“A call for the superintendent,” she announced, but she managed to sound apologetic about the fact, and she added, “Sorry,” as if there had actually been a chance in hell that she could have done something about it.
“Here comes trouble,” DI Angus MacPherson rumbled as “At this hour?” Frances Webberly asked. She said anxiously, “Malcolm, good heavens … You can't …”
A sympathetic murmur rose from the guests. They all knew either first-or secondhand what a phone call at one in the morning meant. So did Webberly. He said, “Can't be helped, Fran,” and he put a hand on her shoulder as he went to take the call.
Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley wasn't surprised when the superintendent excused himself from the party and climbed the stairs with the cordless receiver pressed to his ear. He was surprised, however, at the length of time that his superior officer was gone. At least twenty minutes passed during which the superintendent's guests finished their cake and coffee and made noises about heading for their respective homes. Frances Webberly protested at this, casting more than one vexed glance at the stairs. They couldn't leave just yet, she told them, not before Malcolm had the chance to thank them for being part of their anniversary party. Wouldn't they wait for Malcolm?
She didn't add what she would never say. If their guests left before her husband had completed his phone call, common courtesy suggested that Frances step into the front garden to bid farewell to the people who'd come to honour her marriage. And what had long gone unmentioned between Malcolm Webberly and most of his colleagues was the fact that Frances had not put a toe outside her house in more than ten years.
“Phobias,” Webberly had explained to Lynley on the single occasion when he'd spoken about his wife. “It began with simple things that I didn't notice. By the time they had a tight enough hold on her to get my attention, she was spending all day in the bedroom. Wrapped in a blanket, would you believe it? God forgive me.”
The secrets men live with, Lynley thought as he watched Frances fluttering among her guests. There was an edge to her gaiety that no one could miss, a hint of the determined and the anxious to her pleasure. Randie had wished to surprise her parents with an anniversary party at a local restaurant where there would be more room, even a dance floor for the guests. But that hadn't been possible considering Frances's condition, so the venue was restricted to the family's disintegrating old house in Stamford Brook.
Webberly finally descended the stairs as the company were making their farewells, ushered to the door by his daughter, who wrapped her arm round her mother's waist. It was a fond gesture on Randie's part. It served the double purpose of reassuring Frances even as it prevented her from tearing away from the door.
“Not leaving?” Webberly boomed from the stairs, where he'd lit a cigar that was sending a blue cloud in the direction of the ceiling. “The night is young.”
“The night is morning,” Laura Hillier informed him, fondly pressing her cheek to her niece's and saying her farewells. “Lovely party, Randie. You did your parents proud.” Her hand clasped in her husband's, she went out into the night, where the rain that had been falling heavily all evening had finally stopped.
Assistant Commissioner Hillier's departure gave the rest of the company permission to go, and people began to do so, Lynley among them. He was waiting for his wife's coat to be unearthed from somewhere upstairs, when Webberly joined him at the door to the sitting room and said in a low voice, “Stay a moment, Tommy. If you will.”
There was a drawn quality to the superintendent's face that prompted Lynley to murmur, “Of course.” Next to him, his wife said spontaneously, “Frances, have you your wedding pictures anywhere at hand? I won't let Tommy take me home till I've seen you on your day of glory.”
Lynley shot Helen a grateful look. Within another ten minutes, the remaining guests had departed and while Helen occupied Frances Webberly and Miranda helped the caterer clear away dishes and serving platters, Lynley and Webberly repaired to the study, a cramped room barely large enough for a desk, an armchair, and the bookshelves that furnished it.
Perhaps in deference to Lynley's abstemious habits, Webberly went to the window and wrestled with it to give some respite from his cigar smoke. Cold autumn air, heavy with damp, floated into the room.
“Sit down, Tommy.” Webberly himself remained standing, next to the window, where the dim ceiling light cast him mostly in shadow.
