Playing for the Ashes

  “Or wants to know something,” Nkata said.

  “Yes. There’s that as well.”

  There was one more thread to be woven into the fabric of the investigation, and the fact that it was nearly eight o’clock on a Saturday night didn’t obviate their obligation to see to it. But it would only take two of them. So once DC Nkata had shrugged into his jacket, carefully brushed at its lapels, and jauntily set off in pursuit of whatever Saturday night pleasures he’d been keeping on hold, Lynley said to Sergeant Havers, “There’s one more thing.”

  She was in the act of lobbing her balled-up shortbread wrapper into his waste bin. She lowered her arm and sighed. “There goes dinner, I suppose.”

  “In Italy they rarely dine before ten o’clock, Sergeant.”

  “Jesus. I’m living la dolce vita and I didn’t even know it. Do I have time to get a sandwich, at least?”

  “If you’re quick about it.”

  She set off in the direction of the officers’ canteen. Lynley picked up the phone and punched in Helen’s number. Eight double rings and he was listening to her answering machine for the second time that day. She couldn’t get to the phone; if the caller cared to leave a message….

  He didn’t care to leave a message. He cared to talk to her. He waited impatiently for the blasted beep.

  He said pleasantly through gritted teeth, “I’m still working, Helen. Are you there?” He waited. Surely she was just screening her phone calls, waiting for his. She was in the drawing room. It would take her a moment to get to the machine. She was just now gliding to her feet, floating into the kitchen, flipping on the light, reaching for the phone, getting ready to murmur, “Tommy darling,” expectantly. He waited. Nothing. “It’s nearly eight,” he said as he wondered where she was and fought an unsuccessful battle against feeling aggrieved that she wasn’t sitting in her flat waiting for him to phone and outline their evening’s ever more quickly eroding plans. “I thought I’d be able to wrap this up earlier, but that’s not going to be the case, I’m afraid. I’ve another call to make. I can’t say what time I’ll be done. Half past nine? I’m not sure. I’d rather you didn’t hang about waiting for me at this point. Except obviously you haven’t done that, have you?” He winced as this last slipped out. Pique was its undercurrent. He went hastily on. “Listen, I’m awfully sorry this weekend’s got so damnably cocked up, Helen. I’ll be in touch with you as soon as I know—”

  The machine’s android voice thanked him for his message, recited the time—which he already knew—and disconnected.

  He said, “Goddamn it,” and slammed the phone home.

  Where was she at eight o’clock on a Saturday night when she was supposed to be with him? When they had planned to be together the entire weekend? He considered the possibilities. There were her parents in Surrey, her sister in Cambridge, Deborah and Simon St. James in Chelsea, an old school chum who’d just exchanged contracts for a house in a fast-becoming-chi-chi neighbourhood in Fulham. And then there were her erstwhile lovers as well, but he preferred not to think that one of them had coincidentally come skulking out of her past at the very weekend when her future was supposed to be settled.

  “Damn,” he said again.

  “My very thought,” Havers said as she sauntered into his office, sandwich in hand. “Another Saturday evening when I could have crammed myself into something made of spandex and sequins to frug like a maniac—does anyone still do the frug, by the way? Did anyone ever do it?—and here I am, nose to the grindstone, teeth sinking into something the canteen is calling a croque-monsieur.”

  Lynley examined the sandwich she was extending to him. “It looks like grilled ham.”

  “But if they give it a French name, they can charge more for it, son. Just you wait. Next week we’ll be grubbing up with pommes frites and paying mightily for the pleasure.” She chewed like a chipmunk, both cheeks bulging, as Lynley returned his spectacles to his jacket pocket and fished out his car keys. “We’re off, then?” she said. “Where to?”

  “Wapping.” He led the way, saying, “Guy Mollison’s made his statement to the media. It was on the radio news this afternoon. ‘A tragedy for England, a brilliant batsman cut off in his prime, a real blow to our hopes of regaining the Ashes from the Aussies, a cause for serious thought among the selectors.’”

