Playing for the Ashes

  “Olivia. Darling. You don’t want to know. You don’t want to be burdened this way.”

  Her voice was soft, so reasonable. Not the voice of the Miriam Whitelaw who once vigourously pursued good works around London, but the voice of a woman altered forever.

  “I need to know,” I told her. “You need to tell me.” So that I would know how to act, what to do, what to think, how to be from this moment forward.

  So she told me. So simple it all was, really. The house left to look occupied—lights on, music playing, and both on timers to wear the guise of the inhabitant’s logical movements that night. Slipping out through the back garden and down the mews under cover of darkness, careful to make no sound and not taking the car because the car wouldn’t be needed at all.

  “But how?” I asked. “How did you get out there? How did you manage?”

  It was more than simple. An underground ride to Victoria Station, where the trains run twenty-four hours a day to Gatwick, where the car hire agencies are open twenty-four hours as well, where without any difficulty a blue Cavalier can be hired for a drive—not a terribly long drive, really—out to Kent, where the key to the cottage can be easily nicked shortly after midnight, when the lights are out and the cottage’s sole inhabitant is asleep so that she doesn’t hear an intruder who takes less than two minutes to fade into the cottage, to plant in an armchair a cigarette bound with matches, a cigarette taken from a packet bought from any tobacconist, anywhere, a common cigarette really, the most common cigarette imaginable. And then back through the kitchen—pausing only to scoop up two kittens because the kittens are innocent, they haven’t chosen to be there, they aren’t meant to die in a fire with her, a great conflagration in which the cottage is sacrificed but that doesn’t matter, she doesn’t matter, nothing matters except Kenneth and putting an end to the pain that she causes him.

  “You meant to…Then it wasn’t an accident.” What was there left to hold on to, I wondered.

  Accident? No. It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t an accident at all. An accident couldn’t be this carefully planned, drifting back into the night, driving back to the airport, where the trains still make the return trip into London, where outside Victoria Station a cab from the rank will take a lone woman to a darkened house midway up Argyll Road from which the trip to Phillips Walk isn’t far and a silent return in the early hours of the morning—no car’s engine to attract any notice—will go unregarded. So simple really. Because who would think that Victoria Station and Gatwick Airport and a car hired for the evening would ever be connected to a fire in Kent?

  But I am in your hands, Olivia.

  What’s it to me, I thought, but more shakily now, and with less conviction. I don’t know this kid. I don’t know his mother. I don’t know his siblings. I never met his father. If he was dim enough to take himself to Kent on the very night that his father died, wasn’t that his problem? Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?

  And then you came to the barge, Inspector.

  ARM, I tried to tell myself at first. You were asking about Kenneth Fleming, but the real reason you’d come was to do a recce. No one had ever before associated us with the movement, but there was always a chance. Chris had taken up with Amanda in violation of the rules, hadn’t he? Perhaps she was a copper’s nark. She’d gathered information, passed it along to her superiors, and here you were to suss things out. It seemed logical enough. Never mind your talk about a murder investigation, you were here to look for evidence to connect us to ARM.

  Which I’ve given you. Here. In this document. Are you wondering why, Inspector? You, so determined that I should commit an act of betrayal…. Would you like to know?

  Well, that street runs in both directions. Walk along it. See how it feels beneath your feet. Then decide. Like me. Decide. Decide.

  We were sitting on the deck of the barge when I finally told Chris what I knew. I’d hoped to convince him that you were really only there sussing things out, relative to ARM, but Chris isn’t a fool. He’d known something was wrong the moment he saw my mother in Kensington. He’d been at the house, he’d seen her condition, he’d heard her words, he’d seen me pore over the newspapers, he’d seen me try and fail to stop reading them. He asked did I want him to know what was going on.

  I was in my canvas chair. Chris was on the deck with his knees drawn up and his jeans hiked and his white socks rucked so that a band of pale flesh showed on each leg. It made him look vulnerable, that position. It made him look young. He clasped his hands round his legs and his wrists slipped out of his jacket sleeves. So knobbly, they were. Just like his elbows, his ankles, and his knees.

