Playing for the Ashes by Elizabeth George
She paused with the partial print in her hands. “You do have the photographs,” she reminded him. “As well as the report.”
“As I said on the phone, I have additional information. Which I’d like to confirm. With your cooperation, of course.”
Her eyes moved from him to Havers. She returned the plaster cast to its box. It was clear that she was engaged in a mental skirmish with herself: whether to oblige a fellow officer, whether to protest further. She finally said, “Right,” and she pressed her lips together as if to keep herself from further comment.
She removed the police lock from the cottage door and stepped back for them to enter. Lynley nodded his thanks. He went first to the sink where, opening the cupboard beneath it, he verified with Inspector Ardery that Maidstone’s crime scene team had, as he expected, taken the rubbish with them. They were searching for anything with a connection to the incendiary device, she told him. All the rubbish had been carted off. Why did he want the rubbish?
Lynley related Gabriella Patten’s story about Fleming’s search through the waste bins. Ardery listened, her eyebrows drawn together pensively and her hand at her collarbone. No, she told him when he was done, there had been no rubbish left on the floor anywhere. Not in the kitchen. Not in the loo. Not in the sitting room. If Fleming had dumped rubbish out in anger, he’d replaced it all when he had time to cool off. And he’d been scrupulous enough about doing so, she added. There hadn’t been a scrap left anywhere on the floor.
“He could have come to his senses once Gabriella’d left,” Havers pointed out to Lynley. “It’s Mrs. Whitelaw’s cottage. He probably wouldn’t want to trash it, no matter his rage.”
That was a possibility, Lynley conceded. He asked about any cigarette ends in the rubbish, telling Ardery about Gabriella Patten’s claim that she’d stopped smoking. Ardery confirmed. There had been no ends, no burnt matches either. He slipped into an inglenook where a pine table stood. Beneath it sat a wicker animal basket. He squatted to examine it and scraped from its cushion a few strands of fur.
“Gabriella Patten claims the kittens were inside when she left,” he said. “In this basket, I should guess.”
“Well, they got out somehow, didn’t they?” Ardery said.
Lynley moved through the dining room and along the short passage that led to the sitting room. There, he examined the front of the door. Gabriella had used the word bash to describe how Fleming had managed to get into the sitting room where she’d tried to hide herself from his wrath. If that word was accurate, there would be evidence to support it.
Like the rest of the house, the door was painted white, although also like the rest of the house, it now bore a jet patina of soot. Lynley brushed this off at shoulder height. He did the same round the knob. There was no evidence of force.
Ardery and Havers came to join him, Ardery saying with what appeared to be a deliberate show of patience, “We’ve got a match on most of the fingerprints, Inspector,” as Havers checked the fireplace for the fire irons Gabriella had claimed to have used to defend herself. A set was there, a poker that hung from a stand with a brush, a miniature shovel, and tongs. She said, “On these as well? Have you checked these for prints?”
“We’ve checked everything for prints, Sergeant. I believe the information you want is in the report I’ve brought with me.”
Lynley was closing the sitting room door to study its other side. He used his handkerchief to wipe away soot. He said, “Ah. Here it is, Sergeant,” and Havers joined him.
Beneath the knob, a thin, serrated line of discolouration marred the white wood for perhaps eight inches. Lynley ran his fingers along it, then turned from the door to the rest of the room.
“She said she used a chair,” Havers said, and together they examined each of them.
The chair in question was yet another of Mrs. Whitelaw’s nursing chairs, upholstered in bottle-green velvet and sitting beneath a hanging corner cupboard. Havers pulled it away from the wall. Lynley immediately saw the uneven ridge of white against the darker walnut that rimmed the top of the chair and ran down its sides. He placed the chair beneath the knob of the door. The smear of white matched up to the serrated line. “Confirmed,” he said.
Inspector Ardery stood by the fireplace. She said, “Inspector, if you’d told me what you were looking for in the first place, my crime team could have saved you this trip.”
