Playing for the Ashes (61 page)

“So you and Gabriella Patten boffed each other like rattlesnakes.” Havers was cut-tothe-chase incarnate. She even looked at her Timex in case her point escaped Mollison’s comprehension.

Mollison scowled at her, a look that said, What could you possibly know? But he went on. “I thought she wanted what the others…” He grimaced once again. “Listen. I’m not a saint. If a woman makes me an offer, I’m likely to take it. But it’s just an hour of laughs on the side. I always know that. The woman always knows that.”

“Gabriella Patten didn’t know that,” Lynley said.

“She thought that when she and I…when we…”

“Boffed each other,” Sergeant Havers prompted.

“The difficulty was that things continued,” Mollison said. “I mean we did it more than once. I should have cut her off when I
fir
st realised that she was making more out of the—the affair…than she should have.”

“She had expectations of you,” Lynley said.

“I didn’t understand at first. What she wanted. Then when I did, I was just so caught up in…in her. She’s…How can I say this so that it won’t sound so blasted…There’s something about her. Once you’ve had her…I mean, once you’ve experienced…Then things become…Oh hell. This sounds awful.” He dug a crumpled handkerchief from his pocket and passed it over his face.

“So she shivers your timbers,” Havers said.

Mollison looked at her blankly.

“She makes the earth move.”

Still no response.

“She’s a hot tamale between the sheets.”

“Now listen here,” Mollison began, a hot one himself.

“Sergeant,” Lynley said mildly.

Havers said, “I was only trying to—”

He lifted an eyebrow. Try less, it told her. She grumbled herself back into position, pencil at the ready.

Mollison shoved his handkerchief back into his pocket. “When I knew what she really wanted, I thought I could play the affair along for a while. I didn’t want to give her up.”

“And exactly what did she want?” Lynley asked.

“Me. I mean, she wanted me to leave Allie so that she and I could be together. She wanted marriage.”

“But she was married to Patten at the time, wasn’t she?”

“Things were sour between them. I don’t know why.”

“She never said?”

“I didn’t ask. You don’t. I mean, if it’s just for a laugh—the bedroom business—you don’t actually enquire about the state of your partner’s marriage. You just assume things could be better, but you don’t want to get involved in something messy, so you keep everything light. Drinks. Perhaps a meal when time allows. Then…” He cleared his throat.

Havers’ mouth formed the words
You boff each other
, but she didn’t say them.

“So all I know is that she wasn’t happy with Hugh. I mean she wasn’t…How can I put this without sounding…She wasn’t happy with him sexually. He wasn’t always able to…He didn’t…When they did it, she never…I mean, I only know what she told me and I realise that since she told me while we were in the middle of it, she might have been lying. But she said

she’d never actually…you know. With Hugh.”

“I think we understand,” Lynley said.

“Quite. Well, that’s what she told me. But as I said, she told me while we were doing it ourselves, so…You know how women can be. If she wanted me to feel like I was the only one who’d ever…And she was good at that. I did feel that way. Only I didn’t want to marry her. She was something on the side. A diversion. Because I love my wife. I love Allie. I worship her. The rest of this is just the kind of thing that happens when you have something, like a name.”

“Does your wife know about the affair?”

“That’s how I got out of it, actually. I had to confess. It upset Allison like hell—and I’m still sorry for that, mind you—but at least I was able to end things with Gabbie. And I swore to Allison that I’d never have anything to do with Gabbie again. Aside from the times I had to see her with Hugh. When the England team and potential sponsors met.”

“A promise you haven’t kept, I take it?”

“You’re wrong about that. Once we ended the affair, I never saw Gabbie again without Hugh. Until she phoned on Wednesday night.” He looked to the floor miserably. “And then she needed my help. So I gave it to her. And she was…she was grateful.”

“Need we ask how she demonstrated her gratitude?” Havers asked politely.

“Damn,” Mollison whispered. He blinked rapidly. “It didn’t happen on Wednesday night. I didn’t see her then. It was Thursday afternoon.” He lifted his head. “She was upset. She was practically hysterical. It was my fault. I wanted to do something to help. It just happened between us. I’d rather Allie didn’t know.”

“The nature of the help you gave her Wednesday night,” Lynley said. “You supplied her a place to stay?”

“In Shepherd’s Market. I have a
fla
t there with three other blokes from Essex. We use it when we…” He dropped his head again.

“Want to boff someone besides your wives on the sly,” Havers said tiredly.

Mollison didn’t react. He merely said with equal tiredness, “When she phoned on Wednesday night, I told her I’d arrange for her to use the
fla
t.”

“How did she get in?”

“We keep the keys there. In the building. With the porter. So that our wives…You know.”

“And the address?”

“I’ll have to take you there. I’m sorry, but she won’t let you in otherwise. She won’t even answer the door.”

Lynley got to his feet. Mollison and Havers did likewise. Lynley said, “Your row with Fleming. The one you phoned him about on Wednesday night. It had nothing to do with the Pakistani player on the Middlesex side, did it?”

“It had to do with Gabbie,” Mollison said. “That’s why Ken went out to the Springburns to see her.”

“You knew he was going.”

“I knew.”

“What happened out there?”

Mollison’s hands were at his sides, but still Lynley could see his thumbs picking at the skin round his nails. “Gabbie’ll have to tell you that,” he replied.

What Mollison was willing to add to his story was the cause of his fight with Kenneth Fleming. He’d manufactured the tale about the Pakistani player for Allison’s benefit, he said. Had they only conducted the interview in the corridor at China Silk Wharf on the previous evening, he would have been forthright. But he couldn’t venture honesty in Allison’s presence. It too much ran the risk of taking them in the direction of a disclosure about Thursday afternoon. Besides, the row about the Pakistani player was what he’d used to explain away his injuries to his wife when the fracas occurred in the
fir
st place.

