Playing for the Ashes (7 page)

“We shall have to do something about that.”

Her face brightened. “It
is
dinner, then. Lovely. I thought so. And somewhere quite wonderful because you’ve put yourself into that ghastly bow tie which I know you loathe.” She rose from her shopping bags with renewed energy. “It’s a good thing I’ve not eaten then, isn’t it? Nothing shall spoil my dinner.”

“True. Afterwards.”

“After—?”

He reached for his pocket watch and
fli
cked it open. “It’s twenty-five past seven and we’ve only got till eight. We need to be off.”

“Where?”

“The Albert Hall.”

Helen blinked.

“The philharmonic, Helen. The tickets I nearly sold my soul to get. Strauss. More Strauss. And when you’re tired of him, Strauss. Is this sounding familiar?”

Her face became radiant. “Tommy! Strauss? You’re actually taking me to hear Strauss? This isn’t a trick? We don’t have Stravinsky after the interval?
The Rite of Spring
or something equally loathsome?”

“Strauss,” Lynley said. “Before and after the interval. Followed by dinner.”

“Thai food?” she asked eagerly.

“Thai,” he replied.

“My God, this is an evening from heaven,” she declared. She picked up her shoes and an armful of shopping bags. “I won’t be ten minutes.”

He smiled and scooped up the remaining shopping bags. Things were moving according to plan.

He followed her out of the drawing room and along the corridor past the kitchen where a glance inside told him that Helen was adhering to her usual mode of indifferent housekeeping. The breakfast dishes were scattered on the work top. The coffee maker’s light still shone. The coffee itself had long since evaporated, leaving a deposit of sludge at the bottom of the glass carafe and the scent of overworked grounds permeating the air. He said, “Helen, for God’s sake. Don’t you notice that smell? You’ve left the coffee on all day.”

She hesitated in the bedroom doorway. “Have I? What a nuisance. Those machines ought to shut themselves off automatically.”

“And the plates ought to dance themselves into the dishwasher as well?”

“It would certainly show good breeding if they did.” She disappeared into her bedroom where he heard her dropping her packages to the floor. He placed his own on the table, took off his jacket, switched off the coffee maker, and went to the work top. Water, detergent, and ten minutes set the kitchen in order, although the coffee carafe would need a good soak to put it right. He left it in the sink.

He found Helen standing alongside her bed in a teal-coloured dressing gown, pursing her lips thoughtfully as she studied three ensembles she’d put together. “Which says ‘
Blue Danube
followed by seraphic Thai food’ to you?”

“The black.”

“Hmm.” She took a step back. “I don’t know, darling. It seems to me—”

“The black’s fine, Helen. Put it on. Comb your hair. Let’s go. All right?”

She tapped her cheek. “I don’t know, Tommy. One always wants to be elegant at a concert but at the same time not overdressed for dinner. Don’t you think this might be too understated for the one and too overstated for the other?”

He picked up the dress, unzipped it, handed it to her. He went to her dressing table. There, unlike the kitchen, every item was arranged with an attention to order that one might give to assembling surgical instruments in an operating theatre. He opened her jewellery box and drew out a necklace, earrings, two bracelets. He went to the wardrobe and rustled up shoes. He returned to the bed, tossed down jewellery and shoes, turned her to face him, and untied the belt of her dressing gown.

“You’re being excessively naughty this evening,” he said.

She smiled. “But look where it’s got me. You’re taking off my clothes.”

He pushed the gown from her shoulders. It fell to the floor. “You don’t have to be naughty to get me to do that. But I expect you know that already, don’t you?” He kissed her, sliding his hands into her hair. It felt like cool water between his fingers. He kissed her again. For all the frustrations of having his heart enmeshed in her life, he still loved the touch of her, the powdery scent of her, the taste of her mouth.

He felt her fingers working at his shirt. She loosened his tie. Her hands slid to his chest. He said against her mouth, “Helen, I thought you wanted dinner this evening.”

She said, “Tommy, I thought you wanted me dressed.”

“Yes. Right. But first things first.” He brushed the clothing to the floor and drew her to the bed. He slid his hand up her thigh.

The telephone rang.

He said, “Damn.”

“Ignore it. I’m not expecting anyone. The machine will pick it up.”

“I’m on rota this weekend.”

“You’re not.”

“Sorry.”

They both watched the phone. It continued to ring.

“Well,” Helen said. The ringing continued. “Does the Yard know you’re here?”

