Playing for the Ashes (32 page)

She currently lived with a bloke called Christopher Faraday, Nkata said. There was nothing on him. Not even a traffic ticket.

Lynley waited until Sergeant Havers had lit her cigarette, taken two lungfuls, and exhaled the wispy, grey remnants of smoke into the cooling afternoon air. He looked at his pocket watch. It was nearly three o’clock. She would check in with Nkata, pick up a vehicle, and head out to the Isle of Dogs to see Fleming’s family. With time to work on her report taken into consideration, she would need at least two and a half hours, possibly three to get everything done. The day was fast dissolving. The night was booking itself up with further obligations.

He said, “Let’s try for half past six in my office. Sooner if you can make it.”

“Right,” Havers said. She took a final deep pull on her cigarette and headed towards the Yard’s revolving doors, dodging a group of tourists who were wearily pondering a map and talking about “taking a taxi next time, George.” When she disappeared inside, Lynley slid into the car and put it in gear.

“Your daughter’s living in Little Venice, Mrs. Whitelaw,” he said as they pulled away from the kerb.

She didn’t comment. She hadn’t moved the slightest degree since they’d left the pub where they’d had their silent, tense, and—at least on her part—little-eaten lunch. She didn’t move now.

“You’ve never run into her? You’ve made no attempt to locate her throughout the years?”

“We parted badly,” Mrs. Whitelaw said. “I had no interest in locating her. I’ve little doubt the feeling was mutual.”

“When her father died—”

“Inspector. Please. I know you’re doing your job…”

But
and the accompanying protest went unsaid.

Lynley gave her a quick examination in the mirror. At this point, eighteen hours into her knowledge of Fleming’s death, Miriam Whitelaw looked as if she’d been spiritually drawn and quartered, a decade older than she had appeared even that morning when Lynley had fetched her. Her wan face seemed to beg for mercy.

It was, Lynley knew, the perfect opportunity to press for answers while her ability to resist and avoid his queries wore thinner each moment. Every one of his colleagues in CID would have recognised that fact. And most of those same colleagues would have sought the advantage, hammering out questions and demanding answers until they had the ones they sought. But to Lynley’s way of thinking, there was generally a point of diminishing returns in the questioning of those intimately connected to a murder victim. There was a point at which those intimately connected with the murder victim would say anything in order to bring a ceaseless interrogation to an end.

“Don’t be soft, laddie,” DI MacPherson would say. “Mairder is mairder. Go for the throat.”

It never quite mattered whose throat was being gone for. Eventually, the right jugular vein would be hit.

Not for the first time, Lynley wondered if he had a hard enough core to be a policeman. The take-no-prisoners approach to conducting an investigation was anathema to him. But any other approach seemed to place him far too dangerously close to empathising with the living instead of avenging the dead.

He negotiated his way through the traffic near Buckingham Palace, getting stalled behind a tourist coach that was disgorging onto the pavement a large group of blue-haired women in polyester trousers and sensible shoes. He wove through the taxis in Knights-bridge, did some back-street navigating to avoid a traffic snarl south of Kensington Gardens, and finally emerged into the late afternoon shopping and pedestrian frenzy that was Kensington High Street. From there, it was less than three minutes to Staffordshire Terrace, where all was tranquil and a solitary little boy wobbled on a skateboard across the street from Number 18.

Lynley got out to help Mrs. Whitelaw from the car. She took his offered hand. Her own was cool and dry. Her fingers closed over his tightly, then moved to his arm as he led her to the steps. She leaned against him. She smelled faintly of lavender, powder, and dust.

At the door, she fumbled her key against the lock, scraping metal across metal until she was able to get it in. When she had the door opened, she turned to him.

She looked so unwell that Lynley said, “May I phone your doctor?”

“I’ll be all right,” she said. “I must try to sleep. I couldn’t last night. Perhaps tonight….”

“Wouldn’t you like your doctor to prescribe something for you?”

She shook her head. “There’s no medication to prescribe for this.”

“Is there any message you’d like me to give your daughter? I’m going to Little Venice from here.”

Her gaze drifted past him, over his shoulder, as if she was considering the question. Her mouth pulled down at the corners. “Tell her I’ll always be her mother. Tell her Ken doesn’t…Ken didn’t change that.”

Lynley nodded. He waited to see if she would say more. When she didn’t, he went back down the steps. He’d opened the car door when he heard her say:

“Inspector Lynley?” He raised his head. She’d come to the edge of the top step. One of her hands was gripping the wrought-iron banister where a tendril of star jasmine wound about it. “I know you’re trying to do your job,” she said. “I thank you for that.”

He waited until she had gone inside and closed the door behind her. Then he set off again, heading north as he had on the previous night beneath the planes and sycamores in Campden Hill Road. The distance from Kensington to Little Venice was considerably shorter than the trip to Hugh Patten’s house in Hampstead had been. But that trip had been made after eleven at night when traffic was thin. Now the streets were clogged with vehicles. He used the time it took to inch through Bayswater to telephone Helen, but he ended up listening to her answering machine voice telling him she was out and inviting him to leave a message. He said, “Damn,” as he waited for the infernal beep. He hated answering machines. They were just another indication of the social anomie plaguing these
fin
al years of the century. Impersonal and efficient, they reminded him how easy it was to replace a human being with an electronic device. Where once there had been a Caroline Shepherd to answer Helen’s phone, cook her meals, and keep her life in order, now there was a tape cassette, take-away Chinese, and a weekly cleaning woman from County Clare.

“Hullo darling,” he said when the beep finally sounded. And then he thought, Hullo darling and what? Did you find the ring where I left it? Do you like the stone? Will you marry me? Today? Tonight? Damn. He loathed these answering machines.