  He said, “We’d better talk.”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “It’s to do with your mother.” He didn’t phrase it as a question and I didn’t bother to deny it as a form of reply. Instead, I said, “I’ll be a rag doll soon, Chris. I’ll probably have to be tied to a wheelchair. There’ll be tubes and respirators. Think how bad it’s going to be. And when I die—”

  “You won’t be alone.” He reached out and gripped my ankle with his fingers. He gave my leg a little tug. “That’s not what this has been about, Livie. I give you my word. I’ll take care of you.”

  “Like the dogs,” I whispered.

  “I’ll take care of you.”

  I couldn’t look at him. Instead I looked at the island. The willows, their branches skimming the ground, provided a shelter that in a few more weeks would become a screen behind which lovers could lie in that depression in the ground where scores of lovers had lain before them. But I would not be one of them.

  I extended my hand to Chris. He took it, shifting his position so that he sat next to me, gazing as I was, at the island. As I told him what had happened that night in Kensington, he listened. When I was done, he said, “You don’t have many options here, Livie.”

  “What can they do to him? If there’s a trial, chances are he won’t be found guilty.”

  “If he stands trial—guilty or not—what d’you imagine the rest of his life will be like?”

  “Don’t ask me to do this. Please don’t ask me.”

  I felt his lips press against the back of my hand. He said, “It’s getting cold. I’m getting hungry. Let’s go below, all right?”

  He made dinner. I sat in the galley and watched. He brought our plates to the table, sat opposite me in his usual place, but unlike the usual, he didn’t fall to with enthusiasm. He reached across the table and lightly touched my cheek.

  “What?” I said.

  “That,” he said. He forked up a mound of squash. “Nothing seems right, Livie. What to do. How to be. Sometimes it’s all confused.”

  “I don’t care about what’s right,” I said. “I just want what’s easy.”

  “You and everyone else in the world.”

  “You too?”

  “Yeah. It’s no different for me.”

  But it’s seemed to be different for Chris. He’s always seemed so sure of where he was going and what he was doing. Even now, sitting across the table from me, holding my hand, he still seems sure. I raise my head.

  “So?” he says.

  “So I’ve done it,” I say. I feel his fingers tighten on mine. I say, “If I send this to him, Chris, I can’t go home. I’m here. We’re stuck. You and I. Me. The mess that I am. You can’t…You and…You won’t be able to…” I can’t quite say the rest. The words are so easy—You and Amanda can’t be together the way you’d like to be while I’m still here and I’m still alive, Chris. Have you thought of that?—but I can’t say them. I can’t say her name. I can’t put her name with his.

  He doesn’t move. He watches me. Outside the light is growing steadily. I hear a duck flap on the surface of the canal, taking off or landing, impossible to tell.

  “It’s not easy,” Chris says evenly. “But it’s right, Livie. I do believe that.”

  We look at each other and I wonder what he sees. I know what I see and my chest feels full with t
he need to split open and say all the words that are in my heart. What a relief it would be. Let Chris carry the burden for a while. But he gets to his feet and comes round the table to lift me up and help me to my room and I know that he has burdens enough.

  CHAPTER

  26

  With a “Trust me, darling. It’s the best thing for us. I absolutely promise you won’t regret it,” Helen led Lynley to Hyde Park on Sunday morning. They wore the running clothes she’d purchased for them the previous week, and she insisted that, if they were sincere about getting themselves fit, they had to begin by engaging in a brisk march from Eaton Terrace to Hyde Park Corner, which she had chosen as their starting point. Having decided that they were “warmed up quite enough,” she set off north, in the distant direction of Marble Arch.

  She established an admirable pace for them. They passed at least a dozen other joggers without the slightest trouble. Behind her, Lynley paced himself and concentrated on not getting winded too soon. She was remarkable, really, he thought. She ran beautifully, with her head flung back, her arms bent at the elbow, and her dark hair flying. In fact, he was beginning to think that she had been secretly keeping to a fitness programme in order to impress him when she started to fade just as the Dorchester came into view across Park Lane. He came up next to her, saying, “Too fast a pace, darling?”

