Playing for the Ashes (79 page)

“Here’s what I think,” she said. “I think we need Jean Cooper in the interview room. We need to ask her why she hasn’t been exactly forthcoming with helpful information. About her marriage. About Fleming’s visits to her. About the divorce petition and its interesting timing. We need to pick her up and keep her at the Yard for a good six hours. We need to give her a proper grilling for once. We need to wear her down.”

“She won’t venture into Scotland Yard without a solicitor, Havers.”

“What difference does that make? We can deal with Friskin or whoever else she decides to bring with her. The point is to shake her up, Inspector. Which, as far as I’m concerned, is the only way we’re ever going to get to the truth. Because if she hasn’t been shaken up so far—with her son being paraded like a sacrificial goat before the press—then she’s not going to be shaken up till we put the thumbscrews to her personally.” Barbara carved herself some cheese and ate it with the last of her toast. She grabbed a handful of grapes and said, “Yeow!” when their sour taste shot across her tongue and into her throat. She removed the bowl with, “Sorry.
Bleah
. So much for that.”

Lynley cut a slice from the cheddar, but rather than eat it, he merely used his fork to lace it with a geometric decoration of tiny holes. When Barbara was at the point of despairing that he would reply to her suggestion—which, to her way of thinking, was the next and only logical move in the investigation—he nodded as if he and his thoughts had arrived at a point of compromise.

“Sergeant, you’re right,” he said. “And the more I think of it, the more I’m convinced. Shaking up is what’s called for.”

“Good,” she said. “So do we pick Jean up or have her—”

“Not Jean,” he said.

“Not…Then who?”

“Jimmy.”

“Jimmy?
Jimmy
?” Barbara felt the need to do something to keep herself from levitating with pure aggravation. She grasped the edges of her chair seat. “Sir, she’s not going to break over Jimmy. Friskin will have told her today that Jimmy’s not giving us the facts we want. She’ll tell Jimmy to hold the line. If he hangs on and keeps clapping his mouth when we get too close to pinning him down, he’s home free and he’s got to know it. So does she. I’m telling you, sir, Jean Cooper is not going to be shaken up over Jimmy. And she’s not going to break over Jimmy either.”

“Have him there around noon,” Lynley said.

“But why waste our time carting him in again? The press’ll be all over us, not to mention how Webberly and Hillier will react. We won’t gain a thing. And we’ll end up losing more time in the bargain. Sir, listen to me. If we nab Jean, we’re back on track. We’ve got something to work with. If we stick with Jimmy, we won’t shake Jean up at all.”

“You’re right about that,” Lynley said. He balled up his paper napkin and tossed it on the table.

“Right about what?”

“Shaking up Jean Cooper.”

“Great. So if I’m right—”

“But it’s not Jean Cooper I want to shake up. Have Jimmy there at noon.”

Lynley took a deliberately circuitous route home. He was in no hurry. He had no reason to believe that a message from Helen Clyde would be waiting—he understood her well enough by now to know how little she would have liked his attempt to force her hand on the previous morning—and even if that hadn’t been the case, he sometimes found that removing himself from a location in which he was expected to think actually allowed him to think with more clarity than he could muster either at home or in his office. For this reason on more than one occasion, he’d ducked out of New Scotland Yard in the middle of an investigation and cut through the underground station to make the
fiv
e minutes’ walk to St. James’s Park. There he would follow the path that encircled the lake, where he admired the pelicans, listened to the squawking inhabitants of Duck Island, and waited for his mind to clear. So this night, instead of driving southwest towards Belgravia, he dropped down to Regent’s Park. He drifted round the Outer Circle then the Inner Circle, and
fin
ally ended up spinning along Park Road where a turn to the west took him without thinking to the entrance of Lord’s Cricket Ground.

Lights were on in the concourse, temporary lights set up by workmen doing repairs to a drain outside the Pavilion. When Lynley ducked inside the Grace Gates and began to pace in the direction of the stands, a security guard stopped him. After Lynley showed him his warrant card and mentioned the name Kenneth Fleming, the guard appeared ready to settle in for a natter.

