“Those sorts of parties?”
Faraday glanced uneasily at Olivia. “We watched some films. It was just some blokes getting together, drinking, making noise, and having a lark. It didn’t mean anything.”
“And no women were present? None at all?”
“No. They wouldn’t have wanted to watch that stuff, would they?”
“Pornography?”
“I wouldn’t go that far. It was more artistic than that, actually.” Olivia was looking at him steadily. He grinned and said, “Livie, you know it was nothing. The Naughty Nanny. Daddy’s Little Girl. Bangkok Buddha.”
“Those were the films?” Havers clarified, pencil poised.
Seeing she intended to write them down, Faraday willingly recited the rest although the pits on his cheeks took on a deeper hue as he did so. He said when he’d completed the list, “We got them in Soho. There’s a video rental on Berwick Street.”
“And no women were there,” Lynley said. “You’re sure of that? At no time during the evening?”
“Of course I’m sure. Why do you keep asking?”
“What time did you get home?”
“Home?” Faraday gave Olivia a querying look. “I told you before. It was late. I don’t know. Sometime after four.”
“And you were alone here?” Lynley said to Olivia. “You didn’t go out. You didn’t hear Mr. Faraday return?”
“That’s right, Inspector. So if you don’t mind, can we have our dinner now?”
Lynley left his chair and sauntered to the window where he adjusted the shutters and gave a long scrutiny to Browning’s Island a short distance across the pool. He said, looking out, “There were no women present at the party.”
Faraday said, “What is this? I’ve told you that already.”
“Miss Whitelaw didn’t go?”
“I think I still count as a woman, Inspector,” Olivia said.
“Then where were you and Mr. Faraday heading at half past ten on Wednesday night? And more importantly, where were you coming from when you returned around five the next morning? If, of course, you weren’t at the…You did say it was a stag party?”
Neither of them spoke for a moment. One of the dogs—the three-legged mongrel—lurched to his feet and limped in Olivia’s direction. He placed his misshapen head on her knee. Her hand dropped to it but lay flaccid there.
Faraday looked neither at the police nor at Olivia. Instead, he reached for the walker that Olivia had flung to one side. He righted it, ran his hand along its aluminium framework. Finally, he directed a look at Olivia. Clearly, the decision to clarify the situation or to lie further lay with her.
She said under her breath, “Bidwell. That snoop.” She swung her head to Faraday. “I’ve left my fags by the bed. Will you…?”
“Right.” He seemed happy enough to be out of the room, even for the brief time it would take him to fetch her cigarettes. He returned with Marlboros, a lighter, and a tomato tin with half its label missing. This last he placed between her knees. He shook out a cigarette and lit it for her. She spoke to them without removing it from her mouth. When it needed to have its ash dislodged, she let this heedlessly fall onto her black jersey.
“Chris took me out,” she said. “He went on to the party. He fetched me when the party was over.”
“Out,” Lynley said. “From ten at night until five the next morning?”
“That’s right. Out. From ten at night till five in the morning. Probably more like half past five, which Bidwell would have no doubt been delighted to tell you had he been sober enough to read his watch correctly.”
“You were at a party yourself?”
A laugh gusted from her nose. “While the men were getting sweaty watching porn, the women were elsewhere, having a bake-off of their chocolate gateaux? No, I wasn’t at a party.”
“Then where were you, please?”
“I wasn’t in Kent, if we’re heading back in that direction.”
“Can someone confirm where it is that you were?”
She inhaled and peered at him through the smoke. It veiled her as effectively as it had done yesterday, perhaps more so now because she was so insistent about keeping the cigarette in her mouth.
“Miss Whitelaw,” Lynley said. He was weary. He was hungry. It was getting late. They’d bandied the truth round long enough. “Perhaps we’d all be more comfortable having this conversation elsewhere.” At the workbench Havers snapped her notebook closed.
“Livie,” Faraday said.
