Playing for the Ashes (89 page)

“Yeah.”

“Then let’s return to the lighting of the cigarette,” Lynley said.

“Wha’ about it, then?”

“You said you lit it with a match.”

“Yeah.”

“Tell me about that please.”

“’Bout what?”

“The match. Where did it come from? Did you take matches with you? Or did you stop somewhere along the way to get matches? Or were they in the cottage?”

Jimmy rubbed his finger beneath his nose. He said, “Wha’s it matter?”

“I’m not sure it matters at all,” Lynley said easily. “It probably doesn’t. But I’m trying to complete a mental picture of what happened. That’s part of my job.”

Friskin said, “Have a care, Jim.” The boy pressed his mouth closed.

Lynley said, “Yesterday when you had a cigarette in here, you used four matches to light it. Do you remember that? I’m wondering if you had that difficulty in the cottage on Wednesday night. Did you light it with one match? Did you use more?”

“I c’n light a fag with one match. I’m not a spas, am I?”

“So you used one match. From a book? From a box?” The boy shifted in his chair without answer. Lynley took a different tack. “What did you do with the match when you had the JPS lit? And it was a JPS, wasn’t it?” A nod. “Good. And the match? What happened to it?”

Jimmy’s eyes flicked from side to side. Remembering the facts, altering them, fabricating them as he went along. Lynley couldn’t yet tell. The boy finally said with a smile pulling at the corners of his mouth, “Took it with me, I did. In my pocket.”

“The match.”

“Sure. I didn’t want to leave evidence, see?”

“So you lit the cigarette with a single match, put the match in your pocket and did what with the cigarette?”

“Do you want to answer that, Jim?” Mr. Friskin interjected. “It isn’t necessary. You can keep silent.”

“Nah. I c’n tell him. He knows anyways, don’t he?”

“He doesn’t know anything you don’t tell him.”

Jimmy worked this one over. Friskin said, “May I have a moment with my client?” Lynley reached forward to switch the tape machine off.

Jimmy said before Lynley’s hand hit the
stop
button, “Look, I lit the bloody fag and I put it in the chair. I tol’ you that yesterday.”

“Which chair was this?”

“Jim, go easy,” Mr. Friskin cautioned.

“What d’you mean, which chair?”

“I mean which chair in which room?”

Jimmy twisted his hands into the hem of his T-shirt. He lifted the front legs of his chair an inch off the floor. He said under his breath, “Fucking cops,” and Lynley continued with, “We’ve got the kitchen, the dining room, the sitting room, the bedroom. Where exactly was the chair that you set on
fir
e, Jim?”

“You know which chair it was. You saw it yourself. What’re you asking me all this bloody crap for?”

“On which side of the chair did you place the cigarette?”

He made no reply.

“Did you place it on the left or was it on the right? Or was it in the back? Or beneath the cushion?”

Jimmy rocked in his chair.

“And what happened to Mrs. Patten’s animals, by the way? Did you see them in the cottage? Did you take them with you?”

The boy slammed his chair back to the floor. He said, “You listen. I did it. I chopped Dad good and I’ll get her next. I told you that much. I won’t say nothing more.”

“Yes, you did say that much yesterday.” On the table, Lynley opened the
fil
e he’d carried from his office. From the photographs Inspector Ardery had supplied, he found a single enlargement of the armchair in question. It filled the frame with only the scalloped edge of a window curtain hanging above it. “Here,” Lynley said. “Does this jog your memory?”

Jimmy hurled a sullen glance at it, saying, “Yeah, tha’s it,” and began to move his eyes away. They stopped, however, at the corner of a photograph that triangled out from beneath the others. In it, a hand dangled limply over the side of a bed. Lynley saw Jimmy swallow as his eyes locked on to the sight of that hand.

Lynley inched the photograph from the pile, watching the expressions flit across the boy’s face as his father’s body slowly came into view. The hand, the arm, the shoulder, then the side of the face. Kenneth Fleming might have been sleeping save for the deadly
flu
sh of his skin and the delicate roseate froth that bubbled from his mouth.

