Playing for the Ashes

by Elizabeth George

  “Evening,” Barbara said.

  Lynley looked up. The woman turned in her chair. Her face betrayed nothing, and Barbara noticed that Miss Deluxe Fashionplate didn’t bother to evaluate her appearance the way another woman might. Even Barbara’s red high-top trainers went completely disregarded.

  “Ah. Good,” Lynley said. He set down his paperwork and took off his spectacles. “Havers. At last.”

  She saw that a sandwich wrapped in cellophane, a packet of crisps, and a cup with a lid sat waiting for her on the desk in front of the empty chair. She sauntered over to it and picked up the sandwich, which she unwrapped and sniffed suspiciously. She lifted the bread. The mixture inside looked like liver paste blended with spinach. It smelled like fish. She shuddered.

  “It was the best I could do,” Lynley said.

  “Ptomaine on whole wheat?”

  “With an antidote of Bovril to wash it down.”

  “You’re spoiling me with your thoughtfulness, sir.” To the woman, Barbara gave a nod designed to acknowledge her presence at the same time as it communicated disapproval. That social nicety taken care of, she plopped into the chair. At least the crisps were salt and vinegar. She ripped open the bag and began to munch.

  “So what’s up?” she asked. Her voice was casual but her meaningful look in the direction of the other woman said the rest: Who the hell is the beauty queen and what the hell is she doing here and where the dickens is Helen if you need a companion on the very Friday night when you meant to ask her to marry you and did she refuse again and is this how quickly you’ve managed to rebound from the disappointment you blighter you dog?

  Lynley received the message, pushed back his chair, and regarded Havers evenly. After a moment he said, “Sergeant, this is Detective Inspector Isabelle Ardery, Maidstone CID. She’s been good enough to bring us some information. Can you tear yourself away from speculations entirely unrelated to the case and listen to the facts?” Beneath the question she read his unspoken response to her unspoken allegations: Give me a modicum of credit, please.

  Barbara winced and said, “Sorry, sir.” She wiped her hand on her trousers and extended it to Inspector Ardery.

  Ardery shook. She glanced between them but didn’t pretend to understand their exchange. In fact, she didn’t seem interested in it. Her lips curved fractionally in Barbara’s direction, but what went for a smile was merely a cool, professional obligation. Perhaps she wasn’t Lynley’s type after all, Barbara decided.

  “What have we got?” She unlidded her Bovril and took a sip.

  “Arson,” Lynley said. “A body as well. Inspector, if you’d put my sergeant in the picture….”

  In a formal, steady tone Inspector Ardery listed the details: a fifteenth-century restored cottage not far from a market town called Greater Springburn in Kent, a woman in residence, the milkman making his morning delivery, the newspaper and post gone uncollected, a peek through the windows, a burned chair, a trail of deadly smoke against window and wall, a stairway that acted—as all stairways do when a fire breaks out—like a chimney, a body upstairs, and finally the source of ignition.

  She opened her shoulder bag which lay on the floor next to her foot. From it, she brought forth a packet of cigarettes, a box of wooden matches, and an elastic band. For a moment Barbara thought, with a rush of delight, that the inspector was actually going to light up, giving Barbara herself an excuse to do likewise. But instead, she spilled six matches from the box onto the desk and shook a cigarette on top of them.

  “The fire raiser used an incendiary device,” Ardery said. “It was primitive but nonetheless quite effective.” Approximately an inch from the tobacco end of the filtered cigarette, she created a sheafing of matches, their heads up. She fastened them in place with the elastic band and held the contrivance in the palm of her hand. “It acts like a timer. Anyone can make one.”

  Barbara took the cigarette from Ardery’s palm and examined it. The inspector continued to speak. “The fire raiser lights the tobacco and places the cigarette where he wants the blaze, in this case tucked between the cushion and the arm of a wingback chair. He leaves. In four to seven minutes, the cigarette burns down and the matches flame. The fire starts.”

