Playing for the Ashes (34 page)

“Some killer we’ve got here. Right, Inspector?” she demanded.

Chris Faraday waited inside the barge at the bottom of the steps. The dogs milled next to him. They nudged their heads against his knees, mistakenly expecting to be taken on another run. In their minds, he had on the proper clothes. He was standing beneath the door. He had one hand on the railing. As far as they were concerned, he was moments away from dashing up and out, and they meant to accompany him.

He was, in fact, listening to the sounds of the detective’s departure and waiting for his heart to stop bludgeoning his chest. Eight years of training, eight years of what-to-dowhen-and-if had not been enough to keep his body from threatening a most disastrous display of suzerainty over his mind. When he’d first looked upon the detective’s warrant card, his bowels had grown so immediately loose that he’d been certain he wouldn’t be able to contain himself long enough to get to a toilet, let alone long enough to sit through an interview with the appropriate air of insouciance. It was one thing to plan, to discuss, even to rehearse with one member or another of the governing core playing the part of the police. It was another thing to have it
fin
ally happen, despite their precautions, and to have crowd into one’s mind in an instant a hundred and one suspicions about who had betrayed them.

He imagined he felt the barge dip as the detective stepped off it. He listened hard for the sound of footsteps receding on the path along the canal. He decided he heard them, and he climbed up to open the door, not so much to check whether the coast was clear but to let in air. This he breathed deeply. It tasted vaguely of diesel fumes and ozone, just a fraction fresher than the smoke-filled cabin. He sat on the second step from the top and considered what ought to be done next.

If he told the governing core about the detective’s visit, they would vote to disband the unit. They’d done it before with lesser cause than a visit from the police, so he had no doubt they’d move to disband. They’d transfer him for six months to one of the lesser arms of the organisation and reassign all the members of his unit to other captains. It was the most sensible thing to do when a breach of security occurred.

But of course, this wasn’t really a breach of security, was it? The detective had come to see Livie, not him. His visit had nothing at all to do with the organisation. It was merely coincidence that a murder investigation and the concerns of the movement had intersected at this arbitrary point in time. If he held fast, said nothing, and above all stuck to his story, the detective’s interest in them would pass. It was passing already, in fact, wasn’t it? Hadn’t the inspector crossed Livie off his list of potential suspects the minute he saw what condition she was in? Certainly he had. He wasn’t a fool.

Chris punched his right knuckles into his thigh and told himself roughly to stop mismanaging the truth. He had to report the visit from New Scotland Yard’s CID to the governing core. He had to let them make the decision. All he could do was argue for time and hope they weighed his eight years of involvement with the organisation and
fiv
e years as a successful assault captain before they took their vote. And if they voted to disband the unit, it couldn’t be helped. He’d survive. He and Amanda would survive together. It might be all for the better, anyway. No more seeing each other on the sly, no more acting the part of business only, no more soldier and captain, no more anticipating being called up before the governing core for useless explanations and subsequent discipline. They would, at last, be relatively free.

Relatively. There was still Livie to consider.

“Think he went for it, Chris?” Livie’s voice sounded slurred, the way it always sounded when she used up energy too quickly and hadn’t had time to regain the strength required to command her brain.

“What?”

“The party.”

He took a final, marginally bracing breath of the tainted air and eased his body three steps down the ladder. Olivia had plopped back into her armchair and
flu
ng her walker against the wall.

“The story will hold,” Chris replied, but he didn’t add that there were phone calls to make and favours to ask to ensure that it held.

“He’s going to check on what you told him.”

“We’ve always known that could happen.”

“You worried?”

“No.”

“Who’s your
fir
st back-up?”

He watched her evenly and said, “Bloke called Paul Beckstead. I told you about him. He’s part of the unit. He’s—”

“Yeah. I know.” She didn’t challenge him to embellish the story. She would have done once. But she’d ceased her attempts to trip him up in a prevarication just about the same time she began making the first round of doctors’ visits.

