Playing for the Ashes

  Jimmy looked down. Stan was at his elbow, tentatively pinching the navy windcheater between his fingers. Jimmy blinked at the upturned face and the hair that flopped across his forehead and dipped into his eyes. Stan’s nose wanted blowing, and having nothing proper to use for the job, Jimmy took the hem of his T-shirt and wiped it across his brother’s upper lip.

  “That’s disgusting, that is,” he said to Stan. “Can’t you feel it dripping out? No wonder all the sprogs think you’re such a twit.”

  “I ain’t,” he said.

  “You could of fooled me.”

  Stan’s cheeks drooped. His chin began to dimple the way it always did when he was trying not to cry.

  “Look,” Jimmy said with a sigh, “you got to blow your nose. You got to keep yourself up. You can’t wait for somebody to do it for you. There won’t always be somebody around, will there?”

  Stan’s eyelids quivered. “There’s Mum,” he whispered. “There’s Shar. There’s you.”

  “Well, don’t go depending on me, all right? Don’t depend on Mum. Don’t depend on no one. See to yourself.”

  Stan nodded and drew a quivering breath. He raised his head and looked out at the river, his nose reaching only to the top of the wall. “We never got to go sailing. We won’t sail now, will we? Mum won’t take us. Cos if she takes us it’d remind her of him. So we won’t sail, will we? Will we, Jimmy?”

  Jimmy turned from the water with burning eyes. He took the cricket ball from his brother’s hand. He gazed over the lawn of Island Gardens and saw that the grass was far too long to make a proper pitch. Even if it had been decently clipped, the ground was uneven. It looked like moles had started a roadworks under the trees.

  “Dad would of taken us to the nets,” Stan said, as if reading Jimmy’s thoughts. “You remember when he took us to the nets that time? He said to those blokes, ‘This one here’ll be a star bowler for England one day and this one’ll bat.’ You remember that? He said to us, ‘Okay, you toffs, show us your stuff.’ He played wicket keeper and he shouted, ‘A googly. Come on. We want to see a proper googly, Jim.’”

  Jimmy’s fingers closed round the hard leather ball. Off break with leg break, he could hear his father shouting. Go for it. Now. Bowl with your head, Jimmy. Come on. With your head!

  Why, he wondered. What was the point? He couldn’t be his father. He couldn’t re-do what his father had done. He didn’t even want to. But to be with him, to feel his arm tighten round his shoulders and his cheek press briefly against the top of his head. He would bowl for that. Googlies, off breaks, leg breaks, chinamen. Fast, medium, or slow. He would loosen his shoulders, stretch his muscles, and practise the run-up and the follow-through until he was ready to drop. If that’s what it took to please him. If that’s what it took to bring him home.

  “Jimmy?” Stan tugged on his elbow. “You want to bowl for me now?”

  Across the lawn, Jimmy could see Shar’s form still in place in front of the caff. But she was standing now, the binoculars to her face, following the flight of a grey-white bird from east to west, along the river. He wondered if it was the kittiwake gull. For her sake, he hoped so.

  “The ground’s no good,” Stan was saying. “But you could just maybe toss it. That’d be okay with me. Could you toss it, Jimmy?”

  “Yeah,” he said. He strode past the sign that announced no ball games in big black letters on white. He led the way to the smoothest patch of lawn, twenty yards long beneath the mulberry trees.

  Stan scampered after him, bat on his shoulder. “Wait’ll you see,” he said. “I’m getting pretty good. I’ll be as good as Dad someday.”

  Jimmy swallowed hard and tried to forget that the ground was too soft and the grass was too long and it was too late to be as good as anyone. “Take guard,” he said to his little brother. “Let’s see what you can do.”

  CHAPTER

  10

  Detective Constable Winston Nkata sauntered into Lynley’s office, his suit jacket slung over his shoulder, contemplatively rubbing the hair’s width scar that ran across his coffee skin like the shape of a scythe from his right eye to the corner of his mouth. It was a memento of his street days in Brixton—chief battle counsel of the Brixton Warriors—received at the hands of a rival gang member who was currently doing hard time at the Scrubs.