  “Why the exact time span?” Barbara asked.

  “Each brand of cigarette burns at a different rate.”

  “Do we know the brand?” Lynley had replaced his spectacles on his nose. He was glancing through the report again.

  “Not at the moment. My lab has the works—the cigarette, the matches, and the band that held them together. We’ll—”

  “You’re testing for saliva and latent prints?”

  She offered another half-smile. “As you’d expect, Inspector, we’ve a fine lab in Kent and we do know how to use it. But as far as prints go, we’re unlikely to come up with anything more than partials, so I’m afraid you can’t expect too much help there.”

  Lynley, Barbara noted, ignored the unspoken reproach. “As to the brand?” he asked.

  “We’ll know the brand for a certainty. The cigarette end will tell us.”

  Lynley handed Barbara a set of photographs as Ardery said, “It was meant to look like an accident. What the raiser didn’t know is that the cigarette, the matches, and the elastic band wouldn’t burn completely. That’s not, of course, an unreasonable mistake for the raiser to have made. And the benefit is ours as it tells he was a nonprofessional.”

  “Why didn’t they burn?” Barbara asked. She began to flip through the pictures. They matched Inspector Ardery’s description of the scene: the gutted chair, the patterns on the wall, the deadly trail of smoke. She set them aside and looked up for an answer before going on to the pictures of the body. “Why didn’t they burn?” she repeated.

  “Because cigarettes and matches generally remain on the top of ashes and debris.”

  Barbara nodded thoughtfully. She dug out the last of her crisps, ate them, and balled up the bag, which she lobbed into the rubbish. “So why’re we in on it?” she asked Lynley. “This could be a suicide, couldn’t it? Made to look like an accident for insurance purposes?”

  “That possibility can’t be overlooked,” Ardery said. “The chair put out as much carbon monoxide as an engine’s exhaust.”

  “So couldn’t the victim have set the chair ready to go up in flames, lit the cigarette, popped six or eight pills, had a few drinks, and Bob’s your grim-reaping uncle?”

  “No one’s discounting that,” Lynley said, “although all things considered, it seems unlikely.”

  “All things? What things?”

  “The postmortem’s not done. They took the body directly to autopsy. According to Inspector Ardery, the medical examiner has leap-frogged over three other corpses to get his hands on this one. We’ll have the preliminary facts on the amount of carbon monoxide in the blood straightaway. But the drug screen’s going to take some time.”

  Barbara looked from Lynley to Ardery. “Right,” she said slowly. “Okay. I’ve got it. But the drug screen’ll take weeks. So why’d we get the call now?”

  “Because of the corpse.”

  “The corpse?” She picked up the rest of the pictures. They had been taken in a low-ceilinged bedroom. The body of a man lay diagonally across a brass bed. He was on his stomach, partially clothed in grey trousers, black socks, and a pale blue shirt with the sleeves rolled above the elbows. His left arm cushioned his head on the pillow. His right arm was extended towards the bedside table on which sat an empty glass and a bottle of Bushmills. He’d been photographed from every possible angle, near and far. Barbara flipped to the close-ups.

  His eyes were seven-eighths shut, with a crescent of white showing. His skin was flushed unevenly, nearly red in the lips and on the cheeks, closer to pink on the one exposed temple, the forehead, and the chin. A thin line of froth bubbled at one corner of his mouth. It too was stained pink. Barbara studied his face. It looked vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t place it. Politician? she wondered. Television
actor?

  “Who is he?” she asked.

  “Kenneth Fleming.”

  She looked up from the pictures to Lynley, then to Ardery. “Not…?”

  “Yes.”

  She held the photographs sideways and examined the face. “Do the media know?”

  Inspector Ardery answered. “The local CID’s chief superintendent was waiting for formal identification of the body, which—” she turned her wrist and examined the face of a fine-looking gold watch, “will have occurred long before now. But that’s merely a formality as Mr. Fleming’s identification was there in the bedroom, in his jacket pocket.”