  Havers stuffed into her mouth the last triangle of the first half of her sandwich. She said, past the food, “That’s an interesting point, isn’t it, sir? I hadn’t thought before now. Fleming was sure to be chosen for England again. Now he’ll have to be replaced. So somebody’s fortunes are on the definite rise.”

  They cruised up the ramp from the underground parking. Havers gave a longing glance towards the Italian restaurant to the north of the Yard as Lynley turned into Broadway and passed the green at the end of the street where the street lamps were suddenly illuminated, filtering light through the tall plane trees and settling it against the Suffragette Scroll.

  They drove in the direction of Parliament Square. At this time of evening, the ranks of tourist coaches were gone, so Winston Churchill’s statue was left to gaze broodingly towards the river in peace.

  They headed north just before Westminster Bridge, making the turn into Victoria Embankment and spinning along the river. They were driving against the traffic now, and once they passed the catwalk structure of Hungerford Footbridge, the road they were on led towards the City where no one would be going on a Saturday night. They had gardens on one side, the river on the other, and ample time to consider what the post-war architecture on the river’s south bank was doing to demolish the city skyline.

  “What do we know about Mollison?” Havers asked. She’d finished the other half of her sandwich and was digging something out of her trousers pocket. It was a roll of breath mints. Using her thumb, she prised one out and handed the roll to Lynley saying in the spurious bright voice of an overworked air hostess, “Care for a sweet after your meal, sir?”

  He said, “Thanks,” and popped a mint into his mouth. It tasted dusty, as if she’d picked up a partially unwrapped roll from the floor somewhere and decided she couldn’t let it go to waste.

  She said, “I know he plays for Essex when he’s not playing for England, but that’s the extent of it.”

  “He’s been playing for England for the last ten years,” Lynley told her. He went on to disclose the additional facts about Mollison that he’d gathered in a phone conversation with Simon St. James, friend, forensic scientist, and cricket aficionado nonpareil. They’d spoken at teatime, with several interruptions as St. James added fourth and fifth lumps of sugar to his cup, to the background accompaniment of his wife’s strenuous objections. “He’s thirty-seven—”

  “Not too many good years at the wicket left, then.”

  “—and married to a barrister called Allison Hepple. Her father has in the past been a team sponsor, by the way.”

  “These blokes keep popping up everywhere, don’t they?”

  “Mollison’s a Cambridge graduate—Pembroke College—with a rather undistinguished third in natural science. He played cricket at Harrow and then got a Blue at the University. He continued playing once he’d completed his studies.”

  “Sounds like education was just an excuse to play cricket.”

  “It seems that way.”

  “So he’d have the team’s best interests at heart, whatever they are.”

  “Whatever they are.”

  Guy Mollison lived in a section of Wapping that had undergone considerable urban renewal. It was a part of London in which enormous Victorian warehouses loomed over the narrow cobbled streets along the river. Some were still in use, although one glance at a lorry on which Fruit of the Loom Active Wear blazed in bright letters told the partial story of Wapping’s metamorphosis. This was no longer the teeming, crime-ridden dockland where shouting lumpers jostled each other on gangplanks, manhandling everything from lampblack to tortoiseshell. Where once the wharves and the streets overflowed with
bales, barrels, and sacks, rejuvenation reigned. Eighteenth-century oglers of convicted pirates, condemned to be chained at low water and to drown in the ebb and flow of three tides near the Town of Ramsgate pub, had become twentieth-century young professionals. They lived in the warehouses and the wharves themselves, which, listed as historical buildings, could not be torn down and replaced with the south bank behemoths that hulked like monoliths from Royal Hall in Southwark to London Bridge.

  Guy Mollison’s home was in China Silk Wharf, a sixstorey building of cinnamon brick that stood at the juncture of Garnet Street and Wapping Wall. Its Cerberus was a porter who, when Lynley and Havers arrived, was standing guard in a desultory fashion, plonked down in front of a miniature television set in an office the size of a packing crate that opened into the locked, brick-floored entry to the wharf.

