A Traitor to Memory

by Elizabeth George

  On her chest of drawers across the room, the intercom broke into James Pitchford's reveries just about as often as he allowed himself to dream them. From two floors below, the child would whimper and Katja's head would rise from her nightly lesson.

  “It's nothing,” he'd say because if it was something, their shared time that was so precious to him and already too brief would be over for the evening. For if Sonia Davies' whimper escalated to a cry, the possibilities were endless as to what the trouble might be.

  “The little one. I must go,” Katja said.

  “Wait a moment.” He used the opportunity to cover her hand with his own.

  “I cannot, James. If she weeps and Mrs. Davies hears and finds me not with her … You know how she is. And this is my job.”

  Job? he thought. It was more like indentured servitude. The hours were long, and the duties were endless. Caring for a child so constantly ill required the efforts of more than one young woman with virtually no experience.

  Even at twenty-five, James Pitchford could see this. Sonia Davies needed a professional nurse. Why she didn't have one was one of the mysteries of Kensington Square. He wasn't in a position to delve into this mystery, however. He needed to keep his head down and his profile obscure.

  Still, when Katja hurried off to the child in the midst of an English lesson, when he heard her leap out of her bed in the middle of the night and rush down the stairs to come to the aid of the little girl, when he returned from work and found Katja feeding her, bathing her, occupying her with one stimulation or another, he thought protectively, The poor creature has a family, hasn't she? What are they doing to care for her?

  And it seemed to him that the answer was nothing. Sonia Davies was left in Katja's charge while the rest of the crew hovered round Gideon.

  Could he blame them? Pitchford wondered. And even if he could, had they any choice? The Davieses had embarked upon Gideon's fashioning long before Sonia's birth, hadn't they? They were already committed to a course of action, as evidenced by the presence of Raphael Robson and Sarah-Jane Beckett in their world.

  Thinking of Robson and Beckett, Pitchley-Pitchford entered the railway station and dropped the required coins into a ticket machine. As he wandered out onto the platform, he reflected upon the astounding fact that he hadn't thought of either Robson or Beckett for years. Robson, of course, he might well have forgotten since the violin instructor had not lived among them. But it was strange that he hadn't given a passing consideration to Sarah-Jane Beckett in all this time. She had been, after all, so very much a presence.

  “I find my position here more than suitable,” she told him early in her employ, in that peculiar pre-Victorian manner of speaking she used when she was in full Governess Mode. “Whilst difficult at times, Gideon is a remarkable pupil, and I feel most privileged to have been chosen from nineteen candidates to be his instructor.” She'd just joined the household, and her room would be up with his among the eaves on the house's top floor. They would have to share a bathroom the size of a pin head. No bath, just a shower in which an average-size man could barely turn around. She'd seen this on the day she moved in, looked at it disapprovingly, but finally sighed with martyred acceptance.

  “I don't wash garments in the bathroom,” she informed him, “and I prefer that you refrain from doing so as well. If we have consideration for each other in this small way, I dare say we shall manage quite well together. Where are you from, James? I can't quite place you. Normally, I'm very good at accents. Mrs. Davies, for instance, grew up in Hampshire. Can you tell? I quite like her. Mr. Davies as well. But the grandfather? He does seem a bit … Well. One doesn't like to speak ill, but …” She tapped a finger to her temple and lifted her eyes in the direction of the ceiling.

  Barmy was the word James would have chosen at another time in his life. But instead he said, “Yes. He's a queer fish, isn't he? But if you give him a wide berth, you'll find he's harmless enough.”

  So for just over a year, they'd lived in harmony and with the spirit of cooperation. Daily, James left for his job in the City as Richard and Eugenie Davies took themselves to their own places of employment. The elder Davieses remained at home, where Granddad occupied himself in the garden and Gran kept house. Raphael Robson took Gideon through his sessions on the violin. Sarah-Jane Beckett gave the boy lessons in everything from literature to geology.

