Playing for the Ashes

  “He said…” Jeannie smoothed her hand along the front of her smock, pressing her palm against a wrinkle that ran from the waistband to the hem. She thought she’d ironed this smock at two in the morning when she’d finally given up the idea of sleeping, but perhaps she hadn’t done. Perhaps she’d ironed one and put on another. That would be typical of how her mind and her body had taken to working, on auto-pilot, just going through the motions.

  “I was sixteen,” she said, “when you were born. You know that, Jim? I thought I knew everything. I thought I could be a proper mother without nobody telling me what I was s’posed to do to be one. It comes natural to women, is what I thought. Bloke gets a girl pregnant and her body changes and so does the rest of her with it. I didn’t want no one telling me how to be a mum to my little boy because I knew, see. I decided it’d be just like an advert, with me spooning cereal into your mouth and your dad hanging about in the background taking snapshots of how happy we were. I decided to make another baby fast as well because I reckoned kids aren’t s’posed to grow up alone and I wanted to do things the way a mum’s s’posed to do them. So we had you and then we had Shar and then we were eighteen years old, me and your dad.”

  Jimmy made a sound into the pillow, but it was inarticulate, more a mewl than a word.

  “But I didn’t know, see. That was the problem. I thought you had a baby and you loved him and he grew up and had babies of his own. I didn’t think about other parts: the talking to him and listening to him, scolding him when he’s done wrong, not flying off the handle when you want to scream and smack his bum for doing what you told him a hundred times not to do. I thought of Father Christmas and seeing his face in a bonfire’s light on Guy Fawkes Day. We’ll have such good times, I thought. I’ll be such a good mummy. And I know it all already, I do, because I have my mum and dad for models so I know exactly what kind of parent I don’t want to be.”

  She inched her hand across the counterpane, leaving it resting close to his body. She could feel the warmth of him even though she didn’t touch him. She hoped he could feel the same from her.

  “I guess what I’m saying’s that I didn’t do right, Jim. I thought I knew everything so I didn’t want to learn. What I’m saying is that I’m a failure, Jim. But I want you to know that I didn’t mean to be.”

  His body was still tense, but it didn’t seem quite so rigid as it had before. And she thought she saw his head turn a fraction.

  She said, “Mr. Friskin told me what you said to them. But he said there’s more that they want to know. And he asked me something, too, Mr. Friskin. He said…” She found it was no easier than it had been the first time she’d attempted to say it. Only this time there was nothing else to do but to plunge forward and hear the worst in response. “He said that you wanted to talk to them, Jim. He said that you wanted to tell them something. Won’t you…Jim, won’t you tell me what it is? Won’t you trust me that much?”

  His shoulders then his back began to quake.

  “Jim?”

  Then his entire body was quivering. He pulled on the bed-post. He scrabbled with the counterpane. He dug into the bed with his toes.

  “Jimmy,” his mother said. “Jimmy. Jim!”

  He turned his head and gasped for a breath. Which is when Jeannie saw that her son was laughing.

  Barbara Havers hung up the phone, crammed the last bourbon biscuit into her mouth, chewed energetically, and sloshed down a mouthful of tepid Darjeeling. So much for afternoon tea, she thought. Wasn’t employment at New Scotland Yard just another variation on nutritional bliss?

  She grabbed her notebook and headed for Lynley’s office. She didn’t find him behind his desk, however. Instead, she encountered Dorothea Harriman making yet another newspaper delivery. This one was today’s Evening Standard. Her face bore an expression communicating both her disapproval of and distaste for this chore, but it seemed more directed to the reading material itself than to being charged with the task of procuring it for Lynley. Two other offending tabloids dangled at arm’s length from her body. She placed them on the floor next to Lynley’s chair and neatly followed up with the others she’d brought him that morning until only the Evening Standard remained on his desk.

  “Ghastly things.” Harriman spoke with a toss of her head, every bit as if she didn’t avidly thumb through those same papers on a daily basis, looking for the latest and most lubricious gossip on the royal family. “I can’t think what he wants them for in the first place.”

  “It’s to do with the case,” Barbara said.