“Denton knows where I am. He would have told them.”

“We might have already left for all they know.”

“They have the car phone and the seat numbers at the concert.”

“Well, perhaps it’s nothing. Perhaps it’s my mother.”

“Perhaps we ought to see.”

“Perhaps.” She touched her
fin
gers to his face, sketching a pattern across his cheek to his lips. Her own lips parted.

He drew in a breath. His lungs felt oddly hot. Her fingers moved from his face to his hair. The phone stopped ringing and in a moment from the other room a disembodied voice spoke into Helen’s answering machine. It was an only too recognisable disembodied voice, belonging to Dorothea Harriman, secretary to Lynley’s divisional superintendent. When she went to the effort of tracking him down, it always meant the worst. Lynley sighed. Helen’s hands dropped to her lap. “I’m sorry, darling,” he said to her and reached for the telephone on the bedside table, interrupting the message that Harriman was leaving by saying, “Yes. Hello, Dee. I’m here.”

“Detective Inspector Lynley?”

“None other. What is it?”

As he spoke, he reached out for Helen once more. But she was already moving away from him, slipping from the bed and bending to retrieve her dressing gown from where it lay in a heap on the
flo
or.

CHAPTER
3

T
hree weeks into her new domestic arrangements, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers decided that what she liked best about her solitary life in Chalk Farm was the choices it gave her in the area of transportational anxiety. If she wished to avoid dwelling upon the implications behind twenty-one days of not yet having spoken to a soul in her neighbourhood aside from a Sri Lankan girl called Bhimani who worked the till in the local grocery, all she had to concentrate on was the hair-pulling happiness of her daily commute to and from New Scotland Yard.

Even before she’d acquired it, her tiny cottage had long been a symbol to Barbara. It meant liberation from a life that had held her chained for years to duty and ailing parents. But while making the move had given her the freedom from responsibility that she had dreamed of having, that same freedom brought a solitude that closed in on her at moments when she was least prepared to encounter it. So Barbara had taken a distinct if sardonic pleasure in the discovery that there were two means of getting to work each morning, both of them teeming with teeth-grating, ulcer-causing, and—best of all—loneliness-displacing distractions.

She could fi ght the traffic in her ageing Mini, battling her way down Camden High Street to Mornington Crescent where she could choose at least three different routes, all of which wound through the sort of life-in-amedieval-city congestion that every day seemed to become more hopeless of remedy. Or she could take the underground, which meant sinking into the bowels of Chalk Farm Station and waiting for a train with ever-decreasing hope among the faithful but understandably irascible riders of the capricious Northern Line. And even then, not just any train would do, but one that passed through Embankment Station where she could catch yet another train to St. James’s Park.

It was a situation based firmly in the realm of cliché: On a daily basis, Barbara could choose between the devil and the deep blue sea. This day, in deference to her car’s increasingly ominous rattles, she’d chosen the sea, wading past her fellow-commuters on escalators, in tunnels, and on platforms, clinging to a stainless steel pole as the train hurtled through the darkness and jostled its riders onto one another’s feet.

She endured the irritants with resignation. Another bloody commute. Another chance to conclude conveniently that her loneliness was really of no account because there was neither time nor energy at the end of the day for social interaction anyway.

It was half past seven when she began her trudge up Chalk Farm Road. She stopped in Jaffri’s Fine Groceries, a shop crammed with so many “delicacies to delight the discriminating palate” that the resulting space was the approximate width of a Victorian railway carriage and just about as well lit. She scrunched past a teetering display of soup tins—Mr. Jaffri was deeply committed to “savoury soups from the seven seas”—and struggled with the glass door to the freezer where a sign declared that row upon row of Häagen-Dazs ice cream represented “absolutely every
fla
vour under the sun.” It wasn’t the Häagen-Dazs she wanted, although salt and vinegar crisps with a chaser of vanilla almond fudge didn’t sound half-bad for dinner. Instead she wanted the one item that sheer mercantile inspiration had prompted Mr. Jaffri to stock, so certain was he that the slow gentrification of the neighbourhood and the inevitable drinks parties that would follow would place it in high demand. She wanted ice. Mr. Jaffri sold it by the bagful, and ever since moving into her new digs, Barbara had been using it in a bucket beneath her kitchen sink as a primitive means of preserving her perishables.