Lynley stooped to scrutinise the carpet in the vicinity of the door. He found a minute rip that lined up with the direction that the chair would have travelled had someone forced it away from the doorknob beneath which it had leaned. Additional confirmation, he thought. At least in part, Gabriella Patten had been telling the truth.
“Inspector Lynley,” Ardery said again.
Lynley stood. Every inch of the other officer’s body was communicating affront. Their agreement had been easily enough reached: she would handle Kent, he would handle London. They would meet intellectually—and physically as well, if it came down to it—somewhere in between. But getting to the truth behind Fleming’s death wasn’t as simple as that, as he well knew. The nature of the investigation was going to call for one of the two of them to become subordinate, and he could see that Ardery didn’t like the idea of subordination being assigned to her.
He said, “Sergeant, would you give us a moment?”
Havers said, “Right,” and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen. He heard the outer door close behind her as she left the cottage.
Ardery said, “You’re pushing things, Inspector Lynley. Yesterday. Today. I don’t appreciate it. I’ve got the information for you. I’ve got the reports. I’ve got the lab working overtime. What more do you want?”
“Sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to press in.”
“Sorry worked yesterday. It’s not good enough this afternoon. You intend to press. You intend to keep pressing. I want to know why.”
He gave fleeting thought to whether he should attempt to unruffle her feathers. It couldn’t be easy for her, exercising her profession in a field dominated by men who probably questioned her every movement and doubted her every opinion and report. But to placate her now seemed condescending. He knew he wouldn’t have bothered had she been a man. So, to his way of thinking, the fact that she wasn’t shouldn’t enter into their discussion now.
He said, “The point isn’t who does what or who investigates where. The point is finding a killer. We agree on that, don’t we?”
“Don’t patronise me. What we agreed to was a clear delineation of your responsibility as opposed to mine. I’ve kept to my side of the bargain. What’s happened to yours?”
“This isn’t a contractual situation, Inspector. Our predetermined boundaries aren’t as clear as you’d like them to be. We have to work together or we won’t work at all.”
“Then perhaps you need to redefine what working together is going to mean. Because as far as I can see at the moment, I’m working for you, at your pleasure and behest. And if that’s the way it’s going to be, then I’d appreciate your clarifying the point right now so that I can decide what steps I’m going to take to give you the headroom you appear to need.”
“What I need is your expertise, Inspector Ardery.”
“I find that difficult to believe.”
“And I won’t be getting it if you ask your CC to remove you from the case.”
“I didn’t say—”
“We both know the threat was implicit.” He didn’t add the other adjective, unprofessional. He never much cared for the way that word was bandied about whenever one officer came into conflict with another. Instead he said, “We all work differently. We have to make accommodations for each other’s style. Mine is to hound each piece of information. I don’t intend to step on toes when I do it, but that happens sometimes. It doesn’t mean I think my colleagues can’t do their jobs. It just means I’ve learned to trust my own instincts.”
“More than anyone else’s, obviously.”
?
“I see. How convenient.”
“What?”
“How you have your professional commitments arranged. Your colleagues make accommodation for you. You make no accommodation for them.”
“I didn’t say that, Inspector.”
“You didn’t have to, Inspector. You made it fairly clear. You’re to hound information in any way you choose. I’m to provide it when and if it meets your needs.”
“That’s arguing your role is unimportant,” Lynley said. “I don’t believe that. Why do you?”
“Beyond that,” she continued as if he hadn’t spoken, “I’m to offer no opinion and make no objection to whatever direction you choose to take. And if that direction requires me to be at your beck and call, I’m to accept it, like it, and keep my mouth shut like a good little woman, no doubt.”
“This isn’t a male-female problem,” Lynley said. “It’s one of approach. I’ve brought you away from your Sunday afternoon to serve my needs and I apologise for that. But we’re beginning to gather some information that may break the case open, and I’d like to follow up on it while I can. The fact that I choose to follow up on it personally has nothing to do with you. It’s not a statement about your competence. It is, if anything, a statement about mine. I’ve offended where I didn’t mean to. I’d like to get past that and move on to have a look at what you’ve gathered since yesterday. If I may.”
