“Shut that bitch up,” he barked. “Kill her if you have to.” And he went on his way.
At the moment, the crime scene action was being dominated by the forensic pathologist, who beneath a makeshift shelter of polythene sheets was wearing a bizarre combination of tweeds, wellingtons, and up-market Patagonia rain wear. He was just completing his preliminary examination of the body, and Leach got enough of a look to see they were dealing with either a cross-dresser or a female of indeterminate age, badly mangled. Facial bones were crushed; blood seeped from the hole where an ear had once been; raw skin on the head marked the areas where hair had been ripped from the scalp; the head hung at a natural angle but with a highly unnatural twist. It was just the thing to have to look upon when one was already light-headed with fever.
The pathologist—Dr. Olav Grotsin—slapped his hands on his thighs and pushed himself to his feet. He snapped off his latex gloves, tossed them to an assistant, and saw Leach where the DCI stood, attempting to ignore his own ill health and assessing what could be assessed from his position of less than four feet from the corpse.
“You look like hell,” Grotsin said to Leach.
“What've we got?”
“Female. One hour dead when I got here. Two at the most.”
“You're sure?”
“About what? The time or the sex?”
“The sex.”
“She's got breasts on her. Old but there. As for the rest, I don't like cutting off their knickers in the street. You can wait till the morning on that, I presume.”
“What happened?”
“Hit-and-run. Internal injuries. I'd venture to guess she's ruptured everything that could be ruptured.”
Leach said, “Shit,” and stepped past Grotsin to squat by the body. It lay a scant few inches from the driver's door of the Calibra, on its side with its back to the street. One arm was twisted behind it, and the legs were tucked beneath the Vauxhall's chassis. The Vauxhall itself was unblemished, Leach noted, which hardly surprised him. He couldn't see a driver hotly seeking a parking space and running over someone lying in the street in order to get it. He looked for tyre marks on the body and on the dark raincoat she wore.
“Her arm's dislocated,” Grotsin was saying behind him. “Both legs are broken. And we've got a bit of candy floss as well. Turn her head and you'll see it.”
“The rain didn't wash it off?”
“Head was protected under the car.”
Protected was an odd choice of word, Leach thought. The poor sow was dead, whoever she was. Pink froth from her lungs may well have indicated that she didn't die instantly, but that was not much help to them and no help at all to the hapless victim. Unless, of course, someone had come upon her while she still lived and managed to catch a few critical words as she lay dying in the street.
Leach got to his feet and said, “Who phoned it in?”
“Right over there, sir.” It was Grotsin's assistant who replied, and she nodded across the street where for the first time Leach saw that a Porsche Boxter was double-parked with its hazard lights blinking. Two police constables were guarding this vehicle at either end, and just beyond them a middle-aged man in a trench coat stood beneath a striped umbrella and anxiously alternated his gaze from the Porsche to the broken body that lay some yards behind it.
Leach went over to examine the sports car. It would be a short night's work if the driver, the vehicle, and the victim were forming a neat little triad here on the street, but even as he approached the car, Leach knew that this would not be likely. Grotsin would hardly have used the words hit-and-run if only the first term applied.
Still, Leach walked round the Boxter carefully. He squatted in front of it and examined its front end and its body. He went from there to the tyres and checked each of these. He lowered himself to the rain-washed pavement and scrutinised the Porsche's undercarriage. And when he was done, he ordered the car impounded for the crime team's analysis.
“Oh, I say. That can't be necessary” was the complaint made by Mr. Trench Coat. “I stopped, didn't I? As soon as I saw … And I reported it. Surely you can see that—”
“It's routine.” Leach joined the man as a PC was offering him a cup of coffee. “You'll have the car back quick enough. What's your name?”
“Pitchley,” the man said. “J. W. Pitchley. But see here, this is an expensive car, and I see no reason … Good God, if I'd hit her, the car would show the signs.”
“So you know it's a woman?”
Pitchley looked flustered. “I suppose I thought … I did go over to it … to her. After I rang triple nine. I got out of the car and went to see if there was anything I could do. She might have been alive.”
“But she wasn't?”
“I couldn't actually tell. She wasn't … I mean, I could see she was unconscious. She wasn't making a sound. She might have been breathing. But I knew not to touch….” He gulped his coffee. Steam rose from the cup.
“She's a fair enough mess. Our pathologist concluded she's a woman by checking for breasts. What did you do?”
Pitchley looked aghast at the implication. He glanced over his shoulder to the pavement, as if worried that the collection of onlookers standing there could hear his exchange with the detective and would draw erroneous conclusions from it. “Nothing,” he said in an undertone. “My God. I didn't do anything. Obviously, I could see that she was wearing a skirt beneath her coat. And her hair's longer than a man's—”
“Where it's not been ripped from her skull.”
Pitchley grimaced but went on. “So when I saw the skirt, I just assumed. That's it.”
“And that's where she was lying, is it? Right there by the Vauxhall?”
“Yes. Right there. I didn't touch her, didn't move her.”
“See anyone on the street? On the pavement? On a porch? At a window? Anywhere?”
