Playing for the Ashes by Elizabeth George
“You stay there, Toast,” Olivia said. She settled her shoulders against her chair when the dog obeyed. She looked pleased with the diversion she’d effected.
“If you reached one conclusion about your mother’s relationship with Fleming,” Lynley said, “I can’t think it would be difficult to reach another. She’s a wealthy woman, when one considers her property in Kensington, Stepney, and Kent. And you and she are estranged.”
“So what?”
“Are you aware of the fact that your mother’s will names Fleming as her chief beneficiary?”
“Should I be surprised?”
“Of course, she’ll have to alter it now that he’s dead.”
“And you’re thinking I’ve hopes she’ll leave her ducats to me?”
“Fleming’s death makes that a possibility, wouldn’t you say?”
“I’d say you misjudge the degree of animosity between us.”
“Between you and your mother? Or you and Fleming?”
“Fleming?” she repeated. “I didn’t know the bloke.”
“Knowing him wasn’t necessary.”
“For what?” She took a hard pull at her cigarette. “Are you leading up to suggesting that I had something to do with his death? Because I wanted my mother’s money? What a fucking joke.”
“Where were you on Wednesday night, Miss Whitelaw?”
“Where was I? Jesus!” Olivia laughed, but her laughter triggered a sharp spasm of some kind. She gave a choked gasp and jerked back into her chair. Her face quickly reddened and she dropped her cigarette into the tin, gulping out, “Chris!” and turning her head to one side, away from Lynley.
Faraday hurried back into the workroom. He said quietly with his hands on her shoulders, “Okay. Okay. Just breathe and relax.” He knelt at her side and began kneading her legs as the beagle joined him and sniffed her feet.
A small black-and-white cat wandered into the workroom from the direction of the galley, mewling softly. Under the workbench, Toast began to struggle to his feet. Faraday said over his shoulder as he worked on Olivia, “No! Stay! You too Beans. Stay,” and he clucked softly till the cat was within his reach. He scooped it off the floor and dropped it into Olivia’s lap, saying, “Hang on to her, Livie. She’s been messing round with the bandage again.”
Olivia’s hands dropped over the cat, but her head pressed back against the chair and she didn’t look at the animal. Eyes closed, she was breathing deeply—in through her nose and out through her mouth—as if her lungs might at any moment forget how to work. Faraday continued to massage her legs. He said, “Better? Okay? Easing up now, is it?”
Finally she nodded. Her breathing slowed. Her head dropped and she gave her attention to the cat. She said in a strained voice, “This isn’t going to heal if she doesn’t wear a proper collar to keep her paws from it, Chris.”
Lynley saw that what had first appeared to be part of the cat’s white fur was really a bandage that looped round her left ear and covered her eye. “Cat fight?” he asked.
“She’s lost the eye,” Faraday said.
“It’s quite a group you’ve got here.”
“Yeah. Well. I look after the toss-outs.”
Olivia laughed weakly. At her feet, the beagle’s tail thumped happily against her chair, as if he understood and took part in some obscure joke.
Faraday drove his fingers into his hair. “Shit. Livie…”
“It doesn’t matter,” she replied. “Let’s not start displaying our nasties here, Chris. The inspector isn’t interested in them. Just in where I was on Wednesday night.” She raised her head and looked at Lynley, continuing with “Where you were, too, Chris. I imagine he’ll want to know that as well. Although the answer is quick and easy enough. I was where I always am, Inspector. Right here.”
“Can someone corroborate that?”
“Unfortunately, I didn’t know I’d be needing corroboration. Beans and Toast would be happy to oblige, of course, but somehow I doubt you’re fluent in dog.”
“And Mr. Faraday?”
Faraday rose. He rubbed at the back of his neck. He said, “I was out. A party with some blokes.”
“Where was this?” Lynley asked.
“Clapham. I can give you the address if you want.”
“How long were you gone?”
“I don’t know. It was late when I got back. I drove one of the blokes home, up to Hampstead first, so it must have been round four.”
“And you were asleep?” This to Olivia.
“I’d hardly be anything else at that hour.” Olivia had returned to her earlier position, head resting against the back of the chair. Her eyes were closed. She was petting the cat, who was studiously ignoring her and rhythmically working her thighs into a suitable state for napping upon.
Lynley said, “There’s an extra key to the cottage in Kent. Your mother indicates that you know about it.”
“Does she?” Olivia murmured. “Well, that makes two of us, doesn’t it?”
“It’s gone missing.”
“And I suppose you’d like to have a look round here for it? It’s an honest desire on your part, but one requiring a warrant. Have you got one?”
“I imagine you know that can be arranged without too much difficulty.”
Her eyes opened a slit. Her lips twitched with a smile. “Why is it I think you’re bluffing, Inspector?”
“Come on, Livie,” Faraday said with a sigh. And to Lynley, “We don’t have any key to any cottage. We haven’t even been in Kent since…Hell, I don’t know.”
“But you have been there?”
