Playing for the Ashes by Elizabeth George
She allowed herself a mental curse and made it a gratifying one. Then she said, “So how much time do you need?”
“For what?” He was assembling the newspapers inside a box.
“For your thinking. How much time do you need to think?”
He set a copy of The Times on top of the Sun. A lock of blond hair fell against his forehead and he swept it back with an index finger. He said, “You’ve misunderstood. I’m not the one who needs time to think.”
“Then who does, Inspector?”
“I thought it was obvious. We’re waiting for the killer to be identified by name. And that takes time.”
“How much more, for Christ’s sake?” Barbara demanded. Her voice rode the scale, and she tried to control it. He’s lost it, she thought. He’s gone right over the ruddy edge on this one. “Inspector, I don’t want to tread where you’d rather not have me, but is there the slightest possibility that Jimmy’s—” she desperately sought a neutral word, couldn’t find a decent one, and settled on, “Jimmy’s conflict with his mother strikes too close to home? Is there a chance that you’re giving him and Jean Cooper so much elbow room because…well, because you’ve been there before, in a manner of speaking?” She inhaled quickly on the cigarette, tapped ash to the floor, and surreptitiously spread it round in the guise of dust.
“In what manner of speaking?” Lynley enquired pleasantly.
“You and your mum. I mean, for a time you were…” She sighed and blurted it out. “You and she were at odds for years, weren’t you? So perhaps you’re seeing too much of you and your mum whenever you think about Jimmy and his. I mean…” She kicked the heel of her right brogue into the instep of her left. She was digging her grave and although she knew it, she couldn’t quite decide how to put down the shovel. “Maybe you’re thinking that with time you’d have been capable of something Jimmy Cooper can’t manage, sir.”
“Ah,” Lynley said. He finished stacking the newspapers in the box. “You’re wrong about that.”
“So you agree that even you would have balked at naming your mother in a murder case?”
“I’m not saying that, although it’s probably the truth. What I’m saying is you’re wrong about what I’m thinking. And about who in this case needs to manage what.”
He lifted the box of newspapers. She picked up the accompanying stack of files. He headed for the door and she trailed behind him, unsure where they were taking this lot but ready to tag along to see.
“Then who?” she asked. “Who needs to manage what?”
“Not Jimmy,” Lynley said. “It never was Jimmy.”
CHAPTER
22
Jeannie Cooper took her time about folding the last article of laundry. It wasn’t so much that the job of folding an eight-year-old’s pyjama top was a difficult one. It was, instead, that once the laundry was finished, Jeannie would have no additional excuse for not joining her children in the sitting room where for the last half hour they’d been watching a chat show on the telly.
In the kitchen stuffing clothes into the washer-dryer, Jeannie strained to hear conversation among them. But they were as silent as mourners at a wake.
Jeannie couldn’t exactly recall if this was how her children had always watched television. She didn’t think so. She seemed to remember the occasional shout of protest when one or the other of them switched the channels, the occasional laugh at an ancient Benny Hill sketch. She seemed to remember questions asked by Stan and answered by Jimmy and countered with mild disagreement from Shar. But even in clouded memory Jeannie realised that all of these reactions and exchanges between her children had taken place outside the realm of her own experience, like dreams in which she was an observer but in which she played no active part. And that, she saw with a slow dawn of understanding, had been fairly much the way that she had approached being a mother since Kenny had left her.
During the past few years, she’d used the idea of getting on with things as a way to avoid her children. Getting on with things meant that she went to work at Crissys as always, rising at quarter past three, leaving the house before four, arriving home at midday in time to go through the motions of motherhood such as asking was there school work to be done for the morning. She saw to having their clothes washed proper. She made the meals. She kept up the house. She told herself that she did right by them as a proper mum by doing her duty: hot meals on the table, church on occasion, a Christmas tree strung with fairy lights, Easter Sunday with Gran, money to play on the video games. But even as she made these efforts at a normal life, she knew that she too had committed the sin of desertion against her children, just like Kenny. Only she’d committed it more insidiously than Kenny. For while her living body had remained in place in Cardale Street—allowing her children to believe they still had one parent present whose love was constant—the heart and soul of her had fled like feathers in the wind the very same day that Kenny left.
Loving her husband more than the three lives created by that love was the ugly secret which Jeannie had long kept closed up inside. She mostly ignored it. Because first of all she couldn’t bear the burning pain that moved quite regularly from between her breasts to between her legs where she ached for him whenever she heard or read his name or listened to his voice on the telephone. And because second of all, she knew that loving a man in excess of the children she had borne that man was a sin so grave and so unnatural that she could not expect redemption no matter how long she attempted to pay for committing it.
She’d believed that the least she could do was to keep her children from knowing. She promised herself they weren’t ever to realise how she felt every day like a fresh used milk bottle, all empty inside but with a film remaining, reminding her what the contents had been. So she went through the motions of mothering, promising herself she wouldn’t let her kids down and cause them more pain like their dad.
