Playing for the Ashes (59 page)

The boy’s hair had begun to slither forward on his shoulders as if it lived a life of its own. He allowed it to do so, screening his face.

“Did you follow your father to Kent? Or did he tell you he was going there? You said he told you he had things to sort out. Did he tell you the things had to do with Gabriella Pat-ten, or did you just assume that?”

“Stop it!” Jean mashed out her cigarette and slammed the metal ashtray onto the coffee table. “What’re you going on about, you? You got no right to come into my house and talk to my Jim like this. You got no shred of proof. You got no witness. You got no—”

“On the contrary,” Lynley said. Jean snapped her mouth shut. He leaned forward in his chair. “Do you want a solicitor, Jimmy? Your mother can phone for one, if you like.”

The boy shrugged.

“Ms. Cooper,” Havers said, “you can phone for a solicitor. You might want to do that.”

But Jean’s previous threat to do so had apparently been attentuated by her anger. “We don’t need a naffing solicitor,” she hissed. “He’s done nothing, my Jim. Nothing.
Nothing
. He’s sixteen years old. He’s the man of this family. He sees to his brother and sister. He has no interest in Kent. He was here Wednesday night. He was tucked in bed. I saw to it myself. He—”

“Jimmy,” Lynley said, “we’ve made casts of two footprints that are going to match the boots you’re wearing. They’re Doc Martens, aren’t they?” The boy gave no response. “One print was at the bottom of the garden where you came over the fence from the paddock next door.”

“This is rubbish,” Jeannie said.

“The other was on the footpath from Lesser Springburn. At the base of that stile near the railway tracks.” Lynley told him the rest: the denim fibres that no doubt would match the knee rips of the jeans he was wearing, the oil on those fibres, the oil in the shrubbery near Lesser Springburn’s common. He willed the boy to react in some way. To shrink away from the words, to attempt to deny them, to give them something—however tenuous—to work with. But Jimmy said nothing.

“What were you doing in Kent?” Lynley asked.

“Don’t you talk to him like this!” Jean cried. “He wasn’t in Kent! He wasn’t ever!”

“That’s not the case, Ms. Cooper. I dare say you know it.”

“Get out of this house.” She jumped to her feet. She placed herself between Lynley and her son. “Get out. The both of you. You’ve had your say. You’ve asked your questions. You’ve seen the boy. Now get out. Out!”

Lynley sighed. He felt doubly burdened— by what he knew, by what he needed to know. He said, “We’re going to have to have answers, Ms. Cooper. Jimmy can give them to us now or he can come along and give them to us later. But either way, he’s going to have to talk to us. Would you like to phone your solicitor now?”

“Who d’you work for, Mr. Fancy Talk? Give me the name. It’s him I’ll phone.”

“Webberly,” Lynley said. “Malcolm Webberly.”

She seemed taken aback at Lynley’s cooperation. She narrowed her eyes and scrutinised him, perhaps wavering between standing her ground and making for the telephone.
A trick
, her expression said. If she left the room to make the call, they’d have her son alone and she knew it.

“Does your son have a motorbike?” Lynley asked.

“Motorbike proves nothing.”

“May we see it, please?”

“It’s a piece of rust. Wouldn’t take him as far as the Tower of London. He couldn’t of got to Kent on that bike. He couldn’t.”

“It wasn’t in front of the house,” Lynley said. “Is it in the back?”

“I said—”

Lynley rose. “Does it leak oil, Ms. Cooper?”

Jeannie clasped her hands in front of her in what could have been taken as an attitude of supplication. She began to twist one within the other. When Havers rose from her chair as well, Jean looked from one of them to the other, as if she were considering
fli
ght. Behind her, her son moved, pulling in his legs, shoving himself to his feet.

He shambled into the kitchen. They heard him open a door that squeaked on unoiled hinges. Jean cried, “Jim!” but he didn’t answer.