She had clasped her arms in front of her as they were speaking. Lynley could see the pressure she was applying with her fingertips. He waited for her to conclude whatever inward battle she was engaged in, and he tried to keep his impatience from showing and his face as noncommittal as possible. There seemed no purpose in offending her further. Both of them knew that the advantage was his. A single phone call from him and the Yard would take whatever political steps were necessary to either neutralise her or remove her from the case. Which, he felt, would be rather a waste as she seemed to be quick, intelligent, and able.
Her grip loosened on her arms. She said, “All right.” Lynley didn’t know what she was agreeing to and guessed she was agreeing to nothing save making the next move, which was to lead him back through the cottage and out the kitchen door where Sergeant Havers was lounging in one of the chairs under the arbour. Wisely, Lynley saw, she hadn’t touched anything in Inspector Ardery’s box of evidence and reports. And her face was a perfect study of disregard as they joined her.
Ardery once again removed the plaster casts of the footprints from the box, as well as the reports and the photographs. She said, “We’ve identified the shoe. The pattern on the sole is fairly distinctive.”
She handed the complete cast to Lynley. It duplicated the entire sole of a shoe. Around the edges ran markings that resembled a dog-tooth cornice. Indentations in the plaster, they would be raised portions on the shoe sole itself. Extending diagonally across the shoe bottom from one cornice to another was a second series of indentations, like slashes. These motifs were repeated on the heel. It was, Lynley saw, a distinctive design.
“Doc Martens,” Ardery said.
“Walking shoes? Boots?”
“They appear to be boots.”
“Good for exercising one’s right to xenophobia,” Havers remarked. “Have a little march through Bethnal Green. Stomp on some faces with those nice metal tips.”
Lynley set the second cast next to the first. The second depicted the toe end of the shoe and perhaps three inches of the sole. He could see they’d been made by the same boot. One of the cornice markings along the left edge was misshapen, as if it had been irregularly worn down or partially chopped off with a knife. This misshapen mass appeared in both casts and was not, Ardery told them, a normal feature of the shoes themselves.
“The complete cast is from the bottom of the garden,” Ardery said. “It marked the spot where someone came over the fence from the paddock next door.”
“And the other?” Lynley asked.
She gestured towards the west. “There’s a public footpath that runs above the spring. It goes to the village, Lesser Springburn. There’s a stile perhaps three-quarters of the way into the village. The print was there.”
Lynley ventured a question she wasn’t going to like. It bore too much the unspoken message that she and her team might have missed something along the way. “Will you show us?”
“Inspector, we’ve combed the village. We’ve spoken to everyone there. Believe me, the report—”
“Is probably far more complete than any I might write,” Lynley said. “Nonetheless, I’d like to have a look for myself. If you don’t mind.”
She was well aware of the fact that they didn’t need either her permission or her presence if they chose to have a wander down a public footpath. Lynley could read that understanding in her expression. Although his request had implied equality, at the same time it suggested doubt about her thoroughness. It was up to her to choose which meaning she would comprehend.
“Very well,” she said. “We can go into the village and have a look round there. It’s only a ten-minute walk from here.”
The footpath began at the spring, a bubbling pool some fifty yards from Celandine Cottage. The path was well trodden. It rose gently above the stream that flowed from the pool, on one side edging first a series of paddocks and then an orchard in which untended apple trees—blooming pink and white like a snowfall at sunset—were being fatally overgrown with the creeping pestilence of old man’s beard. On the other side of the path, blind nettles mixed with blackberry brambles, and the white sprays of cow parsley rose above ivy which climbed the oaks, the alders, and the willows. Most of the trees along the path and the stream were in leaf, and the distinctive prree answered by a strong clear whistle indicated the presence of both warbler and thrush.
