A Traitor to Memory

by Elizabeth George

  Havers moved into the kitchen that lay just beyond the sitting room as Lynley turned to look at the bookshelves. She called out, “One mod con in here. She's got an answer machine, Inspector. Light's blinking.”

  “Play it,” Lynley said.

  The first disembodied voice floated from the kitchen as Lynley took his reading spectacles from his jacket pocket in order to examine more closely the few volumes on the fitted bookshelves.

  A man's deep and sonorous voice said, “Eugenie. Ian,” as Lynley picked up a book called The Little Flower and opened it to see it was a biography of a Catholic saint called Therese: French, from a family of daughters, a cloistered nun, suffered an early death from whatever one would contract living in a cell with no heating in France in midwinter. “I'm sorry about the row,” the voice continued from the kitchen. “Phone me, will you? Please? I've got the mobile with me,” and he followed this declaration with a number that began with a recognisable prefix.

  “Got it,” Havers called out from the kitchen.

  “It's a Cellnet number,” Lynley said, and picked up the next book as the next voice—this one a woman's—left her message, saying, “Eugenie, it's Lynn. Dearest, thank you so much for the call. I was out for a walk when you rang. It was so very kind of you. I hardly expected … Well. Yes. There it is. I'm just about coping. Thanks for asking. If you ring me back, I'll give you an update. But I expect you know what I'm going through.”

  Lynley saw he was holding another biography, this one of a saint called Clare, an early follower of St. Francis of Assisi: gave away all she owned, founded an order of nuns, lived a life of chastity and died in poverty. He picked up a third book.

  “Eugenie,” another man's voice from the kitchen, but this one distraught and obviously familiar to the dead woman, since he spoke without attribution, saying, “I need to speak with you. I had to ring again. I know you're there, so will you pick up the phone? … Eugenie, pick up the God damn phone.” A sigh. “Look. Did you actually expect me to be happy about this turn of events? How could I be? … Pick up the phone, Eugenie.” A silence was followed by another sigh. “All right. Fine. If that's how you're going to play it. Flush history down the toilet and get on with things. I'll do the same.” The phone banged down.

  “That sounds like a decent field to plough,” Barbara called.

  “Hit one-four-seven-one at the end of the messages and pray for good luck.” The third book, Lynley saw, detailed the life of St. Teresa of Avila, and a quick examination of its jacket was enough to inform him that thematic unity was being achieved on the bookshelves: the convent, poverty, an unpleasant death. Lynley read this and frowned thoughtfully.

  Another man's voice, again without attribution, came from the answer machine in the kitchen. He said, “Hullo, darling. Still asleep or are you out already? I'm just ringing about tonight. The time? I've a bottle of claret that I'll bring along if that suits. Just let me know. I'm … I'm very keen to see you, Eugenie.”

  “That's it,” Havers said. “Fingers crossed, Inspector?” “Metaphorically,” he replied as in the kitchen Havers punched in 1471 to trace whoever had made the most recent call to Eugenie Davies' home. As she did so, Lynley saw that the rest of the books on the shelves were also biographies of Catholic saints, all of them female. None of them were recently published, most of them were at least thirty years old, and some of them had been printed prior to World War II. Eleven of them had the name Eugenie Victoria Staines inscribed on their fly leaves in a youthful hand; four of them were stamped Convent of the Immaculate Conception, and five others bore the inscription To Eugenie, with fondest regards from Cecilia. Out of one of this last group—the life of someone called Saint Rita—a small envelope fell. It bore no postmark or address, but the single sheet of paper had been dated nineteen years earlier in a beautifully schooled hand that had also written:

  Dearest Eugenie,

  You must try not to give in to despair. We can none of us understand God's ways. We can only live through the trials He chooses for us to endure, knowing that there is a purpose behind them which we may not be able to understand at the time. But we will understand eventually, dear friend. You must believe that.

  We deeply miss you at morning Mass and all of us hope that you will return to us soon.