“No. No one. I was just driving along. There was no one anywhere except her, and I wouldn't have noticed her at all except her hand—or her arm or something … white, this was—caught my eye. That's it.”
“Were you alone in your own car?”
“Yes. Yes, of course I was alone. I live alone. Over there. Just up the street.”
Leach wondered at the volunteered information. He said, “Where were you coming from this evening, Mr. Pitchley?”
“South Kensington. I was … I was dining with a friend.”
“The friend's name?”
“I say, am I being accused of something?” Pitchley sounded flustered rather than concerned. “Because if phoning the emergency services when one finds a body is grounds for suspicion, I'd like a solicitor with me when I—Hello, there. Do keep your distance from my car, would you please?” This last was directed towards a swarthy constable who was part of a fingertip search ongoing in the street.
More constables combed the area surrounding Pitchley and Leach, and it was from this group that a female PC presently emerged, a woman's handbag in her latex-gloved grip. She trotted towards Leach, and he donned his own gloves, stepping away from Pitchley with instructions to the man to give his address and phone number to one of the policemen guarding his car. He met the female constable in the middle of the street and took the handbag from her.
“Where was it?”
“Ten yards back. Beneath a Montego. Keys and wallet are in it. There's an ID as well. Driving licence.”
“Is she local?”
“Henley-on-Thames,” the constable replied.
Leach unfastened the handbag's clasp, fished out the keys, and handed them over to the constable. “See if they fit any of the cars in the area,” he told her and as she set off to do so, he took out the wallet and opened it to locate the ID.
He first read the name without making a connection. Later he would wonder how he'd failed to twig her identity instantly. But he was feeling so much like trampled horse turds that it wasn't until he'd read not only her organ donor card but also the name imprinted on her cheques that he realised who the wom
an actually was.
Then he looked from the handbag he was holding to the crumpled form of its owner lying like so much discarded rubbish in the street. And as his body shuddered, what he said was, “God. Eugenie. Jesus Christ. Eugenie”.
Far across town, Detective Constable Barbara Havers sang along with the rest of the party-goers and wondered how many more choruses of jolly-good-fellowing she was going to have to live through before she could make her escape. It wasn't the hour of the night that bothered her. True, one in the morning meant that she was already cutting critically into her beauty rest, but since even doing a Sleeping-Beauty wouldn't make an inroad into her general appearance, she knew that she could live with the knowledge that if she managed to get four hours' kip at the end of the night, she was going to be one lucky bird. Rather, she was bothered by the reason for the party, exactly why, along with her colleagues from New Scotland Yard, she'd been crammed into an overheated house in Stamford Brook for the last five hours.
She knew that twenty-five years of marriage was something worth celebrating. She could count on the digits of her right hand the couples she knew who'd attained that hallmark of connubial longevity, and she wouldn't even have to use her thumb. But there was something about this particular couple that didn't strike her as right, and try as she had done from the moment she'd first stepped into the sitting room where yellow crepe paper and green balloons made a brave attempt to camouflage a shabbiness that had more to do with indifference than with poverty, she'd not been able to shake the feeling that the guests of honour and the company assembled were all taking part in a domestic drama for which she—Barbara Havers—had not been given a script.
At first she told herself that her disconnected feeling came from partying with her superior officers, one of whom had saved her neck from the professional noose nearly three months earlier and one of whom had attempted to knot the rope himself. Then she decided her discomfort came from arriving at the party in her usual state—dateless—while everyone else had a companion in tow, including her fellow and favourite detective constable, Winston Nkata, who'd brought along his mother, an imposing woman six feet tall and dressed in the Caribbean colours of her birth. Finally, she settled on the simple fact of celebrating anyone's marriage as the source of her uneasiness. Jealous cow, I am, Barbara finally told herself with some disgust.
But even that explanation couldn't withstand much serious scrutiny, because under normal circumstances Barbara wasn't given to wasting energy on envy. True, there were reasons aplenty all round for her to feel that barren emotion. She was standing in a crowd of chattering couples—husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers and companions—and she herself was spouseless, partnerless, and childless without a single prospect on her horizon for changing those conditions. But having engaged in her usual reaction to this state of affairs by browsing the buffet table for edible distraction, she'd quickly won herself over to considering all the freedoms afforded her unattached status, and she'd dismissed any disquieting emotions that threatened to undermine her peace of mind.
Still, she didn't feel as bonhomous as she knew she ought to be feeling at an anniversary party, and as the guests of honour took an overlarge knife in their clasped hands and began to assail a cake whose icing was decorated with roses, ivy, twined hearts, and the words Happy Twenty-fifth, Malcolm & Frances, Barbara surreptitiously stole glances round the crowd to see if anyone besides herself was giving more attention to his wristwatch than to the waning moments of the celebration. No one was. Each and every person was focused on Detective Superintendent Malcolm Webberly and his uxorial companion of a quarter of a century, the redoubtable Frances.