“All right.” She stubbed her cigarette out and fumbled with the packet. It slipped from her fingers and fell to the floor. She said, “Leave it,” when Faraday would have picked it up. “I was with my mother,” she told Lynley.
Lynley wasn’t sure what he had expected to hear, but this wasn’t it. He said, “Your mother.”
“Right. You’ve met her, no doubt. Miriam Whitelaw, woman of few but eternally correct words. Number 18 Staffordshire Terrace. The mouldy, old Victorian relic. That’s the house, not my mother, by the way. Although she does come in a fine second in the mould and old department. I went to see her at half past ten on Wednesday night, when Chris set off for the party. He fetched me the next morning on his way home.”
Havers opened her notebook once again. Lynley could hear her pencil scratching furiously against the paper.
“Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?” he asked. The larger question remained unasked: Why hadn’t Miriam Whitelaw herself told him earlier?
“Because it had nothing to do with Kenneth Fleming. His life, his death, his anything. It had to do with me. It had to do with Chris. It had to do with my mother. I didn’t tell you because it was none of your business. She didn’t tell you because she wanted to protect my privacy. What little I have left.”
“No one has privacy in a murder investigation, Miss Whitelaw.”
“Oh balls. What pompous, arrogant, narrow-minded shit. Do you trot that line out for everyone? I didn’t know Kenneth Fleming. I never even met him.”
“Then I’d assume you’d be eager to clear yourself of any suspicion. His death, after all, removes every obstruction to your inheriting your mother’s fortune.”
“Have you always been such a bleeding fool or is this an act for my benefit only?” She raised her head to look at the ceiling. He could see her blink. He watched her throat work. Faraday put his hand on the arm of her chair, but he didn’t touch her. “Look at me,” she said. It sounded as if she spoke through her teeth. She lowered her head and met Lynley’s eyes. “Just bloody look at me and use your brains. I don’t give a shit about my mother’s will. I don’t care about her house, her money, her stocks, her bonds, her business, her anything. I’m dying, all right? Can you deal with that fact, no matter how much it destroys your precious case? I’m dying. Dying. So if I had it in mind to knock off Kenneth Fleming and weasel back into my mother’s will, what in God’s name would be the point? I’ll be dead in eighteen months. She’ll be alive another twenty years. I’m not inheriting anything, from her or anyone. Not anything. Got it?”
She’d begun to tremble. Her legs were jitterbugging against her chair. Faraday murmured her name. She snapped, “No!” without a clear reason. She held her left arm against her body. Her face had taken on a sheen during their interview, and it seemed to glisten more brightly. “I went to see her on Wednesday night because I knew Chris had the party to go to and couldn’t come with me. Because I didn’t want Chris to come with me. Because I needed to see her alone.”
“Alone?” Lynley asked. “Weren’t you running the chance that Fleming would have been there?”
“He didn’t count as far as I was concerned. I couldn’t bear the thought of Chris seeing me grovel. But if Kenneth saw, if he was in the room even, I thought it might increase my chance for success. The way I saw it, Mother’d be only too happy to act the role of Lady Forgiveness and Mother Compassion in front of Kenneth. She wouldn’t think of chucking me into the street if he was there.”
“I found it didn’t matter. Mother saw…” Olivia twisted her head towards Faraday. He seemed to believe that she needed encouragement because he nodded at her and his expression was gentle. “Mother saw me. Like this. Maybe worse than this because it was later, at night, and I’m worse at night. And it turned out that I didn’t need to grovel. I didn’t need to ask her for anything.”
“That’s why you’d gone to see her in the first place? To ask for something?”
“Yes. That’s why.”
“What?”
“It has nothing to do with this. With Kenneth. With his death. With anything but me and my mother. And my father as well.”
“Nonetheless, it’s a final point. We’ll need it. I’m sorry if it’s difficult for you.”
“No. You’re not sorry.” She moved her head from side to side in slow negation. She looked too weary to fight him any longer. “I requested,” she said. “Mother agreed.”
“To what, Miss Whitelaw?”
