Playing for the Ashes by Elizabeth George
“Which part?” Lynley asked mildly. “That she would know about the will or that she would kill Fleming?”
Mrs. Whitelaw’s colourless cheeks took on sudden colour, rising like flames from her neck. “Do you actually intend me to answer that question?”
“I intend to get to the truth,” he replied.
She removed her dark glasses. She hadn’t her regular spectacles with her, so there was nothing to replace the dark glasses with. It seemed a gesture designed largely for its effect, a listen-to-me-young-man movement worthy of the schoolteacher she had once been.
“Gabriella also knew there was a key out here. I told her about it myself. She may have told someone. She may have told anyone. She may have shown anyone where it was.”
“Would that make sense? You said last night that she came here for seclusion.”
“I don’t know what went on in Gabriella’s mind. She enjoys men. She enjoys drama. If letting someone know where she was and where the key could be found heightened the possibility of a drama in which she could play the starring role, she would have told him. She probably would have sent out announcements.”
“But not to your daughter,” Lynley said, drawing her back into the line of fire even as he mentally acknowledged the fact that her description of Gabriella fitted hand-in-glove with Patten’s description on the previous night.
Mrs. Whitelaw refused to be drawn into argument. She said with deliberate calm, “Ken lived out here for two years, Inspector, while he was playing for the Kent county side. His family stayed in London. They visited him here at the weekends. Jean, his wife. Jimmy, Stan, and Sharon, his children. They’d all know about the key.”
And Lynley refused to let her sidestep. “When was the last time you saw your daughter, Mrs. Whitelaw?”
“Olivia didn’t know Ken.”
“But she no doubt knew about him.”
“They’d never even met.”
“Nonetheless. When did you see her last?”
“And if she had, if she knew about everything, it wouldn’t have made a difference. She’s always had contempt for money and material things. She wouldn’t have cared a fig who was inheriting what.”
“You’d be surprised how much people learn to care about goods and money when it comes down to it. When did you last see her, please?”
“She didn’t—”
“Yes. When, Mrs. Whitelaw?”
The woman waited a stony fifteen seconds before she answered. “Ten years ago,” she said. “Friday evening, the nineteenth of April, at the Covent Garden underground station.”
“You’ve a remarkable memory.”
“The date stands out.”
“Why is that?”
“Because Olivia’s father was with me that evening.”
“Is that significant somehow?”
“It is to me. He dropped dead after our meeting. Now, if you don’t mind, Inspector, I’d like to step into the air. It’s rather close in here, and I wouldn’t want to trouble you by fainting again.”
He stepped aside to let her pass. He heard her ripping off her surgical gloves.
Sergeant Havers passed the ceramic planter to Inspector Ardery. She looked about the potting shed with its sacks of soil and its dozens of pots and utensils. She muttered, “What a mess. If there’s fresh evidence in here, it’s muddled up with fifty years of gubbins.” She sighed and said to Lynley, “What d’you think?”
“That it’s time we tracked down Olivia Whitelaw,” he said.
OLIVIA
We’ve had our dinner, Chris and I, and I’ve done the washing up, as usual. Chris is dead patient when it takes me three-quarters of an hour to do what he could do in ten minutes. He never says, “Give over, Livie.” He never shuttles me to one side. When I break a plate or a glass or drop a pan on the kitchen floor, he lets me handle the mess of it by myself and he pretends not to notice when I curse and cry because the broom and the mop won’t behave as I’d like. Sometimes in the night when he thinks I’m asleep, he sweeps up the crockery or glass that I’ve missed from the breakage. Sometimes he scrubs down the floor to take away the stickiness from where the pan spilled. I never mention the fact that he’s done this, although I hear him at it.
Most nights before he goes to bed, he cracks open the door to my room to check on me. He pretends it’s to see if the cat wants to go out, and I pretend to believe him. If he sees I’m awake, he says, “One last call for felines wishing to engage in further nightly ablutions. Any takers in here? What about you, Panda-cat?” I say, “She’s settled in, I think,” and he says, “Need anything yourself then, Livie?”
I do. Oh, I do. I’m need incarnate. I need him to shed his clothes in the light from the corridor. I need him to slide into my bed. I need him to hold me. I have a thousand and one needs that won’t ever be fulfilled. They peel my flesh from my body one thin strip at a time.
Pride will go first, I was told. It’ll seep as naturally as sweat from my pores, and it will begin this process the moment I recognise how much of my life is in the hands of others. But I fight that idea. I hold on to who I am. I summon the ever weakening image of Liv Whitelaw the Outlaw. I say to Chris, “No. I need nothing at all. I’m fine,” and I sound to my own ears as if I mean it.
Sometimes quite late he says casually, “I’m going out for an hour or so. Will you be all right on your own? Shall I ask Max to pop over?”
I say, “Don’t be daft. I’m fine,” when I want to say instead, “Who is she, Chris? Where did you meet? Does she mind that you can’t spend the night with her because you’ve got to come home to tend to me?”
