Playing for the Ashes (83 page)

“No,” Lynley said. “That’s not what happened.”

“It is! I told you and told you and—”

“You’ve told us how you imagined it happened. Perhaps you’ve told us how you would have carried it off had you been given the opportunity. But you haven’t told us how it was done.”

“I have!”

“No.” Lynley stopped the tape recorder. He removed the cassette and replaced it with one from their previous session. It was pre-set at the spot he’d selected earlier that morning, and he punched the button and let it play. Their voices issued from the speakers.

“
Were you smoking a cigarette at the time
?”“
What d’you think? I’m some sort of wally
?”“
Was it like these? A JPS
?”“
Yeah. Tha’s right. A JPS
.”“
And you lit it? Will you show me, please
?”“
Show you what
?”“
How you lit the cigarette
.” Lynley shut off the machine, removed the

tape, replaced it with the cassette from this current session. He punched
record
.

“So?” Jimmy said. “I said what I said. I did what I did.”

“With a JPS?”

“You heard it, di’n’t you?”

“Yes. I heard it.” Lynley rubbed his forehead, then dropped his hand to observe the boy. Jimmy had tilted his chair onto its back legs and was rocking it. Lynley said, “Why are you lying, Jim?”

“I never—”

“What don’t you want us to know?”

The boy continued to rock. “Hey, I
told
you—”

“Not the truth. You haven’t told me that.”

“I was there. I said.”

“Yes. You were there. You were in the garden. You were in the potting shed. But you weren’t in the cottage. You didn’t kill your father any more than I did.”

“I did. Bastard. I gave it to him good.”

“The day your father was murdered was the same day that your mother was supposed to acknowledge his petition for divorce. Did you know that, Jim?”

“He deserved to die.”

“But your mother didn’t want to divorce. If she’d wanted that, she would have served him with her own petition two years after he’d left his family. That’s legal desertion. She would

have had grounds.”

“I wanted him dead.”

“But instead she held on for four years. And she may have thought she was finally going to win him back.”

“I’d kill him again if I got the chance.”

“Would she have reason to think that, Jim? After all, your father had continued to visit her throughout those years. When you kids weren’t home. Did you know that?”

“I did it. I
did
.”

“I dare say her hopes may still have been strong. If he continued to seek her out.”

Jimmy dropped the legs of his chair to the floor. His hands twisted inside his T-shirt, stretching the material in the direction of his knees. He said, “I
told
you.” And his meaning was clear: Bugger off. I’m not saying nothing else.

Lynley rose. “We won’t be bringing charges against your client,” he said to Mr. Friskin.

Jimmy’s head
fle
w up.

“But we’ll want to talk to him again. Once he’s had a chance to recall exactly what happened last Wednesday night.”

Two hours later, Barbara Havers was giving Lynley her report into the Wednesday-night movements of Chris Faraday and Amanda Beckstead. Amanda, she told him, lived in a conversion on Moreton Street. There were neighbours above and neighbours below, a friendly group who acted as if they spent all of their waking hours monitoring one another’s business. Amanda confirmed that Chris Faraday had been with her.

“It’s a rather difficult situation because of Livie,” she’d said in a soft, composed voice, her right hand curved gently round her left. She’d been on her lunch hour from the animal grooming and photography studio that she and her brother ran in Pimlico, and she’d agreed to a chat with the detective sergeant so long as she was able to eat her cheese sandwich and drink her bottle of Evian at the same time. They’d walked to Pimlico Gardens and Shrubbery at the edge of the river, where they sat not far from the statue of William Huskisson, a nineteenth-century statesman rendered in stone and attired in a toga and what appeared to be riding boots. Amanda didn’t seem to notice the incongruity of Huskisson’s apparel, nor did she seem bothered by the wind that was picking up off the river or the cyclonic howl of traffic tearing along Grosvenor Road. She merely sat in an easy lotus position on the wooden bench and spoke earnestly as she attended to her lunch.

