Richard wasn't answering. Jill said, “Richard, I don't understand. How did they connect you with Eugenie? I realise she must have kept your surname, but Davies isn't so uncommon that one would make the leap that you and she had once been married.”
“One of the police on the scene,” Richard said. “He knew who she was. Because of the case …” He aimlessly shifted the copy of Radio Times so that the one beneath it was on top. This one pictured Jill herself in modern garb among the costumed cast of her triumphant production of Desperate Remedies, filmed within weeks of Jill's final breakup with Jonathon Stewart, whose passionate vows to leave his wife “once our Steph has finished up at Oxford, darling” had proved to be just about as steadfast as his performance in bed had been reliable. Two weeks after “our Steph” had her diploma in her grubby little grasp, Jonathon was making another excuse which involved settling the wretched girl “in her new digs up in Lancaster, darling.” Three days later Jill had pulled the plug on their relationship and buried herself in Desperate Remedies, whose title couldn't have been more appropriate to her emotional state at the time.
Jill said, “The case?” and a moment later realised what case he was speaking about. The case, of course, the only one that mattered. The case that had broken his heart, destroyed his marriage, and coloured the last two decades of his life. She said, “Yes, I suppose the police might remember.”
“He was involved. One of the detectives. So when he saw her name on her driving licence, he tracked me down.”
“Yes. I see.” She half-rolled into a kneeling position from which she was able to touch his curved shoulder. “Let me make you something. Tea, coffee.”
“I could do with a brandy.”
She lifted an eyebrow, although since he was looking at the magazine cover and not at her, he didn't see the action. She wanted to say, At this hour? Surely not, darling. But she heaved herself to her feet and went to the kitchen, where she took a bottle of Courvoisier from one of the sleek cupboards and poured him an exact two tablespoons, which seemed an adequate amount to restore him.
He joined her in the kitchen and took the glass without comment. He drank a sip and swirled the remaining liquid in the glass. He said, “I can't get the sight of her out of my mind.”
This seemed too much to Jill. All right, the woman was dead. And yes, she'd died in a dreadful way, with much to be pitied. Indeed, it was a grim affair, having to look upon her broken body. But Richard hadn't had a single word from his former wife in nearly two decades, so why would he be so distraught at her death? Unless he was still carrying a torch for her … Unless, perhaps, he'd not been quite truthful about the death of their marriage and what he'd done with the corpse.
Jill said with care and placing a loving hand on his forearm, “I know this must be a terrible time for you. But you've not actually … seen her in all these years, have you?”
A flicker in his eyes. Of their own accord, her fingers tightened. Don't make this into a Jonathon situation, she told him silently. Lie to me now, and I will end this, Richard. I will not live in a fantasy again.
He said, “No, I've not seen her. But I've spoken to her recently. A number of times in the last month or so.” He seemed to feel the shield she put up to protect her heart from damage at this piece of news, because he went on hastily. “She phoned me because of Gideon. She'd read about what happened at Wigmore Hall. When he didn't recover from that … situation … quickly, she phoned to ask me about him. I haven't told you because … I don't actually know why I haven't told you. It didn't seem very important at the time. And beyond that, I didn't want anything to upset you in these final weeks … the baby. It hardly seemed fair to you.”
“That's completely outrageous.” Jill felt a swelling of righteous anger.
Richard said, “I'm sorry. We spoke for only five minutes … ten minutes at the most each time she phoned. I didn't consider—”
“I don't mean that,” Jill interrupted. “I don't mean it's outrageous that you didn't tell me. But that she phoned you at all. That she had the audacity to phone you, Richard. That she could walk out of your life—out of Gideon's life, for God's sake—and then phone up when she reads about him because she's curious that he's had a bit of trouble at a performance. My God, what cheek.”
Richard said nothing in reply to this. He merely swirled the brandy round in his glass and observed the thin patina it left on the sides. There was something more here, Jill concluded. She said, “Richard? What is it? There's something you're not telling me, isn't there?” And she felt once again a basic shutting down when confronted with the idea that a man with whom she was so intimately involved might not be as forthcoming as she required of him. Odd, she thought, how one humiliating and disastrous relationship had the potential to affect every involvement that followed it. “Richard? Tell me. Is there something more?”
“Gideon,” Richard said. “I didn't tell him that she'd been phoning me about him. I didn't know what to tell him, Jill. It's not as if she was asking to see him, because she wasn't asking to see him at all. So what would have been the point, telling him? But now she's dead and he's got to be told about that and I'm terrified that hearing it is going to make him take a turn for the worse.”
“Yes. I can see how it could.”
“‘Is he well?’ she wanted to know, Jill. ‘Why isn't he playing, Richard?’ she asked. ‘How many concert engagements has he actually broken? And why? Why?’”
“What was she after?”
“She must have phoned me a dozen times in the last two weeks alone,” Richard said. “There she was, this voice from the past which I thought I'd bloody well recovered from and—” He stopped himself.
