Playing for the Ashes (63 page)

“How did Wednesday night change things?”

She turned her head so that the
fin
gers on her temple were now at her brow. “There are certain things that, when said between a man and a woman, inflict irreparable damage upon a relationship. I’m sure you understand.”

More matter with less art
was what Lynley thought. What he said was, “I’m going to have to ask you to be specific, Mrs. Patten. Fleming arrived at half past nine or ten. Did the row begin immediately or did he lead up to it in some way?”

She raised her head. A perfect circle of colour the size of a ten pence coin had appeared in each of her cheeks. “I don’t see how a detail-by-detail regurgitation of the evening is going to make any difference to what came afterwards.”

“We’ll judge that for ourselves,” Lynley said. “Did the row begin immediately?”

She made no reply. Mollison said, “Gabbie, tell him. It’s all right,” with some urgency. “It doesn’t make you look bad.”

She gave a quick, breathy laugh. “That’s because I didn’t tell you all of it. I couldn’t, Guy. And to have to tell it all now…” Her
fin
gers passed over her eyelids, and her lips trembled convulsively beneath the shelter of her hand.

“Would you like me to leave?” Mollison offered. “Or I could wait in the other room. Or outside—”

She leaned towards him, reached for his hand. He moved an inch closer to her. “No,” she said. “You’re my strength. Stay. Please.” She held his hand in both of hers. She took a deep breath. “All right,” she said.

She’d been out for a long walk, she told them. It was part of her routine, two long walks a day for aerobic exercise, one in the morning and one in the evening. On this evening, she’d made a partial circuit of the Springburns, covering at least six miles at a brisk, steady pace. She arrived back at Celandine Cottage to find Ken Fleming’s Lotus sitting in the drive.

“As I said, I thought he’d gone to Greece with James. So I was surprised to see his car. But I was happy as well because we hadn’t been together since the previous Saturday night and, prior to that moment of realising he’d come out to Kent on a whim, I’d had no hope of seeing him before his return from Greece on Sunday night.”

She entered the cottage, calling his name. She found him upstairs in the loo. He was kneeling on the floor, going through the rubbish. He’d already done the same in the kitchen as well as in the sitting room, and he’d left the waste bins overturned behind him.

“What was he looking for?” Lynley asked.

That’s what Gabriella wanted to know, and Fleming wouldn’t tell her at first. He wouldn’t say a word, in fact. He simply tore through the rubbish and when he was done, he stormed into the bedroom and ripped the counterpane and the covers from the bed. He examined the sheets. Then he went downstairs to the dining room, took the liquor bottles from the antique washstand that held them, lined them up on the table, and studied the level of the liquid in each. After he was done—with Gabriella continually asking him what he was looking for, what was wrong, what had happened—he returned to the kitchen and pawed through the rubbish another time.

“I asked him if he’d lost something,” Gabriella said. “He repeated the question and laughed.” Then he got to his feet, kicked the rubbish to one side, and grabbed her arm. He demanded to know who had been there. He said Gabriella had been alone since Sunday morning, it was now Wednesday night, she couldn’t have actually been expected to survive four entire days without a good dose of slavering male companionship—she’d never done that before, had she?—so who had provided it? Before she could answer or protest her innocence, he flew out of the cottage and stalked through the garden to the compost heap where he began digging through that as well.

“He was like a madman. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I begged him to at least tell me what he was looking for so that I could help him find it, and he said….” She lifted Mollison’s imprisoned hand to her cheek and closed her eyes.

“It’s okay, Gabbie,” Mollison said.

“It isn’t,” she whispered. “His face was so twisted I wouldn’t have known him. I backed away. I said, ‘Ken, what is it? What
is
it? Can’t you tell me? You’ve got to tell me,’ and he—he leaped up. He soared right off the ground.”

Fleming recited the time they’d been apart, saying, Sunday night, Monday night, Tuesday night, Gabriella. Not to mention the mornings and the afternoons in between. That gave her plenty of time, he declared. Gabriella asked him time for what, for
what
? He laughed and said she’d had quite enough time to service all of Middlesex and half of Essex as well. And she was a wily one, wasn’t she? She’d have destroyed the evidence, if there was evidence in the first place. Because perhaps she didn’t ask the others to make the same accommodation to her puling need for protection and security as she had asked of Fleming. Perhaps the others were enjoying the rewarding plunge into her excessively cooperative minge without the hindrance of latex between them. Is that what it was, Gabriella? Ask Ken to use condoms to keep him thinking what a cautious little lover our Gabriella is while all the time you’re passing it out to the others with no such demand?

“So he’d been going through the rubbish…. He’d actually been
looking
for…As if I…” Gabriella faltered.

“I think we get the picture.” Havers tapped her pencil against the sole of her brogue. “Did you have the row outside?”

That’s where it began, Gabriella told them. First Fleming accused and Gabriella denied, but her denials only enraged him further. She told him that she refused to discuss such ludicrous accusations, and she returned to the cottage. He followed. She tried to lock him out but, of course, he had his own key. So she went through to the sitting room and tried unsuccessfully to wedge the door closed by propping a chair beneath its handle. The effort was useless. Fleming bashed the door open by using his shoulder. The chair slid to the
flo
or. He was inside. Gabriella retreated to a corner with one of the fire irons in her hand. She warned him not to come near. He disregarded her.

“I thought I could strike him,” she said. “But when it came down to it, all I could imagine was the blood and the bone and what he would look like if I actually did it.” She hesitated as Fleming approached her. She warned him off again. She raised the
fir
e iron. “And then suddenly he became quite rational,” she told them.