Lynley and Havers followed him, with his mother close on their heels. When they joined him, he was pulling open the door of a small shed at the bottom of the garden. Next to it, a gate gave way into what appeared to be a walk that ran between the houses on Cardale Street and those on the street behind them.

As they watched, Jimmy Cooper wheeled his motorbike out of the shed. He straddled the seat, started the bike, let it idle, then shut it off. He did it all without looking at any of them. Then he stood to one side—right arm clasping left elbow, weight on left hip—as Lynley squatted to examine the machine.

The motorbike was as Jean Cooper had said, largely rust. Where it wasn’t rust, it had once been red, but the colour had oxidized over time, leaving dull patches that, mixing with the rust, looked like scabs. The engine itself still ran, however. When Lynley started it himself, it turned over without difficulty and rumbled without misfiring once. He shut the engine off and set the bike on its kickstand.

“I told you,” Jean said. “It’s a heap of rust. He drives it round Cubitt Town. He knows he isn’t to take it anywhere else. He does errands for me. He goes to see his grandma. Down by Millwall Park. He—”

“Sir.” Sergeant Havers had been squatting on the bike’s other side, examining it. Now she lifted a finger, and Lynley saw the oil dotting the end of it like a blood blister. “It’s got a leak,” she added unnecessarily, and as she did another drop of oil fell from the engine onto the concrete of the path where Jimmy had parked it.

He should have felt a sense of vindication, but instead Lynley felt only regret. At
fir
st he couldn’t understand why. The boy was surly, uncooperative, and filthy, a probable young thug who’d been asking for trouble for years. He’d found it now, he’d be put out of commission, but that last fact gave Lynley absolutely no pleasure. A moment’s consideration told him why. He’d been Jimmy’s age when he
fir
st fell out with one of his parents. He knew what it felt like to hate and to love an incomprehensible adult with equal force.

He said heavily, “Sergeant. If you will,” and he walked to the gate and studied its wood as Havers read Jimmy Cooper the official caution.

CHAPTER
12

T
he rustling of the bedclothes awakened him, but Lynley kept his eyes shut for a moment. He listened to her breathing. How odd, he thought, that he should find joy in such an unadorned thing.

He turned on his side to face her, carefully so that he shouldn’t wake her. But she was awake already, lying on her back with one leg drawn up and her eyes studying the acanthus leaves that looped in plaster across the ceiling.

He found her hand beneath the covers and locked her fingers in his. She glanced at him, and he saw that a small vertical line had formed between her eyebrows. With his other hand, he smoothed it away.

“I’ve realised,” she said.

“What?”

“You diverted me last night, so I never had an answer to my question.”

“As I recall, you diverted me. You promised chicken and artichokes, didn’t you? Wasn’t that why we trekked down to the kitchen?”

“And it was in the kitchen that I asked you, wasn’t it? But you never answered.”

“I was occupied. You occupied me.”

A smile feathered her mouth. “Hardly,” she said.

He laughed quietly. He leaned over to kiss her. He traced the curve of her ear where her hair fell away.

“Why do you love me?” she asked.

“What?”

“That was the question I asked you last night. Don’t you remember?”

“Ah. That question.” He rolled onto his back and joined her in looking at the ceiling. He held her hand against his chest and considered the elusive why of loving.

“I can’t match you in either education or experience,” she pointed out. He lifted a doubting eyebrow. She smiled
fle
etingly. “All right. I can’t match you in education. I have no career. I’m not even gainfully employed. I have no wifely skills and fewer wifely aspirations. I’m very nearly frivolity personified. Our backgrounds are similar, if it comes to that, but what does similarity in background have to do with giving your heart to another?”

“It had everything to do with marriage at one time.”

“We’re not talking about marriage. We’re talking about love. More often than not, those two are mutually exclusive and entirely different subjects. Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII were married and look what happened to them. She had his babies and got to make his shirts. He catted round and used up six wives. So much for similarity in background.”

Lynley yawned. “What else could she expect, marrying a Tudor? Richmond’s own son. She was establishing a genealogical link to primeval slime. Cowardly. Penurious. Murderous. Politically paranoid. And with damned good reason for the latter.”

