Playing for the Ashes (64 page)

“And does he live alone? The porter?”

“What does that have to do with anything, Inspector?”

“Did Fleming end your relationship on Wednesday night, Mrs. Patten? Was that part of the row? Were your personal plans for a new marriage junked?”

“Now wait a minute,” Mollison said hotly.

“No, Guy.” Gabriella released Mollison’s hand. She shifted her position. Her legs were still beneath her, but she faced Lynley now. Indignation made her speech stiff. “Ken ended the relationship. I ended the relationship. What does it matter? It was over. I left. I phoned Guy. I came to London. I arrived around midnight.”

“Can someone confirm that? Besides the porter,” who, Lynley thought, would probably be only too happy to verify anything Gabriella claimed.

“Oh yes indeed. Someone else can con
fir
m.”

“We’ll need the name.”

“And believe me, I’m happy to give it. Miriam Whitelaw. We spoke on the phone not five minutes after I walked into this
fla
t.”

Her face flashed with a smile of triumph when she read the momentary surprise on Lynley’s.

Double alibi, he thought. One for each of them.

Jimmy said, “I don’t want her to come.”

“Jim!”

“I said.” He shook back his hair, realised his error when the photographers rapidly caught his unshielded face, lowered his head again.

“You got to let me—”

“No.”

Lynley was aware of the fodder they were providing the reporters, who were listening as eagerly as they were taking notes. It was too soon for their newspapers to run a story that included Jimmy’s name, and their editors— governed by the Contempt of Court Act— would make certain not to print an identifi able photograph that could prejudice a trial and land them all in the nick for two years. But still the papers would be sure to use what they could, when they could, so he said quietly, “Phone your solicitor if you’d like, Ms. Cooper. Have him meet us at the Yard.”

“What d’you think I am? A piece of
flu
ff from Knightsbridge? I don’t
have
a bleeding… Jim! Jim! You let me come.”

Jimmy looked at Lynley for the
fir
st time. “I don’t want her. I won’t talk with her there.”

“Jimmy!” His mother said his name in a wail. She spun and stumbled back into the house.

The reporters acted the part of Greek chorus again.

“Solicitor? Then he’s a de
fin
ite suspect.”

“Will you confirm that, Inspector? Is it safe to assume—”

“Is Maidstone Constabulary cooperating completely?”

“Have you the autopsy report yet?”

“Come on, Inspector. Give us something, for God’s sake.”

Lynley ignored them. Havers swung open the gate. She pushed past them and made room for Lynley and the boy. The reporters and photographers dogged them down the street to the Bentley. When their questions continued to go ignored, they merely increased their volume, shifting in subject matter from “Do you have a statement?” to “Kill your dad, boy?” The noise brought neighbours into gardens. Dogs started to bark.

Havers said, “Jesus,” under her breath and, “Mind your head there,” to Jimmy as Lynley opened the back door of the car. As the boy slid inside and the photographers pressed round the window to record every nuance of expression on his face, Jean Cooper burst through them. She waved a Tesco’s bag in her hand. Lynley stiffened. Havers said, “Watch it, sir!” and moved forward as if she would intercede.

Jean flung a reporter to one side. She snarled, “Sod you,” at another. She thrust the bag at Lynley. “You listen to me. You hurt my son…You bloody even touch him…” Her voice quavered. She pressed her knuckles against her mouth. “I know my rights,” she said. “He’s sixteen years old. You don’t ask him one question without a solicitor. You don’t even ask him to spell his name.” She leaned over and shouted through the raised window of the Bentley. “Jimmy, you don’t talk to no one till the solicitor comes. You hear that, Jim? You don’t talk to no one.”

Her son stared straight ahead. Jean cried out his name. Lynley said, “We can arrange the solicitor at our end, Ms. Cooper. If that would be of help.”

She straightened and flung her head back in a movement not unlike her son’s. She said, “I don’t fancy your kind of help.” She pushed back through the reporters and photographers. She broke into a run as they began to follow.

Lynley handed the Tesco’s bag to Havers. They were heading north on Manchester Road before she opened it. She said, ploughing through it, “One change of clothes. Two pieces of bread and butter. Sailing book of some sort. Pair of glasses.” She shifted in her seat and said as she offered these last to Jimmy, “D’you want the specs?”

He stared at her in answer, offered her an expression of “Get knotted,” then looked away.

Havers popped the glasses back into the bag, put it on the floor, and said, “Right, then,” as Lynley picked up the car phone and punched in the number for New Scotland Yard. He tracked down Detective Constable Nkata in the incidents room where the background noise of telephones and conversation told him that at least some of the officers he’d called off rota to work the weekend had returned from their investigations into the Wednesday night movements of the case’s primary suspects. He said, “What do we have?”

Nkata said, “Kensington’s in. No change there, man. She’s staying clean, your Mrs. Whitelaw.”

“What’s the report?”

“Staffordshire Terrace’s lined with conversions. You know that, ’Spector?”

“I’ve been in the street, Nkata.”

