Playing for the Ashes (75 page)

I didn’t want her help. I wanted to work at the zoo, to run along the canal with the dogs, to melt like shadows into labs with the liberators, to drink to our victories with Chris in pubs, to stand at the window of that
fla
t where the assault team meet near Wormwood Scrubs and look at the prison and thank God I was prisoner of nothing any longer.

“It’s done, Chris,” I repeated.

He circled his arm round his legs, resting his head on his knees. “If that’s your decision,” he said.

“Yeah. Well. It is,” I lied.

CHAPTER
18

L
ynley chose Bach’s
Brandenburgischen Konzerte
Number One because the music reminded him of childhood, of making a carefree run across the park at his family home in Cornwall, racing his brother and sister towards the old woodland that protected Howenstow from the sea. Bach didn’t make demands as Lynley found that the Russians did. Bach was froth and air, the perfect companion to engaging in thoughts having nothing at all to do with his music.

Lynley swirled the last of the whisky in his glass and noted how the amber turned to gold when the light struck it. He drank it down, enjoyed the heat of it against the back of his throat, and placed the glass next to the decanter on the cherrywood table beside his chair. Violins and French horns were chasing one another in the Bach concerto. Lynley’s thoughts were doing much the same within his skull.

He and Sergeant Havers had separated after their dinner in Kensington, Havers catching the tube in the high street to return to her car and New Scotland Yard, Lynley paying another visit to Staffordshire Terrace. It was an evaluation both of this visit and of his own disquiet for which the concerto served as background.

Miriam Whitelaw had led him once again up the stairs and into the drawing room where a single brass floor lamp shed a cone of light upon a wingback chair. The lamp did virtually nothing to eliminate the drawing room’s enormous caverns of darkness, and Miriam Whitelaw faded easily into the gloom, dressed in a black tunic and trousers. It didn’t appear as if she had taken him to this part of the house by deliberate design, however, knowing he intended to question her and seeking darkness to hide from him. On the contrary, it appeared as if she’d been sitting there herself prior to his arrival because she murmured, “I can’t seem to deal with the light any longer. The moment I see it, my head begins to pound and then a migraine comes and then I’m useless. Which is what I don’t want to be.”

She had moved slowly but with sure knowledge of the room’s plethora of furniture, and she switched on a fringed lamp just beyond the piano. And then another on a gate-leg table. None of the bulbs were bright, so the light remained muted, glowing much as the gaslamps must have done in her grandfather’s time. She said, “The darkness helps me to pretend. I’ve been sitting here imagining sounds.” She seemed to read the question from the shadows where Lynley stood because she went on quietly with, “I always
fir
st heard Ken before I saw him when he came home. The garage door slamming shut. His footsteps on the flagstones in the garden. The kitchen door opening. I’ve been imagining that. Those sounds. Hearing him come home. Not actually being here, you see, not in the room with me, not even in the house because that isn’t possible, is it? But arriving. The sounds he made. Because somehow if I can force them to exist again in my head, it seems to me that he won’t be gone.”

She had returned to a chair where, Lynley saw, an old cricket ball lay tangent to a Persian pillow. She sat and cupped her hands round the ball in a position so natural that Lynley realised she must have been doing that in the semidarkness before his arrival, just sitting with the ball in her hands.

She had said, “Jean phoned late this afternoon. She said you’d taken Jimmy. Jimmy.” Her hands trembled and she grasped the ball more firmly. “I
fin
d I’ve
fin
ally become too old, Inspector. I don’t understand anything any longer. Men and women. Husbands and wives. Parents and children. All of it. I don’t understand.”

Lynley had used the opening to ask her why she hadn’t told him about her own daughter’s visit to her on the night of Fleming’s death. For a moment she said nothing. Silence magnified the ticking of the grandfather clock. Finally, she murmured in what sounded like defeat, “Then you’ve spoken to Olivia.”

He said he’d spoken to Olivia twice and since she’d lied the first time about where she’d been on the night that Fleming died, he wondered what else she might be lying about.

Or her mother for that matter, who, as it turned out, had lied as well.

“I made a deliberate omission,” Mrs. Whitelaw said. “I did not lie.” She went on to tell him, much as her daughter had done although far more quietly and with greater resignation, that the visit had nothing to do with the case, that discussing it with him would have violated Olivia’s right to privacy. And Olivia had that right, Mrs. Whitelaw asserted. That right was one of the few things she did have left.

“I’ve lost them both. Ken…Ken now. And Olivia…” She brought the cricket ball to her breasts and held it there as if it helped her to continue. “Olivia soon. And in a way so brutal that when I think about it…which I can barely bring myself to do…to be stripped of control over her body, to be stripped of her pride, but every moment until she breathes her last to be completely
aware
of that inhuman stripping… Because she was so proud, my Olivia, she was so haughty, she was a wild thing that raged through my life for years until I couldn’t bear her any longer and blessed the day she
fin
ally pushed me far enough to break with her completely.” She seemed on the verge of losing her composure, but she reined herself back. “No, I didn’t tell you about Olivia, Inspector. I couldn’t. She’s dying. It was bad enough to have to talk about Ken. To talk about Olivia as well…. I couldn’t bear it.”

She would have to bear it now, Lynley had thought. And he’d asked her why Olivia had come to see her. To make peace, Mrs. Whitelaw told him. To ask for help.

“Which will come to her far more easily now that Fleming’s gone,” Lynley pointed out.

She’d turned her head into one of the projecting wings of the chair, saying with great weariness, “Why won’t you believe me? Olivia had nothing to do with Ken’s death.”

“Perhaps not Olivia herself,” Lynley said and waited for her reaction. It was a motionless one, head still turned into the side of the chair, hand still holding the cricket ball to her breast. Nearly a minute of silence ticked by on the grandfather clock before she asked him what he meant.