Jill felt the chill. It started from her ankles and swept up quickly to close round her heart. She said carefully, “Thought you'd recovered?” and tried to stop herself from thinking what she couldn't bear to think, but the words ricocheted round her head anyway: He still loves her. She walked out on him. She disappeared from his life. But he continued to love her. He climbed into my bed. He joined his body to mine. But all the time he was loving Eugenie.
No wonder he'd never remarried. The only question was: Why was he remarrying now?
The damn man read her mind. Or perhaps her face. Or maybe he felt the chill as well, since he said, “Because it took me that much time to find you, Jill. Because I love you. Because at my age, I never expected to love again. And every morning when I awake, even on that miserable sofa of yours, I thank God for the miracle that you love me. Eugenie is a distant part of my past. Let's not make her part of our future.”
And the truth of it was, as Jill knew well, that they both had pasts. They were not adolescents, so neither of them could expect the other to come into their new life unburdened. The future was what was important, at the end of the day. Their future and the future of the baby. Catherine Ann.
Henley-on-Thames was easily accessible from London, especially when the morning commute along the M40 created tailbacks that extended in the opposite direction only. So DI Thomas Lynley and DC Barbara Havers were rolling south in the direction of Henley from Marlow just under an hour after having left Eric Leach's incident room in Hampstead.
DCI Leach, fighting off either a head cold or flu, had introduced them to a squad of detectives who, while slightly leery of the presence of New Scotland Yard among them, also seemed willing to accept their participation in a work load that currently included a series of rapes on Hampstead Heath and an arson in the Grade II-listed cottage of an ageing actress of both title and considerable reputation.
Leach detailed the preliminary findings from the post-mortem examination first, pending blood, tissue, and organ analysis, and they amounted to a multitude of injuries on a body that had ultimately been identified through dental records as belonging to one Eugenie Davies, aged sixty-two. First came the fractures she had sustained: the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae, the left femur, ulna, and radius, the right clavicle, and the fifth and sixth ribs. T
hen came the internal ruptures: liver, spleen, and kidneys. The cause of death had been determined as massive internal haemorrhaging and shock, and the time had been set between ten o'clock and midnight. An evaluation of trace evidence on the body would be forthcoming.
“She was thrown about fifty feet,” Leach told the detectives assembled in the incident room as they stood among the computers, the china boards, the filing cabinets, the copy machines, and the photographs. “According to forensic she was then driven over at least twice, possibly three times, as indicated by contusions on the body and markings left on her mac.”
A general murmur greeted this remark. Someone said, “Nice neighbourhood, that” with heavy irony.
Leach corrected the DC's misapprehension. “We're assuming a single car, not three, did the damage, McKnight. We'll hold that position till we hear otherwise from Lambeth. One hit from the vehicle put her flat out on the pavement. Then once over her, once in reverse, and back again.”
Leach indicated several pictures on the china board before he went on. They depicted the street as it had been in the aftermath of the hit-and-run. He gestured to one in particular showing a section of tarmac photographed between two orange traffic cones with a line of cars along the pavement in the background. “The point of impact appeared to be here,” he said. “And the body landed here, square in the centre of the road.” Another set of traffic cones, plus a large rectangle of the street taped off. “The rain took care of some of the blood that would have been where the body landed. But it wasn't raining hard enough to carry away all the blood from the site or the tissue and bone fragments either. However, the body's not where the tissue and bone are. Instead, it's over here next to this Vauxhall at the kerb. And notice how she's tucked a bit under it? We reckon that our driver, having knocked her down and having done his bit of back and forthing over her body, then got out of his car, dragged the woman to one side, and drove off.”
“She couldn't have been dragged beneath a set of wheels? Lorry, perhaps?” The question came from a DC who was noisily eating from a cup of instant noodles. “Why rule that out?”
“Nature of what few tyre marks we've got,” Leach informed him, reaching for his coffee, which he'd left on a nearby desk heaped with files and computer printouts. He was more loosely strung than Lynley had expected upon their first introduction not forty minutes earlier in his office. Lynley took this as a good sign of what it was going to be like working with the DCI.
“But why not three cars, sir?” one of the other DCs asked. “The first knocks her down, drives off in a panic. She's wearing black so the next two don't even see her lying in the road and run over her before they know what's happened.”
Leach took a gulp of coffee and shook his head. “You won't find anyone giving you good odds on our having three conscienceless citizens all in the same neighbourhood on the same night running over the same body and not one of them reporting it. And nothing in your scenario explains how the hell she ended up partway under that Vauxhall. Only one explanation does that, Potashnik, and it's why we're the ones looking at the situation.”
There was a murmur of agreement at this.
“I'd put good money on the bloke who reported it being the driver we're looking for,” someone from the back of the room called out.
“Pitchley pulled in a brief and put in the plug straightaway,” Leach acknowledged, “and that bears the stench of manure, you're right. But I don't think we've heard the last from him, and that car of his is going to be what unseals his lips, make no mistake.”
“Pinch a bloke's Boxter and he'll sing ‘God Save the Queen’ on demand,” a DC at the front pointed out.