  She huffed. “No. No.” She flung out her arms. “Wonderful, isn’t it?…Air…this exercise.”

  “Yes, but you’re going rather red in the face.”

  “Am I?” She continued to chug along determinedly. “But that’s…good…isn’t it? Blood…Circulation. That sort of thing.”

  They pounded forward another fifty yards.

  “I should think…” She was gulping down air like a survivor of asphyxia. “Very good for one…don’t you?”

  “Indeed,” he said. “A cardiovascular workout is probably the best exercise there is in the world. I’m glad you suggested it, Helen. It’s time we made an effort to get in better shape. Shall we slow the pace?”

  “Not…no…at all.” Beads of perspiration were emerging on her forehead and her upper lip. “Good…this…lovely, isn’t?”

  “Quite.” They made a circle round the Joy of Life fountain, and Lynley called out, “Towards Speakers’ Corner or into the park?”

  She waved an arm in a northerly direction. “Corner,” she wheezed.

  “Right. Speakers’ Corner it is. Slower? Faster? What?”

  “This…fine. Wonderful.”

  Lynley stifled a smile. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think we need to put more into this, if we’re going to be serious about exercising regularly. We might start carrying weights as well.”

  “What?”

  “Weights. Have you seen them, darling? You can wear them on your wrists and work your arms while you run. You see, the trouble with running—if we can even call it trouble because God knows it makes me feel absolutely wonderful, doesn’t it you?”

  “Yes…Yes.”

  “The trouble, though—here, let’s increase our speed a bit, I think we’re slowing up—is that the heart gets a workout and the lower body is shaped up, but the upper body can go straight to hell. Now if we were to wear weights on our arms and exercise them as we ran, we would—”

  She stumbled to a sudden halt. She stood, hands on knees, her chest heaving and her breath coming in what could have been taken for shrieks.

  “Something wrong, Helen?” Lynley ran in place. “A complete circuit of the park should take us only…I don’t know. What’s the circumference? Six miles?”

  “My God,” she gasped. “This…My lungs…”

  “Perhaps we ought to rest. Two minutes, all right? One doesn’t want to cool down. You can strain a muscle if you get too cool and then start off again. We don’t want that.”

  “No. No.” It took her the two minutes to catch her breath, body flung on the grass and head raised to the sky. When she could finally breathe normally, she didn’t rise to her feet. Instead, she lay back, closed her eyes, and said, “Find me a taxi.”

  He joined her, leaning back on his elbows. “Nonsense, Helen. We’ve only begun. You need to work up to it. You need to get used to it. If I set the alarm for five each morning and we’re faithful about getting up when it goes off, I dare say you’ll be able to run round this park two times over in no more than six months. What do you say?”

  She opened one eye and fixed it on him. “Taxi. And you’re a beast, Lord Asherton. How long have you been running without telling me, please?”

  He smiled and fingered a lock of her hair. “November.”

  She turned her head away in disgust. “You unconscionable rat. Have you been laughing at my expense since last week?”

  “Never, darling.” And he coughed abruptly to cover a laugh now.

  “Have you been getting up at five?”

  “Six mostly.”

  “And running?”

  “Hmm.”

  “And do you propose to continue to do so?”

  “Of course. As you yourself said, it’s the best exercise there is and we need to keep in shape.”

  “Right.” She gestured towards Park Lane and flopped her arm to the ground. “Taxi,” she said. “I’ll exercise later.”

  Denton intercepted them on their way up the stairs to shower off their morning’s exertion. He was on his way out, a bouquet of flowers in one hand, a bottle of wine in the other, and the words lady killer practically incised upon his forehead. He paused, changed directions, and went into the drawing room, saying to Lynley, “A bloke popped by not ten minutes after you’d gone.” He came back out with a large manila envelope tucked under his arm. Lynley relieved him of it as he said, “He brought this by. Didn’t want to stay. He said just to give it to the inspector as soon as he gets back.”