  “The case?” Harriman’s tone of voice suggested how absurd she thought this line of reasoning was. “Well, I hope he knows what he’s doing, Detective Sergeant Havers.”

  Barbara shared the sentiment. As Harriman took herself off in answer to Webberly’s distant roar of “Harriman! Dee! Where’s the flaming Snowbridge file,” Barbara sauntered over to Lynley’s desk for a look. Head dangling so that his hair obscured his face, hands hanging limp at his sides, Jimmy Cooper graced the front page. As did Mr. Friskin, who was speaking urgently into the boy’s ear. It was impossible to tell whether the picture came from yesterday’s visit to the Yard or today’s, since Jimmy’s T-shirt and blue jeans seemed as permanently attached to his body as his skin and since Barbara hadn’t seen—and hence was not able to judge by—Mr. Friskin’s apparel on either visit. She read the caption and saw that the paper was connecting the picture to this morning’s visit and using it as an illustration for an accompanying article whose headline read: “Yard Pushing Forward on Cricket Murder.”

  Barbara scanned the first two paragraphs. Lynley, she saw, was reeling information out to the press with consummate skill. There were plenty of allegedly’s and several mentions of an unconfirmed report and sources well placed within Scotland Yard. Barbara pulled on her lower lip as she read and wondered at the efficacy of this approach. Like Harriman, she hoped Lynley knew what he was doing.

  She found him in the incidents room, where copies of the photographs of Fleming’s body and the crime scene had been posted on a bulletin board. He was staring at them as one of the DCs spoke on the phone about additional surveillance on the Cardale Street residence and a departmental secretary typed at a word processor. Another DC was on the phone to Maidstone, saying, “If you’ll have her phone DI Lynley as soon as the autopsy…Yeah…Right…Okay. Got it.”

  Barbara joined Lynley, who was sipping from a plastic cup with an unopened packet of Jaffa Cakes at his fingertips. She eyed the biscuits longingly, decided she didn’t need to add any more useless blubber to her frame this afternoon, and sank into a chair.

  “Q-for-Quentin Melvin Abercrombie,” she said by way of introducing her topic. “Fleming’s solicitor. I just got off the phone with him.” Lynley raised an eyebrow although he didn’t take his eyes from the photographs. “Okay. I know. You didn’t tell me to phone. But once Maidstone identified those cigarettes…I don’t know, sir. It seems to me that we need to start hedging a few bets round here.”

  “And?”

  “And I think I’ve got something you might want to know.”

  “About the Fleming-Cooper divorce, I take it.”

  “According to Abercrombie, he and Fleming filled out the petition for divorce three weeks ago this Wednesday. Abercrombie delivered the petition to Somerset House on Thursday and Jean was scheduled to receive her copy and something called the acknowledgement of service form by the following Tuesday afternoon. Abercrombie says that Fleming was hoping to get the divorce on grounds of a two-year separation, which of course was really a four-year separation—as we already know—but all that’s needed legally is two years apart. Following?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “If Jean agreed to end the marriage, Fleming could have had the whole divorce process signed, sealed, and delivered within five months and he’d be free to marry right afterward, which according to Abercrombie, he was hot to do. But he also thought Jean might fight the proceedings, which is what he told A
bercrombie and which is why, according to Abercrombie, Fleming wanted to deliver Jean’s copy of the petition to her personally. He couldn’t do that—it has to come from the divorce registry—but he told Abercrombie that he wanted to take a copy to her to prepare her for what was coming. To sugar-coat it, I suppose. Still with me?”

  “And did he?”

  “Take her an unofficial copy of the petition?” Barbara nodded. “Abercrombie thinks so, although like a typical solicitor he wouldn’t swear to the fact since he didn’t see the papers pass from Fleming’s hands to hers with his own eyes. But he got a message from Fleming on his machine that Tuesday evening and in the message Fleming said that Jean had the papers and that it was looking like she was going to fight it.”

  “The divorce?”

  “Right.”

  “Was he willing to go into open court with her?”

