Only in this case of Kenneth Fleming, the dialogue between Holmes and Gregory would have been altered, from the dog in the night-time to the suspect’s statement. Because that’s where Lynley’s attention was drawn: to the curious incident of the suspect’s statement.
The suspect in question had said absolutely nothing.
Which was—at the end of things—what was so curious.
CHAPTER
21
“Let’s go back to the moment you opened the cottage door,” Lynley said. “Remind me again. Which door was it?”
Jimmy Cooper lifted a hand to his mouth and ripped a sliver of flesh from his finger. They’d been in the interview room for more than an hour, and during that time the boy had managed to draw blood twice, neither time apparently feeling any pain.
Lynley had kept Friskin and Jimmy Cooper waiting in the interview room for forty-seven minutes. He wanted the boy as much on edge as was possible when he finally joined them, so he’d allowed solicitor and client to simmer in the sauce of their own anticipation while they were forced to listen to efficient-police-business-as-usual going on outside in the corridor. There was no question that Friskin was astute enough to have informed his client of the ploy that the police were using in making them wait, but Friskin had no real control over the boy’s psychological state. It was Jimmy’s neck on the line, after all, not his solicitor’s. Lynley was depending upon the boy’s ability to realise that fact.
“Are you intending to bring charges against my client?” Mr. Friskin sounded testy. He and Jimmy had once again run the media gauntlet between Victoria Street and Broadway, and the solicitor didn’t appear to be enjoying the experience. “We’re happy to cooperate with the police, as I believe our presence here has indicated from the first, but if you’ve no intention of bringing charges, don’t you agree that Jim might be better off spending his time in school?”
Lynley didn’t bother to point out to Friskin that the George Green Comprehensive had given Jimmy over to the ministrations of Social Services and the truancy officers during Autumn term. He knew that the solicitor’s protest was more a matter of form than of substance, an overt illustration of support for his client designed to gain his confidence.
Friskin continued. “We’ve raked over the same facts at least four times. A fifth time isn’t going to change them.”
“Can you clarify for me which door it was?” Lynley asked again.
Friskin made much of sighing in disgust. Jimmy shifted his weight from buttock to buttock. “I already said. The kitchen.”
“And you used the key…?”
“From the shed. I already told you that too.”
“Yes. You’ve said as much. I merely want to make certain we’ve got the facts completely straight. You put the key in the lock. You turned the key. What happened next?”
“What d’you mean what happened next?”
“This is ridiculous,” Friskin said.
“What’s s’posed to happen?” Jimmy asked. “I opened the naffing door and I went inside.”
“How did you open the door?”
“Shit!” Jimmy shoved his chair away from the table.
“Inspector,” Friskin interposed. “Is this sojourn into the minutiae of door opening absolutely necessary? What’s the point? What are you after from my client?”
“Did the door swing open once you turned the key?” Lynley asked. “Or did you have to push it?”
“Jim…” Friskin cautioned, as if suddenly realising where Lynley was heading.
Jimmy jerked a shoulder away from the solicitor, perhaps his way of telling Friskin to shove off. “Course I pushed it. How else d’you open a door?”
“Fine. Tell me how.”
“How what?”
“How you pushed it.”
“I just gave it a shove.”
“Below the knob? Above the knob? On the knob? Where?”
“I don’t know.” The boy slouched in his chair. “Above I guess.”
“You gave it a shove above the doorknob. The door opened. You went inside. Were the lights on inside?”
Jimmy furrowed his brow. It was a question Lynley hadn’t asked before. Jimmy shook his head.
“Did you switch them on?”
“Why would I?”
“I expect you’d have wanted to find your way about. You would have needed to locate the armchair. Did you have a torch with you? Did you light a match?”
Jimmy appeared to mull over the options—switching on the lights, carrying a torch, striking a match—and what each of the options might imply. He finally settled on saying, “I couldn’t take a torch on my motorbike, could I?”
“Then you used a match?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then you switched on the lights?”
“I might of. For a second.”
“Fine. Then what?”
“Then I did what I already said I did. I lit the bloody fag and I stuffed it in the chair. Then I left.”
Lynley nodded thoughtfully. He put on his spectacles and removed the photographs of the crime scene from a manila folder. He sifted through them, saying as he perused them, “You didn’t see your father?”
“I already said—”
“You didn’t speak to him?”
“No.”
“You didn’t hear him moving about in the bedroom above?”
“I told you all that.”
“Yes. You did.” Lynley laid the pictures out. Jimmy kept his eyes averted. Lynley made much of studying them. He finally raised his head and said, “You left the way you had come? Through the kitchen?”
“Yeah.”
“Had you left the door opened?”
Jimmy’s right hand snaked to his mouth. His index finger slipped between his front teeth and he was chewing before he seemed to realise it. “Yeah. I guess.”
“It was open?” Lynley asked sharply.
Jimmy shifted gears. “No.”
“It was shut?”
“Yeah. Shut. It was shut. Shut.”