  “Mollison?” he said when Lynley rang the bell, produced his warrant card, and identified his destination. “You wait right here, the both of you. Got it?” He pointed to a spot on the floor and retreated to his office—Lynley’s warrant card in hand—where he picked up the phone and punched a few numbers to the accompaniment of the television audience’s howl of merriment at the sight of four game show contestants crawling through large barrels of red gelatin.

  He returned with the warrant card and what seemed to be a forkful of jellied eel, his evening snack. He said, “Four seventeen. Fourth floor. Turn left from the lift. And mind you check out with me when you leave. Got it?”

  He gave a nod, pitchforked the eel into his mouth, and sent them on their way. They found that the directions to Mollison’s flat were unnecessary, however. When the lift doors purred open on the fourth floor, England’s captain was waiting for them in the corridor. He stood leaning against the wall opposite the lift, with his hands balled into the pockets of his wrinkled linen trousers and his feet crossed at the ankles.

  Lynley recognised Mollison from his signature feature: the nose twice broken on the cricket pitch, flattened at the bridge and never set properly. He was ruddy faced from exposure to the sun, and freckles splattered along the deep V of his receding hairline. Beneath his left eye, a bruise the size of a cricket ball—or a fist, for that matter—was beginning to turn from purple to yellow along its edges.

  Mollison extended his hand, saying, “Inspector Lynley? Maidstone police said they’d asked Scotland Yard to have a look at things. You’re it, I take it.”

  Lynley shook. Mollison’s grip was strong. “Yes,” he said and introduced Sergeant Havers. “You’ve been in touch with Maidstone?”

  Mollison gave Sergeant Havers a nod as he said, “I’ve been trying to get something definite out of the police since yesterday night, but they’re good at fencing off enquiries, aren’t they?”

  “What sort of information are you looking for?”

  “I’d like to know what happened. Ken didn’t smoke, so what’s this nonsense about an armchair fire and a cigarette? And how can an armchair fire and a cigarette turn to ‘possible homicide’ within twelve hours?” Mollison settled back against the wall. This was brick, painted white, and he lounged against it with the overhead light striking his dustcoloured hair and streaking it with gold. “Frankly, I expect I’m reacting to the fact that I still can’t manage to believe he’s dead. I’d spoken to him only on Wednesday evening. We chatted. We rang off. Everything was right as rain. Then this.”

  “It’s the phone call we’d like to talk to you about.”

  “You know we talked?” Mollison’s features sharpened. Then he seemed to relax with the words, “Oh. Miriam. Of course. She answered. I’d forgotten.” He slipped his hands into his pockets again and slid a half inch down the wall, as if he intended to remain there for a while. “What can I tell you?” He looked from one to the other ingenuously, as if he saw nothing strange in the fact that their conference was taking place in the corridor.

  “May we go to your flat?” Lynley asked.

  “That’s rather rough,” Mollison said. “I’d like to handle things out here, if we can.”

  “Why?”

  He cocked his head in the general direction of his flat, saying in a lowered voice, “My wife. Allison. I’d like not to upset her if I can avoid it. She’s eight months pregnant and not feeling up to snuff. Things are rather dicey.”

  “She knew Kenneth Fleming?”

  “Ken? No. Well, to speak to him, yes. They made casual chit-chat if they saw each other at a drinks party or something.”

  “Then I assume she’s not in shock over his death?”

  “No. No. Nothing like that.” Mollison grinned and gently knocked his head against the wall in a self-deprecating manner. “I’m a worrier, Inspector. This is our first. A boy. I don’t want things to go wrong.”

  “We’ll keep that in mind,” Lynley said pleasantly. “And unless your wife has some information she’d like to share with us regarding Fleming’s death, she doesn’t even need to stay in the room.”

  Mollison quirked his mouth as if to say more. He used his elbows to push himself away from the wall. “Right then. Come along. But mind her condition, won’t you?”

  He led them down the corridor to the third door, which he swung open upon an enormous room with oak-framed windows overlooking the river. He called out, “Allie?” as he crossed the birch floor and made for a sitting area that formed three sides of a quadrangle. The fourth side comprised glass doors that stood open to reveal one of the wharf’s original landing planks where goods had once been hoisted up into the warehouse.