  “Abercrombie said he didn’t think so because in the message Fleming made an allusion to having to wait another year—to make it five years they’ve been apart—in order to get a divorce without Jean’s consent to it. He didn’t want to have to do that because, Abercrombie says, he was hot as a pepper to get on with his life—”

  “As you’ve already mentioned.”

  “Quite. But he wanted even less to fight it out in open court and have everyone’s name and dirty linen in the paper.”

  “Especially his own, no doubt.”

  “And Gabriella Patten’s.”

  Lynley gave his plastic cup a half turn on the table, saying, “So how does all this constitute hedging our bets, Sergeant?”

  “Because of how it all fits together. Are you familiar with divorce laws, sir?”

  “Having never managed so much as a marriage…”

  “Right. Well, I had a crash course from Q. Melvin on the phone.” She underlined each step as she related it to him. First the solicitor and the client filled out a petition for dissolution of the marriage. Then the petition was filed with the divorce registry, who forwarded a copy of it along with an acknowledgement of service form to the respondent. The respondent had eight days to verify receipt of the paperwork by filling in the acknowledgement of service form and returning it to the court. And then the rest of the wheels of the process began to roll.

  “Which is what’s so interesting,” Barbara said. “Jean received her copy of the petition on the Tuesday in question, and she had eight days to acknowledge having got it. But as things turned out, she never had to acknowledge having got it, so the process of divorcing never had to begin.”

  “Because on the same day that the acknowledgement of service form was due back in court, Fleming died in Kent,” Lynley said.

  “Right. On the very same day. Now how’s that for a flipping coincidence.” Barbara went to look at the pictures, particularly a close-up of Fleming’s face. The murdered dead, she thought, never do look as if they’re sleeping. It’s only in fantasies that the police gaze upon them and reflect upon the poignant beauty of a life cut off prematurely. “Should we bring her in?” she asked. “Because it does explain why—”

  “What a day, what a day.” Detective Constable Winston Nkata swung into the room with his jacket slung over his shoulder and a lamb samosa steaming in his hand. “Have you any idea how many video shops’re in Soho? I tell you, man, I have seen each one of them inside and out, upside and down.” He took a mountain lion’s bite from his samosa and, having garnered their attention, he flipped a chair round backwards and dropped onto it, leaning his elbows on its back and using the samosa to emphasise his remarks. “But the end result was the end result, no matter how many catalogues I forced these innocent eyes to wander through. And let me tell you, ’Spector, my dear mum is going to do some serious talking to you about what you had her youngest boy sifting through today.”

  “I believe you had the name of the shop,” Lynley said drily. “There wasn’t a need to make this an extended pornographic expedition, was there?”

  Nkata took another bite of the samosa. Barbara felt her stomach rumbling in response to the scent of the meat. Oh, to be back on the streets, she thought, with access to food unprocessed, unpreserved, and more than likely unhealthy.

  “Got to be thorough, man. When promotion time comes, you think of Nkata behind those letters DS.” His jaws worked the meat like a pile driver forcing steel into the ground. “Here’s the situation, though it took some doing to get it from the shop bloke ’cause, as he kept saying in my ear when he wasn’t trying to blow in it—which is a story I’ll save for another time—”

  “Thank you,” Lynley said fervently.

  “—seems like most blokes out there don’t much like it broadcast to the fuzz when they’re hiring skin films. Not that it’s illegal, mind you. But it puts a dent in the reputation. Course in this case, there was nothing to worry about since the blokes in question never hired those films.” He took a last bite and licked the pastry crumbs from his fingers. “Now, why is it I’m thinking that news doesn’t surprise you?”

  “Do the films even exist?” Barbara asked.

  “Oh my yes. Every one of them, though according to the shop bloke Wild in the Woolly has been hired so often it’s like watching gymnastics in a snow storm.”

  Barbara said to Lynley, “But if Faraday or one of his mates didn’t hire them last Wednesday…” She gave the pictures of Fleming another glance. “What’s this got to do with Jimmy Cooper, sir?”