“To mix my ashes with my father’s, Inspector.”
CHAPTER
17
Barbara Havers was experiencing that God’s-in-His-heaven feeling as she reached the serving platter an instant before Lynley and speared the last hoop of calamari fritti. She lingered over the satisfying decision as to which sauce she would use for the squid’s submersion: marinara, virgin olive oil and herbs, or garlic and butter. She chose the second, wondering which of them was virgin, the olive or the oil. And, for that matter, how either one of them could possibly be a virgin in the first place.
When Lynley had first suggested sharing the calamari to start, she’d said, “Good idea, sir. Calamari it is,” and gazed at the menu with an attempt at arranging her features into something that might communicate the appropriate degree of sophistication. Her most significant experience with Italian food had been the occasional plate of spaghetti bolognese bolted down in one café or another where the spaghetti came from a packet and the bolognese from a tin, and both were slopped onto a plate where a ring of rust-coloured oil quickly seeped from the food like an invitation to permanent dyspepsia.
There had been no spaghetti bolognese on the menu here. Nor had there been an English translation of anything else. One could probably have obtained an English menu for the asking, but that would mean revealing one’s ignorance before one’s superior officer who spoke at least three bloody languages that Barbara was aware of and who perused the menu with great interest and asked the waiter just how stagionato the cinghiale was and what process was used to age it. So she ordered blithely away, mangling pronunciations, affecting an aura of experience, and praying she wasn’t requesting octopus.
Calamari came close, as she discovered. True, it didn’t look like squid. No tentacles gestured companionably to her from the platter. But had she known what it was when she agreed to share it with Lynley, she would have pleaded an allergy to all things having appendages that were even remotely capable of suction.
Her first taste of it reassured her, however. Her second, third, and fourth—moving among the dipping sauces with ever increasing enthusiasm—convinced her that she’d been leading a far too sheltered gastronomic existence. She was making a decided inroad into the artful arrangement of delicate hoops when she first realised that Lynley was hardly keeping pace. She soldiered on, effecting her final prandial ace in triumph and waiting for Lynley to remark upon either her appetite or her table manners.
He did neither. He was watching his fingers tear a piece of focaccia into bits, as if with the intention of scattering the resulting crumbs along the edge of the planter that marked the perimeter of Capannina di Sante, a restaurant that sat a few steps off Kensington High Street and offered—along with a putative but obscure connnection to an eating establishment of the same name in Florence—the Continental experience of al fresco dining whenever the capricious London weather permitted it. Through some process of avian telepathy, six small brown birds had gathered the moment Lynley removed the bread from its wicker serving basket and dropped it onto his plate. Now they hopped expectantly from the planter’s edge to the well-trimmed junipers growing within it, each fastening a bright, beseeching eye on Lynley, who seemed oblivious of them.
Barbara popped the last hoop of calamari into her mouth: She chewed, savoured, swallowed, sighed, and anticipated il secondo, soon to come. She’d chosen it solely for the complexity of its name: tagliatelle fagioli all’uccelletto. All those letters. All those words. However they were supposed to be pronounced, she was sure the dish had to be the chef’s masterwork. If it wasn’t, anatra albicocche would follow. And if she found she didn’t care for that—whatever it was—she had little doubt that Lynley’s dinner would go mostly uneaten, and be passed her way. At least, that’s how things were shaping up so far.
“Well?” she said to him. “Is it the food or the company?”
He said, apropos of nothing as far as she could tell, “Helen cooked for me last night.”
Barbara reached for another piece of focaccia and ignored the birds. Lynley had put on his spectacles to read a wine label and he nodded for the waiter to pour.
“And the grub was so memorable you can’t bear to eat here? Lest the taste of food drive the memory away? You made a vow that nothing would cross your lips unless it came from her hands? What?” Barbara asked. “How much of that squid did you have, anyway? I thought this was supposed to be a celebration. We’ve got our confession. What else do you want?”
“She can’t cook, Havers. Although I imagine she might manage an egg. If she boiled it.”
