Playing for the Ashes (6 page)

She said, “Why’s he so pink?”

The green man said, “Is this your husband?”

Sergeant Coffman said, “Carbon monoxide flushes the skin when it gets into the bloodstream.”

The green man said, “Is this your husband, Mrs. Fleming?”

So easy to say yes, have done with it, and be out of there. So easy to turn, walk back down those corridors, face the cameras and the questions without giving answers because there were none really—there never had been. So easy just to slip into the car, to be driven off and to ask for sirens to make the going quick. But she couldn’t form the right word.
Yes
. It seemed so simple. But she couldn’t say it.

Instead she said, “Pull down the sheet.”

The green man hesitated. Sergeant Coffman said, “Mrs.… Ms.…” and sounded in pain.

“Pull down the sheet.”

They wouldn’t understand, but that didn’t matter because in another few hours they’d be out of her life. Kenny, on the other hand, would be there forever: in the faces of her children, in the unexpected slide of footsteps on the stairs, in the eternal whip-crack of a leather ball as somewhere in the world on a clipped green
fie
ld the willow wood hit it soaring over the boundary for another six.

She could tell that the sergeant and the green man were looking at each other, wondering exactly what they ought to do. But it was her decision, wasn’t it, to see the rest. It had nothing at all to do with them.

The green man folded the sheet with both hands, starting at the body’s shoulders. He did it neatly, each fold a precise three inches across, and slowly enough so that he could stop the moment she told him she’d seen enough.

Except she’d never see enough. Jeannie knew this fact at the very same moment as she knew she’d never forget the sight of Kenny Fleming dead.

Ask them questions, she told herself. Ask them the questions anyone would ask. You got to. You must.

Who found him? Where was he? Was he naked like this? Why’s he look so peaceful? How’d he die? When? Was she with him? Is her body nearby?

But instead she took a step nearer the trolley and thought about how she’d loved the clean angles of his collar bone and the muscles of his shoulders and arms. She remembered how his stomach was hard, how the hair grew thick and coarse round his penis, how his thighs were roped with the sinews of a runner, how his legs were lean. She thought about the twelve-year-old boy he’d been, fumbling with her knickers the very first time behind the packing crates on Invicta Wharf. She thought about the man he’d become and the woman she was and how even on the afternoon he’d driven that fancy car of his into Cubitt Town and sat in the kitchen and shared a cuppa and said the word
divorce
that she’d been expecting him to say for four years now, their
fin
gers still finally managed to find each other and to grasp like blind things with a will of their own.

She thought of the years together—KennyandJean—that would trail her like hungry insistent dogs for the rest of her life. She thought of the years without him that unspooled before her in a ribbon of grief. She wanted to grab his body and throw it to the floor and drive her heel into his face. She wanted to claw at his chest and pound her
fis
ts into his throat. Hate beat in her skull and made a vice of her chest and told her how much she still loved him. Which made her hate him all the more. Which made her wish he could only die again and again right into eternity.

She said, “Yes,” and stepped back from the trolley.

“It’s Kenneth Fleming?” Sergeant Coffman said.

“It’s him.” Jeannie turned away. She disengaged the sergeant’s hand from her arm. She adjusted her handbag so that its handle fit snugly into the bend of her elbow. She said, “I’d like to buy some fags. I don’t suppose you got a tobacconist hereabouts?”

Sergeant Coffman said she’d see about the cigarettes as soon as she could. There were papers to be signed. If Mrs. Fleming—

“Cooper,” Jeannie said.

If Ms. Cooper would come this way….

The green man stayed behind with the corpse. Jeannie heard him give a low whistle-breath between his teeth as he rolled the trolley towards a hanging dome of light in the centre of the room. Jeannie thought she heard him mutter the word
Jesus
, but by that time the door had shut behind them and she was being seated at a desk beneath a poster of a longhaired dachshund puppy wearing a tiny straw hat.

