself made the best point of all. What was Fleming supposed to be doing while she crept round the cottage setting up the
fir
e?”

“Who put out the cats?”

“The cats?”

“The kittens. Who put out the kittens? Fleming? Why? Did he know they were there? Did he even care?”

“So what are you saying? Fleming was killed by a manhating animal lover?”

“There’s that to consider, isn’t there?” Lynley put the car in gear and pointed it towards Piccadilly.

From the deck of the barge, where the mid-morning sun had at last managed to scrape the top of the trees and was
fin
ally streaming band after band of comforting heat against his aching muscles, Chris Faraday watched the two policemen and felt his stomach go numb. They weren’t dressed like cops—one in a leather jacket and blue jeans, the other in cotton trousers and an open-necked shirt—so under other circumstances, Chris might have talked himself into believing they were anyone from casual day trippers to Jehovah’s Witnesses doing their witnessing along the canal. But under these circumstances, watching them climb aboard one barge after another, seeing barge owners’ heads swivel in his direction and then rapidly look away after catching sight of him, Chris knew who the men were and what they were doing. Their job was to question his neighbours and to gather either corroboration for or a conflicting account of his movements on Wednesday night, and they were employing a professional and systematic approach. It also happened to be a conspicuous one, designed to rattle his nerves if he managed to catch sight of it.

Success, he mentally saluted them. His nerves were appropriately rattled.

There were steps to be taken, phone calls to be made, and reports to be given. But he couldn’t summon the will to do anything. This has nothing to do with me, he kept telling himself. But the truth was it had everything to do with him and had done for the last five years, since the evening he’d picked Livie off the street and mentally designated her rehabilitation and regeneration his personal challenge. Fool, he thought. Pride goeth and here at last was the fall.

He dug his fingers into the angry muscles at the base of his skull. They were bunched into knots, like a tangle of wires. They were responding in part to the sight of the police but also in part to a night without sleep.

Misery and irony make for nasty bedfellows, Chris decided. Not only had they kept him awake, but they were turning his life into a waiting game. The very fact of them, creeping round the boundaries of his consciousness, had caused him to open his eyes this morning, to fasten them on the knot holes in the pine ceiling of his bedroom, and to feel like a Puritan being tested for witchcraft, with a weight like an anvil sitting squarely on his chest. He must have slept, but he couldn’t remember having actually done so. And the sheets and blankets—so twisted that they looked and felt like laundry just come out of a washing machine—gave mute testimony to the thrashing round that had taken the place of slumber.

He’d grunted with the pain of
fir
st movement. His neck and shoulders felt frozen in position, and while he needed to pee so badly that his dick was practically seeking out the toilet without his assistance, his back was sore and his limbs were weary. Getting out of bed loomed like a project he couldn’t hope to complete in less than a month.

What had got him up was the thought of Livie, the
this must be what it’s like for her
that sent equal proportions of energy and guilt swirling through his system. He’d groaned, flopped from his back to his side, and stuck his feet out of bed to test the room’s temperature. A soft tongue licked his toe. Beans was lying on the floor, patiently waiting for breakfast and a run.

Chris dropped his hand over the side of the bed, and the beagle cooperatively slithered forward on the floor, putting his head within petting distance. Chris smiled. “Good boy,” he murmured. “How ’bout a cup of tea? Are you here to take my order for breakfast? I’ll have eggs, toast, a rasher of bacon—not too crisp, mind you—and a bowl of strawberries on the side. Got that, Beans?”

The dog’s tail thumped. He offered a pleasurable whine in reply. Livie’s voice called from across the corridor, “Chris, you up? You up yet, Chris?”

“Getting,” Chris said.

“You slept late.”

She hadn’t sounded reproachful. She never sounded reproachful. But still he’d felt reproached.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Chris, I didn’t mean—”

“I know. It’s nothing. Just a bad night.” He swung himself out of bed. He sat for a moment, his head in his hands. He tried not to think but failed, as he had failed for most of the night.

What a monumental howl the fates must be having with all this, he’d thought. He’d lived his entire life thus far without giving in to impulse. He’d only deviated from that mode of living once. And now, because of that single moment when he’d first seen Livie waiting for her regular Sunday afternoon trick with those shopping bags of sexual gewgaws at her feet, because of that instant when he’d wondered idly if her hard brittle edges could possibly be smoothed, he was going to pay. One way or another, if he couldn’t think of a direction in which he could lead the police, he was heading for consequences the likes of which he’d never once dreamed of. And it was such a bloody joke at the bottom of it all. Because, for the very first time, he was guilty of nothing…and guilty of everything.

“Shit,” he’d moaned.

“You all right, Chris?” Livie called. “Chris, you all right?”

He’d scooped his pyjama bottoms from the floor and thrust his legs into them. He’d gone to her room. He could tell from the placement of the walker that she’d tried to get herself out of bed, and he felt another rush of guilt. “Livie, why didn’t you call me?”

She offered him a wan smile. She’d managed to put all of her jewellery on—except for the nose ring, which lay on a copy of something called
Hollywood Wives
. He frowned at the book and not for the
fir
st time wondered at her capacity for wallowing in the tasteless and the insignificant. She said as if in answer, “I’m picking up pointers. They have hours and hours of acrobatic sex.”

“I hope they enjoy it,” Chris said.

He sat on her bed and eased Panda to one side as the dogs crowded into the room. They moved restlessly from the bed to the chest of drawers to the clothes cupboard that gaped open and spit a cascade of black in the direction of the
flo
or.

“They’re wanting their run,” Livie said.

“Spoiled little beggars. I’ll take them in a minute. You ready, then?”

“Right.”

She grasped his arm and he swept back the covers, pivoted her body, dropped her legs to the floor. He placed the walker in front of her and raised her to her feet.

“I can cope with the rest,” she said and began the torturous progress towards the loo, inching forward, lifting the walker, dragging her feet in the only semblance of walking she could manage now. She was getting worse, he realised and he wondered exactly when it had happened. She could no longer put her feet squarely down. Instead, she walked—if her sluggish movement could be called that—on whatever happened to hit the
flo
or
fir
st, be it ankle, arch, heel, or toe.

He still needed the toilet himself. He could have been and gone in the time it would take her just to make it from her room to the loo. But he stayed where he was on the edge of her bed and made himself wait. It was little enough punishment, he decided.

He’d left her in the galley, doing her part to make their breakfast, which consisted of pouring cornflakes into bowls and spilling a quarter of the contents onto the floor. He’d taken the dogs for their run and returned with
The Sunday Times
. She’d dipped her spoon into her bowl in silence and begun to read the paper. He’d been holding his breath every time she opened a newspaper from Thursday evening onwards. He’d kept thinking, She’ll notice, she’ll begin to question, she isn’t a fool. But thus far she had neither noticed nor questioned. So caught up was she in what was in the paper that she hadn’t yet noticed what was not.