Playing for the Ashes (40 page)

A woman’s voice responded, “In the bedroom. Are you through with them, then?”

“Not quite,” he said. “Shut the door so we don’t disturb you, darling.”

In reply, they heard her footsteps, but instead of shutting herself off, Allison moved into the room, with one hand holding a sheaf of papers and the other pressed into the small of her back. She was hugely pregnant, but she didn’t seem to be unwell, as her husband had suggested. Rather, she appeared to be caught in the middle of work, with spectacles perched on the top of her head and a biro clipped on to the collar of her smock.

“Finish with the brief,” her husband said. “We don’t need you here.” And then with an anxious look at Lynley, “Do we?”

Before Lynley could reply, Allison said, “Nonsense. I don’t need coddling, Guy. I quite wish you’d stop it.” She set her papers on a glass dining table that stood between the sitting area and the kitchen behind it. She removed her spectacles and unclipped her biro. “Would you like something?” she asked Lynley and Havers. “A coffee perhaps?”

“Allie. Cripes. You know you’re not supposed to—”

She sighed. “I wasn’t planning to have one myself.”

Mollison grimaced. “Sorry. Hell’s bells. I’ll be glad when it’s over.”

“You’re certainly not alone.” His wife repeated her offer to Lynley and Havers.

“I could do with a glass of water,” Havers said.

“Nothing for me,” said Lynley.

“Guy?”

Mollison asked for a beer and fastened his eyes on his wife as she lumbered into the kitchen where recessed lighting gleamed down on speckled granite work tops and brushed chrome cupboards. She returned with a can of Heineken and a water goblet in which
flo
ated two slivers of ice. She placed both on the coffee table and lowered herself into an overstuffed chair. Lynley and Havers took the sofa.

Mollison, ignoring the beer he’d asked for, remained standing. He went to the doors he’d previously shut and opened one of them. “You’re looking flushed, Allie. Bit close in here, isn’t it?”

“It’s fine. I’m
fin
e. Everything’s
fin
e. Drink your beer.”

“Right.” But instead of joining them, he squatted next to the open door where a wicker basket stood in front of a pair of potted palms. He reached into the basket and brought out three cricket balls.

Lynley thought of Captain Queeg and half expected to see him begin rolling them round his palm, despite their size.

“Who’s going to replace Ken Fleming on the team?” he asked.

Mollison blinked. “That presupposes Ken would have been chosen to play for England another time.”

“Would he have been chosen?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“I don’t know at the moment.” Lynley recalled additional information St. James had given him. “Fleming replaced a chap called Ryecroft, didn’t he? Wasn’t that just before the winter tour? Two years ago?”

“Ryecroft chipped his elbow.”

“And Fleming took his place.”

“If you want to call it that.”

“Ryecroft never played for England again.”

“He never got his form back. He doesn’t play for anyone any longer.”

“You were at Harrow and Cambridge together, weren’t you? You and Ryecroft?”

“What’s my friendship with Brent Ryecroft got to do with Fleming? I’ve known him since I was thirteen years old. We were at school together. We played cricket together. We were best man for each other at our weddings. We’re friends.”

“You’ve been his advocate as well, I dare say.”

“When he could play, yes. But he can’t now, so I’m not. That’s an end to it.” Mollison straightened, two balls in one hand, one in the other. He juggled them expertly for a good thirty seconds before he went on, looking through them to say, “Why? Are you thinking I got rid of Fleming to get Brent back on to the England team? That’s a lousy proposition. There’re a hundred players better than Brent at this point. He knows it. I know it. The selectors know it.”

“Did you know Fleming was going to Kent on Wednesday night?”

He shook his head, concentrating on the balls in the air. “As far as I knew, he was taking off on a holiday with his boy.”

“He didn’t mention that he’d cancelled the trip? Or postponed it?”

“He didn’t give a hint in that direction.” Mollison leaped forward as a ball got beyond him. It clattered to the floor and bounced onto a carpet the colour of sea foam, which served as boundary for the sitting area they were in. It rolled to Sergeant Havers. She picked it up and placed it deliberately on the sofa beside her.

Mollison’s wife, at least, read the message clearly. “Sit down, Guy,” she said.

“Can’t,” he replied with a boyish smile. “I’m up. All this energy. Got to work it off.”

Allison said to them with a weary smile, “When the baby arrives, he’ll be my second child. Do you want the beer or not, Guy?”

“I’ll drink it. I’ll drink it.” He juggled two balls instead of three.

“What are you so nervous about?” his wife asked. She added, with a tiny grunt as she adjusted her position to face Lynley more directly, “Guy was here on Wednesday night with me, Inspector. That’s why you’ve come to talk to him, isn’t it? To check on his alibi? If we get to the facts straightaway, we can put the conjectures to rest.” She curved her hand round her stomach, as if to emphasise her condition. “I don’t sleep well any longer. I doze when I can. I was up most of the night. Guy was here. If he’d left, I would have known. And if I somehow miraculously slept through his departure, the porter would not have done. You’ve met the night porter, I take it?”

“Allison, cripes.” Mollison
fin
ally pitched the balls back to their wicker basket. He strode to one of the other chairs, sat, and popped the top on his beer. “He doesn’t think I killed Ken. Why would I, in the first place? I was just talking bosh.”

“What was your row about?” Lynley asked. He didn’t wait for Mollison to counter with “What row?” He went on to say, “Miriam Whitelaw heard the beginning of your conversation with Fleming. She said you mentioned a row. You said something about forgetting the row and getting on with things.”

