Playing for the Ashes

  “He didn’t give a hint in that direction.” Mollison leaped forward as a ball got beyond him. It clattered to the floor and bounced onto a carpet the colour of sea foam, which served as boundary for the sitting area they were in. It rolled to Sergeant Havers. She picked it up and placed it deliberately on the sofa beside her.

  Mollison’s wife, at least, read the message clearly. “Sit down, Guy,” she said.

  “Can’t,” he replied with a boyish smile. “I’m up. All this energy. Got to work it off.”

  Allison said to them with a weary smile, “When the baby arrives, he’ll be my second child. Do you want the beer or not, Guy?”

  “I’ll drink it. I’ll drink it.” He juggled two balls instead of three.

  “What are you so nervous about?” his wife asked. She added, with a tiny grunt as she adjusted her position to face Lynley more directly, “Guy was here on Wednesday night with me, Inspector. That’s why you’ve come to talk to him, isn’t it? To check on his alibi? If we get to the facts straightaway, we can put the conjectures to rest.” She curved her hand round her stomach, as if to emphasise her condition. “I don’t sleep well any longer. I doze when I can. I was up most of the night. Guy was here. If he’d left, I would have known. And if I somehow miraculously slept through his departure, the porter would not have done. You’ve met the night porter, I take it?”

  “Allison, cripes.” Mollison finally pitched the balls back to their wicker basket. He strode to one of the other chairs, sat, and popped the top on his beer. “He doesn’t think I killed Ken. Why would I, in the first place? I was just talking bosh.”

  “What was your row about?” Lynley asked. He didn’t wait for Mollison to counter with “What row?” He went on to say, “Miriam Whitelaw heard the beginning of your conversation with Fleming. She said you mentioned a row. You said something about forgetting the row and getting on with things.”

  “We had a dust-up during a four-day match last week at Lord’s. Things were tense. Middlesex needed ninety-one with eight wickets in hand. They had to work like the devil to win. One of their better batsmen had gone out with a fractured finger, so they weren’t a particularly happy group. I made a remark after the third day, out in the car park, about one of their Paki players. It had to do with the play, not the man, but Ken didn’t want to see it that way. He took it as racist. Things went from there.”

  “They had a fight,” Allison clarified calmly. “Out in the car park. Guy got the worst of it. Two bruised ribs, the black eye.”

  “Odd that it didn’t make the papers,” Havers noted. “Tabloids being what they are.”

  “It was late,” Mollison said. “No one was about.”

  “Just the two of you were there?”

  “That’s it.” Mollison gulped his beer.

  “You didn’t tell anyone afterwards you’d brawled with Fleming? Why’s that?”

  “Because it was stupid. We’d had too much to drink. We were acting like thugs. It’s not something either one of us wanted to get round.”

  “And you made peace with him afterwards?”

  “Not straightaway. That’s why I phoned on Wednesday. I assumed he’d be selected for the England team this summer. I assumed as much about myself. As far as I was concerned, we didn’t need to be living in each other’s knickers for things to go smoothly when the Aussies arrive, but we needed at least to be at ease with each other. I’d made the remark in the first place. I thought it wise if I also made peace.”

  “What else did you talk about on Wednesday night?”

  He set the beer on the table, leaned forward, and clasped his hands loosely between his legs. “The Aussie spin bowler. The condition of the pitches at the Oval. How many more centuries we can expect from Jack Pollard. That sort of thing.”

  “And during that conversation, Fleming never mentioned he was heading to Kent that night?”

  “Never.”

  “Or Gabriella Patten? Did he mention her?”

  “Gabriella Patten?” Mollison cocked his head in perplexity. “No. He didn’t mention Gabriella Patten.” He looked so directly at Lynley as he spoke that the very earnestness of his gaze gave him away.

  “Do you know her?” Lynley asked.

  Still the eyes remained firm. “Sure. Hugh Patten’s wife. He’s sponsoring the test match series this summer. But you must have dug up that information by now.”

  “She and her husband are living apart at the moment. Are you aware of that?”