  “It's astonishing working with a genius,” she informed him. “The child is like a sponge, James. One would think he'd be hopeless at anything but music, but that isn't the case. When I compare him to what I had my first year in North London …” Again and as always, she used her eyes to express the rest: North London, that dwelling place of society's detritus. Fully half of her students there were black, she'd informed him. And the rest of them—with a pause for effect—were Irish. “One doesn't wish to cast aspersions on minorities, but there are limits to what one should expect oneself to endure in one's chosen career, don't you think?”

  She spent time with him when she wasn't with Gideon. She asked him out to the cinema or for a drink at the Greyhound, “just as friends.” But often on those just-as-friends evenings, her leg pressed against his in the darkness as the celluloid flickered its images on the screen, or she took his arm as they entered the pub and she slid her hand from his biceps to his elbow to his wrist so that when their fingers touched it was only natural that they clasp and remain clasped once they were seated.

  “Tell me about your family, James,” she urged him. “Do tell me. I want every detail.”

  So he manufactured tales for her because telling tales had long ago become his stock in trade. He was flattered by the attention that she—an educated girl from the Home Counties—was willing to show him. He had held his own counsel and kept his head down for so many years that Sarah-Jane Beckett's interest in him stirred an appetite for companionship that he'd kept suppressed for most of his life.

  She wasn't the companion he was seeking, however. And while he couldn't have said exactly who that companion would be in his evenings with Sarah-Jane, he felt no heaving of the earth when her leg touched his and no pleasurable longing for the pressure of something more than her palm against his own when she took his hand.

  Then Katja Wolff arrived, and with Katja the situation was different. But then, Katja Wolff had been as different from Sarah-Jane Beckett as was humanly possible to be.

  7

  “SHE MIGHT HAVE been meeting with the ex,” DCI Leach said in reference to the man Ted Wiley had seen in the car park of the Sixty Plus Club. “Divorce doesn't mean goodbye forever, take it from me. He's called Richard Davies. Track him down.”

  “He could be the third male voice on her answer machine as well,” Lynley acknowledged.

  “What did that voice say again?”

  Barbara Havers read the message from her notes. “Sounded angry,” she added, and tapped her biro meditatively against the paper. “You know, I wonder if our Eugenie played men off against each other.”

  “You're thinking of this other bloke … Wiley?” Leach said.

  “Could be something there,” Havers noted. “We've got three separate men on her answer machine. We've got her—this is according to Wiley—arguing with a bloke in the car park. We've got her wanting to talk to Wiley, having something to tell him, something he apparently feels was important …” Havers hesitated and glanced at Lynley.

  He knew what she was thinking and what she wanted to say: We've also got love letters from a married man and a computer with access to the internet. She was clearly waiting for him to give her the go-ahead to say this, but he held his tongue, so she finished lamely with, “We've got reason to look closely at every bloke who knew her, 'f you ask me.”

  Leach nodded. “Have at Richard Davies, then. Get what you can.”

  They were in the incident room, where detective constables were reporting in on the activities to which they'd been assigned. Following Lynley's phone call to the DCI on the way back into town, Leach h
ad allocated further manpower to the PNC in order to trace all navy and black Audis with number plates ending in ADY. He'd put a constable on to BT for a list of the incoming and outgoing phone calls from Doll Cottage in Henley, and another constable was getting on to Cellnet to track down the mobile phone whose owner had left a message on Eugenie Davies' answer machine.

  Of the activities reported as being completed so far that day, only the DC with the responsibility for gathering information from forensic had offered a useful detail: A number of minute paint particles had been found on the dead woman's clothing when it was examined. Further particles had also been found on her body, specifically upon her mangled legs.

  “They're putting the paint under analysis,” Leach said. “Broken down, it might well give us the make of the car that hit her. But that'll take time. You know the dance.”

  “Have you got a colour on the paint?” Lynley asked.

  “Black.”

  “What colour is the Boxter you're holding?”