But despite her efforts at playing the role she’d decided she was supposed to play, Jeannie now saw that the end had been that she’d caused her kids as much grief as their dad had done, because her mulish commitment to getting on with things had required an equal getting on from them. If she was to go through the motions of being mother, without once owning up to the desolation she felt at Kenny’s departure, then her kids could go through the motions of being kids in the very same fashion. They’d all muddle through it together that way, their behaviour declaring—despite what they felt—that if Dad was gone, if he didn’t want them, if he wasn’t coming back, then to hell with him.
She put Stan’s pyjamas on top of the final stack of laundry and picked it up. She hesitated at the foot of the stairs. Stan was on the floor between the sofa and the coffee table, pressing his cheek against Jimmy’s knee. Shar was shoulder-to-shoulder with her brother, holding the sleeve of his T-shirt between her fingers. They were losing him, they knew they were losing him, and the sight of them clinging to him as if clinging alone could prevent that loss made Jeannie’s eyes smart so bad that she wanted to snap at their heads and fling them apart.
“Kids,” she said, but it came out too sharp.
Shar looked quickly in her direction, as did Stan. Stan’s arm tightened round Jimmy’s leg. Jeannie knew they were armouring themselves, and she wondered when they’d learned so much from simply hearing the tone of her voice. She altered it and said with a gentleness that felt born from exhaustion and despair, “I got us fish fingers and chips for tonight. Cokes as well.”
Stan’s face brightened. He said, “Cokes!” and looked up expectantly at his brother. Cokes were a treat, but Jimmy gave no reaction to the news, although Shar said with grave courtesy, “Cokes’re real nice, Mummy. Shall I do the table?”
“You do that, luv,” Jeannie said.
She carried the laundry upstairs. She took her time about replacing everything in its appropriate drawer.
In the boys’ room she rearranged Stan’s platoon of teddy bears. She made orderly the books and the comic books on their wrought-iron shelv
Jeannie sat abruptly on the edge of Jimmy’s bed.
“The police claim that he’s lying to them,” Mr. Friskin had told her. “They’re saying he wasn’t in the cottage but that’s not an unchanging situation, believe me. I assure you that they intend to keep at him.”
Jeannie had grasped eagerly at this frail thread of hope. “But if he’s lying—”
“They claim that he’s lying. There’s a fine distinction between what they claim to us and what they actually know when we’re not there. The police use dozens of tricks to get suspects to talk, and we have to be wary that this may be one of them.”
“What if it isn’t? What if it’s true that he lied from the first and they know it? Why would they want to keep at him?”
“For one logical reason. I assume they expect he can name the killer.”
Horror came over her like a rush of sickness, pushing from her stomach up to her throat.
“That’s my best guess on what they’re up to,” Mr. Friskin said. “It’s a reasonable conclusion for them to reach. They’re assuming, from his admitted presence at the scene last Wednesday, that he must have seen the arsonist. They’re carrying that assumption further to include the fact that he knows who the arsonist is. They’re doubtless concluding that he’s assuming responsibility so that he doesn’t have to sneak on someone else.”
She was able to manage only the single word “Sneak.”
“We frequently see this sort of recalcitrance on the part of teenagers, Mrs…Ms. Cooper. Although admittedly, it’s usually the product of an unwillingness to betray one of their peers. But that tendency of young people to hold their tongues might well have become somewhat skewed in Jimmy. Because of his—pardon me for saying it quite this way—but because of his circumstances, who knows exactly where his loyalties lie?”
“What’s that mean?” she asked. “‘Because of his circumstances’?”
The solicitor studied the tops of his shoes. “If we’re to assume the boy’s lying betrays an unwillingness to sneak and nothing else, then we have to examine his life for the sort of close social ties that encourage this predilection for holding one’s tongue no matter the cost. Ties like those formed at school with good mates. But if there are no deep social ties and thus no way he may have learned this behaviour, then we have to assume the boy’s lying represents something else altogether.”
“Like what?” Jeannie asked although her lips and mouth felt dry when she said it.
“Like protecting someone.” Mr. Friskin moved his study of his shoes to a study of her face. Seconds ticked their way towards a minute, and Jeannie felt their passage in the pulse that was beating in her temples.
The police would be back, Mr. Friskin finally told her. The best that she could do for her son right now would be to encourage him to tell them the truth when they came. She saw that, didn’t she? Didn’t she see that the truth was their only hope of removing the police and the media from Jimmy’s life? Because he didn’t really deserve to have them hounding him like this indefinitely, did he, Ms. Cooper? Certainly the boy’s very own mother would agree with that.
Jeannie pressed her hand along the brown zigzagging design of the counterpane on Jimmy’s bed. She could still hear Mr. Friskin’s grave voice: It’s really the only way, Ms. Cooper. Encourage the boy to tell the truth.
And even if he told the truth, what then? she wondered. How would telling the truth ever serve to obliterate the reality of having gone through this hell in the first place?
