Playing for the Ashes (22 page)

On the table stood four glasses, a tray, and three bottles of The MacAllan, each one stamped with a distillery date: 1965, 1967, 1973. The ’65 was half-empty. The ’73 hadn’t yet been opened.

Patten poured a quarter glassful of the ’67 and used the glass to gesture to the bottles. “Will you try some? Or is that not allowed? You’re on duty, I take it?”

“A swallow won’t hurt,” Lynley said. “I’ll try the ’65.”

Havers chose the ’67. When they had their drinks, Patten made for the chaise longue, and he sat with his right arm curled behind his head and his eyes on the view. “Hell, I love this damn place. Sit down. Take a moment to enjoy yourselves.”

Light from the far end of the salon
fil
tered through the french doors, lying in neat parallelograms on the flagstones. But as they took their seats, Lynley noticed that Patten had positioned the furniture so that only the top of his head was illuminated. This would allow them to gather one initial and potentially useless fact about the man from his appearance: His dark hair bore that peculiar metallic tinge that sometimes accompanies surreptitious colouring done outside of a hairdressing salon.

“I’ve heard about Fleming.” Patten lifted his drink, his eyes still on the view. “The word went out around three this afternoon. Guy Mollison phoned. He was letting this summer’s sponsor know. Only the sponsor, he said, so for God’s sake keep it under your hat until the announcement’s official.” Patten shook his head derisively and swirled the whisky in his glass. “Always has England’s interests in mind.”

“Mollison?”

“He’ll be chosen captain again, after all.”

“Are you sure about the time?”

“I’d just come in from lunch.”

“Odd that he knew it was Fleming, then. He was phoning before the body was identified,” Lynley said.

“Before the wife identified it. The police already knew who he was.” Patten turned from the view. “Or didn’t they tell you that much?”

“You appear to have a great deal of information.”

“My money’s involved.”

“More than money, as I understand it.”

Patten swung himself off the chaise longue. He walked to the edge of the terrace where the flagstones gave way to the gentle slope of lawn. He stood, ostensibly admiring the view.

“Millions of them.” He gestured with his glass. “Dragging through their lives every day without the slightest thought as to what it’s all about. And by the time they conclude that life might actually be about something besides grubbing for money, eating, eliminating, and coupling in the dark, it’s too late for most of them to do anything about it.”

“That’s certainly the case for Fleming.”

Patten kept his eyes on the shimmering lights of London. “He was a rare one, our Ken. He knew there was more than what he had in hand. He meant to have it.”

“Your wife, for example.”

Patten made no reply. He tossed back the rest of his whisky and returned to the table. He reached for the unopened 1973 bottle. He broke the seal and removed the cap.

“How much did you know about your wife and Kenneth Fleming?” Lynley asked.

Patten returned to the chaise longue and sat on its edge. He looked amused when Sergeant Havers crinkled through her notebook’s pages to find a clean sheet. “Am I being given the caution for some reason?”

“That’s rather premature,” Lynley said. “Although if you’d like your solicitor present—”

Patten laughed. “Francis has heard enough from me this past month to keep him in his favourite port wine for a year. I think I can soldier on without him.”

“You’ve legal problems, then?”

“I’ve divorce problems, then.”

“You knew about your wife’s affair?”

“I hadn’t a clue until she said she was leaving me. And even then, I didn’t know an affair was at the bottom of things at first. I just thought I hadn’t been giving her enough attention. Ego, if you will.” His mouth curved with a wry smile. “We had one hell of a row when she said she was leaving. I bullied her a bit. ‘Who d’you suppose is going to want to pick up a thick-headed piece of fluff like you, Gabriella? Where in Christ’s name do you think you’ll find another bloke willing to take on a tart without a brain in her head? Do you actually think you can walk out on me and not become what you were when I found you in the first place? A six-quid-an-hour office temp with nothing to recommend her but a somewhat erratic ability to alphabetise?’ It was one of those nasty marital scenes, over dinner at the Capital Hotel. In Knightsbridge.”

“Odd that she chose a public place for the conversation.”

“Not odd when you consider Gabriella. It would have appealed to her sense of drama, although I dare say she imagined me sobbing into my consommé rather than losing my temper.”

“When was this?”

“The conversation? I don’t know. Sometime early last month.”

“And she told you she was leaving you for Fleming?”

“Not on your life. She had a good-size divorce settlement on her mind, and she was clever enough to realise she’d have a bloody rough time getting what she wanted from me financially if I knew she had someone she’d been screwing on the side. She merely defended herself at first. You can imagine how it ran: ‘Fat lot you know, Hugh, I can
fin
d another bloke, I can walk out of here as easy as pie, I’m not a piece of mindless fluff to everyone, son.’” Patten set his glass on the flagstones and swung his legs onto the chaise longue. He resumed his earlier position, right arm cushioning his head.

“But she said nothing about Fleming?”

“Gabriella’s no simpleton despite the fact that she occasionally acts like one. And she’s no fool when it comes to positioning herself financially. The last thing she’d have been likely to do is to burn her bridges with me before she was certain there was going to be a new way to get across the river.” He ran his hand back through his hair, fingers spread, in a gesture that seemed designed to emphasise its thickness. “I knew she’d been
fli
rting with Fleming. Hell, I’d
seen
her flirt with him. But I thought nothing of it because pulling men was nothing out of the ordinary for Gabriella. She’s on automatic pilot when it comes to blokes. Always has been.”