He apologised. He asked for the
fir
e iron. He promised he wouldn’t hurt her. He said he’d heard rumours. He’d been told things, he confessed, and they’d been swarming round inside his skull like hornets. She asked what things, what rumours? She asked to be told so that she could at least defend herself or explain. He asked if she would, if she would explain, if he told her a name would she tell him the truth?

“There was something so pitiful about him,” Gabriella said. “He seemed helpless and broken. So I set down the fire iron. I told him I loved him and that I’d do anything to help him through whatever it was he was going through.”

He said Mollison, then. He wanted to know about Mollison first. She repeated the word
fir
st
. She asked him what he meant by
fir
st
. And that single word set him off again.

“He fancied that I’d had a score of lovers. I didn’t much like his accusations. So I made some nasty ones of my own. About him. About Miriam. He reacted to that. The row escalated from there.”

“What prompted you to leave?” Lynley asked.

“This.” She swept the heavy mass of hair from her shoulders. On either side of her neck bruises lay like watery ink stains against her skin. “I actually thought he was going to kill me. He was wild.”

“In defence of Mrs. Whitelaw?”

No. He laughed Gabriella’s accusations off as an utter absurdity. His real concerns lay in Gabriella’s past. How many times had she been unfaithful to Hugh? With whom? Where? How did the couplings come about? Because don’t tell me it’s only Mollison, he warned. That answer isn’t on. I’ve spent the last three days asking around. I’ve got names. I’ve got places. And the best you can do for yourself right now is just to make sure the names and places match.

“I’m at fault for that,” Mollison said. With his free hand, he brushed Gabriella’s hair back into place. His gesture hid her bruises once again.

“As am I.” Gabriella lifted Mollison’s hand a second time and spoke against it. “Because after you and I ended, I was distraught, Guy. I did exactly what he accused me of doing. Oh, not everything because who would have had the time to do all the things he wanted to believe that I managed to do. But I did some of it, yes. And with more than one lover. Because I was desperate. Because my marriage was a joke. Because I missed you so much that I wanted to die, so what did it matter what happened to me anyway?”

“Oh Gabbie,” Mollison said.

“I’m sorry.” She dropped their hands to her lap. She raised her head and gave him a tremulous smile. Mollison lifted his free hand to her cheek. A single tear trailed down it. He brushed it away.

Havers broke into the tender scene. “So he was choking you, right? You broke away and made a run for it.”

“Yes. That’s what happened.”

“Why’d you take his car?”

“Because it was blocking mine.”

“He didn’t run after you?”

“No.”

“How’d you get his keys?”

“Keys?”

“To the car.”

“He’d left them on the work top in the kitchen. I took them to stop him from following me. Then, when I got out to the drive, I saw that the Lotus was in the way. So I took his car. I never heard from him or saw him after that.”

“And the kittens?” Lynley asked.

She looked at him, nonplussed. “Kittens?”

“What did you do with them? I understand you have two.”

“Oh God, I’ve quite forgotten about the kittens. They were sleeping in the kitchen when I left for my walk earlier.” She looked genuinely stricken for the first time. “I was supposed to take care of them. I made a bargain with myself when I found them by the spring. I promised I wouldn’t abandon them. And then I ran off and—”

“You were terrified,” Mollison told her. “You were running for your life. You can’t be expected to think of every ramification of what you were doing.”

“That’s not the point, is it. They were helpless and I left them because all I could think about was myself.”

“They’ll turn up somewhere,” Mollison said. “Someone’s got them, if they weren’t at the cottage.”

“Where did you go when you left?” Lynley asked.

She said, “I drove directly to Greater Springburn. I telephoned Guy.”

“How long a drive is that?”

“Fifteen minutes.”

“So your row with Fleming lasted more than an hour?”

“More than…?” Gabriella looked at Mollison in confusion.

“If he arrived at half past nine or ten and if you didn’t phone Mollison until after eleven, we have more than an hour to account for,” Lynley said.

“Then we must have quarrelled that long. Yes, I suppose we did.”

“You did nothing else?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“There was a packet of Silk Cut in a kitchen cupboard at the cottage,” Lynley said. “Are you a smoker, Mrs. Patten?”

Mollison moved restlessly on the sofa. “You can’t be thinking that Gabriella—”

“Do you smoke, Mrs. Patten?”

“No.”

“Then whose cigarettes are those? We’ve been told Fleming didn’t smoke.”

“They’re mine. I used to smoke, but I’ve been off them for nearly four months. For Ken’s sake, mostly. It’s what he wanted. But I always keep a packet nearby just in case I need them. I
fin
d it’s easier to resist them if they’re in the next room. It doesn’t feel quite so much like denial that way.”

“So you didn’t have another packet? Opened already?”

She looked from Lynley to Havers. She went back to Lynley. She seemed to put the question in context. She said, “You aren’t thinking I killed him. You aren’t thinking I set some sort of fire. How could I have done? He was there. He was raging. Do you think he might have paused for a while and stepped aside and let me…What is it that I’m supposed to have done?”

“Do you have a packet of cigarettes here as well?” Lynley asked. “To make it easier to keep resisting?”

“I’ve a packet. Unopened. Would you like to see it?”

“Before we leave. Yes.” Gabriella bridled at this, but Lynley went on. “Once you phoned Mollison and made the arrangements for this flat, what happened next?”

“I got in the car and drove here,” she said.

“Did anyone meet you here?”

“At the
fla
t? No.”

“So no one can actually verify the time you arrived.”

Her eyes flashed angrily at the implication. “I woke the porter. He gave me the key.”