  “I have been living the life today.” Nkata affectionately laid his jacket over the back of a chair in front of Lynley’s desk. “First Shepherd’s Market eyeing some fine ladies. Then on to Berkeley Square for a nice little crawl through the Cherbourg Club. It get any better than this when I make sergeant?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Havers said, fingering the material of his jacket experimentally. He was clearly modelling himself sartorially after the detective inspector for whom they both worked. “I’ve spent the afternoon on the Isle of Dogs.”

  “Sergeant of my Dreams, you have not yet met the right people.”

  “Obviously.”

  Lynley was talking on the phone to their superintendent at his home in north London. They were going over the rota list, with Lynley informing his superior officer which detective constables would be pulled off what remained of their weekend leave to assist in the murder investigation.

  Superintendent Webberly said to him, “And what’re you doing about the press, Tommy?”

  “Considering how best to use them. They’re hot enough on the story.”

  “Go careful with that. They like a good whiff of scandal, the bastards. See to it you’re not the one to give them the crumb that prejudices the case.”

  “Right.” Lynley rang off. He rolled his chair a few inches away from his desk and said, “Where are we, then?” to Nkata and Havers.

  “Patten’s clean as an ankle-biter after a bath,” Nkata told them. “He was at the Cherbourg Club on Wednesday night, playing some fancy card game in a private room with the big punters. He didn’t leave till the milk-floats were floating next morning.”

  “They’re sure it was Wednesday?”

  “Members sign in on a chit. Chit’s kept six months. All the doorman had to do was finger through last week’s lot and there he was, Wednesday night, with a guest of the female persuasion. Even if they hadn’t had the chits, I’d say they’d remember Patten well enough.”

  “Why?”

  “According to a dealer I chatted up, Patten drops one or two thousand quid at the tables every month or so. Everyone knows him. It’s a case of ‘Come in, sit down, and what can we get you to make you happy while we’re bleeding you dry.’”

  “He said he was winning on Wednesday night.”

  “So he was and so the dealer said. But he’s usually paying it out, not taking it in. He’s a drinker too. Keeps a flask on him. There’s no drinking in the games room, from what I was told, but the dealer’s been instructed to look the other way when he takes a nip.”

  “Who were the other big punters in the room that night?” Havers asked.

  Nkata consulted his notebook. This was maroon and minuscule, and he generally wrote in it using a matching mechanical pencil with which he produced a delicate microscopic script at odds with his large and lanky frame. He recited the names of two members of the House of Lords, an Italian industrialist, a well-known QC, an entrepreneur whose businesses included everything from film making to take-away foods, and a computer wizard from California who was in London on holiday and more than willing to pay the two-hundred-fifty-quid temporary membership fee to say he’d been fleeced in a private casino.

  “Patten’s play wasn’t even interrupted during the evening,” Nkata said. “He went down once round one in the morning to pop his lady into a taxi, but even then he just patted her bum, handed her over to the doorman, and got back to the game. And that’s where he stayed.”

  “What about Shepherd’s Market,” Lynley said. “Did he go there for action afterwards?”

  Once a well-known red-light district, Shepherd’s Market was a short walk from Berkeley Square and the Cherbour
g Club. Although it had undergone a renaissance in recent years, one could still wander through its network of pleasant pedestrian walkways past its wine bars, its florists, and its chemists’ shops, and make the sort of eye contact with a lone, loitering woman that led to sex for hire.

  “Might have,” Nkata replied. “But the doorman said Patten was driving his Jag that night and he had it brought round when he was ready to leave. He’d’ve walked to the market. No hope of getting a parking space otherwise. Course he could’ve cruised through, picked up a flash-tail, and took her home. But that’s not where Shepherd’s Market fits in.” Nkata savoured the moment of announcement by leaning back in his chair and giving his facial scar another caress. “God bless the clamp,” he said with devotion. “And the clampers and the blessed clampees. The clampees, especially, in this case.”

  Havers said, “What’s that got to do with—”

  “Fleming’s car,” Lynley said. “You’ve found the Lotus.”