“So?”
“So nothing. I was merely reminded.”
“Of Helen’s cooking?”
“We had a disagreement.”
“Over her cooking? That’s bloody sexist, Inspector. Is she going to sew buttons and darn socks for you next?”
Lynley returned his spectacles to their case, slipped the case into his pocket. He picked up his glass and considered the colour of the wine before he drank.
“I told her to decide,” he said. “We move forward or we end it. I’m tired of begging and I’m finished with limbo.”
“And did she decide?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to her since. I hadn’t even thought of her, in fact, until just now. What do you think that means? Have I a chance of recovery when she breaks my heart?”
“We all recover when it comes to love.”
“Do we?”
“Recover from sexual love? Romantic love? Yeah. But as far as the other goes, I don’t think we ever recover from that.” She paused as the waiter removed and replaced plates and cutlery. He poured more wine for Lynley, more mineral water for her. “He says he hated him, but I don’t believe that. I think he killed him because he couldn’t stand how much he loved him and how much it hurt to watch him choose Gabriella Patten over him. Because that’s the way Jimmy would have seen it. That’s the way kids always see these things. Not only as a rejection of their mums but as a rejection of themselves as well. Gabriella took his dad—”
“Fleming had been out of the house for years.”
“But it was never permanent until now, was it? There was always hope. Now hope was dead. And to make things worse, to make the rejection feel even more complete, his dad was postponing Jimmy’s birthday holiday. And why? To go to Gabriella.”
“To end their relationship, according to Gabriella.”
“But Jimmy didn’t know that. He thought his dad was running out to Kent to boff her.” Barbara lifted her glass of mineral water and pondered the scenario she’d created. “Wait. What if that’s the key?” She asked the question more of herself than of him. Lynley waited cooperatively. Their second courses arrived. Fresh cheese was offered, Romano or Parmesan. Lynley chose the Romano. Barbara followed his lead. She tucked into her pasta, tomatoes, and beans. Not what she would have expected from the name. But not at all bad. She threw on some salt.
/> “He knew her,” she said, twirling the tagliatelle somewhat inexpertly on the edge of her plate. The waiter had thoughtfully provided her with a large spoon, but she hadn’t a clue how she was supposed to use it. “He saw her. He’d been round her, hadn’t he? Sometimes with his dad. But other times…Other times suppose not. Dad would go off with the other two kids, leaving Jimmy with her. Because Jimmy was the hard nut, wasn’t he? The other two might have been easy to win over, but Jimmy wasn’t. So she’d play up to him. Fleming would even encourage her to do so. She was going to be the boy’s step-mum one day. She’d want him to like her. Fleming’d want him to like her. It was important that he like her. She’d want him, in fact, to more than like her.”
“Havers, you can’t be suggesting she seduced that boy.”
“Why not? You saw her yourself this morning.”
“What I saw was that she had Mollison to win over and not a great deal of time to do it.”
“D’you think that come-on was for Mollison’s benefit? What about for yours? A little glimpse of what you were going to miss out on because you happened to be a cop on a case. But what if you weren’t? Or what if you phoned her later this evening and said you needed to come round to talk and get a few more facts straight? D’you think she wouldn’t like to test her power on you?” Lynley slid the tines of a fork into a scampi. He ate without reply. “She likes to pull men, sir. Her husband told us, Mollison told us, she as much as told us herself. How could she have resisted the chance to pull Jimmy if the chance came along?”
“Frankly?” Lynley asked.
“Frankly.”
“Because he’s repellent. Unwashed, unhygienic, probably infested with body lice, and possibly a carrier of disease. Herpes, syphilis, gonorrhoea, warts, HIV. Gabriella Patten might enjoy exercising her sexual prowess over men, but she didn’t strike me as entirely mindless. Her first concern in any situation would be taking excellent care of Gabriella Patten. We’ve heard that, Havers. From her husband, from Mrs. Whitelaw, from Mollison, from Gabriella herself.”
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