Playing for the Ashes (5 page)

“Who was who?”

“The victim. The woman with the kittens.”

“That’s the problem,” Coffman replied. “That’s why the guv’s gone to Pembury with the body. That’s why there’ll be a news conference later. That’s why it’s all so dicey now.”

“Why?”

“A woman lives here, you see.”

“A film star or something? Someone important?”

“She isn’t that. She isn’t even a she.”

Isabelle raised her head. “What’s going on?”

“Snell doesn’t know. No one knows but us.”

“No one knows what?”

“The body upstairs was a man’s.”

CHAPTER
2

W
hen the police showed up at Billingsgate Market, it was mid-afternoon, and by all rights Jeannie shouldn’t even have been there because at that hour the London fish market was as dead and as empty as an underground station at three in the morning. But she
was
there, waiting for a repairman who was on his way to Crissys Café to fix the cooker. It had broken down at the worst possible time, in the middle of the rush that usually came around half past nine after the fishmongers had dealt with the buyers from the city’s posh restaurants and the rubbish crew had finished ridding the vast car park of Styrofoam crates and mollusc nets.

The girls—for they were always called
the girls
at Crissys, no matter that the oldest was fifty-eight and the youngest was Jeannie herself, thirty-two—had managed to coax the cooker into working at half heat for the rest of the morning, which allowed them to continue competently setting out fried bacon and bread, eggs, blood pudding, welsh rabbit, and toasted sausage sandwiches as if nothing were the matter. But if they were to avoid a mutiny among their customers—worse, if they were to avoid losing their customers to Catons upstairs—the small caff’s cooker would have to be fixed at once.

The girls drew lots for the responsibility in the same way they’d been drawing lots for the fifteen years Jeannie had worked with them. They lit wooden matches simultaneously and watched them burn down. The first person to drop hers lost.

Jeannie was as good as any of them at holding on till the flame licked her
fin
gers, but today she wanted to lose the burn. Winning meant she’d have to go home. Staying and waiting God knew how long for the repairman to show up meant she could avoid trying to think what to do about Jimmy a while longer. Everyone from her nearest neighbours to the school authorities was using the word
juvenile
in a way Jeannie didn’t like when they talked about her son. They said it the way they’d say
yob or bloody little sod
or
thug
, none of which applied. But they wouldn’t know that, would they, because they only saw the surface of the boy and they didn’t stop to think what might be underneath.

Underneath, Jimmy hurt. He had four years of hurting that matched her own.

Jeannie was sitting at one of the tables by a window, having a cuppa and munching from a bag of carrot sticks that she always brought from home, when she finally heard the car door slam. She assumed it was the repairman at last. She glanced at the wall clock. It was after three. She closed her copy of
Woman’s Own
upon “How Do You Know If You’re Good in Bed?”, rolled the magazine into a tube that she tucked into the pocket of her smock, and pushed back her chair. It was then that she saw it was a panda car, occupied by a man and a woman. And because one of them
was
a woman, who looked grave and searched the length of the sprawling brick building with sombre eyes as she set her shoulders and adjusted the triangular tips of the collar of her blouse, Jeannie felt a quiver of warning run across her skin.

Automatically, she looked at the clock a second time and thought of Jimmy. She offered a prayer that, despite his disappointment at the ruin of his sixteenth birthday holiday, her oldest child had gone to school. If he hadn’t, if he’d done yet another bunk, if he’d been picked up somewhere he oughtn’t be, if this woman and this man—and why were there two of them?—had come to inform his mother of another piece of mischief…It didn’t bear thinking what might have happened since Jeannie had left the house at ten till four that morning.

She went to the counter and fumbled a packet of cigarettes from where one of the other girls kept her secret stash. She lit it, felt the smoke burn against her throat and
fil
l her lungs, felt the immediate sense of light in her head.