  With Christ's love and my own, Eugenie,

  Cecilia

  Lynley returned the paper to its envelope and snapped the book closed. He called out, “Convent of the Immaculate Conception, Havers.”

  “Are you recommending a lifestyle change for me, sir?”

  “Only if it suits you. In the meantime, make a note to track down the convent. We want someone called Cecilia if she's still alive, and I've a feeling that's where we might find her.”

  “Right.”

  Lynley joined her in the kitchen. The simplicity of the sitting room was repeated there. The kitchen hadn't been updated in several generations, from the look of it, and the only appliance that could be said to be remotely modern was the refrigerator, although even it appeared to be at least fifteen years old.

  The answer machine was sitting on a narrow wooden work top. Next to it stood a papiermâché holder containing several envelopes. Lynley picked these up as Havers went over to a small table and two chairs that abutted one of the walls. Lynley glanced over to see that the table was set not for a meal but for an exhibition: Three neat lines of four framed photographs apiece stood upon it as if for inspection. Envelopes in hand, Lynley went to Havers' side as she said, “Her kids, d'you think, Inspector?”

  Every photograph indeed depicted the same subjects: two children who advanced in age in each picture. They began with a small boy—perhaps five or six years old—holding an infant who, in later pictures, turned out to be a little girl. From first to last, the boy looked desperately eager to please, wide-eyed and smiling so broadly and anxiously that every tooth in his mouth was on display. The little girl, on the other hand, seemed mostly unaware that a camera was focused on her at all. She looked right, she looked left, she looked up, she looked down. Only once—with her brother's hand on her cheek—had anyone managed to get her to look into the camera.

  Havers said in her usual blunt fashion, “Sir, doesn't it look like there's something wrong with this kid? And she's the one that died, right? The one the superintendent told you about? This is her, right?”

  “We'll need someone to confirm it,” Lynley replied. “She could be someone else. A niece. A grandchild.”

  “But what d'you think?”

  “I think yes,” Lynley said. “I think she's the child who died.” Drowned, he thought, drowned in what could have gone down as an accident but instead turned into something far more.

  The photo must have been taken not long before she died. Webberly had told him that the girl had died at two, and Lynley saw that she couldn't have been much less than that at the time of this picture. But Webberly hadn't told him everything, he realised as he studied the photo.

  He felt his guard go up and his suspicions heighten.

  And he didn't much like either one of those sensations.

  5

  MAJOR TED WILEY didn't think in terms of the police when the silver Bentley pulled to the kerb across the street from his bookshop. He was in the middle of ringing up a purchase at the till for a youthful housewife with a sleeping toddler in a push chair, and rather than concentrate on the presence of a luxury vehicle in Friday Street during non-Regatta season, he instead engaged the youthful housewife in conversation. She'd bought four books by Dahl, which clearly were not intended for herself, so it appeared she was one of the few modern young parents who understood the importance of introducing a child to reading. Along with the insidious dangers of cigarette smoking, this was one of Ted's favourite topics. He and his wife had read to all three of their girls—not that there had been a surfeit of other nighttime activities for children to engage in in Rhodesia all those years ago—and he liked to think that the early start which he and Connie had given
to them resulted in everything from respect for the written word to a determination to attend first-class universities.

  So seeing a young mother in possession of a stack of children's books delighted Ted. Had she herself been read to as a child? he wanted to know. What were the little one's favourites? Wasn't it astonishing how quickly children attached themselves to a story they'd been read, demanding it over and over again?

  Thus, Ted saw the silver Bentley only out of the corner of his eye. He gave it little thought other than, Fine motor, that. It was only when the car's occupants got out and approached Eugenie's house that he bade a friendly farewell to his customer and moved closer to the window to watch them.

  They were an odd pair. The man was tall, athletically built, blond, and admirably dressed in the sort of well-made suit that ages over time like a fine wine. His companion wore red trainers, black trousers, and an overlarge navy pea jacket that hung to her knees. The woman lit up a fag before she had the car door closed, which made Ted's lip curl in distaste—the world's tobacco manufacturers were surely going to burn for eternity in a section of hell designed just for them—but the man walked straight to Eugenie's door.