  Lynley unfastened the envelope’s clasp, saying, “Are you off, then?”

  “Picnic in Dorking. Box Hill,” Denton said.

  “Ah. Seeing a Janeite these days?”

  “Pardon, m’lord?”

  “Nothing. Just stay out of trouble, will you?”

  Denton grinned. “Always.” They could hear him whistling as he shut the front door behind him.

  “What is it, Tommy?” Helen returned to him from the stairway as he pulled out the contents of the envelope: a stack of yellow lined pads, each covered with an uneven scrawl rendered in pencil. He read the first words on the top pad—Chris has taken the dogs for a run—and then he drew a deep breath and let it out.

  “Tommy?” Helen said.

  “Olivia,” he answered.

  “She took your bait, then.”

  “It appears that she did.”

  But Lynley found that she had laid her own bait as well. While Helen showered, washed her hair, dressed, and did whatever else it was that women found necessary to eat up at least ninety minutes, he read by the window in the drawing room. And he saw what Olivia had meant him to see. And he felt what she had meant him to feel. When she first revealed the information about ARM—so unnecessary to what he needed from her to bring the investigation into Kenneth Fleming’s death to a successful conclusion—he thought, Wait, what is this, why? But then he saw what she was doing, and he knew it arose from the anger and despair with which she had faced the act of betrayal that he had asked her to commit.

  He was reading the final pad of writing when Helen rejoined him. She picked up the other pads. She began to read as well. She said nothing when he completed his reading, tossed the pad down, and left the room. She merely continued, flipping the pages quietly, her bare feet and slim legs stretched out on the sofa, a pillow at her back.

  Lynley went to shower and change. He thought about some of the ironies of life: meeting the right person at the worst possible time, deciding upon a course of action only to have it bring about one’s own downfall, having a cherished belief proven fallacious, attaining what one desperately wants only to discover one doesn’t actually want it at all. And this one, of
course, this final irony. Having thrown down a gauntlet comprising half-truths, outright lies, and deliberate misinformation only to have a gauntlet of fact thrown down in return.

  Decide, he could hear her taunting him. So decide, Inspector. You can do it. Decide.

  When he rejoined Helen, she was midway through the stack of pads. As she read, he went to the breakfront cabinet against the wall and began restlessly flipping through a line of CDs. He didn’t know what he was looking for any more than he would know when he found it.

  Helen continued to read. He aimlessly chose Chopin. Opus 53 in A-flat Major. It was his favourite piece by a composer non-Russian. When the music began to pour from his stereo, he went to the sofa. Helen drew up her feet and changed her position. He sat next to her, kissed the side of her head.

  They didn’t speak until she had finished reading, and by then another piece of music had begun.

  She said, “So you were right.” And when he nodded, “You knew it all.”

  “Not all. I didn’t know how she’d managed it. And I didn’t know who she had hoped would be arrested if it came down to it.”

  “Who?” Helen asked.

  “Jean Cooper.”

  “The wife? I don’t see—”

  “She hired a blue Cavalier. She dressed in a fashion she never would have worn otherwise. Had either she or the car been seen at the cottage that night, the description any witness gave would match Jean Cooper.”

  “But the boy…Tommy, didn’t the boy say the woman he saw had light hair?”

  “Light hair, grey hair. He wasn’t wearing his glasses. He recognised the car, he only half saw the woman, he assumed the rest. He thought his mother had come to see his father. And she had reason to see him, reason to kill Gabriella Patten as well.”

  Helen nodded thoughtfully. “If Fleming had told Miriam Whitelaw that he was going to Kent to end his affair with Gabriella…”

  “He’d still be alive.”

  “So why didn’t he tell her?”

  “Pride. He’d made a mess of his life once before. He wouldn’t have wanted her to know how close he’d come to making a mess of it again.”