Playing for the Ashes (29 page)

Lynley nodded. “And makes for the cottage. He lets himself inside. He’s come prepared so it doesn’t take long. He lights the incendiary device, tucks it into the armchair, and leaves.”

“Locking up behind him,” Ardery added. “Which means he had a key in the
fir
st place. It’s a mortise lock.”

Sergeant Havers gave her head a rough shake. “Have I missed something?” she asked. “A watcher? What watcher?”

Lynley gave her the facts as they crossed the lawn to rejoin Mrs. Whitelaw beneath the arbour. Like the rest of them, she’d not yet removed her surgical gloves, and her hands looked oddly cartoonish lying white and folded in her lap. He asked her who had keys to the cottage.

“Ken,” she said, after a moment’s thought. “Gabriella.”

“Yourself?”

“Gabriella had mine.”

“Are there any others?”

Mrs. Whitelaw raised her head to look at Lynley directly, although he couldn’t read her expression behind the dark glasses. “Why?” she asked.

“Because it does appear that Kenneth Fleming was murdered.”

“But you’ve said a cigarette. In the armchair.”

“Yes. I’ve said that. Are there any other keys?”

“People loved this man. Loved him, Inspector.”

“Perhaps not everyone. Are there other keys, Mrs. Whitelaw?”

She pressed three fingers to her forehead. She appeared to be considering the question, but giving the question consideration at this point suggested two possibilities to Lynley. Either she believed that answering would indicate her acceptance of the direction their thinking was taking them: that someone had hated Kenneth Fleming enough to murder him. Or she was temporising while she decided what her answer was likely to reveal.

“Are there other keys?” Lynley asked again.

Her reply was faint. “Not really.”

“Not really? Either there are or there aren’t additional keys.”

“No one has them,” she said.

“But they exist? Where are they?”

She lifted her chin in the general direction of the garage. “We’ve always kept a key to the kitchen door in the potting shed. Under a ceramic planter.”

Lynley and the others looked in the direction she had indicated. No potting shed was visible, just a tall yew hedge with a break through which ran a brick path.

“Who knows about that key?” Lynley asked.

Mrs. Whitelaw caught her lower lip between her teeth, as if realising how odd her answer was going to sound. “I don’t precisely know. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t know?” Sergeant Havers repeated slowly.

“We’ve kept it there for more than twenty years,” Mrs. Whitelaw explained. “If work needed to be done while we were in London, the workmen could get in. When we came out at the weekends, if we forgot the key, there was the extra.”

“We?” Lynley asked. “You and Fleming?” In her hesitation to respond, he saw how he had misinterpreted. “You and your family.” He extended his hand to her. “Show us, please.”

The potting shed abutted the rear of the garage. It was little more than a wooden frame with roof and sides made of sheets of polythene and shelves attached to the upright beams that formed the frame. Mrs. Whitelaw stepped past a ladder and dislodged dust from an upright, folded table umbrella. She moved aside a beaten-down pair of men’s shoes and indicated on one of the crowded shelves a yellow ceramic duck whose hollowed-out back served as a planter.

“Under this,” she said.

Sergeant Havers did the honours, lifting the duck carefully at bill and tail with the tips of her gloved fingers. “Not a sausage,” she reported. She replaced the duck and looked beneath the clay pot next to it, then beneath a bottle of insect spray, and along the shelf until she’d moved every object.

Mrs. Whitelaw said, “The key must be there,” as Sergeant Havers continued to search, but the tone of her voice indicated a protest given largely because it was the expected response.

Lynley said, “I assume your daughter knows about the extra key.”

Mrs. Whitelaw’s shoulders seemed to stiffen. “I assure you, Inspector, my daughter would have had nothing to do with this.”

“Did she know about your relationship with Fleming? You mentioned you’ve been estranged. Was it because of him?”