  “As to that …” Leach told his team to get on with their work and he led the way back to his office, saying, “Car's silver. And it's clean. Not that I'd expect some bloke—no matter how much he's rolling in bunce—to run down a woman in a motor that cost more than my mum's house. We're still holding the car, though. It's proving useful.”

  He paused at a coffee machine and plugged in a few coins. A viscous liquid drizzled pathetically into a plastic cup. Leach said, “You?” and held the cup up in offer. Havers accepted, although she looked as if she regretted the decision once she tasted the brew; Lynley chose the course of wisdom and demurred. Leach purchased another cup for himself and took them into his office, where he used his elbow to shoot the door home. His phone was ringing, and he barked “Leach” into it as he set down his coffee and sank into his desk chair, nodding Lynley and Havers to chairs of their own. “Hello, love,” he said to his caller, his face brightening. “Nope … Nope … She's what?” With a glance at the other detectives, “Esmé, I can't actually talk at the moment. But let me say this: No one has said anything at all about getting remarried, okay? … Yes. Right. We'll speak later, love.” He dropped the receiver back into place, saying, “Kids. Divorce. It's a real nightmare.”

  Lynley and Havers made noises of sympathy. Leach slurped coffee and dismissed the phone call. He said, “Our bloke Pitchley came by for a little chat this morning, solicitor in tow” and he brought them up to date on what the man from Crediton Hill had revealed: that he not only had recognised the name of the hit-and-run victim, that he not only had once known the hit-and-run victim, but that he'd also lived in the very same house with the hit-and-run victim at the time of the murder of said victim's daughter. “He's changed his name from Pitchford to Pitchley for reasons he's not talking about,” Leach concluded. “I like to think I would have twigged his identity eventually, but it's been twenty years since I last saw the bloke and a hell of a lot of fish have swum under the bridge in the meantime.”

  “Not surprising,” Lynley said.

  “Now that I know who he is, though, I've got to tell you he smells sweet to me for this business, Boxter or not. He's got something the size of a T-Rex marching through his conscience. I can feel it.”

  “Was he a suspect in the child's death?” Lynley asked. Havers, he noted, had flipped over a new page in her notebook and was jotting the information down on a sheet that looked stained with brown sauce.

  “No one was a suspect at first. Until all the reports came in, it looked like a case of negligence. You know what I mean: A flaming idiot goes to take a phone call while the toddler's in the bath. The kid tries to reach for a rubber ducky. She slips, knocks herself on the head, and the rest is academic. Unfortunate and tragic, but it happens.” Leach slurped more coffee and picked up a document from his desk, which he used to gesture with. “But when the reports came in on the child's body, there were bruises and fractures no one could explain, so everyone became a suspect. It all came down to the nanny dead quick. And she was a real piece of work, she was. I might've forgotten Pitchford's face, but as to that German cow … There's not a chance in hell I'd ever forget her. Cold as a cod, that woman was. Gave us one interview—one interview, mind you, about a toddler that died in her care—and she never said another word. Not to CID, not to her solicitor, not to her barrister. Not to anyone. Took her right to silence straight to Holloway. Never shed a tear either. But then, what else could you expect from a Kraut? Family were mad to engage her in the first place.”

  From the corner of his eye, Lynley saw Havers tap her biro against the paper she was writing on. He glanced her way to see her eyes had narrowed at Leach. She wasn't a woman who put up with bigotry in any of its forms—from xenophobia to misogyny—and he could tell she was about to make a comment that wouldn't endear her to the detective chief inspector. He interceded, saying, “The German girl's origins worked against her, then.”

  “Her flaming Kraut personality worked against her.”

  “‘We will fight them on the beaches,’” Havers murmured.

  Lynley shot her a look. She shot him one back.

  Leach either didn't hear or chose to ignore Havers, for which Lynley was grateful. The last thing they needed was a division among them, with lines being drawn on the issue of political correctness.

  The DCI leaned back in his chair and said, “The diary and phone messages are all you came up with?”