She dug one bag out of the freezer and lugged it to the counter where Bhimani was perched, awaiting another opportunity to pound upon the keys of the new till that not only chimed like Big Ben when the total was presented but also informed her in bright blue numbers the exact amount of change she was supposed to hand over to the customer. As always, the purchase was made in silence, with Bhimani ringing up the price, smiling close-lipped, and nodding eagerly at the total when it appeared on the digital screen.

She never spoke. Barbara had thought at first that she was mute. But one evening she had caught the girl in the middle of a yawn and got a glimpse of the gold that capped most of her teeth. She’d wondered since then if Bhimani didn’t smile because she wished to conceal the value of her dental work or because, in coming to England and observing the common man, she’d realised how unusual it was and didn’t care to display it.

Barbara said, “Thanks. See you,” and scooped up her ice once Bhimani had presented her with seventy-five pence in change. She hauled her shoulder bag up her arm, locked the ice onto her hip, and went back to the street.

She continued up the road. She passed the local pub on the opposite pavement, and she gave brief thought to squeezing in among the boozers, ice and all. They appeared to be at least a depressing decade her junior, but she hadn’t had her weekly pint of Bass yet and its seductive call made her theorise about how much energy it would take to inch inside to the bar, order the pint, light up a fag, and act friendly. The ice could act as a conversation piece, couldn’t it? And how much of it would realistically melt if she took quarter of an hour to mingle with the Friday-after-work crowd? Who knew what could come of it? She might strike up an acquaintance with someone. She might make a friend. Even if she didn’t, she was feeling parched as the desert. She needed some liquid. She could do with a spirit-lifter as well. She was feeling tired from the day and thirsty from the walk and hot from the tube. A relatively cool drink would be perfect. Wouldn’t it?

She paused and gazed across the street. Three men were surrounding a long-legged girl, all four of them laughing, all four of them drinking. The girl, standing with her hips against a window-sill of the pub, lifted and drained her glass. Two of the men reached for it simultaneously. The girl laughed and tossed her head. Her thick hair rippled like a horse’s mane, and the men moved in closer.

Perhaps another night, Barbara decided.

She plodded on, keeping her head down, making her eyes concentrate on the pavement.

Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Step on a line, break your mother’s
…No. It wasn’t the topic she wished to dwell on at the moment. She cleared her head of the doggerel by whistling. She chose the first tune that came into her mind: “Get Me to the Church on Time.” It wasn’t exactly appropriate to her situation, but it served its purpose. And as she whistled she realised that she must have thought of it because of Inspector Lynley’s big plan for Popping the Question tonight. She chortled inwardly at the thought of his expression of surprise—and dismay, of course, since he didn’t exactly want his plans to be public information—when she’d stopped by his office and said, “Good luck. I hope she says yes this time,” before she left the Yard. At
fir
st, he’d attempted to act nonplussed by her comment, but she’d heard him phoning round for concert tickets all week and she’d witnessed his grilling of fellow officers in an attempt to discover the perfect Thai restaurant, and since she knew that Strauss and Thai food meant an evening designed to please Lady Helen Clyde, she deduced the rest. “Elementary,” she’d said into his startled silence. “I know you hate Strauss.” She waggled her
fin
gers at him in farewell. “My, my, Inspector. What we do for love.”

She made the turn into Steele’s Road and passed beneath the newly lea
fin
g lime trees. In them, birds were settling for the evening as were the families in the grit-stained brick houses that lined the street. When she reached Eton Villas, she turned yet again. She hiked the ice bag higher on her hip and cheered herself with the thought that, her abysmal social circumstances aside, at least this was the
fin
al time she would have to haul ice from Jaffri’s Fine Groceries.

For three weeks she had lived in her digs without aid of modern refrigeration, stowing her milk, her butter, her eggs, and her cheese in a metal bucket. She had spent those three weeks—evenings and weekends and the odd lunch hour—in search of a refrigerator that she could afford. She’d finally located it last Sunday afternoon, the perfect appliance that fit the size of her cottage and the size of her purse. It wasn’t exactly what she’d been looking for: barely a metre tall and decorated with hideous, yellowing floral transfers. But when she handed over the cash and established ownership over the appliance, which—in addition to its unappealing decoration of roses, daisies, fuchsias, and flax—also gave a portentous
crankle-clank
whenever its door was slammed, Barbara had thought philosophically about beggars and choosers. The move from Acton to Chalk Farm had cost her more than she had anticipated, she needed to economise, the refrigerator would do. And since the owner’s son had a son who drove an open-back lorry for a gardening service, and since that son’s son was willing to drop by his dear old gran’s at the weekend and pick up the refrigerator and transport it all the way up to Chalk Farm from Fulham for a mere ten quid, Barbara had been willing to overlook the fact that not only did the appliance probably have a limited life span, but also that she would have to spend a good six hours scraping off dear old gran’s transfers. Anything for a bargain.