She had told her son on the previous night that she’d failed as a mother, but Jeannie saw now that the statement was nothing but self-serving twaddle because when she’d made it, she hadn’t really believed it at all. She’d merely said it as a means of getting the boy to talk to her, hoping he’d say, No, you ain’t been bad, Mum, you been through a rough patch like all of us have, I understand that, I always did. And the talk between them would grow from there. Because that’s what children were supposed to do. Talk to their mums if their mums were proper. But even the solicitor who’d known Jeannie and her children a mere forty-eight hours had recognised the nature of the relationship between mother and this particular child. For he’d said she was to encourage her son to tell the truth, but he hadn’t suggested that she make any attempt to have Jimmy tell the truth to her.
Tell the truth to your solicitor, Jim. Tell it to the police. Tell it to those reporters who keep nipping at your heels. Tell it to strangers. But don’t give a thought to telling it to me. And once you tell it, Jimmy…And once you tell what you saw and what you know to people who don’t care a stuff for what you’re suffering, to people who only want to end this case so they can go home straightaway and put supper in their stomachs….
No, she thought. It wasn’t going to happen like that. She was his mother. In spite of everything—and because of everything—no one had a duty to the boy but her.
She went back down the stairs. Shar was in the kitchen. She was replacing the oilcloth with their Christmas tablecloth, one edged in holly with a wreath in the centre and Father Christmas ho-hoing in all four corners. Stan and Jim were still watching the telly where a beaky-nosed man with an unshaven face was going on about some film he’d just made, talking like he had a plum in his mouth.
“Bloody poof, he is, i’n’t he, Jim?” Stan giggled and punched his brother on the knee.
Jeannie said, “Watch your mouth. Help your sister with the table,” and went to turn the television off. She said to Jimmy, “Come with me,” and added in a gentler tone as he shrank into the sofa, “Come on, Jim luv. We’re just going out back.” They left Shar meticulously laying fish fingers out on a cooking sheet and Stan shaking frozen chips into a pan.
“Shall I do a green salad as well, Mummy?” Shar asked as Jeannie opened the door to the garden.
“C’n we have baked beans?” Stan added.
“You make what you want,” Jeannie told them. “You call us when things’re ready.”
Jimmy preceded her down the single concrete step to the garden. He ambled to the birdbath and Jeannie joined him, setting her cigarettes and a matchbook on the broken edge.
“Have a fag if you want,” she told her son.
He picked at a jagged section of the birdbath where a chunk of it had long ago fallen off. He made no move towards the cigarettes.
“Course, I wished you wouldn’t smoke,” Jeannie said, “but if you want, it’s okay for now. Me, I wished I never started smoking. P’rhaps I can give it up when all this’s over.”
She looked round the pitiful excuse for a garden: one broken birdbath, one concrete slab with beds of scraggly pansies running along its edges. She said, “It’d be nice to have a proper garden, don’t you think, Jim? P’rhaps we can make this dunghill into a real showplace. When all this’s over. If we take out this old concrete and put in a lawn, some pretty flowers, and a tree, we could sit out here when the weather’s fine. I’d like to do that. I’d want your help, though, with the work. I couldn’t cope with it on my own.”
Jimmy’s hands went into the pockets of his jeans. He brought out his own cigarettes and matches. He lit one and laid the packet and the matches next to her own.
Jeannie felt the hunger strike her when she smelled the smoke. It worked through her nerves like they were being pulled tight. But she didn’t reach for her own cigarettes. Instead, she said, “Oh ta, Jim. That’s nice of you. I will,” and took one of his. She lit it, coughed, and said, “Cor, we both got to get off the weed, huh? P’rhaps we can do it together. I help you. You help me. Afterwards. When this is over.”
Jimmy flicked ash into the empty birdbath.
“I can use the help,” she said. “You probably can use the help as well. ’Sides, we don’t want Shar and Stan to start smoking. We got to set an
He let out breath and smoke. It sounded like a snort. He was scoffing at her words.
She answered the scoff. “Shar and Stan need you.”
His head was turned towards the wall that separated their garden from their neighbour’s, so she couldn’t see his expression although she heard him well enough when he muttered, “They got you.”
“Sure they got me,” Jeannie said. “I’m their mum and I’ll always be here. But they need their older brother as well. You see that, don’t you? They need you here, now more’n ever. They’re going to look to you now that…” She saw the pitfall. She made her voice strong and forced herself on. “They’re going to need you special now that your dad’s—”
“I said they got you.” Jimmy’s voice was terse. “They got their mum.”
“But they need a man as well.”
“Uncle Der.”
“Uncle Der’s not you. He loves them, yeah, but he doesn’t know them like you do, Jim. And they don’t look to him like they look to you. A brother’s different from an uncle. A brother’s more close. A brother’s right there all the time so he can look out for them. That’s important. Looking out for them. For Stan. For Shar.” She licked her lips and inhaled the acrid tobacco smoke. She was fast running out of harmless words.
She ventured round the side of the birdbath so that she was facing him. She took a final drag from the cigarette and crushed what was left of it beneath the sole of her shoe. She saw his eyes dart warily in her direction, and when their glances met, she finally asked gently, “Why’re you lying to the cops, luv?”
He moved his head. He took such a long drag from his cigarette that Jeannie thought he’d smoke it straight to the end in one long gasp.