Playing for the Ashes

by Elizabeth George

  “What are they asking?”

  “If the police would care to confirm the fact that Kenneth Fleming—who died as a result of a smouldering cigarette—wasn’t a smoker in the first place. And if he wasn’t a smoker, are we trying to suggest that the cigarette in the armchair was left there by someone else? And if so, who?…etc., etc. You know how it goes.”

  They passed a pantechnicon, a hearse, and an army lorry with soldiers riding on benches in the back. They passed a horse trailer and three caravans that crept along, snail-paced and snail-shaped. As they slowed for an upcoming traffic light, Mrs. Whitelaw spoke.

  “They’ve been phoning me as well.”

  “The newspapers?” Lynley gave a look in the mirror. She’d turned away from the window. She’d switched from her spectacles to a pair of dark glasses. “When?”

  “This morning. I had two calls before yours. Three afterwards.”

  “About the cigarette smoking?”

  “About anything I might be willing to tell them. Truth or lie. I’m not certain they care. Just so long as it was something about Ken.”

  “You don’t have to talk to them.”

  “I haven’t talked to anyone.” She went back to looking through the side window, saying, more to herself than to them, “What would be the point? Who could understand?”

  “Understand?” Lynley fed her the question casually, all his attention ostensibly given to his driving.

  Mrs. Whitelaw didn’t immediately offer an answer. When she replied, her voice was quiet. “Who would have thought it,” she said. “A young man of thirty-two—vital, virile, athletic, energetic—actually choosing to live not with some young creature firm of flesh and smooth of skin but with a dried-up old woman. A woman thirty-four years his senior. Old enough to be his mother. Ten years older, in fact, than his actual mother. It’s an obscenity, isn’t it?”

  “More a curiosity, I should say. The situation’s unusual. You see that, no doubt.”

  “I’ve heard the whispers and the titters. I’ve read the gossip. Oedipal relationship. Inability to break away from any primal tie, evidenced in his choice of living arrangements and his unwillingness to end his marriage. Failure to resolve childhood issues with his mother and consequently seeking another. Or on my part: Unwillingness to accept the realities of old age. Seeking a notoriety denied to me in my youth. Longing to prove myself through gaining control of a younger man. Everyone has an opinion. No one accepts the truth.”

  Sergeant Havers pivoted in her seat so that she could see Mrs. Whitelaw. “We’d be interested in hearing the truth,” she said. “We need to hear it, in fact.”

  “What does the sort of relationship I shared with Ken have to do with his death?”

  “The sort of relationship Fleming had with every woman may have had a great deal to do with his death,” Lynley answered.

  She took up her handkerchief and watched her hands folding it over and over until it was a long, thin strip. She said, “I’ve known him since he was fifteen years old. He was a pupil of mine.”

  “You’re a teacher?”

  “Not any longer. Then. On the Isle of Dogs. He was a pupil in one of my English classes. I came to know him because he was…” She cleared her throat. “He was terribly clever. A real crack hand, the other children called him, and they liked him because he was easy with them, easy with himself, easy to be around. Right from the start, he was the sort of boy who knew who he was and didn’t feel the need to pretend he was something else. Nor did he feel the need to rub other children’s noses in the fact that he was more talented than they. I liked him for that enormously. For other things as well. He had dreams. I admired that. It was an unusual quality for a teenager to possess in the East End at that time. We struck up a pupil-teacher friendship. I encouraged him, tried to point him in the right direction.”

  “Which was?”

  “Sixth Form College. Then university.”

  “Did he attend?”

  “He did only a lower sixth year, in Sussex on a governor’s scholarship. After that he came home and went to work for my husband at the printworks. Shortly after that, he married.”

  “Young.”

  “Yes.” She unfolded the handkerchief, spread it against her lap, smoothed it out. “Yes. Ken was young.”

  “You knew the girl he married?”

  “I wasn’t surprised when he finally made the decision to separate. Jean’s a good girl at heart, but she isn’t what Ken should have ended up with.”

  “And Gabriella Patten?”

  “Time would have told.”