  A quick shift of the eyes towards his wife and Mollison returned his gaze to Lynley. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry to hear it. I’d always got the impression she and Hugh were crazy about each other.”

  “You saw a lot of them?”

  “Here and there. Parties. The occasional test matches. Some of the winter tour. They follow cricket pretty closely. Well, I suppose they would, wouldn’t they, since he sponsors the team.” Mollison lifted his beer, drained the can. He began to use his thumbs to cave in the side. “Is there another?” he asked his wife, and then said, “No. Stay. I’ll get it.” He sprang to his feet and went to the kitchen where he rooted through the refrigerator, saying, “D’you want something, Allie? You didn’t have enough dinner to keep a gnat going. These chicken legs look decent. Want one, darling?”

  Allison was directing a thoughtful gaze upon the dented beer can that her husband had left on the coffee table. He called her name again when she didn’t respond. She said, “I’m not interested, Guy. In food.”

  He rejoined them, using his thumb to flick open his Heineken. “Sure you don’t want one?” he asked Lynley and Havers.

  Lynley said, “And the county matches?”

  “What?”

  “Did Patten and his wife attend those as well? Did they ever watch an Essex match, for example? Do they have a side they favour when England isn’t playing?”

  “They back Middlesex, I should guess. Or Kent. The home counties. You know.”

  “And Essex? Did they ever come to watch you play?”

  “Probably. I couldn’t swear to it. But like I said, they follow the game.”

  “Recently?”

  “Recently?”

  “Yes. I was wondering when you last saw them.”

  “I saw Hugh last week.”

  “Where was this?”

  “At the Garrick. For lunch. It’s part of what I do: keeping the current team sponsor happy to be the team sponsor.”

  “He didn’t tell you about his separation from his wife?”

  “Hell, no. I don’t know him. I mean I know him, but it’s a formal sort of thing. Sports talk. Who looks good to open the bowling against the Aussies. How I plan to set the field. Who the selectors are thinking of choosing for the team.” He raised his beer, drank.

  Lynley waited until Mollison had lowered the beer before asking, “And Mrs. Patten. When did you last see her?”

  Mollison looked at an enormous Hockney-like canvas that hung on the wall behind the sofa, as if it were a large desk calendar on which he was examining how he had spent his days. “I don’t remember, to tell the truth.”

  “She was at the dinner party,” Allison said. “The end of March.” When her husband appeared nonplussed by the information, she added, “The River Room. The Savoy.”

  “Cripes. What a memory, Allie,” Mollison said. “That was it. The end of March. A Wednesday—”

  “Thursday.”

  “A Thursday night. That’s right. You wore that purple African thing.”

  “It’s Persian.”

  “Persian. That’s right. And I—”

  Lynley stopped Gingold and Chevalier before they got to the refrain. He said, “You haven’t seen her since then? You haven’t seen her since she’s been living in Kent?”

  “In Kent?” His face was blank. “I didn’t know she was in Kent. What’s she doing in Kent? Where?”

  “Where Kenneth Fleming died. The very cottage in fact.”

  “Cripes.” He swallowed.

 
“When you spoke to him on Wednesday evening, Kenneth Fleming didn’t tell you he was heading out to Kent to see Gabriella Patten?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t know he was having an affair with her?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t know he had been having an affair with her since the previous autumn?”

  “No.”

  “That they were planning to divorce their spouses and marry?”

  “No. No way. I didn’t know any of that.” He turned to his wife. “Did you know this stuff, Allie?”

  She’d been watching him throughout Lynley’s questioning. She said without a change of expression, “I’m hardly in a position to know.”

  Mollison said, “I thought she might have said something to you. In March. At the dinner.”

  “She was there with Hugh.”

  “I meant in the cloakroom. Or something.”

  “We had no time alone. And even if we had, revealing that you’re fucking someone outside your marriage isn’t generally cloakroom conversation, Guy. Among women, that is.” Her face and her tone belied her choice of vocabulary. All three served to pin her husband’s eyes on hers. A silence played among them, and Lynley let it stretch out. Beyond the open door, a boat on the river sounded a single blast of its horn. As if this was the cause, a current of chill air gusted into the room. The breeze susurrated the palm fronds and feathered away from her cheeks the strands of hazelnut hair that had escaped the peach ribbon that bound it at the base of Allison’s neck. Guy stood hastily and closed the door.