“Every conversion, it has six, seven
fla
ts. Every flat, it has three, four occupants.”

“This is beginning to sound like the DC’s lament.”

“All I mean here, man, is that that woman’s clean. We talked to every Jack and Dick we could find in every
fli
pping flat. No one in Staffordshire Terrace could say they’d seen her go anywhere in the last week.”

“Which doesn’t say much for their powers of observation, does it? Since she went somewhere with us yesterday morning.”

“But if she’s trekking out to Kent at midnight or there-abouts, she is using her car to get there, right? She’s not asking a taxi to pop her out and wait while she sets a fire. She’s not taking a bus. She’s not taking the train. Not at that hour. And that’s where she’s clean.”

“Go on.”

“Her car’s parked in a garage behind the house, in a mews called—here it is—Phillips Walk. Now, according to our blokes was out there this morning, Phillips Walk is nine-tenths conversions these days.”

“Mews cottages?”

“Right. Bumping up against each other like tarts at King’s Cross. With windows above and windows below. All open Wednesday night ’cause the weather was
fin
e.”

“I take it that no one saw Mrs. Whitelaw leave? No one heard her car start?”

“And on Wednesday night, baby in the cottage opposite her garage was up past four in the morning, being sick on his mummy’s shoulder. Mummy would’ve heard the car since she spent the night pacing in front of the windows trying to settle the nip down. Nothing, though. So unless Mrs. Whitelaw levitated out of there off her roof, she’s clean, ’Spector. Sorry if that’s a spanner.”

“No matter,” Lynley said. “The news doesn’t surprise me. She’s already been given an alibi by another of the principals.”

“You like her for the killer?”

“Not particularly. But I’ve always been partial to tying up loose ends.” He
fin
ished the call by telling Nkata to have an interrogation room ready and to let the press office know that a sixteen-year-old boy from the East End was going to be assisting the police in their enquiries. He replaced the phone and they made the rest of the journey to New Scotland Yard in silence.

The journalists on the Isle of Dogs had obviously phoned whatever colleagues they had hanging about Victoria Street, because when Lynley pulled into the entrance of New Scotland Yard in Broadway, the Bentley was immediately surrounded. Among the jostling crowd shouting questions and thrusting cameras towards the backseat, the television news media were also represented by aggressive cameramen who shouldered through the others.

Havers muttered, “Holy hell,” as Lynley said, “Lower your head, Jim,” and inched the car towards the kiosk and the entry to the underground parking. They gained the kiosk at the cost of a hundred or more photographs and countless feet of video footage, which would no doubt appear on every television station by the day’s end.

Through it all, Jimmy Cooper didn’t react other than to avert his head from the cameras. He betrayed neither interest nor trepidation as Lynley and Havers escorted him to the lift and then through one corridor after another where a press officer hurried along with them for a minute, notebook in her hand, saying unnecessarily considering the gauntlet they’d just run, “The announcement’s gone out, Inspector. A boy. Age sixteen. The East End,” with a quick glance at Jimmy. “Anything else safe to add at this point? The boy’s school? Number of brothers and sisters? Veiled allusions to the family? Anything from Kent?”

Lynley shook his head. The officer said, “Right. Our phones are ringing like fire alarms. You’ll give me more when you can, won’t you?”

She faded away without receiving an answer.

Constable Nkata met them at the interrogation room, where the tape recorder was set and the chairs were arranged, two on each side of a metal-legged table, two backed against the facing walls. He said to Lynley, “You want his dabs?” to which Lynley replied, “Not yet.” He indicated which chair he wished the boy to take. “May we chat for a moment, Jimmy? Or would you prefer to wait for your mother to send a solicitor?”

Jimmy slumped into the chair, hands picking at the hem of his T-shirt. “Don’t matter.”

Lynley said to Nkata, “Let us know when he gets here. We’ll be chatting till then.”

Nkata’s expression told Lynley the message had been received. They’d get what they could from the boy before his solicitor arrived to muzzle him inde
fin
itely.

Lynley flipped the record switch on the tape machine, gave the date and the time, and indicated the persons present in the interrogation room: himself, Sergeant Barbara Havers, and James Cooper, the son of Kenneth Fleming. He said again, “Would you like a solicitor present, Jimmy? Shall we wait?” and when the boy shrugged, Lynley said, “You’re going to need to answer.”

“I don’t need no naffing solicitor, all right? I don’t want one.”

Lynley sat opposite the boy. Sergeant Havers went to one of the chairs against the wall. Lynley heard the scratch of a match being lit and smelled the cigarette smoke a second later. Jimmy’s eyes rested hungrily if briefly on Havers, and then
fli
tted away. Lynley mentally saluted his sergeant. Her habit sometimes served them well. He said, “Smoke if you want,” to the boy. Sergeant Havers flipped her matches onto the table. “Need a fag?” she asked Jimmy. He shook his head once. But his feet moved restlessly on the
flo
or and his fingers continued to pluck at his shirt.