And when he returns from those evenings and looks in on me before he goes to bed, I can smell the sex on him. It’s thick and raw. I keep my eyes closed and my breathing even. I tell myself I have no rights here. I think, His life is his life and mine is mine I’ve known from the first there would be no point of real connection between the two of us he made that clear didn’t he didn’t he didn’t he? Oh yes, oh yes. He made that clear. And I made it clear that that’s the way I wanted it. Yes indeed, that was fine with me. So it doesn’t really matter, does it, where he goes or who he sees? The least of what I feel is hurt. I tell myself all this as I listen to the water running and hear him yawning and know how she’s made him feel this night. Whoever she is. However they met.
I give a laugh as I write this. I recognise the irony of my situation. Whoever would have thought that I’d find myself longing for any man, let alone this man who from the first did everything possible to illustrate the fact that he was not my type.
My type, you see, paid for what he got off me, in one way or another. Occasionally my type and I made a deal in advance for gin or for drugs, but mostly for cash. You can’t be surprised by this piece of information because no doubt you understand that it is, after all, so much easier for one to leap downward than to climb upward in life.
I worked the streets because it was black and wicked, living on the edge. And the older the bloke, the better I liked it because they were the most pathetic. They wore business suits and cruised Earl’s Court, pretending to be lost and in need of direction. Miss, I wonder can you tell me the quickest way to Hammersmith Flyover? to Parsons Green? to Putney Bridge? to a restaurant called…oh my dear, I seem to have forgotten the name of it. And they waited, lips curving hopefully, foreheads shining in the dome lights of their cars. They waited for a sign, a “Want business, love?” and a lean into an open window of their cars and a finger run from their ears to their jaw. “I can do what you like. Whatever you’d like. What d’you like, a lovely man like you? Tell Liv. She wants to make you feel good.” They’d stutter and begin to sweat. They’d say tentatively, How much? My finger would travel downward on their bodies. “Depends on what you want. Tell me. Tell me every nasty thing you want me to do with you tonight.”
It was all so easy. They had marginal imagination once their clothes were off and their hips were hanging like empty saddlebags round their waists.
Every now and again a younger bloke would come by and give me the look. But I stayed with the older types, the ones with wives who sighed and cooperated six or eight times a year, the ones who were tears-in-their-eyes grateful for someone who squealed and said, “Aren’t you the dirty one? Who would’ve thought it to look at you?”
Naturally, all this was connected to my father’s death. I didn’t need nine or ten sessions with Dr. Freud to tell me as much. Two days after I received the telegram telling me Dad had died, I took on my first bloke over fifty years old. I enjoyed seducing him. I revelled in saying, “Are you a daddy? D’you want me to call you Daddy? What would you like to call me in return?” And I felt triumphant and somehow redeemed when I saw those blokes writhe, when I heard them gasp, when I waited for them to moan a name like Celia or Jenny or Emily. Hearing that, I knew the worst about them, which somehow allowed me to justify the worst about myself.
Such was the way I lived until the afternoon I met Chris Faraday some five years later. I was standing near the entrance to Earl’s Court Station, waiting for one of my regulars, a basset-faced estate agent with hair sprouting like wires from his nose. He had a predilection for pain and he always carried in the boot of his car various devices for administering it. Every Tuesday afternoon and Sunday morning, he’d say mournfully as I got into the car, “Archie was naughty yet again, my dear. How on earth shall we manage to punish him today?” He’d hand over the cash and I’d count through it and decide the going rate for handcuffing, nipple clamping, whipping, or terrorising him round the genital area. The money was good, but the level of amusement was starting to decline. He’d taken to calling me Mary Immaculate and asking me to call him Jesus. He’d been shrieking something along the lines of “This is my body which I offer to the Almighty in reparation for your sins” as I upped the pain, and the more I slapped, twisted, or squeezed, the more I clipped this little pincher or that little clamp on to his body, the more he loved it and the more he wanted. But although he happily paid in advance and even more happily drove off to the wife in Battersea afterwards, he was looking more and more to me like sudden heart failure waiting to happen, and I wasn’t keen on finding myself with a smiling corpse on my hands. So when Archie didn’t show at our appointed time of half past five that Tuesday, I was partly put out and partly relieved.
I was thinking about the loss in cash when Chris crossed the street in my direction. Archie had made his request in advance for once, and with gathering up the costumes and props—not to mention the time involved in dressing myself, undressing him, playing wrestle and tug and oh-no-you-don’t-you-bad-little-boy, tying, handcuffing, and using the enema bag—I was losing enough on this one afternoon to keep me in coke for days. So I was cheesed off when I saw this skinny bloke with rips in the knees of his jeans dutifully walking in the zebra crossing as if the police would drag him to the nick should he step off the pavement anywhere else. On a lead he had a dog of a breed so mixed that the word dog itself seemed little more than a euphemism, and he appeared to be walking to accommodate himself to the animal’s limping and lunging gait.
As he passed, I said, “That’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen. Why don’t you do the world a favour and keep it out of sight?”
He stopped. He looked from me to the dog, and slowly enough that I could tell he was making an unfavourable comparison. I said, “Where’d you get that thing, anyway?”
