Playing for the Ashes by Elizabeth George
He replaced the volume, and picked up the paperback on the table next to her bed. He put on his spectacles and read its back cover. “Do people always live happily ever after in these books, Sergeant?”
“I don’t know. The stories stop short of the ever-after part. But the sex scenes are diverting. If you like that sort of thing.” Barbara winced as he read the title—Sweet Southern Comfort—and made an observation of the book’s obvious artwork. Bloody hell, she thought. She said, “Sir. Sir, d’you want something to eat? I don’t know about you, but I never got a proper lunch today. What about some food?”
Lynley carried the novel to one of the two chairs that were tucked beneath the dining table. He said, as he read, “I wouldn’t mind that, Havers. What have you got?”
“Eggs. And eggs.”
“I’ll have eggs then.”
She said, “Right,” and rustled for the bucket beneath the kitchen sink.
She wasn’t much of a cook because she never had the time or the energy to devote to practising. So as Lynley leafed through Sweet Southern Comfort, pausing every few pages to read, to harrumph, and once to say, “Good Lord,” she threw together what she hoped would pass for an omelette. It was slightly burned and slightly lopsided, but she filled it with cheese and onions and a single tomato that was languishing in the bucket atop a mayonnaise jar, and she produced toast from four slices of decidedly stale—but thankfully not mouldy—whole wheat bread.
She was pouring hot water into a teapot when Lynley got to his feet. “Sorry. I’m not much of a guest. I ought to be helping. Where’s your cutlery, Sergeant?”
She said, “Drawer next to the sink, sir,” and carried the teapot to the table. She was saying, “This isn’t much, but it’ll have to—” when she suddenly remembered and crashed the teapot down. She dashed back to the kitchen just as Lynley was sliding the drawer open. She reached past him and snatched up her pants and bra.
He raised an eyebrow. She stuffed the underwear into her pocket. “Such a shortage of drawer space,” she said airily. “I hope you don’t mind P. G. Tips. I don’t have Lapsang Souchong.”
He picked out two knives, two forks, and two spoons from the tangled metallic maze of the drawer. He said, “P. G. Tips is fine,” and took the cutlery to the table. She followed with the plates.
The omelette was on the rubbery side, but Lynley cut into it, forked it up, said, “This looks excellent, Sergeant,” and ate. She’d used the excuse of setting the table to remove Sweet Southern Comfort to the far reaches of the cottage, but he didn’t seem to notice the novel’s absence. Instead, he seemed thoughtful. Extended reflection wasn’t in her line, so after a few minutes of mutual silent forking, chewing, and swallowing, Barbara began to feel restive and finally said, “What?”
“What?” he asked in reply.
“Is it the food, the atmosphere, or the company? Or is it the sight of my underwear? They were clean, by the way. Or was it the book? Did Flint Southern do the deed with Star Whatsername? I can’t remember.”
“They didn’t appear to take off their clothes,” Lynley said, after a moment’s pondering. “How is that possible?”
“Editorial error. So I guess they did it?”
“So I would assume.”
“Right. Good. I don’t need to read the rest. Which is just as well. Flint was getting on my nerves.”
They went on with their meal. Lynley spread blackberry jam on a triangle of toast, graciously ignoring the flecks of butter that speckled the fruit from previous meals. Barbara watched him, uneasy. It was unlike Lynley to withdraw into a lengthy reflection when he was with her. Indeed, she couldn’t remember a time during their partnership when he hadn’t shared with her every permutation of his thought process as they worked through a case. His willingness to sift through his ideas and to encourage her own was a quality in him that she had greatly admired and had ultimately come to take for granted. That he would abjure now what was most essential in their working relationship was out of character in him and disheartening to her.
When he didn’t pursue the opening she’d given him, she ate more omelette, lathered butter onto her toast, and poured herself another cup of tea. She finally said, “Is it Helen, Inspector?”
The mention of Helen seemed to rouse him moderately into saying, “Helen?”