  “Still,” Barbara said, “that could be misdirection if this bloke looks enough like him and someone wanted people to think—”

  Lynley stopped her by raising his hand. “Unlikely, Havers. The local police recognised him themselves.”

  “Ah.” She had to admit that recognising Kenneth Fleming would have been easy enough for anyone who fancied cricket. Fleming was currently the country’s foremost batsman, and he’d been something of a legend for the last two years. He’d been chosen to play for England for the first time at the unusual age of thirty. He’d not come up in the typical way: either through secondary school and university cricket grounds or through experience with the colts and the county seconds. Rather he had played in an East End league for a factory team, of all things, where a retired coach from the Kent county side had seen him one day and had offered to take him on. A long spate of private coaching, it was. Which was one mark against him, something people called a variation of the silver spoon syndrome.

  His initial appearance at the wicket for England had ended in a humiliating golden duck, effected at Lord’s in front of a near capacity crowd when one of the New Zealand fielders managed to catch his first and only shot. Which was a second mark against him.

  Fleming left the field to the jeers of his countrymen, suffered the ignominy of trudging past the unforgiving and unforgetful members of the Marylebone Cricket Club who as always were holding court in the amber-bricked Pavilion, and he responded to a muted catcall in the Long Room by making a decidedly unsportsmanlike gesture. Which was a third mark against him.

  All the marks were the stuff of journalism and the even greater stuff of the daily tabloids. Within a week the country’s cricket-lovers were divided evenly between give-the-poor-bloke-a-chance and cut-off-his-cobblers. Never a group to cave in to public opinion when a test match was at stake, the national selectors decided upon the former. Kenneth Fleming defended the wicket for a second time in a match at Old Trafford. He took guard in a combination of silence and grave reservations. By the time he was through, he’d scored a century. When the bowler finally managed to dismiss him, he’d put 125 runs on the scoreboard for England. He’d never looked back.

  Lynley was saying, “Greater Springburn called in their divisional people at Maidstone. Maidstone”—with a nod to Inspector Ardery—“made the decision to hand us the case.”

  Ardery demurred. She didn’t sound happy about it. “Not I, Inspector. It was my CC’s call.”

  “Just because it’s Fleming?” Barbara asked. “I’d think you lot would be anxious to keep the case to yourselves.”

  “I’d prefer it that way,” Ardery said. “Unfortunately, the principals involved in this particular death appear to be spread all over London.”

  “Ah. Politics.”

  “Indeed.”

  All three of them knew how it worked. London was divided into individual policing districts. Protocol would require the Kent police to clear with the resident district commanding officer every invasion into his patch to conduct an interrogation or an interview. The paperwork, phone calls, and political manoeuvring could take as much time as the investigation itself. Far easier to hand it over to the higher-ups at New Scotland Yard.

  “Inspector Ardery will handle the case in Kent,” Lynley said.

  “It’s already long in motion, Inspector,” Ardery clarified. “Our crime scene team has been at the cottage since one this afternoon.”

  “While we do our part in London,” Lynley finished.

  Barbara frowned at the irregularity of what they were setting up. But she phrased her objection carefully, aware of Inspector Ardery’s understandable inclination to protect her turf. “Won’t that get everyone’s wires crossed, sir? The left hand not knowing. The blind leading the deaf. You know what I mean.”

  “It shouldn’t be a problem. Inspector Ardery and I shall coordinate the investigation.”

  Inspector Ardery and I. He made the statement in an easy, generous fashion, but Barbara heard the implications beneath it as well as if he’d shared them aloud. Ardery herself had wanted the case. Her higher-ups had snatched it from her. Lynley and Havers would do very well to keep Ardery’s feathers oiled if they expected the cooperation they were going to need from her crime scene team.

  “Oh,” Barbara said. “Right. Right. What’s first, then?”

  Ardery got to her feet in a single lithe movement. She was, Barbara saw, exceedingly tall. When Lynley stood as well, his height of six feet and two inches gave him only the two inches over her.