“Oh dear. We’re not heading towards the line of succession and the Princes in the Tower, are we, darling? That takes us somewhat off the track.”

“Sorry.” Lynley raised her hand and kissed her fingers. “Get me anywhere close to Henry Tudor and I become a bit rabid.”

“It’s a very good way to avoid the question.”

“I wasn’t avoiding. Merely temporising while I thought.”

“And? Why? Why do you love me? Because if you can’t either explain or define love, perhaps it’s better to admit that real love doesn’t exist in the
fir
st place.”

“If that’s the case, what do we have, you and I?”

She made a restless movement, akin to a shrug. “Lust. Passion. Body heat. Something pleasant but ephemeral. I don’t know.”

He raised himself on one elbow and observed her. “Let me make certain I understand. We ought to consider that this is a relationship grounded in lust?”

“Aren’t you willing to admit that’s a possibility? Especially if you consider last night. How we were.”

“How we were,” he repeated.

“In the kitchen. Then the bedroom. I admit that I was the instigator, Tommy, so I don’t mean to suggest that you’re the only one who might be absorbed by the chemistry and blind to the reality.”

“What reality?”

“That there’s nothing beyond chemistry between us in the
fir
st place.”

He stared at her long before he moved or spoke. He could feel the muscles of his abdomen tighten. He could sense that his blood was beginning to heat. It wasn’t lust this time that he was starting to feel. But it was a passion all the same. He said calmly, “Helen, what in God’s name is the matter with you?”

“What sort of question is that? I merely want to point out that what you think of as love might be a flash in the pan. Isn’t that a wise possibility to ponder? Because if we were to marry and then discover that what we felt for each other had never been more than—”

He threw back the covers, got out of bed, and struggled into his dressing gown. “Listen to me for once, Helen. Hear this clearly from beginning to end. I love you. You love me. We marry or we don’t. That’s the long and short of it. All right?” He strode across the room and muttered imprecations under his breath. He pulled back the curtains to fill the room with the bright spring sunlight that was blazing down on the back garden of his town house. The window was already partially open, but he threw the sash fully up and took in deep breaths of the morning air.

“Tommy,” she said. “I merely wanted to know—”

“Enough,” he said and thought, Women.
Women
. The twists of their minds. The questions. The probing. The infernal indecision. God in heaven. Monkhood was better.

A hesitant tap sounded against his bedroom door. Lynley snapped, “What is it?”

“Sorry, m’lord,” Denton said. “There’s someone here to see you.”

“Someone…What time is it?” Even as he asked the question, Lynley strode to the table next to the bed and snatched up the alarm clock.

“Nearly nine,” Denton said as Lynley simultaneously read the time and cursed soundly. “Shall I tell him—”

“Who is it?”

“Guy Mollison. I told him he ought to phone the Yard and talk to whoever’s on duty, but he insisted. He said you’d want to hear what he has to say. He said to tell you he remembered something. I told him to leave his number, but he said that wasn’t on. He said he had to see you. Shall I put him off?”

Lynley was already heading in the direction of the bath. “Give him coffee, breakfast, whatever he likes.”

“Shall I tell him—”

“Twenty minutes,” Lynley said. “And phone Sergeant Havers for me, will you, Denton? Tell her to get over here as soon as she can.” He cursed again for good measure and firmly shut the bathroom door behind him.

He’d already bathed and was in the midst of shaving when Helen joined him.

“Don’t say another damn word,” he said to her re
fle
ction in the mirror as he whipped the razor against his lathered cheek. “I’m not up to dealing with any more nonsense. If you can’t accept marriage as the normal consequence of love, we’re
fin
ished. If this—” with a jerk of his thumb towards the bedroom—“is merely about having a good hot grind as far as you’re concerned, then I’ve had it. All right? Because if you’re still too bloody minded to see that—Ouch! God
damn
it.” He’d nicked himself. He grabbed a square of tissue and