Sergeant Coffman said something in a quiet voice to her constable, and Jeannie caught the word
cigarette
, so she said, “Make them Embassys, won’t you?” and began signing her name on the forms where the secretary had placed neat red
x
’s. She didn’t know what the forms were or why she had to sign or what, indeed, she might be signing away or giving her permission to be done. She just kept signing and when she was through, the Embassys were sitting on the edge of the desk along with a box of matches. She lit up. The secretary and the constable coughed discreetly. Jeannie inhaled with deep satisfaction.

“That’s finished things for now,” Sergeant Coffman said. “If you’d like to come this way, we can take you out quickly and get you home.”

“Right,” Jeannie said. She got to her feet. She tucked the cigarettes and matches into her handbag. She followed the sergeant back into the corridor.

The questions hammered at them and the cameras’ lights popped the moment they stepped into the evening air.

“It’s Fleming, then?”

“Suicide?”

“Accident?”

“Can you tell us what happened? Anything, Mrs. Fleming.”

It’s Cooper, Jeannie thought. Jean Stella Cooper.

Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley climbed the front steps of the Onslow Square building that housed the flat of Lady Helen Clyde. He hummed the same ten random notes of music that had been plaguing his brain like hungry mosquitoes ever since he’d left his office. He’d tried to drive them off with several quick recitations of the opening soliloquy from
Richard III
, but every time he directed his thoughts to dive down to his soul to herald the entrance of George, that wiliest Duke of Clarence, the blasted notes returned.

It wasn’t until he had actually let himself into Helen’s building and was bounding up the stairs to her flat that the source of his musical torment dawned upon him. And then he had to smile at the unconscious mind’s ability to communicate through a medium he hadn’t considered part of his world in years. He liked to think of himself as a classical music man, preferably a Russian classical music man. Rod Stewart singing “Tonight’s the Night” was hardly the choice he himself would have made to underscore the evening’s significance. Although, it was appropriate enough. As was Richard’s soliloquy, come to think of it, since like Richard, plots he had laid and although his inductions were not at all dangerous, they were intended to lead in one direction. The concert, a late dinner, a postprandial stroll to that decidedly quiet and underlit restaurant just off the King’s Road where, in the bar, one could depend upon soft music supplied by a harpist whose instrument rendered her incapable of wandering among the tables and interrupting conversations crucial to one’s future…. Yes, Rod Stewart was perhaps more appropriate than
Richard III
, for all his scheming. Because tonight was indeed the night.

“Helen?” he called as he shut the door. “Are you ready, darling?”

Silence was the response. He frowned at this. He’d spoken to her at nine this morning. He’d told her he’d be by at a quarter past seven. While that gave them forty-
fiv
e minutes to make a ten-minute drive, he knew Helen well enough to realise that he had to allow a lengthy margin for error and indecision when it came to her preparations for an evening out. Still, she usually made a reply, calling out, “In here, Tommy,” from the bedroom where he would invariably find her attempting to resolve herself over six or eight different pairs of earrings.

He went in search of her and found her in the drawing room, stretched out on the sofa and surrounded by a mound of green and gold shopping bags whose logo he only too well recognised. Suffering the agonies of a woman who consistently disregards common sense in the selection of her footwear, she was an eloquent testament to the rigours involved in the simultaneous pursuit of bargain and fashion. She had one arm crooked over her head. When he said her name a second time, she groaned.

“It was like a war zone,” she murmured from beneath her arm. “I’ve never actually seen such a crowd in Harrods. And rapacious. Tommy, the word doesn’t even do justice to the women I had to fight through simply to get to the lingerie. Lingerie, for heaven’s sake. One would think they were battling over limited half pints from the fountain of youth.”

“Didn’t you tell me you were working with Simon today?” Lynley went to the sofa, uncrooked her arm, kissed her, and replaced the arm in position. “Wasn’t he supposed to be up to his ears preparing to testify for…What was it, Helen?”