In spite of her shoes—heeled sandals that brought her to Lynley’s height—Inspector Ardery moved along the footpath briskly. She brushed by hedges and brambles, ducked round branches, and spoke over her shoulder as she went. “We’ve an identification of the fibres we found on the split-rail fence at the bottom of the garden. It’s denim. Standard blue jeans. Levi Strauss.”
“That narrows things down to seventy-five percent of the population,” Havers noted quietly.
Lynley fired a monitory look at his sergeant, who was following a few yards in his wake. Having garnered the inspector’s cooperation, however grudging such cooperation might be, he wasn’t about to risk it with one of Havers’ spontaneous but nonetheless ill-timed remarks. She caught his expression and mouthed the word sorry.
Ardery either did not hear the remark or chose to ignore it. She said, “There was oil on the fibres as well. We’ve sent them to analysis to be certain, but one of our older blokes had a good long look under the microscope and he says it’s motor oil. I tend to believe him. He was working in forensic before we had chromatographs to give us all the answers, so he generally knows what he’s looking at.”
“What about the cigarette ends?” Lynley asked. “The one used in the cottage and the others in the garden.”
“We don’t have identification yet.” Ardery hurried on, as if anticipating Lynley’s conclusion that there was some sort of problem requiring his insistence that part of her evidence be assigned for analysis to someone more capable at New Scotland Yard. “Our man’s heading back today from Sheffield. He was speaking at a conference. He’ll get the cigarettes tomorrow morning, and once he’s got them in hand it won’t take long.”
“There’s nothing preliminary to go on?” Lynley asked.
She said, “He’s our expert. We could give you guesswork, but it would be only that. There are eight different points of identification on a cigarette end, and I vastly prefer my man to mark them all for us rather than to catch one or two of them myself, make a stab at the brand, and be incorrect.”
She had come to a rail fence that bisected the footpath. She paused at the lichen
The earth round the stile was softer than that on the path. It presented a maze of footprints, most of them blurred by additional prints that had fallen on top of them. Ardery’s team had been lucky, indeed, to find anything that matched the print at Celandine Cottage. Even a partial seemed miraculous.
“It was towards the edge,” Ardery said, as if in response to Lynley’s thought. “Here, where the bits of plaster are.”
Lynley nodded and looked beyond the fence. Perhaps 150 yards to the northwest, he could see the rooftops that designated the boundary of Lesser Springburn. The path was clearly marked, a beaten track that veered away from the stream, crossed a railway track, skirted an orchard, and dipped into a small housing estate.
They climbed over the stile. At the housing estate, the path finally widened to allow them to walk three abreast, with the back gardens of neat houses lined up on either side of them. They came out into the housing estate itself, a curve of identical detached dwellings with brick exteriors, squat chimneys, bay windows, and gabled roofs. The three detectives were the object of some interest here, for the street was lively with children skipping rope, two men-of-the-house hosing down cars, and a modified cricket match being played by a group of small boys.
“We’ve made the circuit here,” Ardery said. “No one saw anything out of the ordinary on Wednesday night. But they’d have been indoors when he passed.”
“You’ve decided on he,” Lynley said.
“The brand of shoe. Its size. The depth of the print at Celandine Cottage. Yes,” she said, “I’d say we’re looking for a he.”
They emerged onto the Springburn Road at the bottom of the village. To their right, the narrow high street twisted up a modest acclivity between a row of ancient thatched bungalows and a line of shops. Directly in front of them, a secondary lane occupied by a rank of timber-framed cottages led to a church. To their left, a pebbled drive gave way to the car park of the Fox and Hounds pub. From where he stood, Lynley could see that a common lay beyond the pub, with oaks and ashes casting long mid-afternoon shadows against the lawn. A tangle of thick, untended shrubbery grew along its edge. Giving a glance to both the high street and the lane that led to the church, Lynley made his decision and headed for this.