They headed in the direction of Mayfair, rolling through Eaton Square where the central gardens were a wash of colour supplied by everything from pansies to tulips. As they made the turn into Grosvenor Place and buzzed along the buff wall that sheltered Buckingham Palace Gardens from the scrutiny of the curious, Mollison continued.

What happened between him and Fleming, he said, did indeed happen after the third day of the four-day match between Middlesex and Kent. And it did happen in the car park at Lord’s. But it started in the bar—“the one in the Pavilion…behind the Long Room…no doubt the bartender can verify the story if you like”—where Mollison and Fleming, along with six or seven other players, were having a friendly drink together.

“I was drinking tequila,” he said. “It’s a stealthy little bugger, the way it hits you. It goes to your head before you know what’s happened. Your tongue gets looser than it ought. It gets looser faster. So you say things to blokes that you’d otherwise never say.”

He’d heard rumours, Mollison told them, just the odd word dropped now and again linking Fleming to Gabriella Patten. He never heard or saw anything
fir
st hand himself— “They were careful about that, but then that’s Gabriella’s way. She doesn’t advertise the fact when she’s taken a lover”—but when their affair began to head in the direction of marriage, they relaxed their vigilance. People saw. People speculated. Mollison heard.

He didn’t know exactly what it was that prompted him to speak, Mollison told them. He hadn’t…well, he hadn’t
done
anything with Gabriella for the last two years. When their own affair had ended—okay, okay, when he’d confessed his sins to Allison so that he’d had to end the affair or lose his wife—he’d felt relieved and utterly recommitted to his marriage, and that feeling had lasted about two months during which time he was absolutely faithful to Allison. No playing around with anyone at all, not even for laughs. But after that, he began to miss Gabbie. He missed her so much that half the time with Allison he didn’t even want to…He tried to pretend but there are some things a bloke can’t fake…. Well, they knew what he meant, didn’t they? He consoled himself with the thought that Gabbie probably missed him as well. He thought she would do, wouldn’t she, because Hugh always drank like a sailor on leave, which made him a disaster between the sheets. And she wasn’t having it off with anyone else. At least he didn’t think she was. After a time, the soreness of missing her wore off a fraction. He had a few laughs with other women, which made his performance with Allie all the stronger, which allowed him to talk himself into believing that his fling with Gabbie had been just that, good fun while it lasted but still a
fli
ng.

And then he heard the speculation about Fleming. Ken’s living circumstances had always been bizarre, but he—Mollison—had assumed that in the long run Fleming would return to his wife when he’d worked out of his system whatever he needed to work out of his system. That’s what blokes generally did, wasn’t it? But when word went round that Fleming had taken on a pricey solicitor to sort through his situation and to draw up paperwork, and when equal word went round that Hugh and Gabriella Patten were no longer occupying space beneath the same roof, and when he himself saw an affectionate exchange between Fleming and Gabriella on the concourse at Lord’s not a stone’s throw away from the Pavilion where
anyone
might have seen them…. Well, Mollison was no fool, was he?

“I was jealous,” he admitted. He had directed Lynley to a narrow, cobbled street that formed the south boundary of Shepherd’s Market. They parked in front of a pub called Ye Grapes, heavily hung with ivy. They got out of the car and he leaned against it, apparently determined to finish his tale before taking them to the leading female character in it. Sergeant Havers continued making notes of their conversation. Lynley crossed his arms and listened impassively.

“I could have had her myself—married her, I mean—and I hadn’t wanted her,” Mollison said. “But now that someone else had her—”

“Dog in the manger,” Havers said.

“That’s what it was. That and the tequila and being forced to remember what it had been like when she and I were together. And having to think about her doing all that with another bloke. Especially a bloke I knew. I began to feel what a fool I’d been to miss her so badly. She’d probably gone from me to someone else straightaway. I was probably just one in a line of her lovers with Fleming at the end, the wally she’d caught.”

So he’d made a remark in the form of a question that day after the cricket match. It was crude, it demonstrated a familiarity with Gabriella that bore the unmistakable ring of authenticity. He’d rather not tell them what it was, if they didn’t mind. He wasn’t very pleased with the nasty passion that had inspired it, nor with the lack of gallantry that had allowed him to say it in the
fir
st place.

“Ken went completely blank at
fir
st,” Mollison said. “It was as if we were talking about two different people.” So he drove the point home with an allusion to the number of cricketers who’d had a share of what Gabriella Pat-ten was willing to pass round the table.

Fleming left the bar, but he didn’t leave Lord’s. When Mollison got out to the car park, the other man was waiting.

“He jumped me,” Mollison said. “I don’t know if he was defending her honour or just letting me have it. In either case, he caught me off guard. If the groundsman hadn’t come along to pull him off, I’d probably be the murder you’re investigating right now.”

“And Wednesday night when you spoke to him,” Lynley said. “What was that actually about?”

“I told you the truth about my motivation, at least. I wanted to apologise. We were probably going to play together when the team was chosen for the Ashes test matches. I wanted no bad blood between us.”

“What was his reaction to that?”

“He said it didn’t matter, that it was forgotten, that in any case he was going to sort through the muddle with Gabbie that night.”

“He no longer seemed bothered?”

“I expect he was bothered to the bone. But I was the last person he’d let know that, wasn’t I?” Mollison pushed his way off the car. “Gabbie can tell you how bothered he was. She can show you as well.”