He said, “I pinched him.”
I said, “Pinched? That? Well, you’ve got some odd taste, haven’t you?” because aside from having only three legs, half of the dog’s head had no hair. Where the hair had been there were red sores just beginning to heal.
“He is a sad one to look at, isn’t he?” Chris said, gazing reflectively at the dog. “But it wasn’t his choice, which is the circumstance that rather touches me about animals. They can’t make choices. So someone has to care enough to make the right choices for them.”
“Someone should choose to shoot that thing, then. He’s a blight on the landscape.” I dug through my shoulder bag for my cigarettes. I lit one and pointed it at the dog. “So why’d you pinch him? Looking for an entry in an ugly mutt contest?”
“I pinched him because that’s what I do,” he said.
“What you do.”
“Right.” He lowered his eyes to the shopping bags round my feet. The costumes were in them, as well as some new supplies I’d bought for Archie’s entertainment. “And what do you do?”
“I fuck for money.”
“So encumbered?”
“What?”
He gestured to my packages. “Or are you taking a break from shopping?”
“Oh right. I look like I’m dressed for shopping, don’t I?”
“No. You look like you’re dressed for whoring, but I’ve never seen a whore hanging about with so many shopping bags. Won’t you confuse the potential customers?”
“I’m waiting for someone.”
“Who’s failed to show.”
“You don’t know that, do you?”
“There’re eight cigarette butts round your feet. They all have your lipstick round their filters. Terrible colour, by the way. Red doesn’t suit you.”
“You’re some expert, are you?”
“Not in the field of women.”
“In the field of mutts like that one, then?”
He looked down at the dog, which had sunk to the pavement, head on the single forepaw and eyes slowly closing. He squatted next to him and gently cupped his hand round the top of the dog’s head. “Yes,” he said. “In this I’m an expert. I’m the best there is. I’m like fog at midnight, no sight and no sound.”
“What shit,” I said, not because I thought so but because there was something all at once chilling about him and I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. I thought, Puny little bean, bet he couldn’t get it up for love or money. And once I thought that much, I had to know. I said, “Want business, then? Your mate there can watch for an extra five quid.”
He cocked his head. “Where?”
I thought, Got you, and said, “Place called the Southerly on Gloucester Road. Room 69.”
“Appropriate.”
I smiled. “So?”
He straightened. The dog lumbered to his feet. “I could do with a meal. That’s where we were heading, Toast and I. He’s been on display at the Exhibition Centre, and he’s knackered and hungry. And a spot grumpy as well.”
“So it was an ugly dog contest after all. I wager he won.”
“In a manner of speaking, he did.” He watched me gather up my packages and said nothing more until I’d stowed them under my arms. “Right then. Come along. I’ll tell you about this ugly dog of mine.”
What an odd sight we were: a three-legged dog with his head ground up, a rake-thin young-communist-for-freedom type wearing ragged jeans and a kerchief round his head, and a tart in red spandex and five-inch black heels with a silver ring through her nostril.
I thought at the time that I was on my way to an interesting conquest. He didn’t seem keen to have it off with me as we leaned against the outside brick ledge of a Chinese take-away, but I thought he’d come round in good time if I played it right. Blokes usually do. So we ate spring rolls and drank two cups of green tea apiece. We fed chop suey to the dog. We talked in the way people do when they don’t know how far to trust or how much to say—where are you from? who are your people? where’d you go to school? you left university as well? ridiculous, wasn’t it, all that cock?—and I didn’t listen much because I was waiting for him to tell me what he wanted and how much he
“Sorry?” he said.
I put my hand on his thigh. “Hand? Blow? In and out? Front or back? What d’you want?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“Nothing.”
“Sorry.”
I felt my face get hot as my spine went tight. “You mean I’ve just spent the last ninety minutes waiting for you to—”
“We had a meal. That’s what I told you this would be. A meal.”
“You bloody well didn’t! You said where and I said the Southerly on Gloucester Road. Room 69, I said. You said—”
“That I needed a meal. That I was hungry. So was Toast.”
“Bugger Toast! I’m out something like thirty quid.”
“Thirty quid? Is that all he pays you? What do you do for that? And how do you feel when it’s over?”
“What’s it to you? Fucking little worm. Give me the money or I’ll raise bloody murder right here in the street.”
He looked about at the people passing and seemed to consider the offer. “All right,” he said. “But you’ll have to work for it.”
“I said I would already, didn’t I?”
He nodded. “So you did. Come along then.”
I followed in his wake, saying, “Hand is cheapest. Blow depends on how long it takes. You wear a rubber for in and out. More than one position and you pay extra. Clear?”
“Crystal.”
“So where’re we going?”
“My place.”
I stopped. “No way. It’s the Southerly or nowhere.”
“Do you want your money?”
“Do you want your crumpet?”
We were at an impasse on West Cromwell Road, with dinnertime traffic whirling by us and pedestrians trying to get on their way. The smell of diesel fumes made my stomach churn uneasily round the grease from the spring roll.
“Look,” he said. “I’ve got animals waiting to be fed in Little Venice.”