Playing for the Ashes by Elizabeth George
Barbara swallowed. It never got easier. She always braced herself for the worst. She knew what to expect in advance. But every once in a while—every third or fourth conversation with her mother—she felt part of her strength giving way, like a sandstone cliff too long beaten by the ocean.
“Right,” Barbara said.
“I don’t want you to worry.”
“Right,” Barbara said.
“Mum knows you’ll come to see her when you can.”
Mum knew nothing of the kind, but it was generous of Mrs. Flo to make the remark. Not for the first time, Barbara wondered from what remarkable source Florence Magentry took her presence of mind, her patience, and her essential goodness. “I’m on a case,” she told her again. “Perhaps you read about it or saw it on the news. That cricketer. Fleming. He died in a fire.”
Mrs. Flo clucked sympathetically. “Poor soul,” she said.
Yes, Barbara thought. Indeed. Poor soul.
She rang off and went back to her tea. On the work top, the sand-coloured shells of the eggs had begun to sweat with pinpricks of moisture. She picked one of them up. She rolled it the length of her cheek. She didn’t feel much like eating any longer.
Lynley made sure the door to Helen’s flat was locked as he left. He spent a moment reflecting upon the brass knob and matching dead bolt. She wasn’t at home. As far as he could tell from the fact that the post hadn’t been retrieved, she hadn’t been home for most of the day. So, like a bumbling, amateur sleuth, he’d roamed through her flat, looking for clues that would explain her disappearance.
The dishes in the kitchen sink were from breakfast—why Helen couldn’t manage to slide one cereal bowl, one coffee cup, one saucer, and two spoons into the dishwasher would eternally remain a mystery to him—and both The Times and the Guardian bore the appearance of having been unfolded and read. All right. So she hadn’t been in a rush to leave, and no unknown circumstances had upset her to a degree that made her unable to eat. The reality was that he had never actually known Helen to lose her appetite as the result of anything, but at least it was a place to start: no rush to leave and no major catastrophe.
He went to her bedroom. The bed was made—support for the no-rush-to-leave theory. Her dressing table was as precisely arranged as it had been on the previous evening. Her jewellery box was closed. A silver-based scent bottle stood slightly out of line from the rest and Lynley removed its stopper.
He wondered how ill it boded that she’d applied scent before leaving the flat. Did she always wear it? Did she have it on last night? He couldn’t recall. He felt a vague sense of unease as he wondered if his not recalling was as evil an omen as might be Helen’s wearing scent for the first time in weeks. Why did women wear scent, after all? To lure, to heighten interest, to arouse, to invite?
The thought made him stride to the wardrobe and begin fingering through her clothes. Gowns, frocks, trousers, suits. If she was meeting someone, surely her manner of dress would reveal the sex, if not the identity. He began considering the men who had once been her lovers. What had she worn when he’d seen her with them? It was a question without answer. It was a hopeless task. He couldn’t remember. He found himself becoming distracted by the cool-water touch against his cheek of a satin nightgown, which hung on the inside of the wardrobe door.
Insanity, he thought. No, inanity. He shoved the wardrobe door closed in disgust. What was he becoming? If he didn’t get himself under control, he’d soon find himself kissing her jewellery or caressing the soles of her unworn shoes.
That was it, he thought. Jewellery. The bedside table. The ring. The jewel box wasn’t there, where he had placed it last night. Nor was it in the table’s drawer. Nor was it among her other jewellery. Which meant that she was wearing the ring, which meant that she agreed, which meant that certainly she’d gone to her parents to give them the news.
She’d have to spend the night there, so she’d have taken a suitcase. Of course, that was it. Why hadn’t he grasped the truth at once? He hastily checked in the corridor cupboard to verify his conclusion. Another dead end. Her two suitcases were there.