“Livie and Chris have lived together for some years,” she said, “and it hasn’t seemed right for Chris to move on now that Livie’s so ill. I’ve suggested we might try to live communally, my brother, Chris, Livie, myself. But Chris doesn’t want that. He says Livie wouldn’t be able to deal with it if she knew he and I wanted to be together. She’d insist on going into a home, Chris says, because that’s what she’s like. He doesn’t want that. He feels responsible for her. So we’re left as we are.” They’d scraped together what time they could over the past few months, she told Barbara, but they’d never been able to manage much more than four hours alone. Wednesday had been their first opportunity to have an entire night because Livie had made arrangements to see her mother and she wasn’t expecting Chris to return for her until the morning. Amanda said frankly, “It’s just that we wanted to sleep together. And wake up together. It was more than having sex. It was being connected in ways more important than having sex. Do you understand what I mean?”

She’d looked so sincere that Barbara had nodded, as if the experience of sleeping with a man were right up her alley. Quite, she’d thought. Being connected to some bloke. I understand how that feels. Ab-so-bloody-lutely and without a doubt.

At the conclusion of her report, Barbara said to Lynley, “So I see it this way. Either Fleming’s death is a conspiracy involving most of Moreton Street, or Amanda Beckstead is telling the truth. I cast my vote with the second option. What about you?”

Lynley was standing at his office window, hands in his pockets, attention directed down towards the street. Barbara wondered if the reporters and photographers had dispersed. She said, “So what did you get from the yobbo this time round?”

“More inadvertent verification that he didn’t murder his father.”

“He’s holding tight on everything else?”

“At the moment.”

“Bollocks.” She pulled out a stick of Juicy Fruit and folded it into her mouth. She said, “Why don’t we just pick her up? What’s the point of going through the back door like

this?”

“The point is evidence, Sergeant.”

“We’ll get the evidence. We’ve already got motive. We’ve got means and opportunity. We’ve got enough to haul her in and have at least one decent go at her. The rest’ll fall into place after that.”

Lynley shook his head slowly. For a long time he gazed at the street below, then at the sky, which was grey as a battleship, as if spring had decided on a sudden moratorium. “The boy has to name her,” he
fin
ally said.

Barbara tried to believe she’d misheard him. She popped her chewing gum in exasperation. It was so unlike Lynley to take this mincing-on-tiptoes approach that she wondered, with a twinge of disloyalty, if his habitual indecision about his future with Helen Clyde was finally beginning to seep into his work. “Sir.” She aimed for a tone of comradely patience. “Isn’t that an unrealistic expectation of a sixteen-year-old boy? She’s his mother, after all. They may not get on, but if he names her as his father’s killer, don’t you see what he’ll be doing to himself? And don’t you think he
knows
what he’ll be doing to himself?”

Lynley pensively
fin
gered his jaw. Barbara felt encouraged enough to continue.

“He’ll be losing both parents inside of a week. Do you actually imagine him doing that? Do you expect him to turn his sister and his brother—not to mention himself—into legal orphans? Wards of the court? Isn’t that asking a hell of a lot? Isn’t that trying to break him more than he needs to be broken?”

“It may be, Havers,” Lynley said.

“Good. Then—”

“But, unfortunately, breaking Jimmy Cooper that much is exactly what we need if we’re to get to the truth.”

Barbara was about to argue her own point further when Lynley looked past her and said to the doorway, “Yes, Dee. What is it?”

Dorothea Harriman adjusted one of the frills of her silk jabot. She was a vision in blue this afternoon. “Superintendent Webberly is asking for you and Detective Sergeant Havers,” Harriman said. “Shall I tell him you’ve just left?”

“No. We’ll come along.”

“Sir David’s with him,” Harriman added. “Sir David’s called for the meeting, in fact.”

“Hillier,” Barbara groaned. “God spare us. Sir, it’ll be at least two hours if he builds up a head of steam. Let’s duck out while we can. Dee can make our excuses.”