  Lynley rose as well. Sergeant Havers shot him an are-you-crazy-his-wicket’s-as-sticky-as-it’s-going-to-get look. She reluctantly dug her way out of the overstuffed sofa. Lynley took out his card. He said, “If anything else comes to mind, Mr. Mollison,” and when Mollison turned from the door, he handed the card over to him.

  “I’ve told you everything,” Mollison said. “I don’t know what else…”

  “Occasionally something jogs the memory. A chance remark. An overheard conversation. A photograph. A dream. Telephone me if that happens to you.”

  Mollison shoved the card into the breast pocket of his shirt. “Sure. But I don’t think—”

  “If it happens,” Lynley said. He nodded to Mollison’s wife and ended the interview.

  He and Havers didn’t speak until they were in the lift, gliding down to the entry where the porter would release the doorlocks and let them out into the street. Havers said, “He’s dancing a jig with the truth.”

  Lynley said, “Yes.”

  “Then why aren’t we up there pinning him to the wall?”

  The lift doors shooshed open. They stepped out into the entry. The porter came out of his office and marched them to the door with the formality of a prison guard releasing convicts. Lynley said nothing as they went out into the night.

  Havers lit a cigarette as they walked towards the Bentley. She said, “Sir, why aren’t we—”

  “We don’t need to do what his wife can do for us,” was Lynley’s reply. “She’s a barrister. There’s a blessing in that.”

  At the car, they stood on opposite sides. Lynley gazed in the direction of the Prospect of Whitby where a few pub regulars had spilled into the street. Havers puffed away on her cigarette, bulking up on the nicotine before the long drive home.

  “But she won’t be on our side,” Havers said. “Not with a baby due. Not if Mollison’s involved.”

  “We don’t need her on our side. We just need her to tell him what he forgot to ask.”

  Havers stopped the cigarette midway to her mouth. “Forgot to ask?”

  “‘Where’s Gabriella now?’” Lynley said. “The fire was in Gabriella’s lodgings. The coppers have got one corpse they’re nosing round, but that corpse is Fleming. So where the hell is Gabriella?” Lynley disarmed the car’s security system. “Interesting, isn’t it?” he said as he opened the door and slid inside. “All the things people reveal by saying nothing.”

  CHAPTER

  11

  The beer garden of the Load of Hay tavern was aswarm with life. Fairy lights glittered from the trees and made a coruscating rooftop above the drinkers, shining on the bare arms and long legs of those celebrants of the ever-warming May weather. Unlike the previous evening, however, Barbara did not give a passing thought to joining them as she cruised past She still hadn’t yet imbibed her weekly pint of Bass, she still hadn’t spoken to a soul in her neighbourhood aside from Bhimani at the grocery, but it was half past ten and she’d been up too long with too little sleep to bolster her. She was knackered.

  She took the first parking space she found, next to a mound of rubbish bags, which bled weeds and grass cuttings onto the pavement. It was in Steele’s Road, directly beneath an alder whose reaching branches stretched high above the street and promised a prodigious speckling of bird droppings by morning. Not that bird droppings mattered all that much, when one considered the condition of the Mini. Indeed, if her luck held, Barbara thought, there might be enough guano to plug up the holes that currently freckled the car’s rusting bonnet.

  She picked her way through the rubbish bags to the pavement and trudged in the direction of Eton Villas. She yawned, rubbed the soreness from her shoulder, and vowed to dump out the contents of her bag and do some committed jettisoning of her belongings. What was in the damn thing anyway, she wondered as she lugged it towards her home. It felt as if she were hauling round a load of bricks. It felt, in fact, as if she’d stopped by Jaffri’s Fine Groceries, picked up another two bags of ice, and tucked them in with the rest of her belongings.

  Her footsteps halted at the mental picture her mind created of Jaffri’s and ice. Bloody hell in sodding spades, she thought. She’d forgotten about the refrigerator.