She used her knee to open the gate of the semi-detached Edwardian house in Eton Villas behind which her small cottage stood. The house was yellow, with a cinnamon door recessed into a white front porch. This was overhung with wisteria that climbed from a small square of earth next to the french doors of the ground
flo
or flat. Through the doors this evening, Barbara could see a small, dark girl laying plates on a table. She wore a school uniform and her waist-length hair had been plaited neatly and tied up with tiny ribbons at the end. She was chatting to someone over her shoulder and as Barbara watched, she skipped happily out of sight. Family dinner, Barbara thought. Then she deleted the modi
fie
r, set her shoulders, and headed down the concrete path that ran next to the house and led to the garden.

Her cottage abutted the wall at the bottom of the garden, with a false acacia tree looming above it and four casement windows looking out on the grass. It was small, built of brick, with woodwork painted the same yellow that had been used on the main house, and a new slate roof that sloped up to a terra-cotta chimney. The building was a square that had been elongated to a rectangle through the addition of a tiny kitchen and an even tinier bathroom.

Barbara unlocked the door and
fli
pped on the ceiling light. It was dim. She kept forgetting to buy a stronger bulb.

She set her shoulder bag on the table and her ice on the work top. She gave a grunt as she lifted the bucket from beneath the sink, and she waddled with it towards the door and cursed when some of the cool water sloshed onto her shoe. She emptied it, carried it back to the kitchen, and began repacking it and thinking about dinner.

She assembled her meal quickly—ham salad, a two-day-old roll, and the rest of a tin of beetroot—then went to the bookshelves that stood on either side of the minuscule fireplace. She’d left her book there before turning off her light last night and as she recalled the hero Flint Southern was just about to sweep the sassy heroine Star Flaxen into his arms where she was going to feel not only his muscular thighs encased in tight blue jeans but also his throbbing member, which, of course, was throbbing and had always throbbed only for her. They would consummate this desperate throbbing within the next few pages, accompanied by hardening nipples and birds taking flight, after which they would lie in each other’s arms and wonder why it had taken them one hundred and eighty pages to reach this miraculous moment. There was nothing like great literature to accompany a
fin
e meal.

Barbara grabbed the novel and was about to head back to the table when she saw that her answering machine was blinking. One blink, one call. She watched it for a moment.

She was on rota this weekend, but it was hard to believe that she was being called back to work less than two hours after having left it. That being the case and her number being ex-directory, the only other caller would be Florence Magentry, Mrs. Flo, her mother’s keeper.

Barbara meditated on the possibilities presented by pushing the button and listening to the message. If it was the Yard, she was back at work with barely time to cool her heels or eat her meal. If it was Mrs. Flo, she would be embarking on another trip on the Great Guilt Railway. Barbara hadn’t gone to Greenford last weekend to see her mother as scheduled. She hadn’t gone to Greenford the weekend before. She knew that she had to go this weekend if she was to continue to live with herself, but she didn’t want to, she didn’t want to think why she didn’t want to, and talking to Florence Magentry—even listening to her voice on the machine—would lead her to consider the nature of her avoidance and ask her to begin assigning it the appropriate labels: selfishness, thoughtlessness, and all the rest.

Her mother had been in Hawthorne Lodge for nearly six months now. Barbara had managed a visit at least every two weeks. The move to Chalk Farm had finally provided her with an excuse not to go and she’d grabbed on to it happily, substituting her presence with telephone calls in which she catalogued for Mrs. Flo all the reasons why there would have to be yet another unfortunate delay in her regularly scheduled appearances in Greenford. And they
were
good reasons, as Mrs. Flo herself assured Barbara during one or another of their usual Monday/Thursday chats. Barbie wasn’t to pick at herself if she wasn’t able to get out to Mum right away. Barbie had a life as well, dear, and no one expected her to try not to live it. “You get yourself settled into that new house of yours,” Mrs. Flo said. “Mum’ll do just fine in the meanwhile, Barbie. See if she won’t.”