  Ted waited for him to knock, but he didn't. As his companion sucked at her cigarette like someone with a death wish, the man examined an object in his hand, which turned out to be a key to Eugenie's front door, because he inserted this key in the lock and after making a remark to his companion, they both went inside.

  At this sight, Ted went numb from his feet to his earlobes. First that unfamiliar man at one in the morning, then last night's encounter between Eugenie and that same individual in the car park, and now these two strangers in possession of a key to the cottage … Ted knew he had to get over there at once.

  He glanced round the shop to see if any more customers were considering purchases. There were two others. Old Mr. Horsham—Ted liked to call him Old Mr. Horsham because it was such a relief to find someone out and about who was older than he himself—had taken a volume about Egypt off the shelf and appeared to be weighing it rather than inspecting it. And Mrs. Dilday was, as usual, reading another chapter from a book she had no intention of purchasing. Part of her daily ritual was to select a best seller, carry it casually to the back of the shop, where the armchairs were, read a chapter or two, mark her place with a grocery receipt, and hide the book among secondhand volumes of Salman Rushdie, where—considering the tastes of the average citizen in Henley—it would not be noticed.

  For nearly twenty minutes Ted waited for these two customers to remove themselves from the premises so that he could invent a reason to go across the road. When Old Horsham finally bought Egypt for a gratifying sum, saying, “Saw action there in the war,” as he handed over two twenty-pound notes, which he extricated from a wallet that looked old enough to have seen action with its owner, Ted then turned his hopes towards Mrs. Dilday. But this, he saw, was going to be fruitless. She was firmly ensconced in her favourite overstuffed armchair, and she'd brought a Thermos of tea with her as well. She was pouring, sipping, and reading quite happily, just as if she were in her own home.

  Public libraries exist for a reason, Ted wanted to tell her. But instead he alternated between watching her, sending her mental messages about leaving at once, and peering out of the window for any kind of indication of who the people were in Eugenie's house.

  In the midst of his mental imaging of Mrs. Dilday actually purchasing her novel and trotting off to read it, the telephone rang. His eyes still on Eugenie's house, Ted felt behind him for the receiver and picked it up on the fifth double ring.

  He said, “Wiley's Books,” and a woman asked, “Who's this speaking, please?”

  He said, “Major Ted Wiley. Retired. Who's this?”

  “Are you the only person who uses this line, sir?”

  “What …? Is this BT? Is there a problem?”

  “Your phone number registers on one-four-seven-one as the last to have called this number that I'm speaking from, sir. It belongs to a woman called Eugenie Davies.”

  “Right. I phoned her this morning,” Ted informed his caller, trying to keep his voice as steady as he could. “We've a dinner engagement.” And then because he had to ask it although he already knew the answer, “Is something wrong? Has something happened? Who are you?”

  The receiver at the other end was covered for a moment as the woman spoke to someone else in the room. She said, “Metropolitan police, sir.”

  Metropolitan … that meant London. And suddenly Ted could see it again: Eugenie driving into London last night with the rain beating down against the roof of the Polo and the spray from the tyres arcing out into the road. “London police?” he asked nonetheless.

  “That's right,” the woman told him. “Where are you, exactly, sir?”

  “Across from Eugenie's house. I've a bookshop …”

  Another consultation. Then, “Would you mind stepping over here, sir? We've one or two questions we'd like to ask you.”

  “Has something …” Ted could barely force himself to say the words, but they had to be said. If nothing else, the police would expect to hear them. “Has something happened to Eugenie?”

  “We can come to you if that's more convenient.”

  “No. No. I'll be there at once. I must close up first, but I'll—”

  “Fine, Major Wiley. We'll be here for quite some time.”

  Ted walked to the back, where he told Mrs. Dilday that an emergency required him to shut up shop for a time. She said, “Dear me. I hope it's not your mum?” because that was indeed the most rational emergency: his mother's death, although at eighty-nine it was only the stroke that was preventing her from taking up kick-boxing in her declining years.