Harriman dimpled. “More than happy to do it, Detective Inspector. He’s in charcoal, by the way.”

Barbara sank deeper into her chair. Sir David Hillier’s charcoal suits were legendary at New Scotland Yard. Perfectly tailored, creased like newly forged axe blades wherever creases were needed, otherwise unwrinkled, unfrayed, and unmarred, they were what Hillier donned whenever he wanted to project the power of his position as Chief Superintendent. He was always “Sir David” when he arrived in Victoria Street wearing charcoal. On any other day, he was simply “the Guv.”

“Are they in Webberly’s office?” Lynley asked.

Harriman nodded and led the way.

Both Hillier and Webberly were seated at the circular central table in Webberly’s office, and the subject Hillier clearly wished to discuss covered every inch of the table-top, spread out as if perused rapaciously by an inexperienced actor seeking journalistic approbation after opening night. This morning’s newspapers. And, from what Barbara could ascertain from a quick glance as Hillier made much of getting to his feet in the presence of a member of the opposite sex, the chief superintendent had got his hands on yesterday’s as well.

“Inspector, Sergeant,” Hillier said.

Webberly heaved himself from the table and moved behind them to shut the door. The superintendent had enjoyed more than one cigar so far this day, and the atmosphere in his office was fusty, the room overhung with a layer of smoke.

Hillier used a gold pencil in a sweeping gesture to take in the newspapers on the table. The photographs from this morning’s selection featured everything from Mr. Friskin using his arm to shelter Jimmy’s face from the photographers to Jean Cooper pushing her way through a jostling crowd of reporters as she tried to make her way to her car. Additionally, however, readers’ appetites for information had today been fed with a broader array of pictures than those depicting the principals in the case. The
Daily Mail
was running what appeared to be a photo-essay on the life and times of Kenneth Fleming, complete with pictures of his former home on the Isle of Dogs, his family, the cottage in Kent, the printworks in Stepney, Miriam Whitelaw, and Gabriella Patten. The
Guardian
and the
Independent
were going for a more intellectual approach, using a graphic of the crime scene. And the
Daily Mirror
, the
Sun
, and the
Daily Express
were running interviews with sponsors of the England team, Guy Mollison, and the captain of the Middlesex side. But the largest number of column inches—in
The Times
—had been devoted to the issue of the growing crime rate among teenagers, leaving the reader to conclude what veiled allusions the newspaper was making by running such a story in conjunction with features on the murder of Fleming. No prejudice here, the story declared, but heavy use of the word
alleged
didn’t deter the paper from honing its story on the possibility of an unnamed sixteen-year-old’s guilt.

Hillier used his pencil a second time, to indicate two chairs opposite his own. When Barbara and Lynley sat cooperatively, he paced to the bulletin board across the room by the door and made much of examining the departmental notices that were hanging there. Webberly wandered over to his desk, but instead of sitting, he leaned his barrel-sized bum against the window-sill and stripped open a cigar.

“Explain,” Hillier said. He spoke to Webberly’s bulletin board.

“Sir,” Lynley said.

Barbara glanced Lynley’s way. His tone was even but not deferential. Hillier wouldn’t like that.

The chief superintendent continued, employing a modulation of voice that suggested he was engaged in a verbal contemplation. “I spent my morning most curiously. Half in fending off the editors of every major daily in the city. Half on the phone with former and future sponsors of the England cricket team. I experienced a less-than-gratifying meeting with the deputy commissioner and went on to partake of an indigestible lunch at Lord’s Cricket Ground with seven members of the MCC. Are you perceiving a pattern in these activities, Lord Asherton?”

Next to her, Barbara could feel Lynley bristle at the use of his title. She could sense the effort it cost him not to take Hillier’s bait.

He said with perfect equanimity, “There’s understandable anxiety on every front that we close this case. But that’s generally the situation when a public figure is murdered. Don’t you agree…Sir David?”