“Out to Kent? Sure. But not to a cottage. I didn’t even know there was a cottage till you brought it up.”
“So you don’t read the newspapers yourself. The ones you bring home for Olivia to read.”
“I read them, yeah.”
“But you took no note of the cottage when you read the stories about Fleming.”
“I didn’t read the stories about Fleming. Livie wanted the newspapers. I fetched them for her.”
“Wanted the newspapers? Expressly wanted them? Why?”
“Because I always want them,” Olivia snapped. She reached out and circled Faraday’s wrist with her hand. “Stop playing the game,” she said to him. “He only wants to trap us. He’s looking to prove we snuffed Kenneth Fleming. If he can do it before dinner tonight, he’ll probably have time to give his girlfriend a length. If he’s got a girlfriend.” She pulled at Faraday’s wrist. “Get my transport, Chris.” And when he didn’t move at once, she said, “It’s okay. It doesn’t matter. Go on. Get it.”
Faraday went through the door to the galley and came back bearing a three-sided aluminium walker. He said, “Beans, one side,” and when the dog had shuffled out of the way, he set it in front of Olivia’s chair. “Okay?” he said.
“Okay.”
She passed him the cat, who mewled in protest until Faraday placed her on the tattered corduroy seat of another armchair. He turned back to Olivia, who grasped the sides of the walker and began to hoist herself to her feet. She gave a grunt and a heave, muttering, “Shit. Oh, fuck it,” when she teetered to one side. She shook Faraday’s protective hand from her arm. Finally upright, she glared defiantly at Lynley.
“Some killer we’ve got here. Right, Inspector?” she demanded.
Chris Faraday waited inside the barge at the bottom of the steps. The dogs milled next to him. They nudged their heads against his knees, mistakenly expecting to be taken on another run. In their minds, he had on the proper clothes. He was standing beneath the door. He had one hand on the railing. As far as they were concerned, he was moments away from dashing up and out, and they meant to accompany him.
He was, in fact, listening to the sounds of the detective’s departure and waiting for his heart to stop bludgeoning his chest. Eight years of training, eight years of what-to-do-when-and-if had not been enough to keep his body from threatening a most disastrous display of suzerainty over his mind. When
He imagined he felt the barge dip as the detective stepped off it. He listened hard for the sound of footsteps receding on the path along the canal. He decided he heard them, and he climbed up to open the door, not so much to check whether the coast was clear but to let in air. This he breathed deeply. It tasted vaguely of diesel fumes and ozone, just a fraction fresher than the smoke-filled cabin. He sat on the second step from the top and considered what ought to be done next.
If he told the governing core about the detective’s visit, they would vote to disband the unit. They’d done it before with lesser cause than a visit from the police, so he had no doubt they’d move to disband. They’d transfer him for six months to one of the lesser arms of the organisation and reassign all the members of his unit to other captains. It was the most sensible thing to do when a breach of security occurred.
But of course, this wasn’t really a breach of security, was it? The detective had come to see Livie, not him. His visit had nothing at all to do with the organisation. It was merely coincidence that a murder investigation and the concerns of the movement had intersected at this arbitrary point in time. If he held fast, said nothing, and above all stuck to his story, the detective’s interest in them would pass. It was passing already, in fact, wasn’t it? Hadn’t the inspector crossed Livie off his list of potential suspects the minute he saw what condition she was in? Certainly he had. He wasn’t a fool.
Chris punched his right knuckles into his thigh and told himself roughly to stop mismanaging the truth. He had to report the visit from New Scotland Yard’s CID to the governing core. He had to let them make the decision. All he could do was argue for time and hope they weighed his eight years of involvement with the organisation and five years as a successful assault captain before they took their vote. And if they voted to disband the unit, it couldn’t be helped. He’d survive. He and Amanda would survive together. It might be all for the better, anyway. No more seeing each other on the sly, no more acting the part of business only, no more soldier and captain, no more anticipating being called up before the governing core for useless explanations and subsequent discipline. They would, at last, be relatively free.
Relatively. There was still Livie to consider.
“Think he went for it, Chris?” Livie’s voice sounded slurred, the way it always sounded when she used up energy too quickly and hadn’t had time to regain the strength required to command her brain.
“What?”
“The party.”
He took a final, marginally bracing breath of the tainted air and eased his body three steps down the ladder. Olivia had plopped back into her armchair and flung her walker against the wall.
“The story will hold,” Chris replied, but he didn’t add that there were phone calls to make and favours to ask to ensure that it held.
“He’s going to check on what you told him.”
“We’ve always known that could happen.”
“You worried?”
“No.”
“Who’s your first back-up?”
He watched her evenly and said, “Bloke called Paul Beckstead. I told you about him. He’s part of the unit. He’s—”
“Yeah. I know.” She didn’t challenge him to embellish the story. She would have done once. But she’d ceased her attempts to trip him up in a prevarication just about the same time she began making the first round of doctors’ visits.