  Ardery said, “You’ve things to discuss at this point, Inspector. I dare say you won’t be needing me further. I’ve put my number at the top of the report.”

  “You have.” Lynley fished in the drawer of his desk, brought out a card, and handed it to her.

  She put it in her shoulder bag without glancing at it. “I’ll phone you in the morning. I should have some information from the lab by then.”

  “Fine.” He picked up the report she’d brought with her. He tapped the photographs into place underneath the documents. He placed the report in the centre of the blotter that was itself in the centre of his desk. Clearly, he was waiting for her to take her leave and she was waiting for him to make some sort of comment prior to that. Looking forward to working with you might have done it, but it also would have danced a quick tango with the truth.

  “Good evening, then,” Inspector Ardery finally said. She added with a deliberate, amused smile at Lynley’s manner of dress, “And I do apologise for however I may have disrupted your weekend plans.” She nodded at Barbara, said the single-word farewell of “Sergeant,” and left them.

  Her footsteps echoed sharply as she made her way from Lynley’s office to the lift. Barbara said, “You think they keep her on ice in Maidstone and only defrost her for special occasions?”

  “I think she’s got a rough job in a rougher profession.” He returned to his seat and began flipping through some papers. Barbara looked at him shrewdly.

  “Blimey. Did you like her? She’s pretty enough and I admit when I first saw her sitting here I thought that you…Well, you guessed that, didn’t you? But did you actually like her?”

  “I’m not required to like her,” Lynley said. “I’m merely required to work with her. With you as well. So shall we begin?”

  He was pulling rank, something he rarely did. Barbara felt like grousing about it, but she knew that the equality of rank between him and Ardery meant that they would stick together when the going got tricky. There was no point to arguing. So she said, “Right.”

  He referred to the report. “We have several interesting facts. According to the preliminary report, Fleming died Wednesday night or early Thursday morning. Right now they’re estimating somewhere between midnight and three.” He read for a moment and ticked off something in the report with a pencil. “He was found this morning…at quarter to eleven, by the time the Greater Springburn police arrived and managed to get into the cottage.”

  “Why’s that interesting?”

  “Because—fact of interest number one—from Wednesday night until Friday morning, no one reported Kenneth Fleming missing.”

  “Perhaps he’d gone off for a few days to spend time by himself.”

  “That leads us to fact of interest number two. In taking himself to this particular cottage in the Springburns, he wasn’t ch
oosing solitude. There was a woman staying there. Gabriella Patten.”

  “Is she important?”

  “She’s the wife of Hugh Patten.”

  “Who is…?”

  “The director of a company called Powersource. They’re sponsoring this summer’s test matches against Australia. And she—Gabriella, his wife—has gone missing. But her car’s still at the cottage in the garage. What does that suggest to you?”

  “We’ve got a suspect?”

  “Quite possibly, I’d say.”

  “Or a kidnapping?”

  He teetered his hand back and forth in an I-truly-doubt-it gesture. He went on. “Fact of interest number three. Although Fleming was found in the bedroom, his body—as you saw—was fully clothed save for his jacket. And there was no overnight case in the bedroom or in the cottage.”

  “He hadn’t intended to stay? He may have been knocked unconscious and dragged up there to make it look like he’d decided to have a kip?”

  “And fact of interest number four. His wife and family live on the Isle of Dogs. But Fleming himself lives in Kensington and has done for the last two years.”

  “So they’re separated, right? So why’s that fact of interest number four?”

  “Because he lives—in Kensington—with the woman who owns the cottage in Kent.”

  “This Gabriella Patten?”

  “No. A third woman altogether. Someone called—” Lynley ran his finger down the page, “Miriam Whitelaw.”

  Barbara put her ankle on her knee and played with the lace of her red high-top trainer. “Busy bloke, this Fleming, when he wasn’t playing cricket. A wife on the Isle of Dogs, a what…a lover in Kensington?”