This evening represented Barbara's first encounter with Superintendent Webberly's wife, and as she watched the woman feeding her husband a forkful of cake and laughingly accepting her own forkful in turn, Barbara realised that she'd been avoiding any prolonged consideration of Frances Webberly for the entire evening. They'd been introduced by the Webberlys' daughter Miranda in her rôle of hostess and they'd made the sort of polite conversation one always made with the spouse of a colleague. How many years have you known Malcolm? and Do you find it difficult working in a world with so many men to contend with? and What drew you to homicide investigations in the first place? Still, throughout this conversation, Barbara had found herself itching for an escape from Frances, despite the fact that the other woman's words were kindly spoken, her periwinkle eyes fixed pleasantly on Barbara's face.
But perhaps that was it, Barbara decided. Perhaps the source of her uneasiness lay in Frances Webberly's eyes and what was hidden behind them: an emotion, a concern, a sense of something not quite as it should be.
Yet exactly what that something was Barbara couldn't have said. So she gave herself to what she earnestly hoped were the final moments of the shindig, and she applauded along with the rest of the company as the concluding “and so say all of us” was sung.
“Tell us how you've done it,” someone from the crowd called out as Miranda Webberly stepped in to relieve her parents at the cake.
“By having no expectations,” Frances Webberly said promptly and clasped both hands round her husband's arm. “I had to learn that early, didn't I, darling? Which is just as well since the only thing I actually gained from this marriage—aside from my Malcolm—is the two stone I've never been able to lose from carrying Randie.”
The company joined her lighthearted laughter. Miranda merely ducked her head and continued cutting the cake.
“That sounds a fair bargain.” This was said by Helen, the wife of DI Thomas Lynley. She'd just accepted a plate of cake from Miranda, and she touched the girl fondly on the shoulder.
“Spot on,” Superintendent Webberly agreed. “We've got the best daughter on earth.”
“Oh, you're right, naturally,” Frances said, shooting Helen a smile. “I would be nowhere without Randie. But just you wait, Countess, till the time arrives when that slender body of yours starts to bloat and your ankles swell. Then you'll know what I'm talking about. Lady Hillier, may I offer you cake?”
There it was, Barbara thought, that something not right. Countess. And Lady. She was several beats off, was Frances Webberly, giving those titles a public airing. Helen Lynley never used her title—her husband was an earl as well as a detective inspector, but he'd go to the rack before mentioning that fact and his wife was just as reticent—and while Lady Hillier might indeed be the wife of Assistant Commissioner Sir David Hillier—who himself would go to the rack before failing to make his knighthood known to anyone within hearing distance—she was also Frances Webberly's own sister, and using her title, which Frances had done all night, seemed to be an effort to underscore for everyone differences between them that might otherwise have gone unremarked.
It was all very strange, Barbara thought. Very curious. Very … off.
She gravitated towards Helen Lynley. It seemed to Barbara that the simple word countess had driven a subtle wedge between Helen and the rest of the party, and as a result the other woman was tucking into her cake alone. Her husband appeared oblivious of this—typical man—since he was engaged in conversation with two of his fellow DIs, Angus MacPherson, who was working on his weight problem by ingesting a piece of cake the size of a shoebox, and John Stewart, who was compulsively arranging the remaining crumbs from his own piece of cake in a pattern that resembled a Union Jack. So Barbara went to Helen's rescue.
“Is her countess-ship thoroughly chuffed by the evening's festivities?” she asked quietly when she reached Helen's side. “Or haven't enough forelocks been tugged in her direction?”
“Behave yourself, Barbara,” Helen remonstrated, but she smiled as she said it.
“Can't do that. I've got a reputation to maintain.” Barbara accepted a plate of cake and tucked into it happily. “You know, your slenderness,” she went on, “you could at least try to look dumpy like the rest of us. Have you thought about wearing horizontal stripes?”
“There is that
wallpaper I got for the spare room,” Helen said thoughtfully. “It's vertical, but I could wear it on its side.”
“You owe it to your fellow females. One woman maintaining her appropriate body weight makes the rest of us look like elephants.”
“I'm afraid I won't be maintaining it for long,” Helen said.
“Oh, I wouldn't go to Ladbrokes to put five quid—” Barbara suddenly realised what Helen was saying. She glanced at her in surprise and saw that Helen's face bore an uncharacteristically bashful half smile.
“Holy hell,” Barbara intoned. “Helen, are you really …? You and the inspector? Hell. That's bloody brilliant, that is.” She looked across the room at Lynley, his blond head cocked to listen to something that Angus MacPherson was saying to him. “The inspector hasn't said a word.”
“We've only just found out this week. No one actually knows yet. That seemed best.”
“Oh. Right. Yeah,” Barbara agreed, but she didn't know what to think about the fact that Helen Lynley had just confided in her. She felt a sudden warmth swell over her and a quick pulsing in the back of her throat. “Gosh. Hell. Well, never fear, Helen. Mum'll be the absolute word at this end till you tell me otherwise.” And as she realised her inadvertent pun, Helen did also, and they laughed together.
It was at this moment that Barbara caught sight of the caterer tiptoeing along the side of the dining room from the direction of the kitchen, a cordless phone in her hand.
A Traitor to Memory Page 6