  He said, “No, no. Just … There's something I need to take care of.”

  She peered at him intently but accepted the vague excuse. In a welter of nerves, Ted waited as she drank down the rest of her tea, donned her wool coat, thrust her hands into her gloves, and—without the least attempt to disguise her actions—put the novel she was reading behind a copy of The Satanic Verses.

  Once she was gone, Ted hurried up the stairs to his flat. He found that his heart was alternately fluttering then pounding, and he was going rather light in the head. With the lightness came voices, so real that he swung round without thinking, anticipating a presence that was not there.

  First the woman's voice again: “Metropolitan police. We've one or two questions we'd like to ask …”

  Then Eugenie's: “We'll talk. There's so much to say.”

  And then, unaccountably, his own Connie's murmur coming to him from the grave itself, Connie, who'd known him as no one else had: “You're a match for any man alive, Ted Wiley.”

  Why now? he wondered. Why Connie now?

  But there was no answer, only the question. And there was also what had to be faced and dealt with across the street.

  As Lynley began going through the letters he'd pulled from the papier-mâché holder, Barbara Havers went up the narrowest staircase she'd ever seen to the first floor of the tiny house. There, two very small bedrooms and an antiquated bathroom opened off a landing that wasn't much larger than a drawing pin's head. Both bedrooms continued the theme of monastic simplicity bordering on shabbiness that began in the sitting room below. The first room contained three pieces of furniture: a single bed covered by a plain counterpane, a chest of drawers, and a bedside table on which stood yet another tasseled lamp. The second bedroom had been turned into a sewing room and contained, aside from the answer machine, the only remotely modern appliance in the entire building: an advanced sewing machine next to which lay a considerable pile of tiny garments. Barbara fingered through these and saw that they were dolls' clothes, elaborately designed and more elaborately fashioned with everything from beadwork to faux fur. There were no dolls anywhere in the sewing room nor were there any in the bedroom next door.

  There Barbara went first to a chest of drawers, where she found a humble paucity of
clothing, even by her own indifferent standards of dress: threadbare knickers, equally worn brassieres, a few jumpers, a limp collection of tights. There was neither a fitted clothes cupboard nor a wardrobe in the room, so the few skirts, trousers, and dresses that the woman had owned were folded carefully into the chest of drawers as well.

  Among the trousers and the skirts, at the back of the drawer, Barbara saw that a bundle of letters had been tucked. She fished these out, removed the rubber band that held them together, laid them out across the single bed, and saw that they had all been written in the same hand. She blinked at this hand. She took a moment to assimilate the fact that she recognised the black, decisive scrawl.

  The envelopes bore postmarks as old as seventeen years. The most recent, she saw, had been sent just over one decade ago. She reached for this one and slid the contents out.

  He called her “Eugenie my darling.” He wrote that he didn't know where to begin. He said those things that men always say when they claim to have reached the decision that they no doubt intended to reach all along: She must never doubt that he loved her more than life itself; she must know, remember, and hold to her heart the fact that the hours they had spent together had made him feel alive—truly and wonderfully alive, my darling—for the first time in years; indeed, the feeling of her skin beneath his fingers had been like liquid silk shot through with lightning….

  Barbara rolled her eyes at the purple phrasing. She lowered the letter and gave herself a moment to react to it and, more important, to what it implied. Read more or not, Barb? she asked herself. Read more and she felt something akin to unclean. Not and she felt unprofessional.

  She went back to the letter. He'd gone home, she read, intending to tell his wife everything. He'd screwed his courage to the sticking place—Barbara winced at the pilfering from Shakespeare—and held the image of Eugenie in his mind to give him the strength to deal a mortal blow to a perfectly good and decent woman. But he'd found her unwell, Eugenie darling, unwell in a manner that he couldn't explain in a mere letter, but that he would explain, would lay before her in all its desperate detail, when next they met. This didn't mean they would not be together at the end of the day, darling Eugenie. This didn't mean they had no future. Above all, this didn't mean everything that had passed between them counted for nothing, because that was not the case.