Lynley waited for Webberly to speak. The superintendent, however, was chewing the inside of his lower lip, as if the words he wanted to say were there and he needed to taste them for their fluency.
Outside the house, a car's gears ground discordantly, while inside the doors to kitchen cupboards banged shut. These noises seemed to act like a spur upon Webberly. He looked up from his musing and said, “That was a bloke called Leach on the phone. We used to be partners. I haven't talked to him in years. It's rotten to lose touch that way. I don't know why it happens, but it just does.”
Lynley knew that Webberly had hardly asked him to remain behind in order to hear the superintendent wax melancholy on the state of a friendship. One forty-five in the morning was hardly the hour to be discussing one's former mates. Still, to give the older man an opportunity to confide, Lynley said, “Is Leach still in the force, sir? I don't think I know him.”
“Northwest London police,” Webberly said. “He and I worked together twenty years ago.”
“Ah.” Lynley thought about this. Webberly would have been thirty-five at the time, which meant he was speaking of his Kensington years. “CID?” he asked.
“He was my sergeant. He's in Hampstead now, heading up the murder squad. DCI Eric Leach. Good man. Very good man.”
Lynley studied Webberly thoughtfully: faded, thin straw-coloured hair hastily brushed across his forehead, natural ruddiness of complexion muted, neck holding the head at an angle that suggested too much weight on his shoulders. Everything about him spoke of a single explanation—bad news—and a single source—the phone call.
Webberly roused himself but didn't move from the shadows as he spoke. “He's working a hit-and-run up in West Hampstead, Tommy. That's why he called. It happened round ten, eleven tonight. The victim's a woman.” Webberly paused, seemed to be waiting for Lynley to make a response of some kind. When Lynley didn't do anything other than nod—unfortunately, hit-and-runs happened with a distressing frequency in an urban environment in which foreigners often forgot which side of the street they were supposed to be driving on and in which direction they ought to be looking if they were pedestrians—Webberly studied the tip of his cigar and cleared his throat. “From the state of things, Leach's crime scene people are guessing that someone knocked her down, then deliberately ran over her. And then got out, dragged her body to one side, and drove on his way.”
“Christ,” Lynley murmured reverently.
“Her handbag was found nearby. Car keys and ID were in it. The car itself wasn't far, right there on the street. Inside, on the passenger seat, was a London A to Z, along with specific directions to the street where she was killed. And an address was there as well: Number Thirty-two Crediton Hill.”
“Who lives there?”
“The bloke who found the body, Tommy. The very same bloke who happened to drive up the street within an hour of her being hit.”
“Was he expecting the victim at his home? Had they an appointment?”
“Not that we know of, but we don't know much. Leach said the bastard looked like he'd swallowed an onion when they told him the woman had his address in her car. All he said was 'No. That's impossible,' and phoned his solicitor directly.”
Which was, of course, his right. But there was certainly something suspicious about that being someone's first reaction to learning a murder victim was carrying his address.
Still, neither the hit-and-run nor the oddity of its discovery could explain to Lynley why DCI Leach had phoned Webberly at one in the morning or why Webberly was reporting that phone call to him now.
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He said, “Sir, is DCI Leach in over his head for some reason? Is something wrong with the murder squad in Hampstead?”
“Why did he phone, you mean? And more importantly, why am I telling you?” Webberly didn't wait for a reply before he sank into his desk chair and said, “Because of the victim, Tommy. She's Eugenie Davies, and I want you involved. I want to move heaven and earth and hell if I have to, to get to the bottom of what happened to her. Leach knew that the moment he saw who she was.”
Lynley frowned. “Eugenie Davies? Who was she?”
“How old are you, Tommy?”
“Thirty-seven, sir.”
Webberly blew out a breath. “Then I suppose you're too young to remember.”