  A strong breeze was riffling the pages of a newspaper, which lay open on a coffee table in the sitting area. Mollison closed the doors, folded the newspaper, said, “Sit down if you like,” and called his wife’s name again.

  A woman’s voice responded, “In the bedroom. Are you through with them, then?”

  “Not quite,” he said. “Shut the door so we don’t disturb you, darling.”

  In reply, they heard her footsteps, but instead of shutting herself off, Allison moved into the room, with one hand holding a sheaf of papers and the other pressed into the small of her back. She was hugely pregnant, but she didn’t seem to be unwell, as her husband had suggested. Rather, she appeared to be caught in the middle of work, with spectacles perched on the top of her head and a biro clipped on to the collar of her smock.

  “Finish with the brief,” her husband said. “We don’t need you here.” And then with an anxious look at Lynley, “Do we?”

  Before Lynley could reply, Allison said, “Nonsense. I don’t need coddling, Guy. I quite wish you’d stop it.” She set her papers on a glass dining table that stood between the sitting area and the kitchen behind it. She removed her spectacles and unclipped her biro. “Would you like something?” she asked Lynley and Havers. “A coffee perhaps?”

  “Allie. Cripes. You know you’re not supposed to—”

  She sighed. “I wasn’t planning to have one myself.”

  Mollison grimaced. “Sorry. Hell’s bells. I’ll be glad when it’s over.”

  “You’re certainly not alone.” His wife repeated her offer to Lynley and Havers.

  “I could do with a glass of water,” Havers said.

  “Nothing for me,” said Lynley.

  “Guy?”

  Mollison asked for a beer and fastened his eyes on his wife as she lumbered into the kitchen where recessed lighting gleamed down on speckled granite work tops and brushed chrome cupboards. She returned with a can of Heineken and a water goblet in which floated two slivers of ice. She placed both on the coffee table and lowered herself into an overstuffed chair. Lynley and Havers took the sofa.

  Mollison, ignoring the beer he’d asked for, remained standing. He went to the doors he’d previously shut and opened one of them. “You’re looking flushed, Allie. Bit close in here, isn’t it?”

  “It’s fine. I’m fine. Everything’s fine. Drink your beer.”

  “Right.” But instead of joining them, he squatted next to the open door where a wicker b
asket stood in front of a pair of potted palms. He reached into the basket and brought out three cricket balls.

  Lynley thought of Captain Queeg and half expected to see him begin rolling them round his palm, despite their size.

  “Who’s going to replace Ken Fleming on the team?” he asked.

  Mollison blinked. “That presupposes Ken would have been chosen to play for England another time.”

  “Would he have been chosen?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I don’t know at the moment.” Lynley recalled additional information St. James had given him. “Fleming replaced a chap called Ryecroft, didn’t he? Wasn’t that just before the winter tour? Two years ago?”

  “Ryecroft chipped his elbow.”

  “And Fleming took his place.”

  “If you want to call it that.”

  “Ryecroft never played for England again.”

  “He never got his form back. He doesn’t play for anyone any longer.”

  “You were at Harrow and Cambridge together, weren’t you? You and Ryecroft?”

  “What’s my friendship with Brent Ryecroft got to do with Fleming? I’ve known him since I was thirteen years old. We were at school together. We played cricket together. We were best man for each other at our weddings. We’re friends.”

  “You’ve been his advocate as well, I dare say.”

  “When he could play, yes. But he can’t now, so I’m not. That’s an end to it.” Mollison straightened, two balls in one hand, one in the other. He juggled them expertly for a good thirty seconds before he went on, looking through them to say, “Why? Are you thinking I got rid of Fleming to get Brent back on to the England team? That’s a lousy proposition. There’re a hundred players better than Brent at this point. He knows it. I know it. The selectors know it.”

  “Did you know Fleming was going to Kent on Wednesday night?”

  He shook his head, concentrating on the balls in the air. “As far as I knew, he was taking off on a holiday with his boy.”

  “He didn’t mention that he’d cancelled the trip? Or postponed it?”