Playing for the Ashes (54 page)

“One of our crime-team blokes spoke to Connor O’Neil,” Ardery said. “He owns the pub. He was working the taps on Wednesday night along with his son.”

“Did he give us anything?”

“He said they finished up around half past twelve. Neither of them saw a strange car in the car park when they locked up. There were no cars left but their own, in fact.”

Lynley said, “That’s no surprise, is it?”

“We checked this site as well,” Ardery continued firmly. “As you can see, Inspector, the ground’s beaten down. It isn’t the proper consistency for taking a print.”

Lynley could see she was right. The vacant spots where ivy didn’t grow were littered with last year’s disintegrating leaves. Beneath them the ground was packed solid, like a stretch of cement. It wouldn’t be capable of taking an impression of anything, be it footprint, tyre print, or the killer’s signature.

He straightened. He looked back the way they had come. The shrubbery was, he believed, the most logical place to hide a vehicle if, indeed, a vehicle had been used at some stage of the crime. It gave on to the car park, which in its turn gave on to the lane that led to the footpath. The footpath steered the walker to within
fif
ty yards of Celandine Cottage. All that was required of the killer they sought was a working knowledge of the local environment.

On the other hand, hiding a vehicle wasn’t completely necessary if the killer acted in concert with someone else. A driver could have paused momentarily at the Fox and Hounds, let off a killer who faded down the lane that led to the footpath, and merely spent an hour or more driving round the countryside until the fire was set and the starter returned. That suggested not only long-term collusion but also an intimate knowledge of Fleming’s movements on the day of his death. Two people, rather than one, would have had to possess a vested interest in his demise.

“Sir,” Sergeant Havers said. “Have a look at this.”

Lynley saw that Havers had inched along the rhododendrons and holly. She was squatting at the point where the shrubbery last made contact with the pub’s car park. She was brushing some fallen leaves to one side and lifting a tendril of ivy from among perhaps a dozen that reached into an oblong patch of earth.

Lynley and Ardery joined her. Over her shoulder, Lynley could see what she had found, a rough circle of packed earth some three inches in diameter. It was stained darker than the rest of the ground, coffee coloured as opposed to the hazel surrounding it.

Havers used her fingers to snap off the tendril she was holding. She grunted her way to her feet, shoved her hair off her forehead, and held the tendril out for Lynley’s inspection. “Looks like some kind of oil to me,” she said. “It’s dripped onto three of these leaves as well. See? Here’s some. And more there. And there.”

“Motor oil,” Lynley murmured.

“That’s what I’d say. Just like the oil on the blue jeans.” Havers indicated the Springburn Road. “He’d have come along there, killed the engine and the lights, and coasted along the edge of the lawn. Parked here. Slipped through the shrubbery and the car park, making for the footpath. Taken the path to the cottage. Jumped the wall into the paddock next door. Waited at the bottom of the garden for the coast to clear.”

Ardery said quickly, “You can’t think we wouldn’t have found tyre prints, Sergeant. Because if a car actually drove across the lawn—”

“Not a car,” Havers said. “A motorbike. Two tyres, not four. Lighter than a car. Less likely to leave a trail. Easy to manoeuvre. Easier to hide.”

Lynley felt reluctant to accept this scenario. “A motorbike rider who then smoked six or eight cigarettes to mark his place at Celandine Cottage? How does that play, Sergeant? What kind of killer leaves a calling card?”

“The kind of killer who doesn’t expect to get caught.”

“But anyone with the least knowledge of forensics would know the importance of not leaving evidence,” Lynley said. “Any evidence. Of any kind.”

“Right. So we’re looking for a killer who foolishly assumed this killing wasn’t going to look like a killing in the first place. We’re looking for someone who was thinking primarily of the end product here: Fleming’s death. How to bring it off and what there was to be gained, not how it might be investigated afterwards. We’re looking for someone who thought that cottage—crammed with antique bloody
fir
e-wood
, Inspector—would go up like a torch once that cigarette burned down far enough in the armchair. In his mind there wouldn’t be evidence. There wouldn’t be a cigarette end. There wouldn’t be the remains of matches. There wouldn’t be anything but rubble. And what, he would think if he did pause to think, would the police be able to make of rubble?”