  Lynley met the blank gaze of her dark glasses in the rearview mirror. “But you know her, don’t you? You knew him. What do you think?”

  “I think Gabriella is Jean,” she said quietly, “with a great deal more money and a Knightsbridge wardrobe. She isn’t…wasn’t Ken’s equal. But that’s not strange, is it? Don’t you find that most men rarely at heart want to marry an equal? It puts a strain on their strength of ego.”

  “You haven’t described a man who appeared to be struggling with weakness of ego.”

  “He wasn’t. He was struggling with man’s propensity for recognising the familiar and repeating the past.”

  “And the past was what?”

  “Marrying a woman on the strength of his physical passion for her. Honestly and naively believing that physical passion and the emotional rapture engendered by physical passion are both lasting states.”

  “Did you discuss your reservations with him?”

  “We discussed everything, Inspector. Despite what the tabloids have on occasion suggested about us, Ken was like a son in my life. He was, in fact, a son in every way save the formalities of either birth or adoption.”

  “You have no other children?”

  She watched a Porsche pass them, followed by a motorcyclist with long red hair streaming like banners from beneath an SS-shaped helmet. “I have a daughter,” she said.

  “Is she in London?”

  Again, the long pause before she answered, as if the traffic they passed were giving her an indication of which words she should choose and how many. “As far as I know. She and I have been estranged for a number of years.”

  “Which must have made Fleming doubly important to you,” Sergeant Havers noted.

  “Because he took Olivia’s place? I only wish it were that easy, Sergeant. One doesn’t replace one child with another. It’s not like owning a dog.”

  “But can’t a relationship be replaced?”

  “A new relationship can develop. But the cicatrix of the old one remains. And nothing grows on a cicatrix. Nothing grows through it.”

  “But it can become as important as a relationship that has preceded it,” Lynley noted. “Will you agree with that?”

  “It can become more important,” Mrs. Whitelaw said.

  They veered onto the M20 and began heading southeast. Lynley didn’t make his next remark until they were spinning along comfortably in the far right lane.

  “You’ve a great amount of property,” he said. “The factory in Stepney, the house in Kensington, the cottage in Kent. I should guess you’ve other investments as well, especially if the printworks is a going concern.”

  “I’m not a wealthy woman.”

  “I dare say you’re not straitened either.”

  “What the company makes is reinvested into the company, Inspector.”

  “Which makes it a valuable commodity. Is it a family business?”

  “My father-in-law began it. My husband inherited it. When Gordon died, I took it over.”

  “And upon your death? Have you arranged for its future?”

  Sergeant Havers, apparently seeing where Lynley was heading, shifted in her seat to give Mrs. Whitelaw her attention. “What does your will say about your fortune, Mrs. Whitelaw? Who gets what?”

  She took off her sunglasses and slid them into a leather case, which she removed from her purse. She returned her regular spectacles to her nose. �
��My will is written to benefit Ken.”

  “I see,” Lynley said thoughtfully. He saw Sergeant Havers reach in her shoulder bag and bring out her notebook. “Did Fleming know about this?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t see the point of your question.”

  “Might he have told someone? Have you told anyone?”

  “It hardly matters now that he’s dead.”

  “It matters a great deal. If that’s why he’s dead.”

  Her hand reached for her heavy necklace in much the same way she’d reached for it on the previous night. “You’re suggesting—”

  “That someone might not have appreciated the fact that Fleming was your beneficiary. That someone might have felt he’d used—” Lynley searched for a euphemism, “extraordinary means to win your affection and trust.”

  “That happens,” Havers said.

  “I assure you. It didn’t happen in this case.” Mrs. Whitelaw’s words teetered between polite calm and cool anger. “As I said, I’ve known…I knew Ken Fleming from the time he was fifteen years old. He started out my pupil. Over time he became my son and my friend. But he was not…he was not…” Her voice wavered and she stopped herself until she could control it. “He was not my lover. Even though, Inspector, I am frankly still woman enough to have more than once wished myself a twenty-five-year-old girl with her life instead of her death ahead of her. A wish, I imagine you agree, that is not completely without its logic. Women are still women and men are still men, no matter their ages.”

