Playing for the Ashes by Elizabeth George
“Did they follow you here? Did they? Because if they did, I’m going to phone my solicitor and—”
“They were here already.” Barbara aimed for patience but at the same time remained uncomfortably aware of the whir of power-driven cameras and her disinclination for being photographed elbowing her way into the putative grieving widow’s home. “They were parked over on Plevna Street. Behind a lorry near the surgery. Their cars were hidden.” She automatically added, “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry,” Jean Cooper scoffed. “Don’t give me that. None of you lot’s sorry about anything.”
But she stepped back from the door and let Barbara into the sitting room of the small terraced house. She seemed to be in the process of some form of housecleaning, because several large black rubbish bags gaped half-filled on the floor and as she kicked these to one side to give Barbara access to a sagging three-piece suite, a hugely muscled man came down the stairs with three boxes stacked in his arms. He said with a laugh, “Great stuff that, Pook. But you ought t’said we was too busy wringing out our snot rags to talk to them now. Ooh. Please. Excuse me, copper, I can’t converse at the moment cos I need to have myself another boo hoo.” He hooted.
“Der,” Jean said. “This’s the police.”
The man lowered the boxes. He looked more belligerent than embarrassed to have been caught speaking unguardedly. He gave Barbara a disbelieving scrutiny that quickly metamorphosed into a dismissive once over. What a moo, what a minge bag, his expression said. Barbara stared back. She held the man pinned with her vision until he thumped the boxes onto the floor near the doorway that led into the kitchen. Jean Cooper introduced him as her brother Derrick. She said to him, unnecessarily:
“She’s here about Kenny.”
“Is she?” He leaned against the wall and balanced on one foot with the other tipped on its toe in an odd dancer’s position. He had unusually small feet for a man his size, made smaller looking by his capacious purple trousers, which were banded by elastic at the waist and the ankles and looked like something a harem dancer might wear. They appeared to be tailored to accommodate the tree-trunk size of his thighs. “What about him, then? You ask me, the naffing little creep finally got his comeuppance.” He aimed his finger at his sister and cocked his thumb like a gun in her direction, although his performance seemed to be largely geared for Barbara’s benefit. “Like I been saying all along, Pook, you lot’re better off without the bleeding wanker. Mr. Effing K.F. Mr. Honeyarse taste so sweet when you kiss it. You ask me—”
“You got all Kenny’s books, Der?” his sister asked pointedly. “There’s more in the boys’ room. But mind you check the insides for his name before you pack them. Don’t take any of Stan’s.”
He folded his arms across his chest as well as he could, considering the girth of his pectorals and the limited range of motion caused by the bulge of his biceps. The position, while no doubt chosen to demonstrate dominance, merely emphasized the oddity of his physique. Through intensive weight training he’d managed to enlarge every part of his body except those whose size was predetermined by lack of muscle or the natural restrictions of skeletal growth. Hence, his hands, his feet, his head, and his ears seemed curiously delicate.
“You trying to get rid of me? ’Fraid I’ll tell this sweet shitbag copper what a rude little prick you was married to?”
“That’ll do,” Jean said sharply. “If you want to stay, stay. But keep your mug shut because I’m just this close…just this close, Der…” She held her thumb pinched to her index finger so that only the space between her nails was left. Her hand trembled. She buried it roughly into the pocket of her housecoat. “Oh bugger it all,” she whispered, “all of it, bugger it.”
Her brother’s expression of insolent aggression vanished immediately. “You’re dead knackered.” He moved his mass from the wall. “You need a cuppa. You won’t eat, fine. I can’t make you do that. But you’re having a cuppa and I’m standing over you till you drink every drop. I’ll see to it, Pook.” He went into the kitchen and started turning on water and slamming cupboards.
Jean began moving the half-filled rubbish bags nearer the stairway. She said, “Sit down, then,” to Barbara. “Say what you’ve come to say. Then leave us be.”