“We had a dust-up during a four-day match last week at Lord’s. Things were tense. Middlesex needed ninety-one with eight wickets in hand. They had to work like the devil to win. One of their better batsmen had gone out with a fractured
fin
ger, so they weren’t a particularly happy group. I made a remark after the third day, out in the car park, about one of their Paki players. It had to do with the play, not the man, but Ken didn’t want to see it that way. He took it as racist. Things went from there.”

“They had a fi ght,” Allison clarified calmly. “Out in the car park. Guy got the worst of it. Two bruised ribs, the black eye.”

“Odd that it didn’t make the papers,” Havers noted. “Tabloids being what they are.”

“It was late,” Mollison said. “No one was about.”

“Just the two of you were there?”

“That’s it.” Mollison gulped his beer.

“You didn’t tell anyone afterwards you’d brawled with Fleming? Why’s that?”

“Because it was stupid. We’d had too much to drink. We were acting like thugs. It’s not something either one of us wanted to get round.”

“And you made peace with him afterwards?”

“Not straightaway. That’s why I phoned on Wednesday. I assumed he’d be selected for the England team this summer. I assumed as much about myself. As far as I was concerned, we didn’t need to be living in each other’s knickers for things to go smoothly when the Aussies arrive, but we needed at least to be at ease with each other. I’d made the remark in the
fir
st place. I thought it wise if I also made peace.”

“What else did you talk about on Wednesday night?”

He set the beer on the table, leaned forward, and clasped his hands loosely between his legs. “The Aussie spin bowler. The condition of the pitches at the Oval. How many more centuries we can expect from Jack Pollard. That sort of thing.”

“And during that conversation, Fleming never mentioned he was heading to Kent that night?”

“Never.”

“Or Gabriella Patten? Did he mention her?”

“Gabriella Patten?” Mollison cocked his head in perplexity. “No. He didn’t mention Gabriella Patten.” He looked so directly at Lynley as he spoke that the very earnestness of his gaze gave him away.

“Do you know her?” Lynley asked.

Still the eyes remained firm. “Sure. Hugh Patten’s wife. He’s sponsoring the test match series this summer. But you must have dug up that information by now.”

“She and her husband are living apart at the moment. Are you aware of that?”

A quick shift of the eyes towards his wife and Mollison returned his gaze to Lynley. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry to hear it. I’d always got the impression she and Hugh were crazy about each other.”

“You saw a lot of them?”

“Here and there. Parties. The occasional test matches. Some of the winter tour. They follow cricket pretty closely. Well, I suppose they would, wouldn’t they, since he sponsors the team.” Mollison lifted his beer, drained the can. He began to use his thumbs to cave in the side. “Is there another?” he asked his wife, and then said, “No. Stay. I’ll get it.” He sprang to his feet and went to the kitchen where he rooted through the refrigerator, saying, “D’you want something, Allie? You didn’t have enough dinner to keep a gnat going. These chicken legs look decent. Want one, darling?”

Allison was directing a thoughtful gaze upon the dented beer can that her husband had left on the coffee table. He called her name again when she didn’t respond. She said, “I’m not interested, Guy. In food.”

He rejoined them, using his thumb to
fli
ck open his Heineken. “Sure you don’t want one?” he asked Lynley and Havers.

Lynley said, “And the county matches?”

“What?”

“Did Patten and his wife attend those as well? Did they ever watch an Essex match, for example? Do they have a side they favour when England isn’t playing?”

“They back Middlesex, I should guess. Or Kent. The home counties. You know.”

“And Essex? Did they ever come to watch you play?”

“Probably. I couldn’t swear to it. But like I said, they follow the game.”

“Recently?”

“Recently?”

“Yes. I was wondering when you last saw them.”

“I saw Hugh last week.”

“Where was this?”

“At the Garrick. For lunch. It’s part of what I do: keeping the current team sponsor happy to be the team sponsor.”

“He didn’t tell you about his separation from his wife?”

“Hell, no. I don’t know him. I mean I know him, but it’s a formal sort of thing. Sports talk. Who looks good to open the bowling against the Aussies. How I plan to set the field. Who the selectors are thinking of choosing for the team.” He raised his beer, drank.

Lynley waited until Mollison had lowered the beer before asking, “And Mrs. Patten. When did you last see her?”

Mollison looked at an enormous Hockneylike canvas that hung on the wall behind the sofa, as if it were a large desk calendar on which he was examining how he had spent his days. “I don’t remember, to tell the truth.”

“She was at the dinner party,” Allison said. “The end of March.” When her husband appeared nonplussed by the information, she added, “The River Room. The Savoy.”

“Cripes. What a memory, Allie,” Mollison said. “That was it. The end of March. A Wednesday—”

“Thursday.”

“A Thursday night. That’s right. You wore that purple African thing.”

“It’s Persian.”

“Persian. That’s right. And I—”

Lynley stopped Gingold and Chevalier before they got to the refrain. He said, “You haven’t seen her since then? You haven’t seen her since she’s been living in Kent?”

“In Kent?” His face was blank. “I didn’t know she was in Kent. What’s she doing in Kent? Where?”

“Where Kenneth Fleming died. The very cottage in fact.”

“Cripes.” He swallowed.

“When you spoke to him on Wednesday evening, Kenneth Fleming didn’t tell you he was heading out to Kent to see Gabriella Pat-ten?”

“No.”

“You didn’t know he was having an affair with her?”

“No.”

“You didn’t know he had been having an affair with her since the previous autumn?”

“No.”

“That they were planning to divorce their spouses and marry?”

“No. No way. I didn’t know any of that.” He turned to his wife. “Did you know this stuff, Allie?”

She’d been watching him throughout Lynley’s questioning. She said without a change of expression, “I’m hardly in a position to know.”