GIDEON
23 August
I didn't like the way you asked me the question, Dr. Rose. I was offended by your tone and the implication. Don't try to tell me there was no implication, because I'm not that much of a fool. And don't make allusions to the “real meaning” behind a patient's drawing inferences from your words in the first place. I know what I heard, I know what happened, and I can summarise both for you in a sentence: You read what I've written, saw an omission in the story, and pounced on it like a criminal barrister with a mind so closed as to be virtually useless.
Let me repeat what I said in our session: I made no mention of my mother until that final sentence because I was attempting to fulfil your assignment to me, which was to write what I remember, and I was writing what I was writing as it came into my mind. She did not come into my mind before then: before Raphael Robson became, virtually, my full-time instructor and companion.
But the Italian-Greek-Portuguese-Spanish girl did come into your mind? you ask me in that insufferably quiet calm placid manner of yours.
Yes, she did. What's that supposed to mean? That I have a heretofore unmentioned affinity for Portuguese-Spanish-Italian-Greek girls, arising from my unacknowledged indebtedness to an unnamed young woman who unknowingly started me on my path to success? Is that it, Dr. Rose?
Ah. I see. You give me no answer. You keep a safe distance in your father's chair and you fix your soulful eyes on me and I'm meant to take this distance between us as the Bosporus waiting for me to swim. Plunge into the waters of veracity, it suggests. As if I'm not telling the truth.
She was there. Of course she was there, my mother. And if I mentioned the Italian girl instead of my mother, it was for the simple reason that the Italian girl—and why can't I remember her blasted name, for God's sake?—figured in the Gideon Legend while my mother did not. And I thought you instructed me to write what I remembered, going back to the earliest memory I could recall. If that's not what you instructed me to do, if instead you wished me to manufacture the salient details of a childhood that is largely fiction but safely and antiseptically regurgitated in such a way that you can identify and label where and what you choose—
Oh yes, I am angry, before you point that out to me. Because I do not see what my mother, an analysis of my mother, or even a superficial conversation about my mother has to do with what happened at Wigmore Hall. And that's why I've come to see you, Dr. Rose. Let's not forget that. I've agreed to this process because there on the stage in Wigmore Hall, in front of an audience paying mightily to benefit the East London Conservatory—which is my own charity, mind you—I mounted the platform, I rested my violin on my shoulder, I picked up my bow, I flexed my left hand's fingers as usual, I nodded to the pianist and the cellist … and I could not play. God in heaven, do you know what that means?
This wasn't stage fright, Dr. Rose. This wasn't a temporary block against a single piece of music, which, by the way, I'd spent the last two weeks rehearsing. This was a total, utter, complete, and humiliating loss of ability. Not only had the music itself been ripped from my brain, but how to play the music—not to mention how to live—was gone as well. I may as well not ever have held a violin, let alone have spent the last twenty-one years of my life performing in public.
Sherrill began the Allegro, and I heard it without the slightest degree of recognition. And where I was supposed to join the piano and the cello: nothing. I knew neither what to do nor when to do it. I was Lot's son incarnate had he and not the man's wife been the one to turn and observe the destruction.
Sherrill covered for me. He feinted. He improvised, God help him, with Beethoven. He worked his way round to my entrance again. And again there was nothing. Just silence like a vacuum, and the silence roared like a hurricane in my head.
So I left the platform. Blindly, body shivering, vision tunneling, I walked. Dad met me in the Green Room, crying, “What? Gideon. For God's sake. What?” with Raphael only a step behind him.
I thrust my instrument into Raphael's hands and collapsed. Babble all round me and my father saying, “It's that bloody girl, isn't it? This is down to her. God damn it. Get a grip, Gideon. You have obligations.”
And Sherrill, who'd left the platform in my wake, asking, “Gid? What happened? Lose your nerve? Shit. It happens sometimes.”