He said, “Scotland Yard, are you? Close to breaking the case? And if you break it, then what? You ask me, we ought to bring back the gallows. Take care of this bloke proper. Do it in public.” He pulled on his tubular nose and spat on the ground. “He was a fine chap, Fleming. Always had a kind word. Asked after the wife and the children, he did. Knew every one of us blokes by name. You don’t
fin
d that often. That’s quality, that is.”

Lynley murmured, “Indeed.” The guard seemed to accept this as encouragement. He looked as if he was about to warm to his topic, so Lynley asked him if the stands were open.

“Not much to see in there,” the guard replied. “Most of the lights ’s off. You need them switched on?”

No, Lynley told him and nodded as the guard waved him on his way.

He knew there would be very little point in bathing the grounds, the playing field, or even the stands with light. Both yesterday evening and all of today had illustrated to him that the essential key to unlocking the truth in the death of Kenneth Fleming was not going to be a piece of evidence—a hair, a match, a note, a footprint—that one could examine in the artificial lights of a cricket ground or even a laboratory and subsequently present in a court of law as irrefutable proof of a killer’s identity. Rather, the key to bringing the case to a close was going to be something far more ethereal, a verification of guilt that rose from a single soul’s unwillingness to keep silent and that same soul’s inability to bear the weight of injustice.

Lynley made his way into one of the stands and walked down the dark aisle to the barrier that divided spectators from field. He rested his elbows on this barrier and let his vision wander from the Pavilion on his left to the shadowy circus-tent awnings that loomed over the Mound Stand on his right, from the square of tarmac at the far end of the field that led one into the nursery grounds to the field itself, a barely perceptible slope of seventeen pitches. In the darkness, the scoreboard was a rectangular shadow etched with ghostly letters, and the gently curving rows of white seats fanned out like cards lying against an ebony table.

Here Fleming had played, Lynley thought. Here at Lord’s he’d lived his dream. He’d batted with a combination of joy and skill, making effortless centuries as if he believed he was owed a hundred runs whenever he took guard. His bat, his name, and his portrait as well might all have one day been collected in the Long Room, placed among those of Fry and Grace. But that possibility, as well as the promise that his skill once made to the future of the sport, had died along with Fleming in Kent.

It was the perfect crime.

From years of investigating murders, Lynley knew that the perfect crime was not one in which there was no evidence, since such a creature could no longer exist in a world where also existed gas chromatography, comparison microscopes, DNA typing, computer enhancement, lasers, and fibre-optic lamps. Rather in this day the perfect crime was one in which none of the evidence collected at the scene could be attached—beyond the law’s required shadow of a doubt—to the killer. There might be hairs on the corpse, but their presence could be easily explained away. There might be fingerprints in the room with the body, but they would be found to belong to another. A questionable presence in the vicinity, a chance remark overheard prior to or after the commission of the crime, an inability to say with certainty where one was at the moment of murder…These constituted mere circumstantial data, and in the hands of a good defence counsel, they were about as significant as dust motes.

Every killer worth his salt knew this fact. And Fleming’s killer was no exception.

In the quiet darkness of Lord’s Cricket Ground, Lynley admitted to himself exactly where the investigation stood after seventy-two hours. They had no hard, usable evidence that could be indisputably attached to one of their suspects at the same time as it was intimately connected to the murder itself. On the one hand, they had cigarette ends, footprints, fibres, two sets of oil stains—one on the fi bres, one on the ground—and a confession. On the other hand, they had a burnt-out chair, half a dozen match ends, and what remained of a single Benson and Hedges cigarette. Beyond that, they had a crucial key to the kitchen door in Jimmy Cooper’s possession, an argument overheard by a farmer out for an evening’s walk, a car park brawl at the cricket ground, a divorce petition due to be acknowledged, and a love affair brought to an unhappy end. But every concrete object in their possession, as well as the testimony collected so far, acted as a tile in what promised to remain a mosaic forever incomplete.