“No. Of course not. We’ve been estranged for years. It has nothing to do—”

“He was like a son. Enough so that you altered your will in his favour. When you made that alteration, did you cut your daughter out entirely?”

“She hasn’t seen the will.”

“Does she know your solicitor? Is it a family firm? Might she have learned about the will from him?”

“The idea’s absurd.”

“Which part?” Lynley asked mildly. “That she would know about the will or that she would kill Fleming?”

Mrs. Whitelaw’s colourless cheeks took on sudden colour, rising like flames from her neck. “Do you actually intend me to answer that question?”

“I intend to get to the truth,” he replied.

She removed her dark glasses. She hadn’t her regular spectacles with her, so there was nothing to replace the dark glasses with. It seemed a gesture designed largely for its effect, a listen-to-me-young-man movement worthy of the schoolteacher she had once been.

“Gabriella also knew there was a key out here. I told her about it myself. She may have told someone. She may have told anyone. She may have
shown
anyone where it was.”

“Would that make sense? You said last night that she came here for seclusion.”

“I don’t know what went on in Gabriella’s mind. She enjoys men. She enjoys drama. If letting someone know where she was and where the key could be found heightened the possibility of a drama in which she could play the starring role, she would have told him. She probably would have sent out announcements.”

“But not to your daughter,” Lynley said, drawing her back into the line of
fir
e even as he mentally acknowledged the fact that her description of Gabriella
fit
ted hand-in-glove with Patten’s description on the previous night.

Mrs. Whitelaw refused to be drawn into argument. She said with deliberate calm, “Ken lived out here for two years, Inspector, while he was playing for the Kent county side. His family stayed in London. They visited him here at the weekends. Jean, his wife. Jimmy, Stan, and Sharon, his children. They’d all know about the key.”

And Lynley refused to let her sidestep. “When was the last time you saw your daughter, Mrs. Whitelaw?”

“Olivia didn’t know Ken.”

“But she no doubt knew about him.”

“They’d never even met.”

“Nonetheless. When did you see her last?”

“And if she had, if she knew about everything, it wouldn’t have made a difference. She’s always had contempt for money and material things. She wouldn’t have cared a fi g who was inheriting what.”

“You’d be surprised how much people learn to care about goods and money when it comes down to it. When did you last see her, please?”

“She didn’t—”

“Yes. When, Mrs. Whitelaw?”

The woman waited a stony
fif
teen seconds before she answered. “Ten years ago,” she said. “Friday evening, the nineteenth of April, at the Covent Garden underground station.”

“You’ve a remarkable memory.”

“The date stands out.”

“Why is that?”

“Because Olivia’s father was with me that evening.”

“Is that significant somehow?”

“It is to me. He dropped dead after our meeting. Now, if you don’t mind, Inspector, I’d like to step into the air. It’s rather close in here, and I wouldn’t want to trouble you by fainting again.”

He stepped aside to let her pass. He heard her ripping off her surgical gloves.

Sergeant Havers passed the ceramic planter to Inspector Ardery. She looked about the potting shed with its sacks of soil and its dozens of pots and utensils. She muttered, “What a mess. If there’s fresh evidence in here, it’s muddled up with fifty years of gubbins.” She sighed and said to Lynley, “What d’you think?”

“That it’s time we tracked down Olivia Whitelaw,” he said.

OLIVIA

W
e’ve had our dinner, Chris and I, and I’ve done the washing up, as usual. Chris is dead patient when it takes me three-quarters of an hour to do what he could do in ten minutes. He never says, “Give over, Livie.” He never shuttles me to one side. When I break a plate or a glass or drop a pan on the kitchen
flo
or, he lets me handle the mess of it by myself and he pretends not to notice when I curse and cry because the broom and the mop won’t behave as I’d like. Sometimes in the night when he thinks I’m asleep, he sweeps up the crockery or glass that I’ve missed from the breakage. Sometimes he scrubs down the floor to take away the stickiness from where the pan spilled. I never mention the fact that he’s done this, although I hear him at it.

