Playing for the Ashes by Elizabeth George
He’d nudged the door with his toe. He saw her first. She was clutching the tarnished brass headboard and she was crying. But she was gasping as well and she was arched up high so the bloke could have at her. And the bloke was kneeling between her upraised thighs. Naked, head bent, his body shining like it was oiled.
“No one,” he was grunting. “No one…ever.”
“No one,” she was gasping.
“Mine.” Then he said it again—mine, mine—and increased his pumping until it was frantic, until she was sobbing, until he reared back and flung his head up, shouting, “Jeannie! Jean!” and Jimmy saw it was his father.
He’d crept downstairs. He’d put his Watney’s on the kitchen work top undrunk, and he turned to the table where an unsealed envelope lay. He slipped his fingers inside, brought forth the papers, saw Q. Melvin Abercrombie, Esq. scrolled across the top. He scanned the unfamiliar terms and the awkward phrases. When he saw the only word that mattered—divorce—he returned the papers to the envelope and left the house.
“Oh God,” Jean whispered when her son was finished. “I loved him, Jim. I never stopped. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I kept hoping he’d come home if I was good enough to him. If I was patient and kind. If I did what he wanted. If I gave him time.”
“Didn’t matter,” Jimmy said. “Didn’t do no good, did it?”
“But it would of,” Jean said. “I know it would of in time, cos I knew your dad. He would of come home if—”
Jimmy shook his head feebly.
“—if he hadn’t met her. That’s the truth of it, Jim.”
The boy closed his eyes.
Gabriella Patten. She was the key. Even when Barbara still wanted to press forward with whatever case they could build against Jean Cooper—“She doesn’t have an alibi, sir. She was home with the kids? Asleep? Who can prove it? No one and you know it”—Lynley directed her thoughts to Gabriella Patten. He didn’t lay any facts out for her perusal, however. He merely said in an exhausted voice as they drove towards the Yard, “It all turns on Gabriella. God. How ironic. To end where we began.”
“If that’s the case, then let’s get her,” Barbara said. “We don’t need the kid. We can pull her in. We can give her a grilling. Not now, of course,” she added hastily as Lynley adjusted the Bentley’s heating system to do something about the chill that was shaking him like a victim of ague. “But tomorrow morning. First thing. No doubt she’s still in May-fair, having a romp with Mollison when Claude-Pierre, or whoever he was, isn’t giving her muscles a proper pounding.”
“That’s not on,” Lynley said.
“Why? You just said that Gabriella’s—”
“Interrogating Gabriella Patten again won’t get us anywhere. It’s the perfect crime, Barbara.”
That’s all he would say. To her demand of “How can it be perfect? We’ve got Jimmy. We’ve got a witness. He saw—” Lynley interrupted with: “What? Whom? A blue car he thought was the Cavalier. A light-haired woman he thought was his mother. No prosecutor’s going to try a case against anyone else based on that testimony. And no jury in the world would ever convict.”
Barbara had wanted to press forward with her points. They had evidence, after all. As flimsy as it was, they still had evidence. The Benson and Hedges. The matches used to make the incendiary device. Surely these counted for something. But she could see that Lynley was drained. Whatever resources he had left were being devoted to controlling his shivering as she guided the Bentley through the evening traffic back to New Scotland Yard. When they had pulled up next to her Mini in the underground car park, he repeated what he’d already told Chief Superintendent Hillier. Despite their having the best intentions in the world, she needed to prepare herself for the fact that they might not be able to break this case.
“Even with the boy’s help, it’s going to come down to conscience,” he said. “And I can’t say conscience is going to be enough.”
“For what?” she’d demanded, feeling the need to argue as well as to understand.
But that’s all he would say, other than, “Not now. I need a bath and a change of clothes,” before he left her.
Now, in Chalk Farm as she wrestled her feet from her sodden shoes at her doorway, she attempted to understand his point about conscience. But no matter how she interpreted the facts and the events of the last few days, they all led her in the same direction and it didn’t point to anyone needing to have a conscience about anything.
After all, they knew it was arson, so they knew it was murder. They had a cigarette that could be tested for saliva. No matter the length of time it might take for Ardery’s people to complete the tests, if sufficient saliva had been deposited by the arsonist—all right, by Gabriella Patten because apparently Lynley had set his sights on her from the very first and not on Jean Cooper—at the end of the testing they would know about ABH antigens, ABO genotype, and Lewis-reaction relationships. Providing, of course, that Gabriella Patten was a secretor. If she wasn’t, they were back to square one. And then they’d be relying upon…what? Conscience? Gabriella Patten’s conscience? What sort of sense did that make? Did Lynley actually expect that the woman would feel compelled to confess that she murdered Kenneth Fleming because he’d thrown her over? And when would she do it? Between boffing Guy Mollison to take her mind off Fleming’s untimely demise and his even more untimely rejection of her? Bloody hell, Barbara thought. No wonder Lynley was saying they might not be able to close the case.
This sort of failure happened to everyone. But it had never happened to Lynley. And, by association since he was the DI with whom she’d worked longest, it also had never happened to her.