They watched each other from across the room. They were wary, like boxers summing up the opposition. Only in their cases, if the blows rained down, they would beat against the heart, leaving the exterior body untouched.
Chris went to the set of fitted cupboards on either side of the workbench. He liberated the posters and maps he’d quickly removed from the wall. He began to replace them: Love Animals, Don’t Eat Them; Save the Beluga Whale; 125,000 Deaths Each Hour; For Whatever Happens to the Beasts, Happens to Man: All Things Are Connected.
“You could have told him the truth about yourself, Livie.” He balled up some Blu-Tack between his thumb and forefinger, affixing it once again to a map of Great Britain that was divided not by countries and counties but by horizontal and vertical segments labelled as zones. “It would have got you off the hook at least. I’ve got the party but you’ve got nothing except being here alone, which doesn’t look good.”
She didn’t reply. He heard her patting the arm of her chair and clicking her tongue for Panda, who, as always, ignored her. Panda always went Panda’s own way. She was a real cat’s feline, won over only when it suited her interests.
Chris said again, “You could have told him the truth. It would have got you off the hook. Livie, why—”
“And it would have run the risk of putting you right on it. Was I supposed to do that? Would you have done that to me?”
He pressed the map against the wall, saw it was crooked, straightened it. “I don’t know.”
“Oh come on.”
“It’s the truth. I don’t know. Put to the same test, I just don’t know.”
“Well, that’s okay, isn’t it. Because I do know.”
He faced her. He dug his hands into the pockets of his tracksuit trousers. Her expression made him feel impaled like a bug on the pinpoint of her belief in him. “Look,” he said, “don’t make me out as a hero here. I’ll only disappoint you in the long run.”
“Yeah. Well. Life’s full of disappointments, isn’t it.”
He swallowed. “How’re the legs now?”
“They’re legs.”
“Didn’t look good, did that? It was bloody awful timing.”
She smiled sardonically. “Just like a polygraph. Ask the question. Then watch her convulse. Get out the darbies and read her the caution.”
Chris joined her, dropping into one of the other chairs, the one the detective had chosen, across from her. He stretched out his legs and touched the toe of his running shoe to the toe of her black thick-soled boot, one of two pairs she’d bought when she first thought that all she needed was more adequate and consistent support for her arches.
“We’re a pair,” he said, nudging his toe along her instep.
“How’s that?”
“I was bricking it outside when he said who he was.”
“You? No way. I don’t believe it.”
“It’s true. I thought I was done for. Dead cert.”
“That’ll never happen. You’re too good to get caught.”
“I’ve never seen getting caught in the act as the way it would go.”
“No? Then what?”
“Something like this. Something unrelated. Something that happens through chance.” He saw her shoe was untied and he bent to tie it. Then he tied the other although it didn’t need it. He touched her ankles and straightened her socks. She reached out and grazed her fingers from his temple to his ear.
“If it comes down to it, tell him,” he said. He felt her hand drop abruptly. He looked up.
“Here, Beans,” she said to the beagle who had placed his front paws on the ladder. “And you! Toast. C’mon, you two fleabags, the both of you. Chris, they’re trying to get out. See to the door, okay?”
“You may need to, Livie. Someone may have seen you. If it comes down to it, you tell him the truth.”
“My truth is none of his business,” she said.
CHAPTER
9
“I already talked to the police in Kent,” were Jean Cooper’s first words when she opened the doo
“Media,” Barbara Havers said in reference to three photographers who, upon Jean Cooper’s opening the door, had begun clicking away with their cameras on the other side of the waist-high hedge that, growing just beyond a low brick wall, separated the front garden from the street. The garden itself was a depressing square of concrete bordered on three sides by an unplanted flower bed and decorated intermittently with plaster casts of coy little cottages, handpainted by someone with extremely limited talent.
“You lot buzz off,” Jean shouted at the photographers. “There’s nothing here for you.” They continued to click and snap away. She punched her fists to her hips. “You listening to me? I said piss off.”
“Mrs. Fleming,” one of them hailed her. “The Kent police are claiming a cigarette caused the fire. Was your husband a smoker? We’ve a reliable source who says he wasn’t. Will you confirm that? Can you give us a comment? Was he alone in the cottage?”
Jean’s jaw clenched to harden her face. “I got nothing to say to you lot,” she called back.
“We’ve a source in Kent who claims the cottage was being occupied by a woman called Gabriella Patten. That’s Mrs. Hugh Patten. Are you familiar with the name? Would you care to comment?”
“I just said I got nothing—”
“Have your children been informed? How are they taking it?”
“You bloody well keep away from my children! If you ask any one of them a single question, I’ll have your balls in a skillet. You understand?”
Barbara mounted the single front step. She said firmly, “Mrs. Fleming—”
“It’s Cooper. Cooper.”
“Yes. Sorry. Ms. Cooper. Let me come in. They can’t ask any more questions if you do, and the only pictures they can take won’t interest their editors. Right, then? Can I come in?”