Most nights before he goes to bed, he cracks open the door to my room to check on me. He pretends it’s to see if the cat wants to go out, and I pretend to believe him. If he sees I’m awake, he says, “One last call for felines wishing to engage in further nightly ablutions. Any takers in here? What about you, Panda-cat?” I say, “She’s settled in, I think,” and he says, “Need anything yourself then, Livie?”

I do. Oh, I do. I’m need incarnate. I need him to shed his clothes in the light from the corridor. I need him to slide into my bed. I need him to hold me. I have a thousand and one needs that won’t ever be ful
fil
led. They peel my flesh from my body one thin strip at a time.

Pride will go first, I was told. It’ll seep as naturally as sweat from my pores, and it will begin this process the moment I recognise how much of my life is in the hands of others. But I fight that idea. I hold on to who I am. I summon the ever weakening image of Liv Whitelaw the Outlaw. I say to Chris, “No. I need nothing at all. I’m fine,” and I sound to my own ears as if I mean it.

Sometimes quite late he says casually, “I’m going out for an hour or so. Will you be all right on your own? Shall I ask Max to pop over?”

I say, “Don’t be daft. I’m fine,” when I want to say instead, “Who is she, Chris? Where did you meet? Does she mind that you can’t spend the night with her because you’ve got to come home to tend to me?”

And when he returns from those evenings and looks in on me before he goes to bed, I can smell the sex on him. It’s thick and raw. I keep my eyes closed and my breathing even. I tell myself I have no rights here. I think, His life is his life and mine is mine I’ve known from the first there would be no point of real connection between the two of us he made that clear didn’t he didn’t he didn’t he? Oh yes, oh yes. He made that clear. And I made it clear that that’s the way I wanted it. Yes indeed, that was fine with me. So it doesn’t really matter, does it, where he goes or who he sees? The least of what I feel is hurt. I tell myself all this as I listen to the water running and hear him yawning and know how she’s made him feel this night. Whoever she is. However they met.

I give a laugh as I write this. I recognise the irony of my situation. Whoever would have thought that I’d find myself longing for any man, let alone this man who from the
fir
st did everything possible to illustrate the fact that he was not my type.

My type, you see, paid for what he got off me, in one way or another. Occasionally my type and I made a deal in advance for gin or for drugs, but mostly for cash. You can’t be surprised by this piece of information because no doubt you understand that it is, after all, so much easier for one to leap downward than to climb upward in life.

I worked the streets because it was black and wicked, living on the edge. And the older the bloke, the better I liked it because they were the most pathetic. They wore business suits and cruised Earl’s Court, pretending to be lost and in need of direction. Miss, I wonder can you tell me the quickest way to Hammersmith Flyover? to Parsons Green? to Putney Bridge? to a restaurant called…oh my dear, I seem to have forgotten the name of it. And they waited, lips curving hopefully, foreheads shining in the dome lights of their cars. They waited for a sign, a “Want business, love?” and a lean into an open window of their cars and a finger run from their ears to their jaw. “I can do what you like. Whatever you’d like. What d’you like, a lovely man like you? Tell Liv. She wants to make you feel good.” They’d stutter and begin to sweat. They’d say tentatively, How much? My finger would travel downward on their bodies. “Depends on what you want. Tell me. Tell me every nasty thing you want me to do with you tonight.”

It was all so easy. They had marginal imagination once their clothes were off and their hips were hanging like empty saddlebags round their waists. I’d smile and say, “Come on, baby. Come to Liv. Do you like this? Hmm? Does this feel nice?” And they’d say, “Oh my dear. Oh my goodness. Oh yes.” And in five hours I’d make enough to pay a week’s rent on the bedsit I’d found in Barkston Gardens and have enough left over to keep myself happy with a half-gram of coke or a bag of pills. The life was so easy I couldn’t understand why every woman in London wasn’t doing it.