  Nkata smiled. “You’re quick, man. I’ll say that for you. I must stop thinking that you made DI fast ’cause your face is so pretty.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Where it oughtn’t be, according to the clampers who were good enough to lock up its tyre. It’s on a stretch of double yellow. On Curzon Street. Sitting there like it was begging to get clamped.”

  “Hell,” Havers groaned. “In the middle of Mayfair. She could be anywhere.”

  “No one’s phoned about having the clamp removed? No one’s paid the fine?”

  Nkata shook his head. “Car wasn’t even locked. The keys were sitting on the driver’s seat as well. Like she was inviting someone to nick it.” He seemed to find a speck on his tie, because he frowned and flicked his fingers against the silk. “If you ask me, there’s one mare out there in a boil over something, and her name’s Gabriella Patten.”

  “She could have been just in a rush,” Havers said.

  “Not leaving the keys like that. That’s no rush. That’s premeditation. That’s ‘How am I best gonna put the little bastard’s cobblers in a real tight squeeze?’”

  “No sign of her anywhere?” Lynley asked.

  “I rang bells and knocked doors from Hill Street to Piccadilly. If she’s there, she’s gone to ground and no one’s talking about it. We could set someone to watch the car, if you want.”

  “No,” Lynley said. “She has no intention of going back for it now. That’s why she left the keys. Have it impounded.”

  “Right.” Nkata jotted a pinhead-size note in his book.

  “Mayfair.” Havers dug in her trousers pocket and brought out a packet of shortbreads, which she ripped open with her teeth. She shook one into her hand and passed the packet round. She munched thoughtfully. “She could be anywhere. A hotel. A flat. Somebody’s town house. She knows he’s dead by now. Why won’t she come forward?”

  “I say she’s glad about it,” Nkata offered to a page in his notebook. “He got what she wanted to give him herself.”

  “The chop? But why? He wanted to marry her. She wanted to marry him.”

  “Surely you have been boiling enough to want to kill someone you don’t truly want dead,” Nkata said. “You get steaming and say, ‘I could kill you, man, I wish you were dead’ and you mean it at the time. You just don’t ’xpect someone to come along like the good-bad fairy and grant your wish.”

  Havers pulled at her earlobe, as if considering Nkata’s words. “There may be a group of good-bad fairies on the Isle of Dogs, then.” She told them what she had learned, underscoring Derrick Cooper’s antipathy for his brother-in-law, Jean Cooper’s weak alibi for the night in question—“In bed asleep from half past nine onward without a sprat able to corroborate, sir”—and Jimmy’s disappearance after the cancellation of the boating holiday. She said, “His mum declares he was there the next morning, tucked into his bed like Christopher Robin, but I’ve a fiver that says he never made it home, and I talked to three blokes at the Manchester Road substation who say he’s been heading for Borstal since he was eleven.”

  Jimmy was a troublemaker, the police had told her. Graffiti at the rowing club, window breaking at the old Brewis Transport building not a quarter of a mile away from the police station itself, pinching cigarettes and sweets near Canary Wharf, knuckling anybody he considered someone’s blue-eyed boy, trespassing behind the walls of the new yuppie housing down by the river, once punching a hole in the wall of his fourth form classroom, doing a bi-or tri-weekly bunk from school.

  “Hardly the sort of thing to be underscored on the daily charge sheet,” Lynley noted drily.

  “Right. I see that. Your possible thug-in-the-making that could still be turned round if someone took him on. But there was one thing more that interested me about him.” She munched on another shortbread as she flipped through her notebook. It was larger than Nkata’s, a Ryman’s purchase with a wrinkled, blue cardboard cover and a spiral binding. Most of the pages were dog-eared. Several were stained with mustard. “He was a fire raiser,” she said as she chewed. “When he was…bloody hell…where did I…Here it is. When he was eleven, our Jimmy started a fire in the waste bin at the junior school in Cubitt Town. In the classroom, by the way, during lunch. He was feeding some science texts into the blaze when he was found.”

  “Had something against Darwin,” Nkata murmured.

  Havers snorted. “Headmaster phoned the police. A magistrate got involved. Jimmy had to see a social worker for…let’s see…ten months after that.”