Barbara remained standing by an old television set while the other woman continued to shift the bags, lugging one to a deep cupboard beneath the stairway. There she pulled out a collection of scrapbooks and albums. She kept her attention fixed on their dusty covers, either in avoidance of Barbara or in avoidance of what the books and their pages displayed. They appeared to contain both photographs and news cuttings, but these had apparently been ill mounted inside because several pictures and several more articles fluttered to the floor as Jean transferred each large, dusty portfolio from the cupboard to the rubbish bag.
Barbara squatted to gather them. The headline of every article had the name Fleming highlighted in orange. They appeared to document the batsman’s career. The photographs, on the other hand, chronicled his life. Here he was a child, there a grinning teenager with a contraband gin bottle raised in a salute, there a young father laughing as he swung a small boy by his hands.
Had the situation surrounding the man’s death been different, Barbara would have said, “Wait. Please, Ms. Cooper. Don’t throw these away. Hold on to them. You don’t want them now because the pain’s too raw. But you will eventually. Go slow here, won’t you?” But any need she may have felt to offer those words of caution and sympathy diminished when she considered the possible implications behind a woman’s holding on to so many mementoes of the man who had left her.
Barbara dropped pictures and cuttings into one of the bags. She said, “Did your husband tell you anything about this, Ms. Cooper?” and handed Jean one of the documents she’d removed from the davenport in Mrs. Whitelaw’s house that morning. It was a letter from Q. Melvin Abercrombie, Esq., Randolph Ave., Maida Vale. Barbara had already memorised its brief contents, verification of an appointment with the solicitor.
Jean read the letter and handed it back. She returned to her packing. “He had a meet with a bloke in Maida Vale.”
“I can see that, Ms. Cooper. Did he tell you about it?”
“Ask him. The bloke. Mr. Nibhead Ashercrown or whoever he was.”
“I can phone Mr. Abercrombie for the information I need,” Barbara said. “Because a client is generally frank with his solicitor when he begins the process of divorce, and a solicitor is generally more than happy to be frank with the police when that client’s been murdered.” She saw Jean’s hands close tightly round the edges of an album. Bull’s-eye, she thought. “There are papers to be filed and others to be served, and no doubt this bloke Abercrombie knows exactly how far your husband got doing what. So I could phone him for the information, but when I find out, I’ll only return to talk to you again. And the press will no doubt still be outside, snapping away and wondering what the coppers are on to and why. Where are your children, by the way?”
Jean stared at her defiantly.
“They know their father is dead, I take it?”
“They aren’t new potatoes, Sergeant. What the hell do you think?”
“Do they also know that their father had recently asked you for a divorce? And he had asked you, hadn’t he?”
Jean inspected the torn corner of one of the picture albums. With her thumb, she smoothed the rent in the artificial leather.
“Tell her, Pook.” Derrick Cooper had come to the kitchen doorway, a box of P.G. Tips in one hand and in the other a mug decorated with Elvis Presley’s famous sneersmile. “What difference does it make? Tell her. You don’t need him. You never needed him.”
“Which is just as well, isn’t it, him being dead.” Jean raised her pale face. “Yes,” she said to Barbara. “But you knew the answer already, didn’t you, ’cause he would of told the old crow that he gave me the word and the crow would of been only too chuffed to pass the news on to everyone in London, especially if i
“Mrs. Whitelaw?”
“Her and who else.”
“Trying to make you look bad? Why?”
“I wasn’t ever good enough to marry her Kenny.” Jeannie snorted a laugh. “Like Gabriella was?”
“Then you knew he intended to marry Gabriella Patten?”
She shoved the album she was holding into one of the bags. She looked about for more employment, but nothing seemed to be at hand. She said, “These need binding up, Der. Where’d you put the wire? Is it still upstairs?” And she watched him plod up to the first floor in reply.
“Did your husband tell your children about the divorce?” Barbara asked. “Where are they, by the way?”
“Leave them out of this,” Jeannie said. “Leave them bloody well alone. They’ve had enough. Four years of enough and it’s going no further.”