  “And if their ages don’t matter? To either of them?”

  “Ken was unhappy in his marriage. He needed time to sort things out. I was happy to be able to give him that. First in the Springburns when he played for Kent. Then in my home when the Middlesex team offered him a contract. If that looks to people as if he were playing the gigolo with me, or as if I were attempting to put my gnarled claws into a younger man, it simply can’t be helped.”

  “You were the brunt of gossip.”

  “Which was of no consequence to us. We knew the truth. You now know it as well.”

  Lynley wondered about that. He’d discovered long ago that the truth was rarely as simple as a verbal explanation made it out to be.

  They exited the motorway and began to weave through the country roads towards the Springburns. In the market town of Greater Springburn, Saturday morning meant an open air market, which filled the square and clogged the streets with cars looking for spaces to park. They inched through the traffic and headed east on Swan Street, where ornamental cherry trees splashed blossoms the colour of candy floss onto the ground.

  Beyond Greater Springburn, Mrs. Whitelaw directed them through a series of lanes sided by tall hedgerows of yew and blackberry brambles. They finally turned into a lane marked Water Street, and she said, “It’s just along here,” as they passed a line of cottages at the edge of an open field of flax. Just beyond this, they began to make a twisting descent towards a cottage that sat on a slight rise of land, surrounded by conifers and a wall, its drive closed off by crime scene tape. Two cars were drawn up to the wall, one a panda car and the other a metallic blue Rover. Lynley parked in front of the Rover, edging the Bentley part way into the cottage drive.

  He surveyed the area—the hop field opposite, the scattering of old cottages farther along the lane, the distinctive cocked-hat chimneys of a line of oast roundels, the grassy paddock immediately next door. He turned to Mrs. Whitelaw. “Do you need a minute?”

  “I’m ready.”

  “There’ll be some interior damage to the cottage.”

  “I understand.”

  He nodded. Sergeant Havers hopped out and opened Mrs. Whitelaw’s door. The older woman stood still for a moment, breathing in the strong, medicinal scent of rape that made an enormous yellow coverlet on a slope of farmland farther along the lane. A cuckoo was calling somewhere in the distance. Swifts were darting into the sky, wheeling higher and higher on scimitar wings.

  Lynley ducked under the police tape, then held it up for Mrs. Whitelaw. Sergeant Havers followed her, notebook in hand.

  At the top of the drive, Lynley swung the garage door open and Mrs. Whitelaw stepped inside to verify that the Aston Martin within looked like Gabriella Patten’s. She couldn’t be absolutely certain, she told them, because she didn’t know the number plates of Gabriella’s car. But she knew Gabriella drove an Aston Martin. She’d seen it when the woman had come to Kensington to see Ken. This looked like the same car, but if asked to swear to it…

  “That’s fine,” Lynley said as Havers noted the number plates. He asked her to look round the garage to see if anything was amiss.

  There was little enough inside: three bicycles, two of which had flat tyres; one bicycle pump; an ancient three-pronged pitchfork; several baskets hanging from hooks; a folded chaise longue; cushions for outdoor furniture.

  “This wasn’t here before,” Mrs. Whitelaw said in reference to a large sack of cat litter. “I don’t keep cats.” Everything else, she said, seemed to be in order.

  They returned to the drive where they walked through the latticework gate and into the front garden. Lynley looked over its colourful abundance, not for the first time reflecting upon the universal obsession that his countrymen and women seemed to have with urging flora to burst from the soil. He always thought it was a direct reaction to the climate. Month upon month of dreary, wet, grey weather acted as a stimulus to which the only response was a starburst of colour the moment spring gave the remotest hint of appearing.