Back in the kitchen, he saw what he had seen at first and had willed himself to ignore. Her answering machine was blinking furiously. It looked as if she’d had a score of calls during the day. He told himself he wouldn’t stoop that low. If he started in with invading her answering machine, he’d soon find himself next steaming open her letters. The long and short of it was that she was out, she had been out all day, and if she intended to return any time soon, she was going to manage it without him standing in the bushes like a lovelorn Romeo waiting for the light.
So he left her flat and drove home to Eaton Terrace, dropping down Sydney Street and weaving his way to the silent white-porticoed neighbourhoods of Belgravia. He told himself that he was exhausted anyway, that he was famished, that he could do with a whisky.
“Evening, m’lord. Rather longish day for you.” Denton greeted him at the door, under his arm a stack of precisely folded white towels. Although he was wearing his usual jacket and trousers, he had already donned his bedroom slippers, Denton’s subtle way of illuminating an off-duty sign. “Expected you round eight.”
They both looked at the grandfather clock ticking sonorously in the entry. Two minutes to eleven.
“Eight?” Lynley said blankly.
“Right. Lady Helen said—”
“Helen? Has she phoned?”
“Hasn’t needed to phone.”
“Hasn’t needed…?”
“She’s been here since seven. Said you’d left her a message. Said she’d got the impression you’d be home near eight. So she popped round and had dinner waiting for you. It’s gone off, I’m afraid. You can only expect so much longevity when it comes to pasta. I tried to warn her off cooking it before you got here, but she wasn’t having any advice from me.”
“Cooking?” Lynley looked vaguely in the direction of the dining room at the rear of the house. “Denton, are you telling me that Helen cooked dinner? Helen?”
“As ever was and I don’t want to get into what she did to my kitchen. I’ve put it right.” Denton shifted the towels to his other arm and headed for the stairway. He jerked his head upward. “She’s in the library,” he said and began climbing the stairs. “Shall I make you an omelette? Believe me, you won’t be wanting the pasta unless you plan to use it for a doorstop.”
“Cooking,” Lynley repeated to himself in wonder. He left Denton waiting for an answer. He made his way to the dining room.
At this point, three hours after it was meant to be consumed, the meal looked like the plastic dinner displays one sees in the windows of restaurants in Tokyo. She’d assembled a concoction of fettuccine and prawns, with wilted side salads, limp asparagus, a sliced baguette, and red wine. This last had been uncorked but not poured. Lynley filled the glasses at the two places laid. He gazed at the meal.
“Cooking,” he said.
He was intrigued by the thought of what the food might actually taste like. As far as he knew, Helen had never assembled an entire meal—unassisted—in her life.
He picked up his glass of wine and circled the table, eyeing each dish, each fork, each knife. He sipped the wine. When he’d made a complete circuit of the dining room, he took a fork and caught three strands of fettuccine between its tines. Certainly, the food was stone cold and probably beyond the redemption of a microwave, but still he could get an idea….
“Christ,” he whispered. What in God’s name had she put into the sauce? Tomatoes, to be sure, but had she actually used tarragon in place of parsley? He chased the pasta down with a hefty swallow of wine. Perhaps it was just as well that he’d arrived home three hours too late to savour the culinary delights spread out on his table.
He picked up the second glass and left the dining room. At least they had the wine. And it was a decent claret. He wondered if she had picked it out herself or if Denton had unearthed it from the wine stock for her.
T
The fine difference between a herb and a spice would have been lost on Helen. She would have wielded nutmeg and cinnamon over her brew with as much gusto as she flung in thyme and sage.