“Right. You remember Helen. About five feet seven inches. Chestnut hair. Brown eyes. Good skin. Weighs something like eight and a half stone. You’ve been sleeping with her since last November. Is this ringing a bell?”
He smoothed more jam across his toast. “It’s not Helen,” he said. “Any more than it’s not always Helen at one level or another.”
“That’s an illuminating response. If not Helen, what?”
“I was thinking about Faraday.”
“What? His story?”
“Its expediency bothers me. It begs to be believed.”
“If he didn’t kill Fleming, he’s going to have an alibi, isn’t he?”
“It’s rather convenient that his is so solid when everyone else’s is sketchy at best.”
“Patten’s is as solid as Faraday’s,” she countered. “For that matter, so is Mollison’s. So is Mrs. Whitelaw’s. So is Olivia’s. You can’t actually be thinking that Faraday’s got this Amanda Beckstead, her brother, and her neighbours all willing to perjure themselves for his benefit. Besides, what did he stand to gain if Fleming died?”
“He doesn’t profit directly.”
“Then who does?” Barbara answered her own question a moment after she asked it. “Olivia?”
“If they managed to get Fleming out of the way, it would be even more certain that Olivia’s mother would take her back. Don’t you agree?”
Barbara sank her knife into the jar of jam and smeared her toast liberally. “Sure,” she said. “After losing Fleming, Mrs. Whitelaw would probably be ripe for the emotional picking.”
“So—”
Barbara lifted her purple-stained knife to stop him. “But facts are still facts no matter how much we’d like to massage them to fit our theories. You know as well as I do that Faraday’s story is going to check out. I’ll do my duty and track down Amanda and Co. tomorrow morning, but five quid says that everyone I talk to has a tale matching Faraday’s point for point. Amanda and her brother might even be able to add someone we can phone to verify everything further. Like a pub with a talkative barman, where Amanda and Faraday swilled pints of Guinness till time was called. Or a neighbour who heard one of them upchucking on the stairs. Or someone who banged on the ceiling and complained how much the bedsprings were creaking while they boffed each other from midnight till dawn. Sure, Faraday didn’t tell the truth at first, but his reasons make sense. You’ve seen Olivia. She’s making the big slide into oblivion. If you were in Faraday’s position, would you want to hurt her if you didn’t have to? You seem to be assigning him some sinister design when all that’s going on is a realistic protection of someone who’s dying.”
Barbara sat back in her chair and took a breath. It was the longest speech she’d ever made in his presence. She waited for him to react to it.
Lynley finished his tea. She poured him another cup. He stirred it absently without adding either sugar or milk, and he used his fork to chase round a last particle of tomato on his plate. It was obvious to her that he wasn’t persuaded by her line of reasoning, and she couldn’t understand why.
She said, “Face it, Inspector. What Faraday’s said is going to check out. Now, we can keep worrying the story if we want to. We can even assign three or four DCs to find out what Faraday’s really up to when he uses the stag party alibi to cover his arse. But at the end of the day, we won’t be any closer to Fleming’s killer than we were in the morning. And it’s Fleming’s killer we’re after here. Or has our focus shifted while I was blinking?”
Lynley crossed his empty plate with his fork and knife. Barbara went to the kitchen where she fetched a bowl of slowly decomposing grapes. She rescued those that
“Here’s what I think,” she said. “I think we need Jean Cooper in the interview room. We need to ask her why she hasn’t been exactly forthcoming with helpful information. About her marriage. About Fleming’s visits to her. About the divorce petition and its interesting timing. We need to pick her up and keep her at the Yard for a good six hours. We need to give her a proper grilling for once. We need to wear her down.”
“She won’t venture into Scotland Yard without a solicitor, Havers.”
“What difference does that make? We can deal with Friskin or whoever else she decides to bring with her. The point is to shake her up, Inspector. Which, as far as I’m concerned, is the only way we’re ever going to get to the truth. Because if she hasn’t been shaken up so far—with her son being paraded like a sacrificial goat before the press—then she’s not going to be shaken up till we put the thumbscrews to her personally.” Barbara carved herself some cheese and ate it with the last of her toast. She grabbed a handful of grapes and said, “Yeow!” when their sour taste shot across her tongue and into her throat. She removed the bowl with, “Sorry. Bleah. So much for that.”