  “Did he continue with the fires?”

  “It appears to be a one-time thing.”

  “Possibly associated with his parents’ separation,” Lynley noted.

  “And another fire could be associated with their divorce,” Havers added.

  “Did he know the divorce was pending?”

  “Jean Cooper says not, but she would do, wouldn’t she? The kid’s got means and opportunity written all over him, and she bloody well knows it, so she’s not likely to help us write motive as well.”

  “And what is the motive?” Nkata asked. “You divorce my mum, I set fire to your cottage? Did he even know his dad was there?”

  Havers shifted gears with ease. “It may have nothing to do with the divorce at all. He could have been in a temper because his dad had cancelled their holiday. He talked to Fleming on the phone. We don’t know what they said. What if he knew Fleming was going to Kent? Jimmy might have got out there somehow, he could have seen his dad’s car in the drive, he could have heard the argument that this bloke—what was his name, Inspector, the farmer who was walking by the cottage?”

  “Freestone.”

  “Right. He could have heard the same argument that Freestone heard. He could have seen Gabriella Patten leave. He could have popped inside and regressed to an eleven-year-old’s act of retaliation.”

  “You’ve not talked to the boy?” Lynley asked.

  “He wasn’t there. Jean wouldn’t tell me where he’d gone. I had a drive round the length of the A1206, but I’d still be there hunting if I’d tried every street.” She popped another shortbread into her mouth and ran her hand through her hair, ruffling it messily. “We need more manpower on this one, sir. I’d at least like someone on Cardale Street who could give us the word when the kid turns up. And he’s going to eventually. He’s got his brother and sister with him right now. Or so his mum said. They can’t stay out all night.”

  “I’ve put some calls out. We’ll have help.” Lynley leaned back in his chair and felt the restless need for a cigarette. Something to do with his hands, his lips, his lungs…. He obliterated the thought by writing Kensington, Isle of Dogs, and Little Venice next to the list of DCs who were even at this moment being given the word by Dorothea Harriman that the bad luck of being on rota had just fallen their way.

  Havers glanced at his notepad. “So?” she said. “What about the daughter?”

  Handicapped, he told her. Olivia Whitelaw couldn’t walk unaided. He went on to explain what he’
d seen of the muscle contortions she’d had and what Faraday had done to ease them.

  “Palsy of some kind?” Havers asked.

  This appeared to be something that was affecting only her legs. A disease, perhaps, rather than a congenital condition. She hadn’t said what it was. He hadn’t asked. Whatever she was suffering from had hardly—at that moment, anyway—seemed germane to Kenneth Fleming’s death.

  “At that moment?” Nkata asked.

  “You’ve got something,” Havers said.

  Lynley was looking at the names of the DCs, deciding how to divide them and how many to send to each location. “Something,” he said. “It may be nothing, but it makes me want to double-check. Olivia Whitelaw claims she spent all of Wednesday night on the barge. Faraday was out. Now, if Olivia was to have left Little Venice, it would have been something of a production. Someone would have had to carry her. Or she’d have had to use the walker. In either case, the going would be slow. So if she went out Wednesday night once Faraday took off, someone may have noticed.”

  “But she couldn’t have killed Fleming, could she?” Havers protested. “She could have hardly got round the cottage garden if she’s as bad off as you say.”

  “She couldn’t have done it alone.” He drew a circle round the words Little Venice. He followed up with an arrow pointing to them as well. “She and Faraday keep a stack of newspapers under the dogs’ water dishes on the deck of the barge. I had a look at them before I left. She and Faraday have bought every available broadsheet today. And all of the tabloids.”

  “So what?” Havers said, playing devil’s advocate. “She’s practically an invalid. She’d want to read. She’d send her boyfriend out to fetch the papers.”

  “And every one of the papers was open to the same story.”

  “Fleming’s death,” Nkata said.

  “Yes. It made me wonder what she’s looking for.”

  “But she didn’t know Fleming, did she?” Havers asked.

  “She claims she didn’t. But if I were a betting man, I’d put money on the fact that she certainly knows something.”