Playing for the Ashes (52 page)

I couldn’t let go. I couldn’t move. All I could do was feel myself melting, like a great blaze was burning away my flesh. I began to weep.

“Her foot,” I cried.

After all I’d seen in my time with ARM, it hardly seems sensible that a dog’s foot dangling on a strip of dead flesh would be what broke me. But it did. I felt the rage course through me. I felt helplessness drag me under like quicksand. I said, “Enough.” And I was the one to grab the petrol can from the doorway where Chris had left it.

He said, “Livie, keep away.”

I said, “Get that dog from the pen. Outside. Get it. I said
get it
, Chris. Get it.” And I began sloshing the petrol around the interior of that hellhole. When the last dog had been taken and the last cage had been tumbled to the floor, I lit the match. The
fla
mes burst up like a geyser and never had I seen such a beautiful sight as
fir
e.

Chris pulled me by the arm or I might have stayed inside and gone up with the interior of that wretched barn. Instead I stumbled out, made sure the retriever had been rescued from the pen, and ran for the lane. I kept saying, “Enough.” I kept trying to wipe from my mind the image of that single pathetic dangling little foot.

We stopped at a phone box in Itchen Abbas. Chris rang the emergency number and reported the fire. He came back to the mini-van.

“That’s more than she deserves,” I said.

“We can’t leave her tied up. We don’t want murder on our consciences.”

“Why not? She’s got it on hers.”

“That’s what makes us different.”

I watched the night streak by. The motor-way loomed ahead, a gash of grey concrete splitting open the land.

“It isn’t fun any longer,” I said to my re
fle
ction in the passenger’s window. I felt Chris looking at me.

“You want out?” he asked.

I closed my eyes. “I just want it to end.”

“It will,” he said.

We shot onto the motorway.

CHAPTER
14

I
t was half past two when Lynley and Havers arrived at Celandine Cottage for the second time. The only alteration from the previous day appeared to be the absence of gawkers at the edge of the property. In their place,
fiv
e young female riders on horseback picked their way along the lane—booted, helmeted, with riding crops in their hands. But these girls didn’t appear the least interested in the police tape that bound off Celandine Cottage. They walked their horses directly by it without a glance.

Lynley and Havers stood by the Bentley and watched them pass. Havers smoked in silence and Lynley gazed at the chestnut poles that rose behind the hedgerow across the lane.

Strings running from these poles to the ground would offer support for hops in the coming weeks. But at the moment strings and poles together looked like denuded tepees in a systematically arranged—but nonetheless abandoned—American Indian village.

They were waiting for the arrival of Inspector Ardery. After four phone calls, made as they zigzagged from Mayfair southeast to Westminster Bridge, Lynley had tracked her down in the restaurant of a country house hotel not far from Maidstone. She’d said when he identified himself, “I’ve brought my mother out to lunch, Inspector,” as if the mere sound of his voice had acted as an unspoken and completely unauthorised reprimand against which she felt she had to defend herself. She added, “It’s her birthday,” in a testy tone and, “I did phone you earlier,” to which he replied, “I realise that. I’m returning the call.” She had wanted to give him her information over the phone. He had demurred. He liked to have the reports in hand, he told her. It was a quirk of his. Besides, he wanted to have a look at the crime scene again. They’d tracked down and spoken to Mrs. Patten, and he wanted to verify the information she’d given them. Couldn’t Ardery herself do the verifying? the inspector had asked him. She could do, but he’d rest more easily if he once again examined the cottage first hand. If she didn’t mind…

Lynley could tell that Inspector Ardery minded a great deal. He couldn’t blame her. They’d set up the ground rules on Friday evening, and he was trying to bend them, if not attempting to violate them altogether. Well, the transgression couldn’t be helped.

Whatever pique she may have been feeling, Isabelle Ardery had it successfully hidden when she braked her Rover and climbed out of it ten minutes after their arrival. She was still attired in lunching-with-Mother: a gauzy bronze dress belted at the waist,
fiv
e gold bangles on her wrist, matching hoop earrings. But she was all business, saying, “Sorry,” in reference to the delay, “I had a call from the lab that they’d identified the cast of the footprint. I thought you might want to have a look at that as well, so I stopped by to pick it up. And ended up getting cornered by the
Daily Mirror
’s chief Mr. Smarm. Could I confirm, if I would, the fact that Fleming was found completely nude with his hands and his feet tied to the bedposts in Celandine Cottage? Would I be willing to go on the record as stating that Fleming had drunk himself into a stupor? If the
Mirror
conjectured that Fleming was diddling two or three of the wives of sponsors of the England cricket team, would their story be inaccurate? A simple yes or no is all we need, Inspector.” She slammed the Rover’s door and walked to the boot, which she opened with a yank. “What slugs,” she said, and then as she raised her head from the boot, “Sorry. I’m going on a bit.”

“We’re dealing with them in London as well,” Lynley said.

“What’s your approach?”

“We generally tell them whatever will be useful to us.”

She took out a cardboard box. She shut the boot. She balanced the box on her hip. She looked at him and cocked her head, as if with interest or perhaps speculation. “Do you really? I’ve never told them a thing. I loathe symbiosis between press and the police.”

“So do I,” Lynley replied. “But it serves us sometimes.”

She shot him a sceptical look and made her way to the crime scene tape, which she ducked under. They followed her through the white rail gate and up the drive. She led them towards the back of the cottage, to the table beneath the grape arbour. Here, she set down the box. Lynley could see that inside were a sheaf of papers, a set of photographs, and two plaster casts. Of these latter, one formed a complete footprint, the other a partial.