This wasn’t, however, the best of cases to fail with. Not only were the media focussed on the crime, provoking more public interest than would attend the murder of someone with a less familiar face and name, but also their superiors at New Scotland Yard were worrying the investigation like schoolboys loosening scabs on their knees. This combined interest from media and superiors did not promise to serve either Lynley or Barbara well. It guaranteed to damage Lynley because from nearly the first he had followed a course that violated one precept of efficacious police work: He had decided to play with the media and was continuing to play with them towards an end of his own devising, one which he had obviously failed thus far to reach. It guaranteed to damage Barbara because she was guilty by association. And Chief Superintendent Hillier had signalled that fact to her when he saw to it that she was present at the only meeting he’d had with Lynley about the case.
She could almost hear the castigation that would accompany her next performance evaluation. Did you once voice an objection, Sergeant Havers? You occupy a subordinate position in the partnership, true, but since when does one’s subordinate position obviate the ability to speak one’s mind in a matter of ethics? It wouldn’t matter to Chief Superintendent Hillier that she had spoken her mind to Lynley during the investigation. She hadn’t done so overtly, which meant that she hadn’t done so in the meeting that Hillier had called.
Hillier had wanted her to point out to Lynley that the media made disastrous lovers. They were at best faithless, tirelessly dogging the object of their lust until they managed to sate themselves. At their worst, they were ungenerous, taking what they could from the object of their passion, leaving nothing behind when they were satisfied.
But she hadn’t said any of that. The ship was sinking and she was about to go down with the crew.
It wouldn’t cost either one of them their jobs. Everyone expected a failure now and then. But to fail with the light of publicity shining so unmercifully on them, publicity that Lynley himself was doing nothing to quash, indeed, was on the point of openly encouraging…. No one was likely to forget that soon, least of all the higher-ups who had Barbara’s future in the palm of their hands.
“Bloody berks, the lot of them,” Barbara muttered as she rummaged through her shoulder bag for the key to her door. She was almost too tired to be depressed.
<
Get off it, Barbara told herself roughly. You’re tired, you’re wet from the thighs to the feet, you’re hungry, you’re worried, you’re in a muddle. You need a shower, which you will take right now. You need a bowl of soup, which you will slurp up directly the shower has been taken. You need to phone your mum and let her know that Sunday you’ll be in Greenford for a walk on the common and anything else that strikes her fancy. And when you’ve done that, you need to get into bed and turn on your reading light and wallow in the highly dubious and always vicarious pleasures of love at second hand.
“Right,” she declared.
She shed her clothes, left them in a heap, and took herself into the bathroom where she turned on the water in the shower until it was steaming and stepped inside with a bottle of shampoo clutched in her hand. She let the water run over her and as she scrubbed her scalp with great vigour, she sang. She made it an oldies night, a tribute to Buddy Holly. And when she’d got through “Peggy Sue,” “That’ll Be the Day,” “Raining in My Heart,” and “Rave On,” she dropped into an offkey eulogy to the great one with a very bad rendition of “American Pie.” She was standing in her old terry robe with a towel round her head, barking, “The daaaay the muuuusic died,” a last time when she became aware of the sound of knocking. She halted her singing abruptly. The knocking halted with her, then started again. Four sharp raps. It was coming from the cottage door.
She said, “Who…?” and padded out from the bathroom on bare feet, retying the belt of her robe. “Yes?” she called out from behind the door.
“Hello, hello. It’s me,” a small voice said.
“It’s you?”
“I visited the other night. Do you remember? That boy gave us your refrigerator by mistake and you were looking at it and I came outside and you invited me to see your cottage if I left a note for my dad and—”
Invited wasn’t the word Barbara would have chosen. She said, “Hadiyyah.”
“You remember! I knew you would. I saw you come home because I was looking out of the window and I asked my dad if I could come for a visit. Dad said okay because I said you were my friend. So—”
“Gosh, I’m done in, actually,” Barbara said, still speaking to the door’s panels. “I’ve only just got home. Can we get together later? Tomorrow, maybe?”
“Oh. I suppose I shouldn’t have…It’s only that I wanted you to…” The small voice dropped off dispiritedly. “Yes. Perhaps later.” Then with a happier lilt, “I’ve brought something for you, though. Shall I leave it on the step? Will it be all right? It’s rather special.”
Barbara thought, What the hell. She said, “Wait a second, okay?” She scooped her discarded clothes from the floor, flung them into the bathroom, and returned to the door. She opened it, saying, “So what’ve you been up to? Does your dad know—” and halted when she saw that Hadiyyah wasn’t alone.
A man was with her. He was dusky skinned, darker than the child, thin and well dressed in a pin-striped suit. Hadiyyah herself was wearing her school uniform, pink ribbons tying up her plaits this time, and she was holding the man’s hand. He wore, Barbara noted, a very fine gold watch.
“I brought my dad,” Hadiyyah announced proudly.
Barbara nodded. “He isn’t what you were going to leave on the step, is he?”
Hadiyyah giggled and pulled on her father’s hand. “She’s cheeky, Dad. I said she was, didn’t I?”