“I understand your son had a holiday planned with his father. Boating in Greece. They were supposed to leave last Wednesday evening. Why didn’t they go?”
Jean pushed herself off the floor and walked to the sitting room window where she took a packet of Embassys from the sill and lit one.
“You got to quit that shit,” her brother said as he lumbered down the stairs and flipped a roll of wire onto one of the bags. “How many times I got to tell you that, Pook?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Right. But now’s not exactly the moment. Weren’t you making tea? I heard the kettle shut off.”
He scowled and disappeared into the kitchen. Water poured and a spoon clinked energetically round a cup. He returned with the tea. He set it on the window-sill and dropped onto the sofa. He assumed a position with legs crossed at the ankles on the coffee table, which communicated his intention of remaining throughout the rest of the interview. Let him, Barbara thought. She returned to previously cultivated ground.
“Your husband had told you he wanted a divorce? He’d told you he intended to remarry? He told you he’d be marrying Gabriella Patten? Did he tell your children all this? Did you tell them?”
She shook her head.
“Why not?”
“People change their minds. Kenny was people.”
Her brother groaned. “That shitbag wasn’t people. He was a fucking star. He was writing his legend and you lot here was a finished chapter. Why’n’t you ever see that? Why’n’t you just let go?”
Jean shot him a look.
“You could of found somebody else by now. You could of gave your kids a real dad. You could of—”
“Shut your face, Der.”
“Hey. Watch who you’re talking at.”
“No. You watch. You can stay if you want, but just shut up. About me, ’bout Kenny, ’bout everything. Okay?”
“Listen.” He jutted his chin at his sister. “Know what your problem is? What it always was. You don’t want to face what you never want to face. That bloody sod thought he was God Almighty with the rest of us born just to lick his arse and you can’t see it, can you?”
“You’re talking rot.”
“You still can’t see it. He walked out on you, Pook. He found a nicer bit of pussy to play with. You knew it when it happened and still you waited for him to have enough of her and come catting back home.”
“We had a marriage. I wanted to keep it.”
“You had something, all right.” His small acorn-shaped eyes slit shut when he smirked. “You was the doormat and he was the boots. Did you like getting tramped on?”
Jean stubbed out her cigarette as carefully as if the ashtray were a piece of Belleek and not what it was, a bit of shell-shaped tin. “Enjoy saying that?” she asked in a low voice. “Make you feel like somebody? Make you feel big?”
“I’m only saying what you need to hear.”
“You’re only saying what you been wanting to say since you was eighteen years old.”
“Oh shit. Don’t be daft.”
“When you first knew Kenny was ten times the man you ever hoped to be.”
Derrick’s biceps grew taut. He dropped his legs to the floor.
“Bugger that rot. Bugger it. Bug—”
“All right,” Barbara said. “You’ve made your point, Mr. Cooper.”
Derrick’s eyes snapped to her. “What’s it to you?”
“You’ve said enough. We’ve got the message. Now I’d like you to leave so that I can talk to your sister.”
He rose in a surge. “Who the hell you telling to shove off here?”
“You. I’m telling you. I thought that was clear. Now can you find the door yourself or do you need my assistance?”
“Oooh, just listen to her. I’m shitting my knickers.”
“Then I’d walk carefully if I were you.”
His face flamed. “You shit-eating slag. I’ll—”
“Der!” Jean said.
“Piss off out of here, Cooper,” Barbara said quietly, “because if you don’t, I’ll have you in the nick so fast that you won’t have time to impress the screws by flexing.”
“You snot-nosed piece of—”
“But I’ll put a week’s pay on most of the lags liking you just fine.”
An ugly vein popped out on his forehead. His chest expanded. His right arm dropped back. His elbow bent.
“Try me,” Barbara said, moving onto the balls of her feet. “Try me. Please. I’ve ten years of Kwai Tan and I’m itching to use them.”
“Derrick!” Jean put herself between Barbara and her brother. He was breathing in a way that reminded Barbara of a water buffalo she’d once watched at the zoo. “Derrick,” Jean said again. “Go easy. She’s a cop.”