A cheer went up from the spectators of the cricket match. The three detectives swung about. The batsman had hit the ball and was dashing for the other set of stumps. Two fielders were racing across the outfield. The bowler was yelling. The wicket keeper was throwing one of his gloves to the ground in disgust. Obviously someone had forgotten a cardinal rule of cricket: No matter what, always try for the catch.

“We need to talk to that boy, Inspector,” Havers said. “You wanted evidence. The Inspector here has provided us with it. Ciga

rette ends—”

“Which have yet to be identified.”

“Denim fibres stained with oil.”

“To be substantiated by the chromatograph.”

“Footprints which have already been identified. A shoe sole with a distinctive marking. And now this.” She gestured to the ivy he held. “What more do you want?”

Lynley didn’t reply. He knew how Havers would react to his answer. It wasn’t more that he wanted. It was less, far less.

Inspector Ardery, he saw, was still staring at the ground beyond Sergeant Havers where the oil stain made its circular splodge. Her face was vexed. She said quietly, more to herself than to them, “I told them to check for prints. We didn’t have the word yet about oil on the fi bres.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Lynley said.

“No. It does. If you hadn’t insisted…”

Havers’ resigned look asked Lynley if she should make herself scarce a second time. Lynley lifted a hand to tell her to stay where she was. He said, “You can’t be expected to anticipate evidence.”

“That’s my job.”

“This oil may mean nothing. It may not be the same as that on the fi bres.”

“Damn it,” Ardery said more to herself than to them. She spent nearly a minute watching the cricket match—the same two batsmen were relentlessly continuing to try the marginal skills of the opposing side— before her features settled once more into a semblance of professional disinterest.

“When this is all over,” Lynley said with a smile as her eyes met his once again, “I’ll have Sergeant Havers relate some of my more interesting errors in judgement on the job.”

Ardery’s head raised fractionally. Her response was cool. “We all make errors, Inspector. I like to learn from mine. This sort of thing won’t happen again.”

She moved away from them, in the direction of the car park, saying, “Is there more you’d like to see in the village?” She did not wait to hear his response.

Havers took the tendril of ivy from his hand. She bagged the individual leaves. “Speaking of errors in judgement,” she said meaningfully and followed Ardery into the car park.

CHAPTER
13

S
ergeant Havers stood outside the Bentley in Shepherd’s Market, splitting a blueberry muffin in two. While Lynley was phoning the Yard, she had paid a visit to the Express Café, returning with two steaming styrofoam cups, which she placed on the car’s bonnet, and a paper bag from which she drew forth her mid-morning snack.

“Bit early for elevenses, but what the hell,” she remarked, offering Lynley a portion.

He waved her off with a “Mind the car for God’s sake, will you, Sergeant?” He was listening to Constable Nkata’s report, which so far consisted of how the DCs assigned to the Isle of Dogs and Kensington were managing to avoid speaking to the press who, in Nkata’s words, were “hanging on the slack like a
flo
ck of crows waiting for road kill.” There was nothing of burning import to relay at the moment from either location or from Little Venice, where another team of DCs was delving into the Wednesday night movements of Olivia Whitelaw and Chris Faraday. “Whole family’s home in Cardale Street, though,” Nkata said.

“The boy as well?” Lynley asked. “Jimmy?”

“Far as we know.”

“Good. If he leaves, tail him.”

“Will do, ’Spector.” The sound of rustling came over the wire, as if Nkata was juggling papers close to the receiver. He said, “Maidstone phoned in. A bird, saying you’re to phone her when you can.”

“Inspector Ardery?”

More rustling. “Right. Ardery. Tell me, she as foxy as she sounds?”

“She’s too old for you, Winston.”

“Hell. Isn’t that always the story?”