They watched each other from across the room. They were wary, like boxers summing up the opposition. Only in their cases, if the blows rained down, they would beat against the heart, leaving the exterior body untouched.

Chris went to the set of
fit
ted cupboards on either side of the workbench. He liberated the posters and maps he’d quickly removed

from the wall. He began to replace them:
Love Animals, Don’t Eat Them; Save the Beluga Whale; 125,000 Deaths Each Hour; For Whatever Happens to the Beasts, Happens to Man: All Things Are Connected
.

“You could have told him the truth about yourself, Livie.” He balled up some Blu-Tack between his thumb and fore
fin
ger, affi xing it once again to a map of Great Britain that was divided not by countries and counties but by horizontal and vertical segments labelled as zones. “It would have got you off the hook at least. I’ve got the party but you’ve got nothing except being here alone, which doesn’t look good.”

She didn’t reply. He heard her patting the arm of her chair and clicking her tongue for Panda, who, as always, ignored her. Panda always went Panda’s own way. She was a real cat’s feline, won over only when it suited her interests.

Chris said again, “You could have told him the truth. It would have got you off the hook. Livie, why—”

“And it would have run the risk of putting you right on it. Was I supposed to do that? Would you have done that to me?”

He pressed the map against the wall, saw it was crooked, straightened it. “I don’t know.”

“Oh come on.”

“It’s the truth. I don’t know. Put to the same test, I just don’t know.”

“Well, that’s okay, isn’t it. Because I do know.”

He faced her. He dug his hands into the pockets of his tracksuit trousers. Her expression made him feel impaled like a bug on the pinpoint of her belief in him. “Look,” he said, “don’t make me out as a hero here. I’ll only disappoint you in the long run.”

“Yeah. Well. Life’s full of disappointments, isn’t it.”

He swallowed. “How’re the legs now?”

“They’re legs.”

“Didn’t look good, did that? It was bloody awful timing.”

She smiled sardonically. “Just like a polygraph. Ask the question. Then watch her convulse. Get out the darbies and read her the caution.”

Chris joined her, dropping into one of the other chairs, the one the detective had chosen, across from her. He stretched out his legs and touched the toe of his running shoe to the toe of her black thick-soled boot, one of two pairs she’d bought when she first thought that all she needed was more adequate and consistent support for her arches.

“We’re a pair,” he said, nudging his toe along her instep.

“How’s that?”

“I was bricking it outside when he said who he was.”

“You? No way. I don’t believe it.”

“It’s true. I thought I was done for. Dead cert.”

“That’ll never happen. You’re too good to get caught.”

“I’ve never seen getting caught in the act as the way it would go.”

“No? Then what?”

“Something like this. Something unrelated. Something that happens through chance.” He saw her shoe was untied and he bent to tie it. Then he tied the other although it didn’t need it. He touched her ankles and straightened her socks. She reached out and grazed her fingers from his temple to his ear.

“If it comes down to it, tell him,” he said. He felt her hand drop abruptly. He looked up.

“Here, Beans,” she said to the beagle who had placed his front paws on the ladder. “And you! Toast. C’mon, you two fleabags, the both of you. Chris, they’re trying to get out. See to the door, okay?”

“You may need to, Livie. Someone may have seen you. If it comes down to it, you tell him the truth.”

“My truth is none of his business,” she said.

CHAPTER
9

“
I
already talked to the police in Kent,” were Jean Cooper’s first words when she opened the door of her house on Cardale Street and found herself looking at Sergeant Havers’ identification. “I told them it was Kenny. I got nothing else to tell. And who’re those blokes, anyway? Did you bring them with you? They weren’t here before now.”

