Playing for the Ashes (67 page)

“And when he wasn’t there?” Lynley asked.

“I found it didn’t matter. Mother saw…” Olivia twisted her head towards Faraday. He seemed to believe that she needed encouragement because he nodded at her and his expression was gentle. “Mother saw me. Like this. Maybe worse than this because it was later, at night, and I’m worse at night. And it turned out that I didn’t need to grovel. I didn’t need to ask her for anything.”

“That’s why you’d gone to see her in the first place? To ask for something?”

“Yes. That’s why.”

“What?”

“It has nothing to do with this. With Kenneth. With his death. With anything but me and my mother. And my father as well.”

“Nonetheless, it’s a final point. We’ll need it. I’m sorry if it’s difficult for you.”

“No. You’re not sorry.” She moved her head from side to side in slow negation. She looked too weary to fight him any longer. “I

requested,” she said. “Mother agreed.”

“To what, Miss Whitelaw?”

“To mix my ashes with my father’s, Inspector.”

CHAPTER
17

B
arbara Havers was experiencing that God’sin-His-heaven feeling as she reached the serving platter an instant before Lynley and speared the last hoop of
calamari fritti
. She lingered over the satisfying decision as to which sauce she would use for the squid’s submersion: marinara, virgin olive oil and herbs, or garlic and butter. She chose the second, wondering which of them was virgin, the olive or the oil. And, for that matter, how either one of them could possibly be a virgin in the
fir
st place.

When Lynley had
fir
st suggested sharing the
calamari
to start, she’d said, “Good idea, sir.
Calamari
it is,” and gazed at the menu with an attempt at arranging her features into something that might communicate the appropriate degree of sophistication. Her most significant experience with Italian food had been the occasional plate of
spaghetti bolognese
bolted down in one café or another where the spaghetti came from a packet and the bolognese from a tin, and both were slopped onto a plate where a ring of rust-coloured oil quickly seeped from the food like an invitation to permanent dyspepsia.

There had been no
spaghetti bolognese
on the menu here. Nor had there been an English translation of anything else. One could probably have obtained an English menu for the asking, but that would mean revealing one’s ignorance before one’s superior officer who spoke at least three bloody languages that Barbara was aware of and who perused the menu with great interest and asked the waiter just how
stagionato
the
cinghiale
was and what process was used to age it. So she ordered blithely away, mangling pronunciations, affecting an aura of experience, and praying she wasn’t requesting octopus.

Calamari
came close, as she discovered. True, it didn’t look like squid. No tentacles gestured companionably to her from the platter. But had she known what it was when she agreed to share it with Lynley, she would have pleaded an allergy to all things having appendages that were even remotely capable of suction.

Her first taste of it reassured her, however. Her second, third, and fourth—moving among the dipping sauces with ever increasing enthusiasm—convinced her that she’d been leading a far too sheltered gastronomic existence. She was making a decided inroad into the artful arrangement of delicate hoops when she
fir
st realised that Lynley was hardly keeping pace. She soldiered on, effecting her final prandial ace in triumph and waiting for Lynley to remark upon either her appetite or her table manners.

He did neither. He was watching his
fin
gers tear a piece of
focaccia
into bits, as if with the intention of scattering the resulting crumbs along the edge of the planter that marked the perimeter of Capannina di Sante, a restaurant that sat a few steps off Kensington High Street and offered—along with a putative but obscure connnection to an eating establishment of the same name in Florence—the Continental experience of
al fresco
dining whenever the capricious London weather permitted it. Through some process of avian telepathy, six small brown birds had gathered the moment Lynley removed the bread from its wicker serving basket and dropped it onto his plate. Now they hopped expectantly from the planter’s edge to the well-trimmed junipers growing within it, each fastening a bright, beseeching eye on Lynley, who seemed oblivious of them.

Barbara popped the last hoop of
calamari
into her mouth: She chewed, savoured, swallowed, sighed, and anticipated
il secondo
, soon to come. She’d chosen it solely for the complexity of its name:
tagliatelle fagioli all’uccelletto
. All those letters. All those words. However they were supposed to be pronounced, she was sure the dish had to be the chef’s masterwork. If it wasn’t,
anatra albicocche
would follow. And if she found she didn’t care for that—whatever it was—she had little doubt that Lynley’s dinner would go mostly uneaten, and be passed her way. At least, that’s how things were shaping up so far.

“Well?” she said to him. “Is it the food or the company?”

He said, apropos of nothing as far as she could tell, “Helen cooked for me last night.”

Barbara reached for another piece of
focaccia
and ignored the birds. Lynley had put on his spectacles to read a wine label and he nodded for the waiter to pour.

“And the grub was so memorable you can’t bear to eat here? Lest the taste of food drive the memory away? You made a vow that nothing would cross your lips unless it came from her hands? What?” Barbara asked. “How much of that squid did you have, anyway? I thought this was supposed to be a celebration. We’ve got our confession. What else do you want?”

“She can’t cook, Havers. Although I imagine she might manage an egg. If she boiled it.”

“So?”

“So nothing. I was merely reminded.”

“Of Helen’s cooking?”

“We had a disagreement.”

“Over her cooking? That’s bloody sexist, Inspector. Is she going to sew buttons and darn socks for you next?”

Lynley returned his spectacles to their case, slipped the case into his pocket. He picked up his glass and considered the colour of the wine before he drank.

“I told her to decide,” he said. “We move forward or we end it. I’m tired of begging and I’m
fin
ished with limbo.”