Lynley rang off and joined Havers on the pavement. He tasted the coffee she’d brought him. “Havers, this is foul.”

His sergeant said past a mouthful of muffin, “But it’s wet.”

“So is motor oil, but I prefer not to drink it.”

Havers munched and raised her cup in the direction from which they had come. “So what d’you think?”

“That’s the question of the hour,” Lynley said. He reflected upon their interview with Gabriella Patten.

“We can verify the phone call with Mrs. Whitelaw,” Havers said. “If she did phone Kensington around midnight on Wednesday, she did it from the flat since the porter verifies the time she picked up the key. Which puts her out of the running. She couldn’t be in two places at once, could she, setting a fire in Kent and having a friendly little chat with Mrs. Whitelaw in London. I expect that’s beyond even Gabriella’s powers.”

But she had others, as they both had seen. And she had no apparent reluctance to use them.

“I’ll stay here for a while,” Guy Mollison had confided without noticeable embarrassment at the conclusion of the interview when he stepped with Lynley and Havers onto the mezzanine and pulled the door partially shut behind him. “She’s had a rough time of it. She needs a friend. If I can do that much…Well, I’m at fault here. If I hadn’t started the trouble with Ken in the first place…It’s just that I owe her. You know.” He looked back over his shoulder at the door. His tongue slipped out, wetted his lips. “She’s broken up about his death. She’ll want someone to talk to. You can see that.”

Lynley wondered at the man’s capacity for self-delusion. It was remarkable to think that they’d actually witnessed the same performance. From her position on the sofa—head and shoulders thrown back, hands folded— Gabriella had told them of her conversation with Miriam Whitelaw and what led up to it.

“The woman’s an utter hypocrite,” she said. “She was butter-wouldn’t-melt whenever she saw Ken and I together. But she hated me, she didn’t want him to marry me, she thought I wasn’t good enough for him. No one was good enough for Ken as far as Miriam was concerned. No one but Miriam, that is.”

“She denies they were lovers.”

“Of course they weren’t lovers,” Gabriella asserted. “But it wasn’t for want of her trying, believe me.”

“Fleming told you this?”

“He didn’t need to tell me. All I had to do was to watch. How she looked at him, how she treated him, how she hung on his words. It was nauseous. And behind his back, there she was, always picking away. At me. At us. All in the name of having only Ken’s best interests at heart. And everything—all of it—done with that treacly little smile on her face. ‘Gabriella, do forgive me. I don’t intend to make you self-conscious…’ and off she’d go.”

“Self-conscious about what?”

“‘Are you sure that’s the word you want to use, dear?’” She did a fair imitation of Mrs. Whitelaw’s soft voice. “‘Don’t you mean
me
instead of
I
? What an intriguing…ah…point of view you’re expressing. Have you read much on the subject? Ken’s a verbacious reader, you know.’”

Lynley doubted Miriam Whitelaw would have ventured into manufacturing words, but he got the general idea. Gabriella’s mimicry continued.

“‘I’m sure that, when you and Ken marry, you’ll want it to be a lasting match, won’t you? So you won’t mind my pointing out to you the importance of a man and woman meeting on an intellectual plane, as well as on a physical one.’” Gabriella shook back her mass of hair, an agitated movement in which she uncovered her bruises once again. “She knew he loved me. She knew he wanted me. She couldn’t bear the thought of Ken feeling something for another woman, so she had to demean it. ‘Of course, you know that ardour isn’t lasting. There has to be something more between lovers if a relationship is going to stand the test of time. I’m sure you and Ken have come to terms with this already, haven’t you, dear? He won’t want to make the same unfortunate mistake with you that he made with Jean.’”

If that’s what she said to Gabriella’s face, then what did the police imagine Mrs. Butter-Wouldn’t-Melt was saying behind Gabriella’s back? To Ken? All of it, Gabriella declared, would have been proclaimed so gently, with such care, with no indication that Mrs. Whitelaw felt anything other than maternal concern for a young man she’d known since he was fifteen years old.