“You’re certain about this?”
Friskin leaned forward. “Exactly how many more times is he going to have to—”
“And you slipped in and slipped out with no impediments?”
“What?”
“No difficulties. You encountered nothing. No one.”
“I said that, di’n’t I? I said it ten times.”
“Then what happened to the animals?” Lynley asked. “Mrs. Patten said that the animals were inside when she left.”
“I didn’t see no animals.”
“They weren’t in the cottage?”
“I’m not saying that.”
“You’ve said you watched the cottage from the bottom of the garden. You’ve told me you saw your father through the kitchen window. You’ve said you saw when he went up to bed. Did you also see him open the door? Did you see him put the kittens out?”
Jimmy’s face declared that he realised the questions were some sort of trick. But he clearly couldn’t fathom what the nature of the trick was. “I don’t know, see. I don’t remember.”
“Perhaps your father put them out before you arrived. Did you notice the kittens in the garden somewhere?”
“Who cares a sod about them bleeding cats?”
Lynley rearranged the photographs. Jimmy’s glance dropped to them and quickly darted away.
“This is a waste of everyone’s time,” Friskin said. “We’re not making any progress, and we have no hope of making progress unless and until you have something new to work with. When you do, Jim will be more than willing to cooperate with your questions, but until that time—”
“What did you wear that night, Jimmy?” Lynley asked.
“Inspector, he’s already told you—”
“A T-shirt, as I recall,” Lynley said. “Is that right? Blue jeans. A pullover. The Doc Martens. Anything else?”
“Underpants and socks.” Jimmy smirked. “Same ’s I got on right now.”
“And that’s all.”
“That’s it.”
“Nothing else?”
“Inspector—”
“Nothing else, Jimmy?”
“I said. Nothing else.”
Lynley removed his glasses and laid them on the table, saying, “That’s intriguing, then.”
“Why?”
“Because you left no fingerprints, so I’d assumed you wore gloves.”
“I didn’t touch nothing.”
“But you’ve just explained how you touched the door to shove it open. Yet it didn’t bear your fingerprints. On the wood, on the knob, inside, outside. The kitchen light switch had no prints of yours either.”
“I wiped them off. I forgot. Tha’s right. I wiped them off.”
“You wiped your prints off and yet managed to leave all the other prints on? How did you orchestrate that?”
Friskin straightened in his chair and looked sharply at the boy. Then he turned his attention to Lynley. He kept silent.
Jimmy shuffled his feet beneath his chair. He pounded the toe of his trainer into the floor. He too said nothing.
“And if you managed the feat of wiping your prints off at the same time as you preserved all the others, why did you then leave your fingerprints on the ceramic duck in the potting shed?”
“I did what I did.”
Friskin said, “May we have a moment, Inspector?”
Lynley began to rise.
“I don’t need no moment!” Jimmy said. “I told you what I did. I said it and said it. I got the key. I went inside. I put the fag in the chair.”
“No,” Lynley said. “That’s not what happened.”
“It is! I told you and told you and—”
“You’ve told us how you imagined it happened. Perhaps you’ve told us how you would have carried it off had you been given the opportunity. But you haven’t told us how it was done.”
“I have!”
“No.” Lynley stopped the tape recorder. He removed the cassette and replaced it with one from their previous session. It was pre-set at the spot he’d selected earlier that morning, and he punched the button and let it play. Their voices issued from the speakers.
“Were you smoking a cigarette at the time?”
“What d’you think? I’m some sort of wally?”
“Was it like these? A JPS?”
“Yeah. Tha’s right. A JPS.”
“And you lit it? Will you show me, please?”
“Show you what?”
“How you lit the cigarette.”
Lynley shut off the machine, removed the tape, replaced it with the cassette from this current session. He punched record.
“So?” Jimmy said. “I said what I said. I did what I did.”
“With a JPS?”
“You heard it, di’n’t you?”
“Yes. I heard it.” Lynley rubbed his forehead, then dropped his hand to observe the boy. Jimmy had tilted his chair onto its back legs and was rocking it. Lynley said, “Why are you lying, Jim?”
“I never—”
“What don’t you want us to know?”
The boy continued to rock. “Hey, I told you—”
“Not the truth. You haven’t told me that.”
“I was there. I said.”
“Yes. You were there. You were in the garden. You were in the potting shed. But you weren’t in the cottage. You didn’t kill your father any more than I did.”
“I did. Bastard. I gave it to him good.”
“The day your father was murdered was the same day that your mother was supposed to acknowledge his petition for divorce. Did you know that, Jim?”
“He deserved to die.”
“But your mother didn’t want to divorce. If she’d wanted that, she would have served him with her own petition two years after he’d left his family. That’s legal desertion. She would have had grounds.”
“I wanted him dead.”
“But instead she held on for four years. And she may have thought she was finally going to win him back.”
“I’d kill him again if I got the chance.”