“Don’t mean bugger all.”
“You do what she says. Derrick! You hear? Derrick!” She grabbed his arm and shook it.
His eyes seemed to unglaze. They moved from Barbara to his sister. “Yeah,” he said. “I hear.” He raised a hand as if to touch his sister’s shoulder, but he lowered it before he made contact with her.
“You go home,” she said and touched her forehead to his arm. “I know you mean good, but we got to talk alone, her and me.”
“Mum and Dad’re broke up ’bout this,” he said. “Kenny.”
“That’s no surprise.”
“They always liked him, Pook. Even after he left. They always took his side.”
“I know that, Der.”
“They thought it was you. I said it wasn’t fair to think like that when they didn’t know what’s what, but they’d never listen. Dad’d say, What in hell’s name d’you know about having a successful marriage, you twit.”
“Dad was cut up. He didn’t mean to talk nasty.”
“They always called him son. Son, Pook. Why? I was their son.”
Jean smoothed her hand against his hair. “You go on home, Der. Things’ll be all right. Go on. Okay? Through the back, though. Don’t let those wallies out front get at you.”
“I ain’t afraid of them.”
“No need giving them something to write about. Go out the back, okay?”
“Drink your tea.”
“I will.”
She sat on the sofa as her brother went into the kitchen. A door opened and closed. Then a moment later, a gate in the back garden creaked on rusty hinges. Jean cradled the mug of tea in her hands.
“Kwai Tan,” she said to Barbara. “What’s that?”
Barbara found that she was still on her toes. She came down off them and began to breathe normally. “Haven’t a clue. I think it’s a way to cook chicken.”
She reached in her shoulder bag for her cigarettes. She lit, smoked, and wondered when the last time it was that a burning carcinogen had tasted this good. ASH be damned. She was owed this fag. She dodged two rubbish bags and made her way to one of the chairs of the three-piece suite. She sat. The cushion was so old and so thin that it felt as if it were filled with bird shot. “Did you speak to your husband any time on Wednesday?”
“Why would I?”
“He was supposed to take your son boating. They were supposed to leave Wednesday evening. The plans got changed. Did he phone to tell you?”
“It was for Jimmy’s birthday. That was the promise, leastways. Who knows if he meant it?”
“He meant it,” Barbara said. Jean looked up sharply. “We found the plane tickets in one of his jackets in Kensington. And Mrs. Whitelaw told us that she helped him pack and watched him put his gear in the car. But somewhere along the line, his plans got changed. Did he tell you why?”
She shook her head and drank from the mug of tea. Barbara noticed that it was one of those trick mugs on which the picture changed when the liquid heated it. Young Elvis sneersmiling had altered to the bloated Elvis of his later years, satin-garbed and warbling into a microphone.
“Did he tell Jimmy?”
Jean’s hands closed round the mug. Elvis disappeared beneath her fingers. She watched the level of the tea rise from right to left as she tilted the mug back and forth. She finally said, “Yeah. He talked to Jimmy.”
“When was this?”
“I don’t know what time.”
“You don’t need to be exact. Was it morning? Afternoon? Just before they were supposed to be leaving? He was going to drive here and fetch the boy, wasn’t he? Did he phone shortly before he was to arrive?”
She lowered her head farther, giving closer scrutiny to her tea.
Barbara said, “Go back through the day mentally. You got up, got dressed, perhaps got the children ready for school. What else? You went to work. You came home. Jimmy was packed for the trip. He was unpacked. He was ready. He was excited. He was disappointed. What?”
The tea continued to hold her attention. Although her head was still lowered, Barbara could see from the movement of her chin that she was chewing on the inside of her lower lip. Jimmy Cooper, she thought with a stirring of interest. What might the rozzers at the local substation have to say when they heard the name?
“Where is Jimmy?” she asked. “If you can’t tell me anything about this Greece trip and his father—”
Jean said, “Wednesday afternoon.” She raised her head as Barbara tapped cigarette ash into the tin shell. “Wednesday afternoon.”