He climbed the stairs to the first floor where the library door was cracked open just enough to let a thread of light fall upon the carpet. She was sitting in one of the large, wingback chairs near the fireplace with the glow from a reading lamp creating an aureole of light round her head. At first glance, she seemed to be intently studying a book that was open upon her lap, but as Lynley approached her, he saw in reality that she was asleep, her cheek on her fist. She had been reading Antonia Fraser’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII, which was not exactly the auspicious augury Lynley had been looking for from her. But when he glanced at the wife whose biography she was currently perusing and saw it was Jane Seymour, he decided to interpret this as a positive sign. Further inspection, however, showed that she was in the midst of the ludicrous trial of Anne Boleyn, Seymour’s predecessor, which boded ill. On the other hand, the fact that she had fallen asleep in the midst of the trial of Anne Boleyn could be interpreted as…
Lynley shook himself mentally. It was ironic, really, when he thought about it. Through most of his adult life, with only one exception, he’d held the upper hand with women. He’d gone his own way and if the path they were taking happened to intersect his, that was well and good. If not, he had rarely felt a mourner for the amorous loss. But with Helen, his entire modus operandi had been set upon its ear. In the sixteen months since he’d first admitted to himself that he’d somehow managed to fall in love with a woman who’d been one of his closest friends for nearly half his life, he’d become completely turned round. He went from one moment believing that he understood women completely to the next moment despairing of ever making the slightest degree of headway into his own profound ignorance. In his blackest periods, he found himself longing for what he liked to describe as “the good old days” when women were born and bred to be wives, consorts, mistresses, courtesans, or anything else that required of them complete submission to the will of the male. How convenient it would have been, really, to present himself at the home of Helen’s father, to lay out his claim for her affections, perhaps even to barter for a dowry, but above all to end up with her, free from having to worry in the least about her wishes in the matter. Had marriages only still been arranged, he could have had her first and worried about winning her later. As it was, the wooing and winning were grinding him down. He was not—had never been—a particularly patient man.
He set her wineglass upon the table next to her chair. He removed the book from her lap, marked the place, and closed it. He squatted in front of her and covered her free hand with his. The hand turned, and their fingers twined. His own closed over an unexpected, unyielding, projecting object and he dropped his glance to see that she was wearing the ring he’d left her. He raised her hand and kissed the palm.
At this, she finally stirred. “I was dreaming of Catherine of Aragon,” she murmured.
“What was she like?”
“Unhappy. Henry didn’t treat her very well.”
“Unfortunately, he’d fallen in love.”
“Yes, but he wouldn’t have discarded her if she’d only provided him with a living son. Why are men so awful?”
“That’s a leap.”
“From Henry to men in general? I wonder.” She stretched. She noted the wineglass he was holding. “I see you’ve found your dinner.”
“I have. I’m sorry, darling. If I’d known—”
“It doesn’t matter. I gave Denton a taste of it and from the expression on his face—which, to his credit, he did try to hide—I could tell I hadn’t exactly scaled a culinary Himalaya. He was good about letting me use the kitchen, though. Did he describe the chaos I reduced it to?”
“He was remarkably circumspect.”
She smiled. “If you and I marry, Denton will certainly divorce you, Tommy. How could he possibly endure my burning the bottoms off all his pots and pans?”
“Is that what you did?”
“He was circumspect, wasn’t he? What a lovely man.” She reached for her wineglass and slowly twirled it by its stem. “It was only one pot, actually. And a small one at that. And I didn’t burn the bottom entirely off. You see, the recipe called for sautéing garlic and I set it to sauté and got distracted by the phone—it was your mother, by the way. If the smoke alarm hadn’t gone off, you probably would have come home to rubble instead of”—she waved her hand in the general direction of the dining room, “fettuccine à la mer avec les crevettes et les moules.”
“What did Mother have to say?”
“She extolled your virtues. Intelligence, compassion, wit, integrity, moral fibre. I asked about your teeth, but she wasn’t terribly helpful there.”
“You’d have to talk to my dentist. Shall I give you his number?”
“Would you do that?”
“And more. I’d even eat fettuccine à la mer avec les crevettes et les moules.”
She smiled again. “I had a taste of it myself. Lord, it was dreadful. I’m hopeless, Tommy.”
“Have you eaten?”