Jimmy was held by the photograph as if it were the stare of a cobra. His hands twisted once again in his T-shirt.

Lynley said quietly, “Which chair was it, Jim?”

The boy said nothing, eyes imprisoned by the picture. Outside the room, work noises ricocheted round the corridor. Inside, the tape machine clicked softly as the tape kept turning in its cassette.

“What happened on Wednesday night?” Lynley asked. “From start to
fin
ish. We need the truth.”

“I told you. I did.”

“But you’re not telling me everything, are you? Why is that, Jimmy? Are you afraid?”

“Of course, he’s afraid,” Friskin said angrily. “Put that photograph away. Turn off the machine. This interview has ended. Now. I mean it.”

“Do you want to end the interview, Jimmy?”

The boy managed at last to force his eyes from the picture. He said, “Yeah. I said what I said.”

Lynley pressed the
stop
button. He made much of gathering the photographs together, but Jimmy wouldn’t look at them again. Lynley said to Friskin, “We’ll be in touch,” and left the solicitor to usher his client through the reporters and photographers who by this time no doubt lay in wait at every entrance and exit to New Scotland Yard.

He met Sergeant Havers—toasted crumpet in one hand, plastic cup in the other—on his way to his office. She said past a bulging cheekful of crumpet, “Billingsgate verifies.

Jean Cooper was at work Thursday morning.

Right on time.”

“Which was?”

“Four
A
.
M
. ”

“Interesting.”

“But she’s not there today.”

“No? Where is she?”

“Downstairs from what reception tells me. Raising holy hell and trying to get past security. You done with the kid?”

“For now.”

“He’s still here?”

“He’s just left with Friskin.”

“Too bad,” Havers said. “Ardery phoned in.”

She waited until they’d got to his office before she passed along Inspector Ardery’s information. The oil on the ivy leaves from Lesser Spring-burn’s common matched the oil on the fi bres found at the cottage. And both matched the oil from Jimmy Cooper’s motorbike.

“Fine,” Lynley said.

Havers went on. Jimmy Cooper’s
fin
gerprints matched the prints on the duck from the potting shed, but—and this was interesting, sir—there appeared to be none at all inside the cottage, none on the window-sills, none on the doors. None of Jimmy’s at least. There were plenty of others.

Lynley nodded. He tossed the Fleming files onto his desk. He opened the next set of newspapers that he’d not yet examined and reached for his glasses.

“You’re not looking surprised,” Havers remarked.

“No. I’m not.”

“Then I suppose you won’t be surprised by the rest.”

“Which is?”

“The cigarette. Their expert got in at nine this morning. He’s made the identification, done the photographs, and finished his report.”

“And?”

“B and H.”

“Benson and Hedges?” Lynley swung his desk chair round towards the window. The pedestrian architecture of the Home Office confronted him, but he didn’t see that as much as he saw the application of
fla
me to a tube of tobacco, followed by one face after another, followed by a cirrus of smoke.

“Definitely,” Havers said. “B and H.” She set her plastic cup on his desk and took the opportunity to flop into one of the chairs in front of it. “That cocks things up for us properly, doesn’t it?”

He didn’t respond. Instead he began yet another mental assessment of what they knew about motive and means, trying to match them with opportunity.

“Well?” Havers said after nearly a minute passed without his reply. “It does, doesn’t it? Doesn’t the B and H cock things up?”

Lynley watched a flock of pigeons rocket from the roof of the Home Office into the sky. They formed themselves into a shape like an arrowhead and soared as one in the direction of St. James’s Park. It was feeding time. The footbridge that passed over the park’s lobster-shaped lake would be lined with tourists, hands outstretched with seeds for the sparrows. The pigeons meant to have their share.

“Indeed,” Lynley said as he watched the birds fly, zeroing in on their destination because they always and only had a single purpose behind their flight. “It certainly puts a new spin on things, Sergeant.”