“Oh, I did and he was. It’s something to do with distinguishing sensitisers in water-gel explosives. Amines, amino acids, silica gel, cellulose plates. I was positively dizzy with all the lingo by half past two. And the beastly man was in such a rush that he even insisted we go without lunch.
Lunch
, Tommy.”

“Dire straits indeed,” Lynley said. He lifted her legs, sat down, and rested her feet in his lap.

“I was willing to cooperate till half past three, working at the word processor till I was nearly blind, but at that point—faint with hunger, mind you—I bid him farewell.”

“And went to Harrods. Faint with hunger though you were.”

She lifted her arm, gave him a scowl, lowered the arm again. “I had you in mind all along.”

“Had you? How?”

She gestured weakly towards the shopping bags that surrounded them. “There. That.”

“There what?”

“The shopping.”

Blankly, he looked at the bags, saying, “You’ve been shopping for me?” and wondering how to interpret such unique behaviour. It wasn’t that Helen never surprised him with something amusing that she managed to ferret out in Portobello Road or the Berwick Street Market, but such largesse…. He examined her surreptitiously and wondered if, anticipating his designs, plans and inductions she had laid herself.

She sighed and swung her legs to the
flo
or. She began rustling round in the bags. She discarded one that seemed filled with tissue and silk, then another containing cosmetics. She burrowed into a third and then a fourth and
fin
ally said, “Ah. Here it is.” She handed him the bag and continued her search, saying, “I’ve one as well.”

“One what?”

“Look and see.”

He pulled out a mound of tissue, wondering how much Harrods was contributing to the inevitable defoliation of the planet. He began to unseal and then to unwrap. He sat staring down at the navy tracksuit and pondered the message behind it.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” Helen said.

“Perfectly,” he said. “Thank you, darling. It’s exactly what I…”

“You
do
need it, don’t you?” She rose from her prowl through the shopping bags and emerged triumphant with a tracksuit of her own, navy like his, although relieved with white piping. “I’ve been seeing them everywhere.”

“Tracksuits?”

“Joggers. Getting themselves fit. In Hyde Park. In Kensington Gardens. Along the Embankment. It’s time we joined them. Won’t that be fun?”

“Jogging?”

“Of course. Jogging. It’s just the very thing. Exposure to fresh air after a day indoors.”

“You’re proposing we do this after work? At night?”

“Or before a day indoors.”

“You’re proposing we do this at dawn?”

“Or at lunch or at tea. Instead of lunch. Instead of tea. We aren’t getting any younger and it’s time we did something to fend off middle age.”

“You’re thirty-three, Helen.”

“And destined to be reduced to flab if I don’t do something positive now.” She returned to the shopping bags. “There are shoes as well. Somewhere. I wasn’t entirely sure of your size, but you can always return them. Now where could they be…Ah. Here.” She brought them forth, triumphant. “It’s early yet, isn’t it, and we could easily change and have a quick jog round the square a few times. Just the very thing to work ourselves up to…” She lifted her head, face suddenly pensive. She seemed to regard his clothing for the very first time. The dinner jacket, the bow tie, the pristinely shined shoes. “Lord. Tonight. We were going…Tonight…” Her cheeks took on colour and she continued hastily. “Tommy. Darling. We’ve an engagement, haven’t we?”

“You’ve forgotten.”

“Not at all. Truly. It’s the fact I haven’t eaten. I haven’t eaten a thing.”

“Nothing? You didn’t seek sustenance somewhere between Simon’s lab, Harrods, and Onslow Square? Why is it I have difficulty believing that?”

“I had only a cup of tea.” When he raised a sceptical eyebrow, Helen added, “Oh, all right. Perhaps one or two pastries at Harrods. But they were the smallest of eclairs, and you know what they’re like. Completely hollow.”

“I seem to recall their being
fil
led with… What is it? custard? whipped cream?”

“A dollop,” she asserted. “A pathetic little teaspoonful. That’s hardly enough to be counted as anything and it’s certainly not a meal. Frankly, I’m lucky to be among the living at the moment, with so little to sustain me from dawn to dusk.”