“Media,” Barbara Havers said in reference to three photographers who, upon Jean Cooper’s opening the door, had begun clicking away with their cameras on the other side of the waist-high hedge that, growing just beyond a low brick wall, separated the front garden from the street. The garden itself was a depressing square of concrete bordered on three sides by an unplanted flower bed and decorated intermittently with plaster casts of coy little cottages, handpainted by someone with extremely limited talent.

“You lot buzz off,” Jean shouted at the photographers. “There’s nothing here for you.” They continued to click and snap away. She punched her fists to her hips. “You listening to me? I said piss off.”

“Mrs. Fleming,” one of them hailed her. “The Kent police are claiming a cigarette caused the fire. Was your husband a smoker? We’ve a reliable source who says he wasn’t. Will you confirm that? Can you give us a comment? Was he alone in the cottage?”

Jean’s jaw clenched to harden her face. “I got nothing to say to you lot,” she called back.

“We’ve a source in Kent who claims the cottage was being occupied by a woman called Gabriella Patten. That’s Mrs. Hugh Patten. Are you familiar with the name? Would you care to comment?”

“I just
said
I got nothing—”

“Have your children been informed? How are they taking it?”

“You bloody well keep away from my children! If you ask any one of them a single question, I’ll have your balls in a skillet. You understand?”

Barbara mounted the single front step. She said firmly, “Mrs. Fleming—”

“It’s Cooper.
Cooper
.”

“Yes. Sorry. Ms. Cooper. Let me come in. They can’t ask any more questions if you do, and the only pictures they can take won’t interest their editors. Right, then? Can I come in?”

“Did they follow you here? Did they? Because if they did, I’m going to phone my solicitor and—”

“They were here already.” Barbara aimed for patience but at the same time remained uncomfortably aware of the whir of power-driven cameras and her disinclination for being photographed elbowing her way into the putative grieving widow’s home. “They were parked over on Plevna Street. Behind a lorry near the surgery. Their cars were hidden.” She automatically added, “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry,” Jean Cooper scoffed. “Don’t give me that. None of you lot’s sorry about anything.”

But she stepped back from the door and let Barbara into the sitting room of the small terraced house. She seemed to be in the process of some form of housecleaning, because several large black rubbish bags gaped half-filled on the floor and as she kicked these to one side to give Barbara access to a sagging three-piece suite, a hugely muscled man came down the stairs with three boxes stacked in his arms. He said with a laugh, “Great stuff that, Pook. But you ought t’said we was too busy wringing out our snot rags to talk to them now. Ooh. Please. Excuse me, copper, I can’t converse at the moment cos I need to have myself another boo hoo.” He hooted.

“Der,” Jean said. “This’s the police.”

The man lowered the boxes. He looked more belligerent than embarrassed to have been caught speaking unguardedly. He gave Barbara a disbelieving scrutiny that quickly metamorphosed into a dismissive once over.
What a moo, what a minge bag
, his expression said. Barbara stared back. She held the man pinned with her vision until he thumped the boxes onto the floor near the doorway that led into the kitchen. Jean Cooper introduced him as her brother Derrick. She said to him,

unnecessarily:

“She’s here about Kenny.”

“Is she?” He leaned against the wall and balanced on one foot with the other tipped on its toe in an odd dancer’s position. He had unusually small feet for a man his size, made smaller looking by his capacious purple trousers, which were banded by elastic at the waist and the ankles and looked like something a harem dancer might wear. They appeared to be tailored to accommodate the tree-trunk size of his thighs. “What about him, then? You ask me, the naffing little creep
fin
ally got his comeuppance.” He aimed his finger at his sister and cocked his thumb like a gun in her direction, although his performance seemed to be largely geared for Barbara’s benefit. “Like I been saying all along, Pook, you lot’re better off without the bleeding wanker. Mr. Effing K.F. Mr. Honeyarse taste so sweet when you kiss it. You ask me—”

“You got all Kenny’s books, Der?” his sister asked pointedly. “There’s more in the boys’ room. But mind you check the insides for his name before you pack them. Don’t take any of Stan’s.”