He said as she reached in to begin unpacking, “I’d like to have another look inside the cottage first, if you don’t mind, Inspector.”

She paused with the partial print in her hands. “You do have the photographs,” she reminded him. “As well as the report.”

“As I said on the phone, I have additional information. Which I’d like to con
fir
m. With your cooperation, of course.”

Her eyes moved from him to Havers. She returned the plaster cast to its box. It was clear that she was engaged in a mental skirmish with herself: whether to oblige a fellow officer, whether to protest further. She
fin
ally said, “Right,” and she pressed her lips together as if to keep herself from further comment.

She removed the police lock from the cottage door and stepped back for them to enter. Lynley nodded his thanks. He went first to the sink where, opening the cupboard beneath it, he verified with Inspector Ardery that Maidstone’s crime scene team had, as he expected, taken the rubbish with them. They were searching for anything with a connection to the incendiary device, she told him. All the rubbish had been carted off. Why did he want the rubbish?

Lynley related Gabriella Patten’s story about Fleming’s search through the waste bins. Ardery listened, her eyebrows drawn together pensively and her hand at her collarbone. No, she told him when he was done, there had been no rubbish left on the
flo
or anywhere. Not in the kitchen. Not in the loo. Not in the sitting room. If Fleming had dumped rubbish out in anger, he’d replaced it all when he had time to cool off. And he’d been scrupulous enough about doing so, she added. There hadn’t been a scrap left anywhere on the
flo
or.

“He could have come to his senses once Gabriella’d left,” Havers pointed out to Lynley. “It’s Mrs. Whitelaw’s cottage. He probably wouldn’t want to trash it, no matter his rage.”

That was a possibility, Lynley conceded. He asked about any cigarette ends in the rubbish, telling Ardery about Gabriella Patten’s claim that she’d stopped smoking. Ardery confirmed. There had been no ends, no burnt matches either. He slipped into an inglenook where a pine table stood. Beneath it sat a wicker animal basket. He squatted to examine it and scraped from its cushion a few strands of fur.

“Gabriella Patten claims the kittens were inside when she left,” he said. “In this basket, I should guess.”

“Well, they got out somehow, didn’t they?” Ardery said.

Lynley moved through the dining room and along the short passage that led to the sitting room. There, he examined the front of the door. Gabriella had used the word
bash
to describe how Fleming had managed to get into the sitting room where she’d tried to hide herself from his wrath. If that word was accurate, there would be evidence to support it.

Like the rest of the house, the door was painted white, although also like the rest of the house, it now bore a jet patina of soot. Lynley brushed this off at shoulder height. He did the same round the knob. There was no evidence of force.

Ardery and Havers came to join him, Ardery saying with what appeared to be a deliberate show of patience, “We’ve got a match on most of the fingerprints, Inspector,” as Havers checked the fireplace for the fire irons Gabriella had claimed to have used to defend herself. A set was there, a poker that hung from a stand with a brush, a miniature shovel, and tongs. She said, “On these as well? Have you checked these for prints?”

“We’ve checked everything for prints, Sergeant. I believe the information you want is in the report I’ve brought with me.”

Lynley was closing the sitting room door to study its other side. He used his handkerchief to wipe away soot. He said, “Ah. Here it is, Sergeant,” and Havers joined him.

Beneath the knob, a thin, serrated line of discolouration marred the white wood for perhaps eight inches. Lynley ran his
fin
gers along it, then turned from the door to the rest of the room.

“She said she used a chair,” Havers said, and together they examined each of them.

The chair in question was yet another of Mrs. Whitelaw’s nursing chairs, upholstered in bottle-green velvet and sitting beneath a hanging corner cupboard. Havers pulled it away from the wall. Lynley immediately saw the uneven ridge of white against the darker walnut that rimmed the top of the chair and ran down its sides. He placed the chair beneath the knob of the door. The smear of white matched up to the serrated line. “Con
fir
med,” he said.

Inspector Ardery stood by the
fir
eplace. She said, “Inspector, if you’d told me what you were looking for in the first place, my crime team could have saved you this trip.”

Lynley stooped to scrutinise the carpet in the vicinity of the door. He found a minute rip that lined up with the direction that the chair would have travelled had someone forced it away from the doorknob beneath which it had leaned. Additional confirmation, he thought. At least in part, Gabriella Patten had been telling the truth.

“Inspector Lynley,” Ardery said again.

Lynley stood. Every inch of the other officer’s body was communicating affront. Their agreement had been easily enough reached: she would handle Kent, he would handle London. They would meet intellectually—and physically as well, if it came down to it—somewhere in between. But getting to the truth behind Fleming’s death wasn’t as simple as that, as he well knew. The nature of the investigation was going to call for one of the two of them to become subordinate, and he could see that Ardery didn’t like the idea of subordination being assigned to her.

He said, “Sergeant, would you give us a moment?”

Havers said, “Right,” and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen. He heard the outer door close behind her as she left the cottage.

Ardery said, “You’re pushing things, Inspector Lynley. Yesterday. Today. I don’t appreciate it. I’ve got the information for you. I’ve got the reports. I’ve got the lab working overtime. What more do you want?”

“Sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to press in.”

“Sorry worked yesterday. It’s not good enough this afternoon. You intend to press. You intend to keep pressing. I want to know why.”

He gave fleeting thought to whether he should attempt to unruffle her feathers. It couldn’t be easy for her, exercising her profession in a field dominated by men who probably questioned her every movement and doubted her every opinion and report. But to placate her now seemed condescending. He knew he wouldn’t have bothered had she been a man. So, to his way of thinking, the fact that she wasn’t shouldn’t enter into their discussion now.