Playing for the Ashes (37 page)

“See, there’s black-headed gulls and herring gulls and glaucous gulls and all sorts of gulls,” his sister was saying companionably. She was polishing her spectacles on the hem of her jumper. “But I’ve been looking for a kittiwake lately.”

“Yeah? What’s that? Don’t sound like a bird to me.” Jimmy opened the packet of Stan’s Hob Nobs and popped one into his mouth. On the lawn at the far side of a circular
flo
wer bed abloom with reds, yellows, and pinks, Stan was attempting to be both bowler and batsman in a single-man cricket match, tossing the ball up, swinging at it wildly, generally missing, and yelling when he hit it, “That’s a four, that’s a four. You saw it, didn’t you?”

“A kittiwake is almost exclusively seagoing,” Shar informed Jimmy. She returned her spectacles to her nose. “They rarely come inshore except to scavenge from
fis
hing boats. In summer—like it almost is now, right?—they nest on cliffs. They make these sweet little nest cups out of mud and bits of string and weeds and they attach them to rocks.”

“Yeah? So why’re you looking for a kittiwhatever here?”

“Kittiwake,” she said patiently. “Because of how unusual it would be to see one. It’d be a real coup.” She lifted her binoculars and scanned the embankment wall where several gulls—unintimidated by the passersby and the afternoon loungers who sat on the benches—were attending to the crumbs she’d left them.

“Kittiwakes have blackish brown legs,” she said. “They have yellow beaks and dark eyes.”

“That sounds like every gull in the world.”

“And when they fly, they bank quite wildly and cut the waves with their wing tips. That’s especially how you tell what they are.”

“Ain’t no waves here, Shar, in case you didn’t notice.”

“Well, of course, I know that. So we won’t see them bank. We’ll have to rely on other visual stimuli.”

Jimmy went for another Hob Nob. He reached into the pocket of his windcheater and brought out his cigarettes. Without looking away from her binoculars, Sharon said, “You oughtn’t to smoke. You know it’s bad. It gives you cancer.”

“What if I want cancer?”

“Why would you want cancer?”

“Quicker way out of this place.”

“But it gives other people cancer as well. It’s called passive smoking. Did you know? The way it works is if you keep smoking, we could die from breathing it, me and Stan. If we’re round you enough.”

“So maybe you don’t want to be round me. No big loss to either of us, is it?”

She lowered the binoculars and set them on the table. The lenses of her spectacles magnified her eyes. “Dad wouldn’t of wanted you to smoke,” she said. “He was always after Mummy to stop.”

Jimmy’s fingers closed round his packet of JPS. He heard the paper crinkle as he crushed it.

“D’you think if she’d stopped smoking…” Sharon gave a delicate cough like she was clearing her throat. “I mean, he asked so many times. He said, ‘Jean, you got to quit it with the fags. You’re killing yourself. You’re killing us all.’ And I used to wonder—”

“Don’t be daft, all right?” Jimmy said harshly. “Blokes don’t leave their wives cos they smoke fags. Jesus, Shar. What a dimwit.”

Sharon gave her attention to the notebook open on the table. Gently, she
fli
pped back a few pages to earlier in the year. She ran her finger over the sketch of a brown bird with subtle orange markings. Jimmy saw the neat label
nightjar
written beneath it.

“Was it because of us, then?” she said. “Because he didn’t want us? D’you think that’s it?”

Jimmy felt a circle of cold growing round him. He ate another Hob Nob. He took the purloined fruit from his windcheater and laid it on the table in front of them. His stomach felt like it was filled with stones, but he took the nectarine and bit into it with a kind of fury.

“Then why?” Sharon asked. “Did Mummy do something bad? Did she
fin
d another bloke? Did Dad stop loving—”

“Shut up about it!” Jimmy pushed himself to his feet. He strode towards the embankment, calling over his shoulder, “What difference does it make? He’s dead. Just shut up.”

Her face crumpled but he turned away. He heard Shar call after him, “And you ought to wear your specs, Jimmy. Dad would of wanted you to wear your specs.” He kicked savagely at the grass. Stan ran to join him. He dragged his cricket bat behind him like a rudder.