“And did she decide?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to her since. I hadn’t even thought of her, in fact, until just now. What do you think that means? Have I a chance of recovery when she breaks my heart?”

“We all recover when it comes to love.”

“Do we?”

“Recover from sexual love? Romantic love? Yeah. But as far as the other goes, I don’t think we ever recover from that.” She paused as the waiter removed and replaced plates and cutlery. He poured more wine for Lynley, more mineral water for her. “He says he hated him, but I don’t believe that. I think he killed him because he couldn’t stand how much he loved him and how much it hurt to watch him choose Gabriella Patten over him. Because that’s the way Jimmy would have seen it. That’s the way kids always see these things. Not only as a rejection of their mums but as a rejection of themselves as well. Gabriella took his dad—”

“Fleming had been out of the house for years.”

“But it was never permanent until now, was it? There was always hope. Now hope was dead. And to make things worse, to make the rejection feel even more complete, his dad was postponing Jimmy’s birthday holiday. And why? To go to Gabriella.”

“To end their relationship, according to Gabriella.”

“But Jimmy didn’t know that. He thought his dad was running out to Kent to boff her.” Barbara lifted her glass of mineral water and pondered the scenario she’d created. “Wait. What if that’s the key?” She asked the question more of herself than of him. Lynley waited cooperatively. Their second courses arrived. Fresh cheese was offered, Romano or Parmesan. Lynley chose the Romano. Barbara followed his lead. She tucked into her pasta, tomatoes, and beans. Not what she would have expected from the name. But not at all bad. She threw on some salt.

“He knew her,” she said, twirling the
tagliatelle
somewhat inexpertly on the edge of her plate. The waiter had thoughtfully provided her with a large spoon, but she hadn’t a clue how she was supposed to use it. “He saw her. He’d been round her, hadn’t he? Sometimes with his dad. But other times…Other times suppose not. Dad would go off with the other two kids, leaving Jimmy with her. Because Jimmy was the hard nut, wasn’t he? The other two might have been easy to win over, but Jimmy wasn’t. So she’d play up to him. Fleming would even encourage her to do so. She was going to be the boy’s step-mum one day. She’d want him to like her. Fleming’d want him to like her. It was important that he like her. She’d want him, in fact, to more than like her.”

“Havers, you can’t be suggesting she seduced that boy.”

“Why not? You saw her yourself this morning.”

“What I saw was that she had Mollison to win over and not a great deal of time to do it.”

“D’you think that come-on was for Mollison’s benefit? What about for yours? A little glimpse of what you were going to miss out on because you happened to be a cop on a case. But what if you weren’t? Or what if you phoned her later this evening and said you needed to come round to talk and get a few more facts straight? D’you think she wouldn’t like to test her power on you?” Lynley slid the tines of a fork into a scampi. He ate without reply. “She likes to pull men, sir. Her husband told us, Mollison told us, she as much as told us herself. How could she have resisted the chance to pull Jimmy if the chance came along?”

“Frankly?” Lynley asked.

“Frankly.”

“Because he’s repellent. Unwashed, unhygienic, probably infested with body lice, and possibly a carrier of disease. Herpes, syphilis, gonorrhoea, warts, HIV. Gabriella Patten might enjoy exercising her sexual prowess over men, but she didn’t strike me as entirely mindless. Her first concern in any situation would be taking excellent care of Gabriella Patten. We’ve heard that, Havers. From her husband, from Mrs. Whitelaw, from Mollison, from Gabriella herself.”

“But you’re thinking of Jimmy
now
, Inspector. What about then? What about before? He can’t have always been such a sleazo. It had to start somewhere.”

“And the loss of his father from the family isn’t enough of a start for you?”

“Was it enough of a start for you? Or your brother?” Barbara saw him lift his head quickly and knew that she’d gone too far. “Sorry. I was out of line there.” She went back to her pasta. “He says he hated him. He says he killed him because he hated him because he was a bastard and deserved to die.”

“You don’t see that as sufficient motive?”

“I’m just saying there’s probably more to it and the more to it is probably Gabriella. She wouldn’t have a clue how to win him over as his future step-mum, but she’d have plenty of tricks up her sleeve or down her blouse. So let’s say she did it. Half because she gets a kick out of seducing a teenager. Half because it’s the only way she can think to get Jimmy on her side. Only she gets him too much on her side. He wants in where his dad’s been playing. He’s in a lather of sexual jealousy and when he sees the chance, he pops off Dad and expects to have Gabriella for himself.”

“That doesn’t take into account the fact that he thought Gabriella was in the cottage as well,” Lynley pointed out.

“So he says. And he would do, wouldn’t he? It would hardly do for us to know he was giving Dad the chop because he wanted in bed with his mum-to-be. But he
knew
his dad was there for a fact. He saw him through the kitchen window.”

“Ardery hasn’t given us his footprints by the window.”

“So? He was in the garden.”

“At the bottom of the garden.”

“He was in the potting shed. He could have seen his father from there.” Barbara paused in the act of twirling her pasta. She could see how difficult it would be to gain weight eating this sort of food every day. The effort to get it from plate to mouth was enormous. She evaluated the expression on Lynley’s face. It was shuttered, too shuttered. She didn’t like it. She said, “You’re not backing away from the kid, are you? Come on. We’ve got a confession, Inspector.”

“An incomplete confession.”

“What did you expect on a first go with him?”

Lynley slid his plate towards the centre of the table. He glanced at the planter where the birds still waited hopefully. He threw them a palmful of crumbs.

“Inspector…”