While Raphael set my violin on the table saying, “Oh dear. I was afraid this would happen eventually.” Because like most people he was thinking of himself, of his own countless failures to perform in a public venue like his father and his father before him. Every member of his family has a high-powered career in performance music save poor sweating Raphael, and I expect he's secretly been biding his time, waiting for disaster to befall me, making us official brothers in misery. He was the one who cautioned against climbing aboard the swift acceleration that occurred in my career after my first public concert when I was seven. Evidently, now he thinks the chickens of catastrophe, born of that acceleration, have come home to roost on my shoulders.
But it wasn't nerves that I felt in the Green Room, Dr. Rose. And it wasn't nerves that I felt before, in front of that audience out in the Hall. It was instead some sort of shutdown, which feels irrevocable and complete. And what was odd about it was that despite the fact that I could hear all their voices—my father's, Raphael's, and Sherrill's—quite clearly, all I could see in front of me was white light shining on a blue, blue door.
Am I having an episode, Dr. Rose? Just like Granddad, am I having an episode that a nice calm countryside visit can cure? Please tell me, because music is not what I do, music is who I am and if I don't have it—the sound and the sheer chivalry of sound—I am nothing but an empty husk.
So what does it matter that in recounting my introduction to music, I made no mention of my mother? It was an omission of sound and fury, and you'd be wise to account its significance accordingly.
But to omit her now would be deliberate, you tell me. You say, Tell me about your mother, Gideon.
25 August
She went to work. She'd been a constant presence for my first four years, but once it became clear that she had a child of exceptional talent that needed fostering, which was going to be not only time-consuming but hideously expensive, she took a job to help out with the costs. I was given into the care of my grandmother—when I was not practising my instrument, having lessons with Raphael, listening to the recordings he brought for me, or attending concerts in his company—but my life had altered so appreciably from what it had been before that day I first heard the music in Kensington Square, I hardly noticed her absence. Prior to that, however, I do remember accompanying her—it seemed like every day—to early morning Mass.
She'd struck up a friendship with a nun at the convent in the square, and between them they'd arranged that my mother could attend the daily Mass that was said for the sisters. She was a convert to Catholicism, my mother. But as her own father was an Anglican minister, I wonder now how much her conversion had to do with devotion to a different dogma and how much it had to do with slapping her father in the face. He wasn't, as I was given to understand it, a very nice fellow. Other than that, I don't recall him.
This is not the case for my mother, but she's a shadowy figure for me because she left us. When I was nine or t
en—I can't remember which—I arrived home from a concert tour of Austria to find that my mother had quit Kensington Square, leaving not a trace of herself behind. She took every article of clothing she possessed, each one of her books, and a number of family photographs. And off she went, like a figurative thief in the night. Except it was the day, I've been told. And she called a taxi. She left no note and no forwarding address, and I never heard from her again.
My father had been with me in Austria—Dad always traveled with me, and Raphael often accompanied us as well—so he was as much in the dark about where Mother had gone and why she had gone as I myself was. All I know is that we came home to find Granddad having an episode, Gran weeping on the stairs, and Calvin the Lodger trying to find the appropriate phone number with no one to help him.
Calvin the Lodger? you ask me. The earlier lodger—James, is that right?—he was gone?
Yes. He must have left the year before. Or the year before that. I don't remember. We had a number of lodgers over time. We had to, in order to make ends meet, as I've already noted.
Do you remember them all? you want to know.
I don't. Just those who figure large, I suppose. Calvin because he was there that night when I first learned my mother had gone. James because he was present when everything began.
Everything? you ask.
Yes. The violin. The lessons. Miss Orr. Everything.
26 August
I associate everyone with music. When I think of Rosemary Orr, I think of Brahms, the concerto that was playing the first time I met her. When I think of Raphael, it's the Mendelssohn. Dad is Bach, the solo violin sonata in G minor. And Granddad will always be Paganini. The twenty-fourth caprice was his favourite. “All those notes,” he would marvel. “All those perfect notes.”
And your mother? you ask me. What about her? Which piece of music do you associate with your mother?
A Traitor to Memory Page 7