“Did you see how I hit it?” Stan asked. “Jimmy, did you see?”

Jimmy nodded numbly. He hurled his nectarine into the flower bed and reached for his cigarettes only to realise he’d left them on the table. He walked to the wall where the pigeons and gulls picked among the crumbs that Sharon had left them. He leaned against it. He looked down at the river.

“Will you bowl for me, Jimmy?” Stan asked eagerly. “Please? I can’t bat proper unless someone bowls.”

“Sure,” Jimmy told him. “A minute. Okay?”

“Okay. Sure.” Stan ran back to the lawn, calling, “Shar, watch us. Jimmy’s goin’ to bowl.”

Which is, of course, what Dad wanted him to do.
You’ve got a fine arm, Jim. You’ve got a Bedser arm on you. Let’s go down to the pitch. You bowl. I bat
.

Jimmy stopped himself from shrieking into the air. He grasped the wrought-iron railing that ran along the top of the embankment wall. He leaned his forehead against it and closed his eyes. It hurt too much. To think, to talk, to try to understand…

Did Mummy do something bad? Did she
fin
d another bloke? Did Dad stop loving her
?

Jimmy hit his forehead against the wrought-iron balusters. He clenched them so hard that they felt like they were melting through his flesh and becoming his bones. He forced his eyes open and looked at the river. The tide was turning. The water was turbid. The current was swift. He thought about the rowing club on Saundersness Road, about the boat launch where the coarse pebbles giving onto the Thames were always strewn with Evian bottles, Cadbury wrappers, cigarette ends, used condoms, and rotting fruit. You could walk right into the river there. No wall to climb over, no fence to scale.
Danger! Deep Water! No Swimming
! were the warnings mounted on the lamppost that stood at the entrance to the launch. But that’s what he wanted: danger and deep water.

Across the river, if he squinted hard, he could just make out the classical domes of the Royal Naval College, and he could use his imagination to fill in the rest: the pediments and columns, the noble facade. Just to the west of these buildings, the
Cutty Sark
stood in dry dock and although they weren’t massive enough for him to make out from the north bank of the river, he could visualise the clipper’s three proud masts and the ten miles of ropes that made up her rigging. On the Australian wool run, she’d never been beaten by another ship. She’d been built as a tea-clipper to sail from China, but when the Suez Canal opened, she’d had to adapt.

That’s what life was about, right? Adapting. That’s what Dad would have called matching one’s bowling to the pitch.

Dad. Dad. Jimmy felt like glass was cutting his chest. He felt on fire. He wanted to be gone from this place, but more than that he wanted to be gone from this life. Not Jimmy any longer, not Ken Fleming’s son, not an older brother who was supposed to do something to make things easier for Sharon and Stan, but a rock sitting in somebody’s garden, a fallen tree in the country, a footpath through the woods.

A chair, a cooker, a picture frame. Anything

but who and what he was.

“Jimmy?”

Jimmy looked down. Stan was at his elbow, tentatively pinching the navy windcheater between his fingers. Jimmy blinked at the upturned face and the hair that
flo
pped across his forehead and dipped into his eyes. Stan’s nose wanted blowing, and having nothing proper to use for the job, Jimmy took the hem of his T-shirt and wiped it across his brother’s upper lip.

“That’s disgusting, that is,” he said to Stan. “Can’t you feel it dripping out? No wonder all the sprogs think you’re such a twit.”

“I ain’t,” he said.

“You could of fooled me.”

Stan’s cheeks drooped. His chin began to dimple the way it always did when he was trying not to cry.

“Look,” Jimmy said with a sigh, “you got to blow your nose. You got to keep yourself up. You can’t wait for somebody to do it for you. There won’t always be somebody around, will there?”

Stan’s eyelids quivered. “There’s Mum,” he whispered. “There’s Shar. There’s you.”

“Well, don’t go depending on me, all right? Don’t depend on Mum. Don’t depend on no one. See to yourself.”