“I’m going to be tied up till this evening, I’m afraid. Shall we have dinner? Sometime around eight?” He paused idiotically as if expecting a reply. “Have you had a good day?”

Another witless pause. “Look, I’ll phone you when I get back to the Yard. Keep the evening free. I mean if you get this message keep the evening free. Because of course I realise you might not get this message at all. And if you don’t, I can’t expect you to hang about waiting for me to phone, can I? Helen, do you have something planned for the evening? I can’t recall. Perhaps we can—”

A beep sounded. A computerised voice recited, “Thank you for the message. The time is three-twenty-one.” The line disconnected.

Lynley cursed. He replaced the phone. He utterly despised those blasted machines.

Since the day had been a fine one, Little Venice still accommodated a good number of people who were taking the afternoon to explore some of London’s canals. They
flo
ated along in tour boats and listened to their guides’ commentaries and gossip to which they appreciatively murmured in response. They strolled along the pavement, admiring the bright spring flowers that grew in pots on the roofs and the decks of barges. They dawdled at the colourful railing of the Warwick Avenue bridge.

To the southwest of this bridge, Browning’s Pool formed a rough triangle of oleaginous water, one side of which was lined with more barges. These were the wide, full-size,
fla
t-bottomed crafts that had once been towed by horses through the system of canals that crisscrossed much of the south of England. In the nineteenth century, they had served as a means of transporting goods. Now they were stationary, and they acted as housing for artists, writers, craftsmen, and poseurs of the same.

Christopher Faraday’s barge
flo
ated directly across from Browning’s Island, an oblong of willow-studded land that rose from the centre of the pool. As Lynley approached it along the walkway bordering the canal, a young man in running gear overtook him. He was accompanied by two panting dogs, one of which loped along unsteadily on only three legs. While Lynley watched, the dogs dashed ahead of the runner and scrambled up the two steps and onto the barge to which he himself was heading.

When Lynley got there, the young man was standing on the deck, towelling the sweat from his face and neck, and the dogs—a beagle and the three-legged mixed breed who looked as if he’d seen the worse end of too many street fights with worthier opponents— were noisily slurping water from two heavy ceramic bowls, which sat on a stack of newspapers. The word
dawg
was painted on the beagle’s bowl, the words
dawg two
on the mixed breed’s.

Lynley said, “Mr. Faraday?” and the young man lowered the blue towel from his face. Lynley produced his warrant card and introduced himself. “Christopher Faraday?” he said again.

Faraday tossed the towel onto the waist-high roof of the cabin and moved to stand between Lynley and the animals. The beagle looked up from his water, jowls dripping. A low growl issued from his throat. “S’okay,” Faraday said. It was difficult to tell whether he was speaking to Lynley or to the dog, since his eyes were on the former but his hand reached back to touch the head of the latter. This was scarred, Lynley noted, with a long-ago incision running from the crest of the head to

between the eyes.

“What can I do for you?” Faraday said.

“I’m looking for Olivia Whitelaw.”

“Livie?”

“I understand she lives here.”

“What’s up?”

“Is she at home?”

Faraday reached for the towel and slung it round his neck. “Go to Livie,” he said to the dogs. And to Lynley as the animals obediently trotted to a glass gazebo-affair that topped the cabin and acted as its entry, “Just a minute, all right? Let me see if she’s up.”

Up? Lynley wondered. It was just after half past three. Was she still plying her trade at night that she had to sleep in the middle of the day?

Faraday ducked into the gazebo and descended some steps. He left the cabin door cracked open behind him. Lynley heard a sharp bark from one of the dogs, followed by the scratching of claws against linoleum or wood. He moved closer to the gazebo and listened. Hushed voices spoke.

Faraday’s was barely distinguishable. “… police…asking for…no, I can’t…you’ve got to…”

Olivia Whitelaw’s became clearer and far more urgent. “I can’t. Don’t you see? Chris. Chris!”

“…cool…be okay, Livie….”

A sound of heavy shuffling followed. Papers crinkled. A cupboard slammed. Then another. Then a third. Moments later footsteps came to the door.

“Mind your head,” Chris Faraday said. He’d donned the trousers of a tracksuit. They’d once been red but now were faded to the same rusty colour of his wiry hair. This was overly thin for a man his age, leaving a small, monk-like tonsure at the top of his head.

Lynley joined him in a long, dimly lit, pine-panelled room. It was partially
fit
ted with carpet and partially floored in linoleum beneath a large workbench where the mixedbreed dog had gone to lie. On the carpet lay three enormous pillows. Near them sat a hotchpotch arrangement of five old and mismatched armchairs. One of these contained a woman, dressed neck to toe in black. Lynley would not have seen her at first had it not been for the colour of her hair, which acted as a beacon against the pine walls. It was an incandescent white-blonde, with an odd cast of yellow to it and roots the colour of dirty engine oil. It was hacked short on one side, grown out to beneath her ear on the other.

“Olivia Whitelaw?” Lynley said.

Faraday moved to the workbench and opened a panel of shutters approximately an inch. The resulting aperture cast light on the wood-panelled ceiling and allowed a diffused glow to fall upon the woman in the chair. She shrank from it and said, “Shit. Chris, go easy,” and she reached slowly to the floor next to her chair and picked up an empty tomato tin from which she removed a packet of Marlboros and a plastic lighter.

When she lit her cigarette, her rings caught the light. They were silver, worn on every
fin
ger. They matched the studs that lined her right ear like chromium eruptions and acted as counterpoint to the large safety pin that slid through her left.

“Olivia Whitelaw. That’s right. Who wants to know and why?” The cigarette smoke reflected the light. It created the sensation that an undulating veil of gauze hung between them. Faraday opened another panel of shutters. Olivia said, “That’ll do. Why’n’t you piss off somewhere?”