“Denton took mercy upon me at half past nine. He whipped up something with chicken and artichokes that was absolute heaven. I bolted it down at the kitchen table and swore him to secrecy on the subject. But there’s more of it left. I saw him stow it away in the refrigerator. Shall I reheat it for you? Surely I can do that much without burning down the house. Or have you had dinner somewhere already?”
He told her that he hadn’t, that every moment he’d expected to bring an end to the day’s work, but that at every juncture the investigation had simply kept extending itself. He admitted he was famished, he drew her to her feet, and they descended the stairs. They avoided the dining room and its steadily solidifying fettuccine à la mer and went instead to the basement kitchen. Helen rooted through the refrigerator while Lynley watched. He felt absurdly comforted in some childish way by the sight of her shifting through jars and plastic bags to pull forth a container in triumph. What was this all about, he wondered, this sudden feeling of total complacency? Was it the ring and the fact that she had chosen to wear it? Was it the promise of a moderately decent meal? Or was it her behaviour, bustling about his kitchen, acting so decidedly wifely towards him, bringing plates from cupboards, taking cutlery from drawers, dumping the chicken and artichokes into a stainless steel pot, setting the pot into the microwave, smacking its door shut with an air of—
“Helen!” Lynley leapt across the kitchen before she had a chance to turn the microwave on. “You can’t put metal in there.”
She looked at him blankly. “Why ever not?”
“Because you can’t. Because the metal and the microwaves will…Hell, I don’t know. I just know you can’t.”
She studied the machine. “Goodness. I wonder…”
“What?”
“That must be what happened to mine.”
“You put metal in it?”
“I actually didn’t think of it as metal. One doesn’t, you know.”
“What? What was it?”
“A tin of vichyssoise. I’ve never cared for it cold, you see. And I thought, Let me just pop it in the microwave for a minute or two. That was that. It boomed, hissed, fizzled, and died. I remember thinking, No wonder they serve it cold, but I thought it was the soup. I never actually connected the tin itself to the booming, hissing, and fizzling.” Her shoulders drooped and she sighed. “First the fettuccine. Now this. I don’t know, Tommy.” She twisted the ring on her finger. He put his arm round her shoulders and kissed h
“Why do you love me?” she asked. “I’m utterly without hope and completely without promise.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“I ruin your dinner. I destroy your pots.”
“Nonsense,” he said and turned her to him.
“I nearly blow up the kitchen. Lord, you’d be safer with the IRA.”
“Don’t be absurd.” He kissed her.
“Left to my own devices, I shall probably burn down this house and all of Howenstow as well. Can you imagine the horror of that. Have you tried?”
“Not yet. But I will. Momentarily.” He kissed her again, drawing her closer this time, teasing her mouth and lips with his tongue. She fitted him naturally, and he marvelled at the entire miraculous, antipodal nature of male-female sexuality. Angle for curve, rough for smooth, hard for soft. Helen was a wonder. She was everything he wanted. And the moment after he had something to eat, he’d prove it to her.
Her arms slipped round his neck. Her fingers moved languorously into his hair. Her hips pressed against his. He felt simultaneously hot in the groin and dizzy in the head as two appetites battled for control of his body.
He couldn’t actually remember the last time he’d managed to have a well-balanced, strength-producing meal. It had been at least thirty-six hours, hadn’t it? He’d had a single boiled egg and a slice of toast this morning, but that hardly counted when one considered the number of hours that had passed since then. He really ought to eat. The chicken and artichokes were sitting on the work top. The concoction would take less than five minutes to reheat. Five more to devour. Three to wash up if he didn’t want to leave the remains for Denton. Yes. Perhaps that was the best idea. Food. Less than fifteen minutes and he’d be right as rain, he’d be strong as an ox, he’d be fit as a fiddle. He groaned. Jesus. What was happening to his mind? He needed sustenance. This very instant. Because if he didn’t eat, he couldn’t possibly…
Helen’s hands drifted down his chest, unbuttoning as they went. They dropped to his trousers and teased his belt loose.