“Doesn’t that bother you?” Sergeant Havers asked the question. She’d
fin
ished her whisky and pushed the glass to join the other that Patten had earlier moved to one side of the table.

Patten’s answer consisted of the word, “Listen,” and he held up his fingers to still their conversation. From the far right side of the garden where a bank of poplars formed a boundary, a bird had begun to call. Its song was liquid and warbling, rising to a crescendo. Patten smiled. “Nightingale. Magnificent, isn’t it? It almost—but not quite—makes one believe in God.” And then to Sergeant Havers, he said, “I liked knowing other men found my wife desirable. It was part of the turn-on, at
fir
st.”

“And now?”

“Everything loses its amusement value, Sergeant. After a time.”

“How long have you been married?”

“Two months short of
fiv
e years.”

“And before?”

“What?”

“Is she your
fir
st wife?”

“What’s that got to do with the price of petrol?”

“I don’t know. Is she?”

Abruptly, Patten looked back at the view. His eyes narrowed against it, as if the lights were too bright. “My second,” he said.

“And your
fir
st?”

“What about her?”

“What happened to her?”

“We were divorced.”

“When?”

“Two months short of five years ago.”

“Ah.” Sergeant Havers wrote rapidly.

“Am I to know what
ah
means, Sergeant?” Patten said.

“You divorced your first wife to marry Gabriella?”

“That’s what Gabriella wanted if I wanted Gabriella. And I wanted Gabriella. I’ve never wanted anyone quite as much, in fact.”

“And now?” Lynley asked.

“I wouldn’t take her back, if that’s what you’re asking. I’ve no particular interest in her any longer, and even if I had, things went too far.”

“In what way?”

“People knew.”

“That she’d left you for Fleming?”

“One draws the line somewhere. With me, it’s infidelity.”

“Your own?” Havers asked. “Or just your wife’s?”

Patten’s head, still leaning back against the chaise longue, turned in her direction. He slowly smiled. “The male-female double standard. It’s not very attractive. But I am what I am, a hypocrite when it comes to the women I love.”

“How did you find out it was Fleming?” Lynley asked.

“I had her followed.”

“To Kent?”

“She tried to lie at first. She said she was just staying at Miriam Whitelaw’s cottage while she sorted out her thoughts about what to do with her life. Fleming was just a friend, she said, helping her out. There was nothing between them. If she was having an affair with him, if she’d left me for him, wouldn’t she be living with him openly? But she wasn’t, was she, and that proved there was no adultery involved, that proved she’d been a good and faithful wife to me and I’d better instruct my solicitor to keep that in mind when he met with hers to talk about the settlement.” Patten rubbed his thumb along his jawline where a dark stubble of whiskers was shadowing his face. “So I showed her the photographs. They, at least, cowed her.”

They were photographs of her and Fleming, he went on without embarrassment, taken at the cottage in Kent. Fond greetings at the doorway in the evening, passionate goodbyes in the drive at dawn, energetic grapplings in an apple orchard not far from the cottage, one enthusiastic mating on the garden lawn.

When she saw the photos, she also saw her future financial status dwindle rapidly, he told them. She flew at him like a spitting cat, she threw the photos in the dining room
fir
e, but she knew she’d lost the larger part of the game.

“So you’ve been to the cottage?” Lynley said.

Oh yes, he’d been there. Once, when he’d delivered the photographs to her. A second time when Gabriella phoned with a request to talk things out and see if they couldn’t arrive at a reasonable and civilised manner of ending their marriage. “That was a euphemism, the talking,” he added. “Using her mouth for speech has never been Gabriella’s forte.”

“Your wife’s gone missing,” Havers said. Lynley glanced in her direction when he heard the unmistakably even and deathly polite tone of the remark.

“Has she?” Patten enquired. “I wondered why there was no mention of her on the news.

I thought at first she’d managed to get to all the journalists and make it worth their while to keep her out of the story. Although that would have been a monumental project, even for someone with Gabriella’s power of suction.”

“Where were you on Wednesday night, Mr. Patten?” Havers jabbed her pencil against the paper as she wrote. Lynley wondered if she was going to be able to read her notes later. “Thursday morning as well.”

“Why?” He looked interested.

“Just answer the question.”

“I shall, once I know what it’s got to do with anything.”

Havers was bristling. Lynley intervened. “Kenneth Fleming may well have been murdered,” he said.

Patten set his glass down on the table. He kept his fingers on the rim. He seemed to be trying to read Lynley’s face for its degree of levity. “Murdered.”

“So you can understand our interest in your where-abouts,” Lynley said.

The nightingale’s song rose from the trees again. Nearby, a single cricket gave answer. “Wednesday night, Thursday morning,” Patten murmured, more to himself than to them. “I was at the Cherbourg Club.”

“Berkeley Square?” Lynley asked. “How long were you there?”

“It must have been two or three before I left. I’ve an itch for baccarat and I was winning for once.”

“Was anyone with you?”

“One doesn’t play baccarat alone, Inspector.”

“A companion,” Havers said testily.

“For part of the evening.”

“Which part?”

“The beginning. I sent her off in a taxi around…I don’t know. Half past one? Two?”

“And afterwards?”

“I continued to play. I came home, went to bed.” Patten moved his glance from Lynley to Havers. He seemed to be waiting for more questions. He finally went on. “You know, I’d hardly be likely to kill Fleming, if that’s where we’re heading, as it appears we are.”

“Who followed your wife?”

“Who what?”

“Who took the pictures. We’ll need the name.”