“That's what I'm relying on,” Leach agreed. “I'm not saying he's the driver who did her in in the first place, and I'm not saying he's not. But no matter which way the wind's blowing, he won't be getting that Porsche off us till we know why the dead woman was carrying his address. If it takes holding the Porsche to shake the information from him, then holding the Porsche and going over it six times with granny's hoover is exactly what's going to happen. Now …”
Leach went on to make the action assignments, most of which put his team into the street where the hit-and-run had occurred. It was lined with houses—some conversions and some individual homes—and the DCs were to get a statement from everyone in the area about what had been seen, heard, smelled, or dreamed about on the previous night. His directions allocated other DCs to dog the forensic lab: some of them monitoring the progress made on the examination of Eugenie Davies' car, others given the responsibility for pulling together all the information regarding trace evidence on the woman's body, still others matching the trace evidence from the body to the Boxter that the police had impounded. This same group would be evaluating any and all tyre prints left in the West Hampstead street and on Eugenie Davies' body and her clothes. A final group of constables—the largest—were assigned to search for a car with damage to its front end. “Body shops, car parks, car hire firms, streets, mews, and lay-bys on the motorway,” Leach informed them. “You don't run down a woman in the street and drive away with no damage.”
“That does put the Boxter out of the running,” a female DC noted.
“Possession of the Boxter's how we prise information from our man,” Leach replied. “But there's no telling if—and where—this bloke Pitchley might have himself another car stowed away. And we'd be wise not to forget that.”
The meeting concluded, Leach met with Lynley and Havers privately in his office. As their superior officer of record, he gave Lynley and Havers instructions in a manner that suggested more than mere homicide—if that were not already enough—was involved in the case. But what that more was, he didn't mention. He merely handed over Eugenie Davies' address in Henley-on-Thames, telling them that the house was their starting point. He assumed, he told them pointedly, that they had enough experience between them to know what to do with what they found there.
“What the hell was that supposed to mean?” Barbara asked now as they swung into Bell Street in Henley-on-Thames, where children were taking their morning exercise in a school yard. “And why've we been given the house while the rest of that lot are beating the pavement from West Hampstead to the river? I don't get it.”
“Webberly wants us involved. Hillier's given his blessing.”
“And that's reason enough to do some serious tip-toeing, 'f you ask me.”
Lynley didn't disagree. Hillier had no love for either one of them. And Webberly's state of mind in his study on the previous evening had suggested a few things but declared nothing. He said, “I expect we'll sort things out soon enough, Havers. What's the address again?”
“Sixty-five Friday Street,” she said, and with a glance at their street map, “Take a left here, sir.”
Sixty-five turned out to be a dwelling seven buildings up from the River Thames on a pleasant street that mixed residences with a veterinarian's surgery, a bookshop, a dental clinic, and the Royal Marine Reserve. It was the smallest house that Lynley had ever seen—bar his own companion constable's tiny dwelling in London that often struck him as fit for Bilbo Baggins and no one else. It was painted pink and it consisted of two floors and a possible attic if the microscopic dormer window on the roof was any indication. Appropriately it bore an enamel plaque which named it Doll Cottage.
Lynley parked a short distance away from it, across the street from the bookshop. He fished the dead woman's set of keys from his pocket while Havers took the opportunity to light up and fortify her bloodstream with nicotine. “When are you going to drop that loathsome habit?” he asked her as he checked the front of the house for an alarm system and put the key in the lock.
Havers inhaled deeply and offered him her most maddening smile of tobacco-induced pleasure. “Listen to him,” she said to the sky. “There may be something more obnoxious than a reformed smoker, but I don't know what it is. Child pornographer come to Jesus on the day of his arrest? Tory with a social conscience perhaps?
Hmm. No. They don't quite match up.”
Lynley chuckled. “Put it out in the street, Constable.”
“I wouldn't even dwell on another option.” She flicked the cigarette over her shoulder, after taking another three hits.
Lynley opened the door, which admitted them into a sitting room. This looked about as large as a shopping trolley, and it was furnished with near monastic simplicity and with a taste that veered towards Oxfam rejects.
“And I thought I 'd achieved drab-with-a-vengeance,” Havers remarked.
It wasn't an inappropriate description, Lynley thought. The furniture was of post-war vintage, crafted at a period of time when rebuilding a capital devastated by bombing had taken precedence over interior design. A threadbare grey sofa accompanied by a matching armchair of an equally disenchanting hue sat against one wall. They formed a little seating area round a blond-wood coffee table spread with magazines and two similar end tables, both of which someone had attempted to refinish unsuccessfully. Three lamps in the room all sported tasseled shades, two of them askew and the third bearing a large burn that could have been turned to the wall but wasn't. Nothing save a single print above the sofa, featuring an unattractive Victorian-era child with her arms round a rabbit, decorated the walls. On either side of a mouse-hole fireplace, fitted shelves held books, but they were spottily placed here and there, and it seemed as if something had stood among them but had been removed.
“Bloody poverty-stricken,” Havers said in assessment. She was, Lynley saw, fingering through the magazines on the coffee table, her hands—latex gloved—fanning the publications out so even Lynley could see from his place by the bookshelves that they all bore pictorial covers that placed them years out of date.
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