“Would she have reason to think that, Jim? After all, your father had continued to visit her throughout those years. When you kids weren’t home. Did you know that?”
“I did it. I did.”
“I dare say her hopes may still have been strong. If he continued to seek her out.”
Jimmy dropped the legs of his chair to the floor. His hands twisted inside his T-shirt, stretching the material in the direction of his knees. He said, “I told you.” And his meaning was clear: Bugger off. I’m not saying nothing else.
Lynley rose. “We won’t be bringing charges against your client,” he said to Mr. Friskin.
Jimmy’s head flew up.
“But we’ll want to talk to him again. Once he’s had a chance to recall exactly what happened last Wednesday night.”
Two hours later, Barbara Havers was giving Lynley her report into the Wednesday-night movements of Chris Faraday and Amanda Beckstead. Amanda, she told him, lived in a conversion on Moreton Street. There were neighbours above and neighbours below, a friendly group who acted as if they spent all of their waking hours monitoring one another’s business. Amanda confirmed that Chris Faraday had been with her.
“It’s a rather difficult situation because of Livie,” she’d said in a soft, composed voice, her right hand curved gently round her left. She’d been on her lunch hour from the animal grooming and photography studio that she and her brother ran in Pimlico, and she’d agreed to a chat with the detective sergeant so long as she was able to eat her cheese sandwich and drink her bottle of Evian at the same time. They’d walked to Pimlico Gardens and Shrubbery at the edge of the river, where they sat not far from the statue of William Huskisson, a nineteenth-century statesman rendered in stone and attired in a toga and what appeared to be riding boots. Amanda didn’t seem to notice the incongruity of Huskisson’s apparel, nor did she seem bothered by the wind that was picking up off the river or the cyclonic howl of traffic tearing along Grosvenor Road. She merely sat in an easy lotus position on the wooden bench and spoke earnestly as she attended to her lunch.
“Livie and Chris have lived together for some years,” she said, “and it hasn’t seemed right for Chris to move on now that Livie’s so ill. I’ve suggested we might try to live communally, my brother, Chris, Livie, myself. But Chris doesn’t want that. He says Livie wouldn’t be able to deal with it if she knew he and I wanted to be together. She’d insist on going into a home, Chris says, because that’s what she’s like. He doesn’t want that. He feels responsible for her. So we’re left as we are.” They’d scraped together what time they could over the past few months, she told Barbara, but they’d never been able to manage much more than four hours alone. Wednesday had been their first opportunity to have an entire night because Livie had made arrangements to see her mother and she wasn’t expecting Chris to return for her until the morning. Amanda said frankly, “It’s just that we wanted to sleep together. And wake up together. It was more than having sex. It was being connected in ways more important than having sex. Do you understand what I mean?”
She’d looked so sincere that Barbara had nodded, as if the experience of sleeping with a man were right up her alley. Quite, she’d thought. Being connected to some bloke. I understand how that feels. Ab-so-bloody-lutely and without a doubt.
At the conclusion of her report, Barbara said to Lynley, “So I see it this way. Either Fleming’s death is a conspiracy involving most of Moreton Street, or Amanda Beckstead is telling the truth. I cast my vote with the second option. What about you?”
Lynley was standing at his office window, hands in his pockets, attention directed down towards the street. Barbara wondered if the reporters and photographers had dispersed. She said, “So what did you get from the yobbo this time round?”
“More inadvertent verification that he didn’t murder his father.”
“He’s hold
ing tight on everything else?”
“At the moment.”
“Bollocks.” She pulled out a stick of Juicy Fruit and folded it into her mouth. She said, “Why don’t we just pick her up? What’s the point of going through the back door like this?”
“The point is evidence, Sergeant.”
“We’ll get the evidence. We’ve already got motive. We’ve got means and opportunity. We’ve got enough to haul her in and have at least one decent go at her. The rest’ll fall into place after that.”
Lynley shook his head slowly. For a long time he gazed at the street below, then at the sky, which was grey as a battleship, as if spring had decided on a sudden moratorium. “The boy has to name her,” he finally said.
Barbara tried to believe she’d misheard him. She popped her chewing gum in exasperation. It was so unlike Lynley to take this mincing-on-tiptoes approach that she wondered, with a twinge of disloyalty, if his habitual indecision about his future with Helen Clyde was finally beginning to seep into his work. “Sir.” She aimed for a tone of comradely patience. “Isn’t that an unrealistic expectation of a sixteen-year-old boy? She’s his mother, after all. They may not get on, but if he names her as his father’s killer, don’t you see what he’ll be doing to himself? And don’t you think he knows what he’ll be doing to himself?”
Lynley pensively fingered his jaw. Barbara felt encouraged enough to continue.
“He’ll be losing both parents inside of a week. Do you actually imagine him doing that? Do you expect him to turn his sister and his brother—not to mention himself—into legal orphans? Wards of the court? Isn’t that asking a hell of a lot? Isn’t that trying to break him more than he needs to be broken?”
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