Lynley cut a slice from the cheddar, but rather than eat it, he merely used his fork to lace it with a geometric decoration of tiny holes. When Barbara was at the point of despairing that he would reply to her suggestion—which, to her way of thinking, was the next and only logical move in the investigation—he nodded as if he and his thoughts had arrived at a point of compromise.
“Sergeant, you’re right,” he said. “And the more I think of it, the more I’m convinced. Shaking up is what’s called for.”
“Good,” she said. “So do we pick Jean up or have her—”
“Not Jean,” he said.
“Not…Then who?”
“Jimmy.”
“Jimmy? Jimmy?” Barbara felt the need to do something to keep herself from levitating with pure aggravation. She grasped the edges of her chair seat. “Sir, she’s not going to break over Jimmy. Friskin will have told her today that Jimmy’s not giving us the facts we want. She’ll tell Jimmy to hold the line. If he hangs on and keeps clapping his mouth when we get too close to pinning him down, he’s home free and he’s got to know it. So does she. I’m telling you, sir, Jean Cooper is not going to be shaken up over Jimmy. And she’s not going to break over Jimmy either.”
“Have him there around noon,” Lynley said.
“But why waste our time carting him in again? The press’ll be all over us, not to mention how Webberly and Hillier will react. We won’t gain a thing. And we’ll end up losing more time in the bargain. Sir, listen to me. If we nab Jean, we’re back on track. We’ve got something to work with. If we stick with Jimmy, we won’t shake Jean up at all.”
“You’re right about that,” Lynley said. He balled up his paper napkin and tossed it on the table.
“Right about what?”
“Shaking up Jean Cooper.”
“Great. So if I’m right—”
“But it’s not Jean Cooper I want to shake up. Have Jimmy there at noon.”
Lynley took a deliberately circuitous route home. He was in no hurry. He had no reason to believe that a message from Helen Clyde would be waiting—he understood her well enough by now to know how little she would have liked his attempt to force her hand on the previous morning—and even if that hadn’t been the case, he sometimes found that removing himself from a location in which he was expected to think actually allowed him to think with more clarity than he could muster either at home or in his office. For this reason on more than one occasion, he’d ducked out of New Scotland Yard in the middle of an investigation and cut through the underground station to make the five minutes’ walk to St. James’s Park. There he would follow the path that encircled the lake, where he admired the pelicans, listened to the squawking inhabitants of Duck Island, and waited for his mind to clear. So this night, instead of driving southwest towards Belgravia, he dropped down to Regent’s Park. He drifted round the Outer Circle then the Inner Circle, and finally ended up spinning along Park Road where a turn to the west took him without thinking to the entrance of Lord’s Cricket Ground.
Lights were on in the concourse, temporary lights set up by workmen doing repairs to a drain outside the Pavilion. When Lynley ducked inside the Grace Gates and began to pace in the direction of the stands, a security guard stopped him. After Lynley showed him his warrant card and mentioned the name Kenneth Fleming, the guard appeared ready to settle in for a natter.
He said, “Scotland Yard, are you? Close to breaking the case? And if you break it, then what? You ask me, we ought to bring back the gallows. Take care of this bloke proper. Do it in public.” He pulled on his tubular nose and spat on the ground. “He was a fine chap, Fleming. Always had a kind word. Asked after the wife and the children, he did. Knew every one of us blokes by name. You don’t find that often. That’s quality, that is.”
Lynley murmured, “Indeed.” The guard seemed to accept this as encouragement. He looked as if he was about to warm to his topic, so Lynley asked him if the stands were open.
“Not much to see in there,” the guard replied. “Most of the lights ’s off. You need them switched on?”
No, Lynley told him and nodded as the guard waved him on his way.