She met the man and woman at the door to Crissys. The woman was exactly Jeannie’s height, and like Jeannie, she had smooth skin that crinkled round the eyes, and light hair that couldn’t rightly be called either blonde or brown. She introduced herself and presented an identification that Jeannie didn’t look at, once she heard her name and title. Coffman, she said. Detective Sergeant. Agnes, she added, as if having a Christian name somehow might soften the effect of her presence. She said she was from Greater Springburn CID and she introduced the young man with her, giving his name as Detective Constable Dick Payne or Nick Dane or some variation thereof. Jeannie didn’t catch it because she heard nothing else clearly once the woman said Greater Springburn.

“You’re Jean Fleming?” Sergeant Coffman said.

“Was,” Jeannie said. “Eleven years of Jean Fleming. It’s Cooper now. Jean Cooper. Why? Who wants to know?”

The sergeant touched a knuckle to the spot between her eyebrows as if this helped her to think. She said, “I’ve been made to understand…You
are
the wife of Kenneth Fleming?”

“I got no decree yet, if that’s what you’re thinking. So I s’pose we’re still married,” Jeannie replied. “But being married’s not exactly the same as being someone’s wife, is it?”

“No. I suppose not.” But there was something about the way the sergeant said those four words and something even more in the way the sergeant looked at Jeannie as she said them that made her suck in hard on her cigarette. “Mrs. Fleming…Miss Cooper…Ms. Cooper…” Sergeant Agnes Coffman went on. The young constable with her dropped his head.

And then Jeannie knew. The real message was contained in the piling up of names. Jeannie didn’t even need her to say the words. Kenny was dead. He was smashed on the motorway or knifed on the platform of Kensington High Street Station or thrown two hundred feet from a zebra crossing or hit by a bus or…What did it matter? However it had happened, it was over at last. He couldn’t come back yet another time and sit across the kitchen table from her and talk and smile. He couldn’t make her want to reach out and touch the red-gold hairs on the back of his hand.

She’d thought more than once in the last four years that she would be glad at this moment. She’d thought, If something could just wipe him off the face of the earth and free me of loving the bastard even now when he’s left and everyone knows I wasn’t good enough, we weren’t good enough, we weren’t family enough…I wanted him to die and die and die a thousand times, I wanted him to be gone, I wanted him to be smashed into bits, I wanted him to suffer.

She thought how odd it was that she wasn’t even shaking. She said, “Is Kenny dead then, Sergeant?”

“We need an official identification. We need you to view the body. I’m terribly sorry.”

She wanted to say, “Why not ask her to do it? She was hot enough to view the body when he was alive.”

Instead, she said, “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll need to use the phone, first,” and the sergeant said of course she could and then retreated with the detective constable to the other side of the caff where they looked out of the windows, across the harbour to the pyramid-topped glass towers of Canary Wharf, another failing promise of hope, jobs, and redevelopment that those toffs from the City periodically flung at the lower East End.

Jeannie phoned her parents, hoping to get her mother but getting Derrick instead. She tried to manage her voice and give nothing away. Upon hearing a simple request, her mother would have gone to Jeannie’s and waited with the children and not asked questions. But with Derrick, Jeannie had to be careful. Her brother always wanted to be in too close.

So she lied, telling Derrick that the repairman she was waiting for at the caff was going to be hours and would he go to her place and see to the kids? Get them their tea? Try to keep Jimmy from doing a bunk this evening? Make sure Stan brushed his teeth proper? Help Sharon with her school work?

The request appealed to Derrick’s need to replace the two families he’d already lost to divorce. Going to Jeannie’s meant he’d have to miss his nightly session with his weights — continuing the process of sculpting every muscle on his body to a monstrous kind of perfection—but in its place would be a chance to play Dad without the attendant lifelong responsibilities.

Jeannie turned to the police and said, “I’m ready, then,” and followed them out to their car.

It took ages to get there because for some reason that Jeannie didn’t understand they didn’t use the siren or the twirly lights. Rush hour had begun. They crossed the river and crawled through the suburbs, passing endless postwar buildings of sooty brick. When they finally made it to the motorway, the going was little better.