“You did say that.” The man observed Barbara with sombre dark eyes. She observed him back. He wasn’t very tall, and his delicate features made him closer to pretty than to handsome. His thick black hair grew straight back from his brow, and a mole high on one cheekbone was so perfectly placed that Barbara could have sworn it was artificial. He could have been anywhere from twenty-five to forty. It was difficult to tell because his skin was virtually unlined. “Taymullah azhar,” he said formally to her.
Barbara wondered how she was supposed to respond. Was this some sort of Muslim greeting? She said with a nod that dislodged her towel, “Right,” and adjusted the towel round her head once more.
A flicker of a smile moved the man’s lips. “I am Taymullah Azhar. Hadiyyah’s father.”
“Oh! Barbara Havers.” She offered her hand. “You moved my refrigerator. I got your note. I just couldn’t read the signature. Thanks. It’s nice to meet you, Mister—” She knotted her eyebrows, trying to remember what it was these people did with their names.
“Azhar alone is sufficient, as we are to be neighbours,” he said. Beneath his jacket, Barbara saw that he was wearing a shirt so white that it looked incandescent in the dying light. “Hadiyyah insisted that I meet her friend Barbara immediately upon my arrival home, but I see that we have not come at a good time.”
“Well, right. Rather. Sort of.” Why was she babbling? She reined herself in. “I just took a partial dip in the Thames, which is why I’m done up like this. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be. I mean, what time is it, anyway? Not time for bed, is it? Would you like to come in?”
Hadiyyah pulled on his hand and made a little dancing movement with her feet. Her father moved his hand to her shoulder, and she was still at once. “No. We would be an intrusion this evening,” he said. “But we do thank you, Hadiyyah and I.”
“Have you had your dinner?” Hadiyyah asked brightly. “Because we haven’t. And we’re going to have curry. Dad’s going to make it. He’s brought us some lamb. We have enough. We have lots. Dad makes a fine curry. If you haven’t had dinner.”
“Hadiyyah,” Azhar said quietly. “School yourself, please.” The child became still again, although her face and her eyes didn’t alter in brightness. “Do you not have something you wish to leave with your friend?”
“Oh! Yes, yes!” She gave a small jump. Her father removed a bright green envelope from his jacket. He handed it to Hadiyyah. She extended it ceremoniously in Barbara’s direction. “This is what I was going to leave on the step,” she said. “You don’t have to open it now. But you can if you want. If you really want.”
Barbara slipped her finger under the flap. She pulled out a scalloped piece of yellow construction paper which, unfolded, became a beaming sunflower whose centre had been carefully printed with the message: “You are most cordially invited to Khalidah Hadiyyah’s birthday party on Friday evening at seven o’clock. Wonderful Games Will Be Played! Delicious Refreshments Will Be Served!”
“Hadiyyah would not settle herself until the invitation had been delivered this evening,” Taymullah Azhar explained politely. “I hope you will be able to join us, Barbara. It will be a—” with a careful glance at the child, “a small gathering only.”
“I’ll be eight years old,” Hadiyyah said. “We’re to have strawberry ice cream and chocolate cakes. You don’t need to bring a present. I expect I’ll have others. Mummy’ll send something from Ontario. That’s in Canada. She’s on holiday, but she knows it’s my birthday and she knows what I want. I told her before she left, didn’t I, Dad?”
“Indeed you did.” Azhar reached for her hand and enclosed it in his own. “And now that yo
“Will you come?” Hadiyyah asked. “We’ll have such fun. We will.”
Barbara looked from anxious child to sober father. She wondered what waters were running here.
“Chocolate cakes,” the girl said. “Strawberry ice cream.”
“Hadiyyah.” Azhar spoke the name quietly.
Barbara said, “Yeah. I’ll come.”
The reward was her smile. Hadiyyah skipped back. She pulled on her father’s hand to draw him in the direction of their flat. “Seven o’clock,” she said. “You won’t forget, will you?”
“I won’t forget.”
“Thank you, Barbara Havers,” Taymullah Azhar said simply.
“It’s Barbara. Just Barbara,” she replied.
He nodded. He gently guided his daughter back to the path. She shot ahead of him, plaits flying round her like twitching ropes. “Birthday, birthday, birthday,” she sang.
Barbara watched them until they disappeared round the side of the main house. She shut the door. She looked at the sunflower invitation. She shook her head.
Three weeks and four days, she realised, without a word and without a smile. Who would have thought her first friend in the neighbourhood would turn out to be an eight-year-old girl?
OLIVIA
I’ve rested for nearly an hour. I should go to bed but I’ve started to think that if I go to my room without finishing this when I’m so close to the end, I’ll lose heart.
Chris wandered out of his room a while ago. His eyes were red-rimmed like they always are when he first wakes up, so I knew he’d been dozing. He had on his striped pyjama bottoms and nothing else. He stood in the doorway of the galley, blinked to clear his eyes. He yawned.
“Reading. Dropped off like a stone. I’m getting old.” He went to the sink and poured himself a glass of water. He didn’t drink. Instead, he leaned over and sloshed the water against his neck and into his hair, which he ruffled vigourously.