  She picked up her pace. She rounded the corner to Eton Villas. She hoped against hope and prayed against prayer that gran’s son’s son had managed to figure things out for himself when he made the long drive from Fulham to Chalk Farm in that open-back lorry of his. Barbara hadn’t told him exactly where to deliver the refrigerator, incorrectly assuming that she would be home when he arrived. But since she hadn’t been, surely he would have asked someone for direction. He wouldn’t have left it sitting on the pavement, would he? And no way would he have simply dropped it in the street.

  He’d done neither, she found, when she got to the house. She went up the drive, skirted a late model red Golf, pushed through the gate, and saw that gran’s son’s son had managed—with or without assistance, she was never to know—to manoeuvre the refrigerator across the lawn in front of the house and down four narrow concrete steps. Now it stood, half-wrapped in a pink blanket with one leg sinking into a delicate mound of chamomile that grew between the flagstones in front of the ground-floor flat.

  “Wrong,” Barbara fumed. “Wrong, wrong, wrong. You flaming absolutely unforgivable twit.”

  She kicked at a flagstone and set her shoulder against the rope that held the pink blanket in place. She gave a grunt and a shove and tested the weight she would have to heave to get the refrigerator back up the four steps, shoo it along the side of the house, and shift it into her cottage at the bottom of the garden. She managed to raise one side two inches, but the effort sank the other side deeper into the chamomile, which, no doubt, the resident of the ground-floor flat was growing for a crucial medicinal need that would now go wanting because of gran’s son’s more-than-useless son.

  She said, “Bloody bleeding hell,” and gave the refrigerator another heave. It sank another inch. She heaved once more. Once more it sank. She said, “Stuff it,” with as much energy as she had used in the heaving, and she plunged her hand into her shoulder bag and brought forth her cigarettes. Disgruntled, she went to a wooden bench that stood in front of the french doors of the ground-floor flat. She sat down and lit up. She observed the refrigerator through the smoke and tried to decide what to do.

  A light went on above her head. One of the french doors opened. Barbara turned
to see the same small, dark girl who had been laying plates on the table for dinner the previous night. She wasn’t in a school uniform this time, however. She was in a nightgown, long and perfectly white with a flounce at the hem and a drawstring at the neck. Her hair was still in plaits.

  “Is it yours, then?” the girl asked solemnly, using one toe to scratch the opposite ankle. “We’ve been wondering about that.”

  Barbara looked beyond her for the rest of we. The flat was dark save for a rod of light that extended from an open doorway in the back.

  “I forgot it was going to be delivered,” Barbara said. “Some idiot bloke delivered it here by mistake.”

  “Yes,” the girl said. “I saw him. I tried to tell him that we didn’t want a refrigerator, but he wouldn’t listen. We’ve got one already, I told him, and I would’ve let him in to see for himself only I’m not supposed to let anyone in when Dad’s not home and he wasn’t home yet. He’s home now, though.”

  “Is he?”

  “Yes. But he’s asleep. That’s why I’m talking low. So I don’t wake him. He brought chicken for dinner and I made courgettes and we had chapatis and then he fell asleep. I’m not supposed to let anyone in when he’s not home. I’m not supposed to even open the door. But it’s all right now, isn’t it, because he’s home. I can shout if I need him, can’t I?”

  “Sure,” Barbara said. She flicked a wedge of ash onto the neat flagstones and when the girl’s dark eyes followed its descent with a thoughtful frown, Barbara slipped one trainershod foot over and casually ground the ash to a smudge of grey-black. The girl observed this and sucked on her lip.

  Barbara said, “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

  “I don’t sleep well, I’m afraid. I mostly read till I can’t keep my eyes open. I have to wait till Dad falls asleep before I turn on my light, though, because if I turn on my light while he’s still awake, he comes into my room and takes the book away. He says I should count backwards from one hundred to fall asleep, but I think it’s so much nicer to read, don’t you? Besides, I can count backwards from one hundred faster than I can fall asleep and when I get to zero, what am I supposed to do?”