He knew there would be very little point in bathing the grounds, the playing field, or even the stands with light. Both yesterday evening and all of today had illustrated to him that the essential key to unlocking the truth in the death of Kenneth Fleming was not going to be a piece of evidence—a hair, a match, a note, a footprint—that one could examine in the artificial lights of a cricket ground or even a laboratory and subsequently present in a court of law as irrefutable proof of a killer’s identity. Rather, the key to bringing the case to a close was going to be something far more ethereal, a verification of guilt that rose from a single soul’s unwillingness to keep silent and that same soul’s inability to bear the weight of injustice.
Lynley made his way into one of the stands and walked down the dark aisle to the barrier that divided spectators from field. He rested his elbows on this barrier and let his vision wander from the Pavilion on his left to the shadowy circus-tent awnings that loomed over the Mound Stand on his right, from the square of tarmac at the far end of the field that led one into the nursery grounds to the field itself, a barely perceptible slope of seventeen pitches. In the darkness, the scoreboard was a rectangular shadow etched with ghostly letters, and the gently curving rows of white seats fanned out like cards lying against an ebony table.
Here Fleming had played, Lynley thought. Here at Lord’s he’d lived his dream. He’d batted with a combination of joy and skill, making effortless centuries as if he believed he was owed a hundred runs whenever he took guard. His bat, his name, and his portrait as well might all have one day been collected in the Long Room, placed among those of Fry and Grace. But that possibility, as well as the promise that his skill once made to the future of the sport, had died along with Fleming in Kent.
It was the perfect crime.
From years of investigating murders, Lynley knew that the perfect crime was not one in which there was no evidence, since such a creature could no longer exist in a world where also existed gas chromatography, comparison microscopes, DNA typing, computer enhancement, lasers, and fibre-optic lamps. Rather in this day the perfect crime was one in which none of the evidence collected at the scene could be attached—beyond the law’s required shadow of a doubt—to the killer. There might be hairs on the corpse, but their presence could be easily explained away. There might be fingerprints in the room with the body, but they would be found to belong to another. A questionable presence in the vicinity, a chance remark overheard prior to or after the commission of the crime, an inability to say with certainty where one was at the moment of murder…These constituted mere circumstantial data,
Every killer worth his salt knew this fact. And Fleming’s killer was no exception.
In the quiet darkness of Lord’s Cricket Ground, Lynley admitted to himself exactly where the investigation stood after seventy-two hours. They had no hard, usable evidence that could be indisputably attached to one of their suspects at the same time as it was intimately connected to the murder itself. On the one hand, they had cigarette ends, footprints, fibres, two sets of oil stains—one on the fibres, one on the ground—and a confession. On the other hand, they had a burnt-out chair, half a dozen match ends, and what remained of a single Benson and Hedges cigarette. Beyond that, they had a crucial key to the kitchen door in Jimmy Cooper’s possession, an argument overheard by a farmer out for an evening’s walk, a car park brawl at the cricket ground, a divorce petition due to be acknowledged, and a love affair brought to an unhappy end. But every concrete object in their possession, as well as the testimony collected so far, acted as a tile in what promised to remain a mosaic forever incomplete.
And it was what they didn’t have that gave Lynley pause, that coursed him back through time to the library of his family home in Cornwall where a fire flickered ochroid light against the library walls and the rain beat on the leaded windows in steady waves. He lay on the floor, head pillowed in his arms. His sister curled round a cushion nearby. Their father sat in his wingback chair and read the tale both children knew by heart: the disappearance of a winning race horse, the death of its trainer, and the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes. It was a story they’d heard times beyond counting, the first one they requested whenever their father made one of his infrequent offers to read to them aloud. Each time as the earl approached the story’s peak moment, their sense of anticipation grew. Lynley would sit up. Judith would clutch the cushion to her stomach. And when the earl cleared his throat and said to Sherlock Holmes in Inspector Gregory’s deferential voice, “‘Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?’” Lynley and his sister would chime in with the rest: Lynley saying, “‘To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time,’” while Judith countered with mock confusion, “‘The dog did nothing in the nighttime,’” and both of them shouting in happy finale: “‘That was the curious incident.’”