They changed motorways once and then left the second one altogether when the signposts started announcing Tonbridge. They wound through two villages, zipped between hedges in the open country, and slowed as they finally came into a town. They eventually stopped at the rear entrance to a hospital where behind a makeshift barrier of rubbish bins half a dozen photographers began clicking and popping with their cameras the moment the Payne-Dane constable opened Jeannie’s door.

Jeannie hesitated, clutching her handbag. She said, “Can’t you make them…?”

To which Sergeant Coffman said over the back of her seat, “I’m sorry. We’ve been holding them off since noon.”

“But how d’they
know
? Have you said? Have you told?”

“No.”

“Then how…?”

Coffman got out and came to Jeannie’s door. “Someone works the police beat. Someone else listens in to radio transmissions with a scanner. Someone else—at the station, sorry to say—usually has a loose tongue. The press put things together. But they don’t know anything for sure yet, and you don’t have to tell them. All right?”

Jeannie nodded.

“Good. Here. Quick now. Let me take your arm.”

Jeannie ran her hand against her smock and felt its coarse material against her palm. She stepped out of the car. Voices began to shout, “Mrs. Fleming! Can you tell us…” as cameras whirred. Between the young detective constable and the sergeant, she hurried inside the glass doors that swung open at their approach.

They went in through the casualty ward where the air stung their eyes with the smell of disinfectant and someone was crying, “It’s my chest, goddamn you!” At first, Jeannie was aware of little but the prevalence of white. The moving bodies in laboratory coats and in uniforms, the sheets on trolleys, the papers on charts, the shelves that seemed covered with gauze and cotton wool. And then, she started to hear the sounds. Feet on the linoleum
flo
or, the
shoosh
of a door swinging shut, the creaking wheels of a cart. And the voices, in an auditory rainbow:

“It’s his heart. I know it.”

“Won’t one of you look…”

“…off his feed for two days…”

“We’ll need an ECG.”

“…Solu Cortef. Stat!”

And someone clattering past, shouting, “Give way,” pushing a trolley on which sat a machine with cords, dials, and knobs.

Through it all, Jeannie could feel Sergeant Coffman’s hand on her arm, curved just above her elbow, warm and firm. The constable didn’t touch her, but he kept close by her side. They walked down a first corridor, then another. They finally came to more white and a new sensation—cold—in an area of quiet with a metal door. Jeannie knew they were there.

Sergeant Coffman said, “Would you like something first? Tea? Coffee? A Coke? Some water?”

Jeannie shook her head. “I’m all right,” she said.

“Are you feeling faint? You’ve gone rather pale. Here. Sit down.”

“I’m all right. I’ll stand.”

Sergeant Coffman peered at her face for a moment as if doubting her words. Then she nodded at the constable who gave a knock on the door and disappeared through it. Sergeant Coffman said, “It won’t be long.” Jeannie thought it had been quite long enough, years in the making. But she said, “Fine.”

The constable was gone less than a minute. When he popped his head round the door and said, “They’re ready for you,” Sergeant Coffman took Jeannie’s arm again and they walked inside.

She’d been expecting to confront his body immediately, laid out and washed like they did in old films, with chairs all round it, suitable for viewing. But instead they walked into an office where a secretary was watching paper spew out of a printer. On either side of her desk, two doors stood closed. A man in green surgical garb was positioned next to one of them, his hand on its knob.

He said, “In here,” in a quiet voice. He swung his door open and as Jeannie approached it, she heard Sergeant Coffman say softly, “Got the salts?” and she felt the green man take her other arm as he said, “Yes.”

Inside, it was cold. It was bright. It was spotless. There seemed to be stainless steel everywhere. There were lockers, long work tops, cupboards on the walls, and a single trolley angling out beneath them. A green sheet covered this, the same split-pea colour as the green man’s medical garb. They approached as if on their way to an altar. And just like at church, when they stopped, they were silent as if experiencing awe. Jeannie realised the others were waiting for her to give them a sign that she was prepared. So she said, “Let’s see him, then,” and the green man bent forward and rolled the sheet back to expose the face.