So he had told her what he still was mulling over now as he sat in his drawing room in Eaton Terrace, what he had been mulling over during his dinner with Sergeant Havers: Chris Faraday had been gone that entire Wednesday night, as had Olivia. Did Mrs. Whitelaw know that?

No. She didn’t.

Lynley didn’t add Faraday’s alibi for Mrs. Whitelaw. But it was Faraday’s alibi that had caused Lynley’s disquiet since he and Havers had first left the barge.

It had been too like a recitation, Faraday’s story of where he had been and what he had done on Wednesday night. He’d run through it with barely a hesitation. The list of partygoers, the list of films they’d hired, the name and address of the video shop. The very ease of Faraday’s account of his evening smacked of something well prepared in advance. Especially his memory of the films themselves, not big screen Hollywood productions with stars as familiar as one’s breakfast cereal, but small-time pornography like
Betty Does Bangkok
or
Wild in the Woolly
or whatever else Faraday had called them. And how many had he listed so effortlessly? Ten? Twelve? Sergeant Havers would have argued that they could check out the shop if Lynley had trouble with the veracity of Faraday’s story. But Lynley had no doubt the shop’s records would show that the
fil
ms had indeed been hired out that night, either by Faraday himself or by one of the chaps on the list of party-goers he’d recited. Which was the whole point in the first place. The alibi was too perfectly constructed.

“Olivia’s boyfriend?” Mrs. Whitelaw had said. “But why have you taken Jimmy? Jean said you took Jimmy.”

For questioning only, Lynley told her. Sometimes it helped one’s memory of events when one was asked to recall them at New Scotland Yard. Were there any other events of Wednesday night that Mrs. Whitelaw herself would now like to relate? Anything she’d left out of their earlier conversations?

No, she had told him. There was nothing. He knew everything now.

He’d said nothing further until they stood at the front door where the light in the entry shone directly into her face. He paused with his hand on the doorknob, affecting a sudden recollection, and turned back to her to say, “Gabriella Patten. Have you heard from her?”

“I haven’t spoken to Gabriella in weeks. Have you found her?”

“Yes.”

“Is she…How is she?”

“Not what I expected of a woman who’s just lost the man she intended to marry.”

“Well,” she said. “That’s Gabriella, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Lynley said. “Is it Gabriella?”

“Gabriella wasn’t worth Ken’s shoe scrapings, Inspector,” Mrs. Whitelaw said. “I only wish Ken had been able to see that for himself.”

“Would he be alive had he done so?”

“I believe he would.”

In the greater light of the entry he’d seen that she’d recently cut herself high on the forehead. A plaster followed the line of her hair. A drop of blood—grumous, dark brown like a cancerous mole—had seeped through the gauze. She raised her fingers and grazed them against the plaster, saying, “It was easier.”

“What?”

“Causing myself this kind of pain. Rather than facing the other.”

Lynley nodded. “It usually is.”

He sank further into his chair in the Eaton Terrace drawing room. He stretched out his legs and gave a speculative glance to the whisky decanter standing next to his glass. He rejected the urge, if only for the moment, steepling his fingers beneath his chin and staring at the pattern in the Axminster carpet. He thought about the truth, half-truths, and lies, the beliefs we cling to, those we publicly espouse, and the frightening juggernaut that love can become when it is felt too wildly, when its once-reciprocated passion is rejected, or when it goes completely unreturned.

Murder was not generally the sacrifice exacted by the force of blind love. Surrendering the self to the person and to the will of another took many other forms. But when one’s headlong capitulation to obsession grew deadly, the consequence of unseeing devotion was catastrophe.

If that had been the case with Kenneth Fleming’s murder, then his killer had loved and hated him in equal parts. And ending his life had been a way for the killer to effect a marriage with the victim, forcing an indissoluble bond between body and body, between soul and soul, linking each to the other permanently in death in a manner that could not have been achieved in life.

Except all of this, Lynley realised, begged the question of Gabriella Patten. And Gabriella Patten—who she was, what she did, and what she said—could not be avoided if he was ever to get to the truth.

The drawing room door swung open slightly and Denton peered round it. When his glance met Lynley’s, he side-stepped into the room and padded on slippered feet to Lynley’s chair. He lifted the decanter from the table, his expression saying, “More?” Lynley nodded. Denton poured the whisky and replaced the decanter among the others on the breakfront cabinet. Lynley smiled at this subtle management of his alcohol intake. Denton was smooth, no question of that. There would be little chance of dipsomania as long as he was around.

“Anything else, my lord?” Denton raised his voice to be heard. Lynley signalled to him to lower the stereo’s volume. Bach receded to a pleasant background lilt.

Lynley asked the question he didn’t need to ask, already knowing the answer from his valet’s silence on the subject. “Lady Helen hasn’t phoned?”

“Not since she left this morning.” Denton assiduously saw to a speck of lint on his sleeve.

“Which was when?”

“When?” He considered the question by lifting his eyes to the Adam ceiling as if the answer to Lynley’s question resided there. “Around an hour after you and the sergeant took off.”

Lynley picked up his glass and swirled the whisky while Denton removed a handkerchief from his pocket and ran it unnecessarily along the top of the cabinet. He went on to use it on one of the decanters. Lynley cleared his throat and made his next question casual. “How did she seem to you?”

“Who?”

“Helen.”

“Seem?”

“Yes. I think we’ve clarified my question. How did she seem?”

Denton frowned thoughtfully, but he was making too much of portraying himself as Mr. Contemplation. “How did she seem…Well… Let me think….”

“Denton, get on with it if you will.”

“Yes. It’s just that I couldn’t quite—”