  They found Inspector Ardery on the terrace behind the cottage. She was sitting at a wicker table beneath a grape arbour, talking into a cellular phone and using a biro to scribble aimless marks on a pad as she did so. She was saying pleasantly, “Listen to me, Bob, I don’t exactly give a shit about your plans with Sally. I have a case. I can’t take the boys this weekend. End of discussion…Yes. Bitch is exactly the epithet I’d choose as well…. Don’t you bloody dare do that…. Bob, I won’t be home, and you know it. Bob!” She folded the mouth piece closed. “Bastard,” she muttered. She set the phone on the table, between a manila folder and a notebook. She looked up, saw them, and said without embarrassment, “Ex-husbands. A species apart. Homo infuriatus.” She rose, brought an ivory hairslide out of the pocket of her trousers, and used it to fasten her hair at the nape of her neck. “Mrs. Whitelaw,” she said and introduced herself. She took several pairs of surgical gloves from her brief case and handed them round. “The dab boys have already come and gone, but I like to be careful all the same.”

  She waited until they had the gloves on before she ducked under the lintel of the kitchen door and led the way into the cottage. Mrs. Whitelaw hesitated just inside, fingering the lock that the fire brigade had broken to get inside. “What should I…?”

  “Take your time,” Lynley told her. “Look round the rooms. Notice as much as you can. Compare what you see to what you know about the place. Sergeant Havers will be with you. Talk to her. Say anything that comes into your mind.” He said to Havers, “Start above.”

  She replied, “Right,” and led Mrs. Whitelaw through the kitchen, saying, “Stairway’s this direction, ma’am?”

  They heard Mrs. Whitelaw say, “Oh dear,” when she saw the condition of the dining room. She added, “The smell.”

  “Soot. Smoke. Lots of this stuff’ll probably have to go, I’m afraid.”

  Their voices faded as they climbed the stairs. Lynley took a moment to scrutinise the kitchen. The building itself was more than four centuries old, but the kitchen had been modernised to include new tiles on the work tops and floor, a leaf-green Aga, chrome fixtures at the sink. Glass-fronted cupboards held dishes and tinned goods. Window sills displayed pots of drooping maidenhair fern.

  “We’ve taken what was in the sink,” Inspector Ardery said as Lynley bent to inspect a double-bowled animal dish just inside the kitchen door. “It looked like dinner for one: plate, wineglass, water glass, one place setting of cutlery. Cold por
k and salad from the fridge. With chutney.”

  “Have you come across the cat?” Lynley began to open and close the kitchen drawers.

  “Kittens,” she said. “There were two of them, according to the milkman. The Patten woman found them abandoned by the spring. We managed to locate them at one of the neighbours. They were wandering in the lane early Thursday morning. The kittens, not the neighbours. We’ve had some interesting news at that end of things, by the way. I’ve had some probationary DCs out interviewing the neighbours since yesterday afternoon.”

  Lynley found nothing unusual in the drawers of cutlery, cooking utensils, and tea towels. He moved to the cupboards. “What did the DCs hear?”

  “It’s what the neighbours heard, actually.” She waited patiently until Lynley turned from the cupboard, his hand on the knob. “An argument. A real screamer, from what John Freestone said. He farms the acreage that begins right across the paddock.”

  “That’s a good forty yards. He must have exceptional ears.”

  “He was doing a fast-walk by the cottage. Around eleven Wednesday night.”

  “Odd time for a stroll.”

  “He’s on a schedule of prescribed cardiovascular activity, or so he said. The truth is, Freestone may just have hoped to get a glimpse of Gabriella’s evening ablutions. According to several accounts, she was well worth glimpsing and not overly particular about drawing the curtains when she began to undress.”

  “And did he? Glimpse her, that is.”

  “He heard a row. Male and female. But mostly female. Lots of colourful language, including some interesting and illuminating names for sexual activities and the male genitalia. That sort of thing.”

  “Did he recognise her voice? Or the man’s?”

  “He said one woman’s shrieking is about the same as another woman’s shrieking to his way of thinking. He couldn’t be sure who it was. But he did voice some surprise that ‘that sweet woman would know setch lang’age.’” She smiled wryly. “I don’t think he gets about much.”

  Lynley chuckled and opened the first cupboard to see an orderly arrangement of plates, glasses, cups, and saucers. He opened the second cupboard. One packet of Silk Cut lay on the shelf in front of assorted tins of everything from new potatoes to soup. He examined the packet. It was still sealed in cellophane.