  “Now I’m not saying Faraday’s mate didn’t hire them at all,” Nkata added hastily. “I’m saying he didn’t hire them that night. On other nights—” Here, he removed his notebook from his jacket pocket. He wiped his fingers on a spotless white handkerchief before he applied them to the pages of his book. He opened to a page that was marked with a thin red ribbon and read off a list of dates going back more than five years. Each one was connected to a different video shop, but the list was cyclical in nature, repeating itself after all the shops had been used once. There was, however, no set period of time between each date. “In’eresting, that bit of detective work. Wouldn’t you say?”

  “Nice initiative, Winston,” Lynley acknowledged. The constable ducked his head in a show of spurious humility.

  One of the telephones rang and was answered. The DC manning it spoke in a hushed voice. Barbara thought about Nkata’s information. Nkata himself went on.

  “Unless they just worked up a fondness for this p’rticular set of films, seems to me like these blokes’re arranging a permanent group alibi for themselves. Memorise a list of films for when the cops come round asking questions, right? Only detail that changes from one time to the next is the shop the films came from, and that’s easy enough to remember, isn’t it, once you’re told the name.”

  “So someone sifting through the records of a single shop wouldn’t see the same films hired over and over,” Barbara said meditatively.

  “Which’d be like putting the alibi in neon. Which is what they didn’t want to do.”

  “They,” she said.

  “Faraday’s stag party,” Nkata said. “Looks to me like whatever they’re into, these blokes, they’re into together.”

  “But not last Wednesday.”

  “Right. Whatever Faraday was into that night, he was into it alone.”

  “Sir?” The DC who had answered the phone turned from his desk into the room. He said, “Maidstone’s faxing the autopsy over, but there’s not much to add. Asphyxiation from carbon monoxide. And enough alcohol in his system to drop a bull.”

  “There’s a bottle of Black Bush on the bedside table.” Barbara gestured to the photographs. “A glass as well.”

  “From the blood alcohol level,” the DC said, “it’s a good bet that he passed out well before the fire was lit. Slept right through it, in a manner of speaking.”

  “If you got to go,” Nkata remarked, “it’s not a bad way.”

  Lynley rose. “Except that he didn’t.”

  “What?”

  “Have to go.” He picked up his no
w empty cup and his unopened packet of Jaffa Cakes. The former he pitched into the rubbish. The latter he looked at with indecision before making up his mind and tossing them to Havers. “Let’s find him,” he said.

  “Faraday?”

  “Let’s see what he can trot out next about last Wednesday night.”

  She hurried after him, saying, “But what about Jean Cooper? What about the divorce?”

  “She’ll still be there when we’re through with Faraday.”

  CHAPTER

  20

  A telephone call located Chris Faraday. He wasn’t in Little Venice but working instead in Kilburn, in a lock-up midway down a mews called Priory Walk. This wasn’t much more than an alleyway, sided by abandoned buildings with boarded windows and graffiti-covered, dingy brick walls. Aside from a Ladbrokes on the corner and a Chinese take-away next door to it called Dump-Ling’s Exotic Foods, the only truly booming enterprise in the area appeared to be the Platinum Gym and Aerobic Studio, whose “especially designed cushioned flooring which reduces impact to your knees and ankles” was at the moment bearing the weight and the sweating gyrations of a veritable herd of after-work aerobic enthusiasts. A vocal by Cyndi Lauper encouraged them whenever their instructor paused in her relentless counting to take a breath.

  Faraday’s lock-up was directly opposite this gym. Its corrugated metal door was three-quarters closed, but a dusty green van was drawn up next to it, and as they approached, Lynley and Havers could see a pair of trainer-shod feet moving from one side of the lock-up to the other.

  Lynley slapped his hand against the corrugated door, called out, “Faraday?” and ducked beneath it. Havers followed.

  Chris Faraday swung round from a workbench that dropped down from one of the walls. On it, various rubber moulds lay amid bags of plaster and metal tools. Five elaborate pencil sketches rendered on onion-skin paper were pinned above this. They represented coffering, various cove mouldings, and other ceiling ornamentations. They were Adam-like in their delicacy, but at the same time bolder than Adam, as if designed by someone without the slightest hope of ever having a ceiling upon which he could mount them.