Playing for the Ashes (62 page)

He led them to Shepherd Street, a few yards from where they had parked the Bentley. There, across from a florist with a window filled with irises, roses, narcissi, and carnations, he pressed the bell for a flat marked by the number 4 and no other identification. He waited for a moment and pressed two more times. Like husband, like wife, Lynley thought sardonically.

After a moment, the sound of static
fli
ckered from the small metal speaker next to the panel of buttons. Guy said into it, “It’s Guy.”

A moment passed before the door buzzed. He pushed it open, saying to Havers and Lynley, “Don’t be rough with her. You’ll see there isn’t any need.”

He led them down a corridor to the rear of the building and up a short flight of stairs to a mezzanine. Off this, a door stood slightly off the latch. Mollison pushed it open, saying, “Gabbie?”

“In here,” was the response. “Jean-Paul is taking his aggressions out on me. Ouch! Be careful. I’m not made of rubber.”

In here
was the sitting room round the corner from the entry. Its overstuffed furniture had been pushed against the walls in order to accommodate a massage table. On this a lightly tanned woman lay upon her stomach. She was petite but voluptuously proportioned, her nudity partially cloaked by a sheet. Her head was turned away from them towards windows that overlooked a courtyard.

“You didn’t phone first,” she said in a sleepy voice as Jean-Paul—garbed from his turban to his toes in white—worked on her right thigh. “Hmm. That’s wonderful,” she whispered.

“I couldn’t.”

“Really. Whyever not? Is the dread Allison being a bother again?”

Mollison’s face flamed. “I’ve brought someone,” he said. “You need to talk to him, Gabbie. I’m sorry.”

The head—capped by a billowing of hair the colour of harvested wheat—slowly turned in their direction. The blue eyes with their heavy fringe of dark lashes went from Mollison to Havers to Lynley and remained on the last. She winced as Jean-Paul’s industrious fingers found a muscle in her thigh that had not as yet submitted to his efforts. She said, “And who exactly are these someones you’ve brought?”

“They’ve got Ken’s car, Gabbie,” Mollison said. His thumbs played nervously along his fingers. “They’ve been looking for you. They’ve already started to comb Mayfair. It’s better for us both if—”

“You mean it’s better for you.” Gabriella Patten’s eyes were still on Lynley. She lifted one foot and rotated it. Perhaps seeing this as direction, Jean-Paul grasped it and began his work, from toes, to ball, to arch. “Lovely,” she murmured. “You reduce me to softened butter, Jean-Paul.”

Jean-Paul was all business. His hand moved up her leg, from there to her thigh. “
Vous avez tort
,” he said in brusque disagreement. “Feel this, Madame Patten. How tense it is become in an instant. Like twisted stone. More than before. Much more. And here and here.” He clucked disapproval.

Lynley felt his lips twitch in a smile that he did his best to control. Jean-Paul was more efficient than a polygraph.

Abruptly, Gabriella shook the masseur’s hands from her body. She said, “I think I’ve had enough for today.” She flipped over, sat up, and swung her legs off the table. The sheet dropped to her waist. Jean-Paul hastily draped her shoulders with a large, pristine white towel. She took her time about using it as a sarong. As Jean-Paul collapsed the massage table and began moving the furniture back into position, Gabriella strolled to a gate-legged table not two feet from where her visitors stood. On this a heavy glass bowl held an array of fruit. She selected an orange and dug manicured
fin
gernails into its skin. The scent of its flesh fairly leapt into the air. She began to peel it away. She said in a quiet voice to Mollison, “Thank you, Judas.”

Mollison groaned. “Come on, Gabbie. What were the options?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask your personal barrister? I’m sure she’d be more than willing to advise you.”

“You can’t stay here forever.”

“I didn’t want that.”

“They need to talk to you. They need to know what happened. They need to get to the bottom of things.”

“Do they? And when did you decide to play the little copper’s nark?”

“Gabbie, just tell them what happened when Ken got to the cottage. Tell them what you told me. That’s all they want to know. Then they’ll be off.”

Gabriella stared defiantly at Mollison for a long moment. She finally dropped her head and gave her attention to the orange. A segment of its peel slipped out of her hand, and she and Mollison bent simultaneously to retrieve it. He reached it first. Her hand closed over his. “Guy,” she said in an urgent voice.

“It’ll all work out,” he said gently. “I promise. Just tell them the truth. Will you do that?”

“If I talk, will you stay?”

“We’ve already been through that. I can’t. You know.”

“I don’t mean afterwards. I mean now. While they’re here. Will you stay?”

“Allison thinks I’ve gone to the sports centre. I couldn’t tell her where…Gabbie, I’ve got to get back.”

“Please,” she said. “Don’t make me face this alone. I won’t know what to say.”

“Just tell them the truth.”

“Help me tell it. Please.” Her
fin
gers moved from his wrist to his arm. “Please,” she repeated. “I won’t take long, Guy. I promise you.”

It seemed as if Mollison tore his eyes from her only through an effort of will. He said, “I can’t spare more than half an hour.”

“Thank you,” she replied on a breath. “I’ll put on some clothes.” She brushed past them and disappeared into a bedroom, shutting the door behind her.

Jean-Paul let himself out discreetly. The others made their way farther into the sitting room. Sergeant Havers went to one of two chairs that sat beneath the courtyard windows. She plopped down, heaved her shoulder bag to the floor, and balanced one brogue-shod foot on the opposite knee. She caught Lynley’s gaze and rolled her eyes heavenward. Lynley smiled. The sergeant had done an admirable job of controlling herself thus far. Gabriella Patten was the sort of woman Havers would have preferred to swat like a fl y.