Stan nodded and drew a quivering breath. He raised his head and looked out at the river, his nose reaching only to the top of the wall. “We never got to go sailing. We won’t sail now, will we? Mum won’t take us. Cos if she takes us it’d remind her of him. So we won’t sail, will we? Will we, Jimmy?”

Jimmy turned from the water with burning eyes. He took the cricket ball from his brother’s hand. He gazed over the lawn of Island Gardens and saw that the grass was far too long to make a proper pitch. Even if it had been decently clipped, the ground was uneven. It looked like moles had started a roadworks under the trees.

“Dad would of taken us to the nets,” Stan said, as if reading Jimmy’s thoughts. “You remember when he took us to the nets that time? He said to those blokes, ‘This one here’ll be a star bowler for England one day and this one’ll bat.’ You remember that? He said to us, ‘Okay, you toffs, show us your stuff.’ He played wicket keeper and he shouted, ‘A googly. Come on. We want to see a proper googly, Jim.’”

Jimmy’s fingers closed round the hard leather ball.
Off break with leg break
, he could hear his father shouting.
Go for it. Now. Bowl with your head, Jimmy. Come on. With your head
!

Why, he wondered. What was the point? He couldn’t be his father. He couldn’t re-do what his father had done. He didn’t even want to. But to be with him, to feel his arm tighten round his shoulders and his cheek press briefl y against the top of his head. He would bowl for that. Googlies, off breaks, leg breaks, china-men. Fast, medium, or slow. He would loosen his shoulders, stretch his muscles, and practise the run-up and the follow-through until he was ready to drop. If that’s what it took to please him. If that’s what it took to bring him home.

“Jimmy?” Stan tugged on his elbow. “You want to bowl for me now?”

Across the lawn, Jimmy could see Shar’s form still in place in front of the caff. But she was standing now, the binoculars to her face, following the flight of a grey-white bird from east to west, along the river. He wondered if it was the kittiwake gull. For her sake, he hoped so.

“The ground’s no good,” Stan was saying. “But you could just maybe toss it. That’d be okay with me. Could you toss it, Jimmy?”

“Yeah,” he said. He strode past the sign that announced
no ball games
in big black letters on white. He led the way to the smoothest patch of lawn, twenty yards long beneath the mulberry trees.

Stan scampered after him, bat on his shoulder. “Wait’ll you see,” he said. “I’m getting pretty good. I’ll be as good as Dad someday.”

Jimmy swallowed hard and tried to forget that the ground was too soft and the grass was too long and it was too late to be as good as anyone. “Take guard,” he said to his little brother. “Let’s see what you can do.”

CHAPTER
10

D
etective Constable Winston Nkata sauntered into Lynley’s office, his suit jacket slung over his shoulder, contemplatively rubbing the hair’s width scar that ran across his coffee skin like the shape of a scythe from his right eye to the corner of his mouth. It was a memento of his street days in Brixton—chief battle counsel of the Brixton Warriors— received at the hands of a rival gang member who was currently doing hard time at the Scrubs.

“I have been living the life today.” Nkata affectionately laid his jacket over the back of a chair in front of Lynley’s desk. “First Shepherd’s Market eyeing some fine ladies. Then on to Berkeley Square for a nice little crawl through the Cherbourg Club. It get any better than this when I make sergeant?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Havers said,
fin
gering the material of his jacket experimentally. He was clearly modelling himself sartorially after the detective inspector for whom they both worked. “I’ve spent the afternoon on the Isle of Dogs.”

“Sergeant of my Dreams, you have not yet met the right people.”

“Obviously.”

Lynley was talking on the phone to their superintendent at his home in north London. They were going over the rota list, with Lynley informing his superior officer which detective constables would be pulled off what remained of their weekend leave to assist in the murder investigation.

Superintendent Webberly said to him, “And what’re you doing about the press, Tommy?”

“Considering how best to use them. They’re hot enough on the story.”

“Go careful with that. They like a good whiff of scandal, the bastards. See to it you’re not the one to give them the crumb that prejudices the case.”