And it was what they didn’t have that gave Lynley pause, that coursed him back through time to the library of his family home in Cornwall where a
fir
e flickered ochroid light against the library walls and the rain beat on the leaded windows in steady waves. He lay on the floor, head pillowed in his arms. His sister curled round a cushion nearby. Their father sat in his wingback chair and read the tale both children knew by heart: the disappearance of a winning race horse, the death of its trainer, and the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes. It was a story they’d heard times beyond counting, the first one they requested whenever their father made one of his infrequent offers to read to them aloud. Each time as the earl approached the story’s peak moment, their sense of anticipation grew.

Lynley would sit up. Judith would clutch the cushion to her stomach. And when the earl cleared his throat and said to Sherlock Holmes in Inspector Gregory’s deferential voice, “‘Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?’” Lynley and his sister would chime in with the rest: Lynley saying, “‘To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time,’” while Judith countered with mock confusion, “‘The dog did nothing in the nighttime,’” and both of them shouting in happy finale: “‘That was the curious incident.’”

Only in this case of Kenneth Fleming, the dialogue between Holmes and Gregory would have been altered, from the dog in the nighttime to the suspect’s statement. Because that’s where Lynley’s attention was drawn: to the curious incident of the suspect’s statement.

The suspect in question had said absolutely nothing.

Which was—at the end of things—what was so curious.

CHAPTER
19

J
eannie Cooper followed Mr. Friskin’s Rover in the blue Cavalier that Kenny had bought for her last year, the first and only item she’d accepted from his cricket largess. He’d brought it round one Tuesday afternoon, saying into her stubborn refusal to accept it, “I don’t want you carting the kids round in that Metro, Jean. It’s nothing but a breakdown waiting to happen, and if it blows on the motorway, the lot of you’ll be stranded.” She’d said stiffl y, “We can cope if we’re stranded. You needn’t think Mrs. Whitelaw’s phone is going to ring some night with me on the line asking you to come fetch us.” To which he’d said in that quiet way of his, flipping the car key from one hand to the other and boring into her eyes with his so that she couldn’t look away no matter how much she wanted to, “Jean, it isn’t about you and me, this car. It’s about them. The kids. So you take it. You tell them whatever you want about how you got it. I don’t mind what you tell them. Don’t mention my name if that’s what you want. I’m only looking to keep them safe.”

Safe, she thought, and a hard angry laugh that bubbled on the fringes of hysteria burst from her mouth like the promise of a serious eruption to come. Kenny wanted to keep them safe, all right. She choked back the cry that wanted to follow the laugh. No, she said to herself. She wouldn’t give anyone the
fla
ming satisfaction of seeing her break another time. Not after yesterday afternoon with those cameras clicking in her face and the reporters like jackals, circling fast and sussing her out, waiting for a show of weakness to record. Well, they’d got their show and they’d mashed it across the front of the paper and that was all she intended to give the bastards.

She’d fought her way through them at New Scotland Yard with a face like a clam shell. They’d shouted their questions and
fir
ed off their cameras, and while she reckoned they’d had themselves a fine time with her Crissys smock and her cap and the splattered apron she hadn’t bothered to remove in her haste to be gone once Mr. Friskin had phoned her at Billingsgate Market with the news that the police were wanting Jimmy once again, she hadn’t given them anything else. Just the outside woman who went to work and came home to her kids. The rest of her the reporters and photographers didn’t see. And if they didn’t see, they could not touch.

They navigated the congestion at Parliament Square, and Jeannie kept as close as she could to Mr. Friskin’s Rover, with the half-formed and unarticulated design of somehow protecting her son this way. Jimmy had refused to ride with her. Instead, he had ducked into Mr. Friskin’s car before either his mother or his solicitor had the chance to speak to him or to each other. Jeannie asked, “What’s happened? What of they done to him?”