  “So far,” Lynley answered. “There was also a card from a woman called Lynn, but that doesn't appear to be germane at the moment. Her child died and Mrs. Davies went to the funeral, apparently.”

  “There was no other correspondence?” Leach asked. “Letters, bills, the like?”

  Lynley said, “No. There was no other correspondence,” and he didn't look Havers' way. “She had a sea chest filled with materials relating to her son, though. Newspapers, magazines, concert programmes. Major Wiley said that Gideon and Mrs. Davies were estranged, but from the look of her collection, I'd guess it wasn't Mrs. Davies who wanted the estrangement.”

  “The son?” Leach asked.

  “Or the father.”

  “We're back to the argument in the car park, then.”

  “We could be. Yes.”

  Leach swallowed the rest of his drink and crushed the plastic cup. He said, “But it's odd, don't you think, to have found so little information about her in the woman's own home?”

  “It was a fairly monastic environment, sir.”

  Leach studied Lynley. Lynley studied Leach. Barbara Havers scribbled furiously into her notebook. A moment passed during which no one admitted to anything. Lynley waited for the DCI to give him the information he wanted. Leach didn't do it. He merely said, “Have at Davies, then. He shouldn't be tough to track down.”

  So the plans were set and the assignments made, and in short order Lynley and Havers were back in the street and heading for their respective cars. Havers lit a cigarette and said, “What're you going to do with those letters, Inspector?”

  Lynley didn't pretend to need clarification. “I'm giving them back to Webberly,” he said, “eventually.”

  “Giving them …” Havers drew in on her cigarette and blew the smoke out in a burst of frustration. “If word gets out that you've taken them from the scene and not turned them in … That we've taken them from the scene and not turned them in … Bloody hell, do you know where that puts us, Inspector? And on top of it, there's that computer. Why didn't you tell Leach about that computer?”

  “I'll tell him, Havers,” Lynley said. “Once I know exactly what's on it.”

  “Jesus in a basket!” Havers cried. “That's suppressing—”

  “Listen, Barbara. There's only one way it would come to light right now that we've got the computer and those letters, and we both know what that one way is.” He looked at her evenly and waited for her to connect the dots.

  Her expression altered. She said, “Hey. I don't grass, Inspector,” and he could see the affront she'd taken.
>
  He said, “That's why I work with you, Barbara,” and he disarmed the Bentley's security system. He opened the door before he spoke to her again, over the car's roof. “If I've been brought in on this case to keep Webberly protected, I'd like to know that and I'd like it said to my face for once. Wouldn't you?”

  “I'd like to keep my nose clean is what I'd like,” Havers replied. “One of us got demoted two months ago, Inspector, and if memory serves me right, it wasn't you.” She was white-faced, watching Lynley with an expression that was completely unlike the belligerent officer he'd worked with for the past several years. She'd taken a professional and psychological beating in the last five months, and Lynley realised that he owed her the opportunity to avoid another one. He said, “Havers, would you prefer to be out of this? That's not a problem. One phone call and—”

  “I don't want to be out.”

  “But it could get dicey. It's already dicey. I more than understand how you might—”

  “Don't talk rubbish. I'm in, Inspector. I'd just like us to have a little care with what we're doing.”

  “I'm taking care,” Lynley assured her. “Those letters from Webberly are not an issue in this case.”

  “You'd better hope that's true,” Havers replied. She pushed away from the Bentley. “Let's get on with it, then. What's next?”

  Lynley accepted her words and dwelt for a moment on how best to approach the next phase of their job. “You've the look of a woman in need of spiritual guidance,” he said. “Track down the Convent of the Immaculate Conception.”

  “What about you?”

  “I'll follow our DCI's suggestion. Richard Davies. If he's seen or talked to his former wife recently, he might know what she wanted to confess to Wiley.”

  “He might be what she wanted to confess to Wiley,” Havers pointed out.

  “There's that as well,” Lynley said.