Mollison went first to the
fir
eplace where he fingered the silk leaves of an artificial aspidistra. He examined himself in the mirrored wall. Then he went to the recessed bookshelves and ran his finger along a collection of paperbacks heavily devoted to Dick Francis, Jeffrey Archer, and Nelson DeMille. He bit at his fingernails for a few moments before swinging round to Lynley.

“It’s not what it looks like,” he said impulsively.

“What isn’t?”

He canted his head towards the doorway. “That bloke. The fact that he was here. It makes her look bad. But it doesn’t mean what you think.”

Lynley wondered what conclusion Mollison assumed he had drawn from Gabriella’s brief but affecting performance. He decided to opt for silence and see where Mollison’s verbal ruminations took him. He wandered to the window and inspected the courtyard where two small birds dipped and bobbed along the edge of a fountain.

“She cares.”

“About what?” Havers asked.

“About what happened to Ken. She’s acting like she doesn’t because of Wednesday night. Because of what he said to her. Because of what he did. She’s hurt. She doesn’t want to show it. Would you?”

“I think I’d tread carefully in a murder investigation,” Havers said, “especially if I was the last known person to have seen the corpse before it was a corpse.”

“She didn’t
do
anything. She just got out fast. And she had cause for that, if you want to know the truth.”

“That’s what we’re looking for.”

“Good. Because I’m quite prepared to tell it.”

Gabriella Patten had rejoined them. She stood framed in the sitting room doorway, clothed in black leggings, a thinstrapped top printed with tropical flowers, and a diaphanous black overjacket that billowed as she moved to the sofa. She unfastened the delicate gold buckles of the black sandals she was wearing and slipped the sandals from her feet. These—pedicured, with toenails painted to match the pink of her
fin
gernails—she curled beneath her as she took position in a corner of the sofa and cast a fleeting smile in Mollison’s direction.

He said, “Do you want anything, Gabbie? Tea? Coffee? A Coke?”

“It’s enough that you’re here. It’s going to be tortuous, having to live through it again. Bless you for staying.” She placed the
fla
t of her palm to the sofa next to her. She said, “Will you?”

In reply, Mollison pushed off from the bookshelves and sat what appeared to be a calculated eight inches from her, close enough to communicate his support while at the same time just beyond her reach. Lynley wondered which of them was supposed to receive the message implied by those eight inches: the police or Gabriella Patten herself. She seemed oblivious of it. Straightening her shoulders and her spine, she turned her attention to the others with a shake of the soft curls that fell to her shoulders.

“You want to know what happened on Wednesday night,” she said.

“It’s a good place to start,” Lynley replied. “But we may venture beyond it.”

“There’s little enough to tell. Ken drove out to the Springburns. We had an ugly row. I left. I have no idea what happened after that. To Ken, that is.” She rested her head against her hand—temple upon
fin
gertips, upper arm stretched along the back of the sofa—and watched Sergeant Havers rif
fle
through her notebook. “Is that necessary?” she asked.

Sergeant Havers continued to rif
fle
. She found the page she wanted, she licked the tip of her pencil, she began to scribble.

“I said—” Gabriella began.

“You had a row with Fleming. You left,” Havers murmured as she wrote. “What time was this?”

“Do you have to take notes?”

“It’s the best way to keep everyone’s story straight.”

Gabriella looked to Lynley to intervene. He said, “As to the time, Mrs. Patten?”

She hesitated, frowning, her attention still on Havers as if wishing to telegraph her unhappiness with the fact that her words would be rendered immortal by the sergeant’s pencil. “I can’t tell you exactly. I didn’t look at a clock.”

“You phoned me sometime round eleven, Gabbie,” Mollison prompted. “From the call box in Greater Springburn. So you must have had the row before then.”

“What time did Fleming arrive to see you?” Lynley asked.

“Half past nine? Ten? I don’t know exactly because I’d been for a walk and when I got back, there he was.”

“You didn’t know he was coming?”

“I thought he was going to Greece. With that—” she rearranged the draping black over-jacket carefully, “with his son. He’d said it was James’s birthday and he was trying to put things right with him, so they were heading to Athens. And from there to a boat.”

“Trying to put things right with him?”

“There was considerable anomie between them, Inspector.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“They didn’t get on.”

“Ah.” Lynley saw Havers’ mouth work round
anomie
as she diligently wrote. God only knew what she would make of the malapropism when she constructed her report. “What was the source of this…anomie?” he asked.

“James couldn’t adjust to the fact that Ken had left his mother.”

“Fleming told you as much.”

“He didn’t need to. James was hostility itself towards his father, and it doesn’t require a background in child psychology to understand why. Children always cling to the tenebrous hope that their separated parents will reunite.” She touched her palm to her chest in emphasis. “I represented the interloper, Inspector. James knew about me. He knew what my presence in his father’s life implied. He didn’t like that, and he let his father know he didn’t like it in any way he could.”

Havers said, “Jimmy’s mother says he didn’t know his father intended to marry you. She says none of the kids knew.”

“Then James’s mother is prevaricating,” Gabriella said. “Ken told the children. He told Jean as well.”

“As far as you know.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“Were you present when he told his wife and children?” Lynley asked.

“I had no desire to publicly revel in the fact that Ken was ending his marriage to be with me. Nor did I have a need to be present to verify the fact that he’d informed his family.”

“But privately?”

“What?”

“Did you revel in it privately?”

“Until Wednesday night, I was mad about him. I wanted to marry him. I would be guilty of prevarication myself if I said I wasn’t pleased to know that he was taking steps in his personal life to bring us together.”