A Traitor to Memory

by Elizabeth George

  She didn't gesture him to one of the two remaining chairs in the sparsely furnished room, both of which were currently occupied with one cat apiece of the same breed as the feline she held. Neither of these was sleeping as one might expect of a cat perched on a comfortable chair. Rather, they were watchful, as if Lynley were a specimen of something in which they might become interested should a sudden burst of energy come upon them.

  Mrs. Staines set the cat she held on to the floor. Bloomer-legged by fur that shone with careful grooming, he sauntered to one of the chairs, leapt effortlessly to its seat, and dispossessed his housemate of it. That cat joined the other and settled down on its haunches.

  “They're beautiful animals,” Lynley said. “Are you a breeder, Mrs. Staines?”

  She didn't reply. She wasn't very different from the cats themselves: observing, withholding, and palpably hostile.

  She walked to a table that stood by itself, next to the carpet impressions of what must have been a sofa. The table held nothing but a tortoiseshell box whose lid Mrs. Staines flipped open with one manicured finger. She took a cigarette out and from the pocket of her slender-legged trousers, she scooped up a lighter. She put flame to tobacco, inhaled, and said, “What's he done?” in the tone of a woman who very much wanted to add this time to the question.

  There were no newspapers in the room. But their absence didn't mean that the Staineses were unaware of Eugenie Davies' death. Lynley said, “There's a situation in London that I'd like to speak to your husband about, Mrs. Staines. Is he at home or still at work?”

  “At work?” She gave a short, breathy laugh before saying, “London, is it? Ian doesn't like cities, Inspector. He can barely cope with the congestion in Brighton.”

  “The traffic?”

  “The people. Misanthropy is one of his less admirable qualities, although he manages to hide it most of the time.” She inhaled from her cigarette in the studied manner of an old film star, her head tilted back so that her hair—thick, stylishly cut, with the occasional strand of grey highlighting it—hung free from her shoulders. She walked to the window in front of which were yet more carpet impressions of furniture now removed. She said, “He wasn't here when she died. He'd gone to see her. They'd had a row, as you must have been told by someone, or why else would you have come. But he didn't kill her.”

  “You've heard about what happened to Mrs. Davies, then.”

  “Daily Mail,” she said. “We didn't know about it until this morning.”

  “Someone was seen having an argument with Mrs. Davies in Henley-on-Thames, someone who took off in an Audi with Brighton number plates. Was that man your husband?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That would be Ian, in the midst of yet another fine plan going awry.”

  “A plan?”

  “Ian always has plans. And if he hasn't a plan, he has a promise. Plans and promises, promises and plans. All of which generally amount to nothing.”

  “That'll do, Lydia.”

  The statement, sharply spoken, came from the doorway. Lynley turned to see that they had been joined by a lanky man with the weathered and yellowing skin of a chronic smoker. He did as his wife had done, crossing the room to the tortoiseshell box and taking a cigarette. He jerked his head at his wife. This apparently communicated a desire to her, for in response she brought out her lighter a second time. She passed it to him and he used it, saying to Lynley, “What can I do for you?”

  “He's come about your sister,” Lydia Staines said. “I told you that you should expect him, Ian.”

  “Leave us.” He lifted his chin in the direction of the two chairs to indicate the cats, adding, “And take them with you before they get turned into someone's new coat.”

  Lydia Staines threw her cigarette still smouldering into the fireplace. She scooped up a cat in each arm and said, “Come along, Caesar,” to the one who remained. She went on with, “I'll leave you to your fun, then,” and accompanied by the animals, she left the room.

  Staines watched her go, something in his eyes of an animal's hunger as his glance traveled over her body, something round his mouth of a man's loathing for a woman with too much power over him. When he heard a radio click on somewhere in the back of the house, he gave his attention to Lynley. He said, “I saw Eugenie, yes. Twice. In Henley. We had a row. She'd given me her word, her promise that she'd speak to Gideon—that's her son, but I expect you know that already, don't you?—and I was depending on her to do it. But she said she'd changed her mind, said something had come up that made it impossible for her to ask him … And that was it. I took off out of there in a dead blind rage. But someone saw us, I take it. Saw me. Saw the car.”

  “Where is it?” Lynley asked.

  “Being serviced.”

  “Where?”

  “Local dealership. Why?”

  “I'll need the address. I'll need to see it, to talk to the people at the dealership as well. They do body work there, I expect.”

  Staines' cigarette tip glowed, long and bright, as he took in enough smoke to see him through the moment. He said, “What's your name?”

  “DI Lynley. New Scotland Yard.”

  “I didn't knock down my sister, DI Lynley. I was angry. I was damn well desperate. But running her over wouldn't take me an inch towards what I need, so I planned to wait a few days—a few weeks if it took that and if I could hold out—and try her again.”

  “Try her for what?”

  Like his wife, he tossed his cigarette into the fireplace. He said, “Come with me,” and headed out of the sitting room.

  Lynley followed him. They went to the first floor of the house, up stairs so well-carpeted that their footfalls were soundless. They walked along a corridor where rectangles of darker paper on the walls indicated paintings or prints had been removed. They entered a darkened room that was set up as an office with a desk holding a computer monitor that glowed with text and numerical information. Lynley examined this and saw that Staines had logged on to the internet, having chosen an on-line stock broker as his reading or research material.

  “You play the market,” Lynley said.

  “Abundance.”

  “What?”

  “Abundance. It's all about thinking and living abundance. Thinking and living abundance effects abundance, and that abundance produces more of the same.”

  Lynley frowned, trying to piece this together with what he saw on the screen. Staines continued.

  “It's all about thinking in the first place. Most people stay stuck in paucity because that's the only thing they know and that's what they've been taught. I was like that myself once. I was damn bloody like that.” He came to join Lynley at the desk and laid his hand on a thick book that was open next to his computer's keyboard. This was heavily highlighted in a variety of colours, as if the reader had studied it for years and had taken something new from each perusal of its words. It looked like a text—Lynley thought vaguely of economics—but Staines' words sounded more like a new age philosophy. The man continued in a low, intense voice.

  “We attract to our lives that which closely resembles our thoughts,” he said insistently. “Think beauty, and we're beautiful. Think ugliness, and we're ugly. Think success, and we become successful.”

  “Think mastery of the international market, and we have it?” Lynley said.

  “Yes. Yes. If you spend your life contemplating your limits, you can expect no freedom from limitation.” Staines' eyes fixed on the glowing monitor. In its light, Lynley saw that his left eye was milky with a cataract, and the skin was puffy beneath it. He went on. “I used to live only within my limits. I was bound by drugs, by drink, by horses, by cards. If it wasn't one thing, it was another. I lost everything that way—my wife, my children, my home—but that'll not happen to me again. I swear it. Abundance will come. I live abundance.”

  Lynley was beginning to get the picture. He said, “It's a risky sort of business, playing the market, isn't it, Mr. Staines? A great deal of money can be made. Or los
t.”

  “There is no risk, with faith, right action, and belief. Right thought produces the result that's intended by God, Who is Himself goodness and Who wants goodness for His children. If we are one with Him and part of Him, we are part of the good. We must tap into it.” As he spoke, he stared intently at the screen. It was divided in such a way that the continually altering prices on a stock exchange somewhere flickered in a band along the bottom. Staines looked mesmerised by this band, as if its moving figures were coded directions to find the Holy Grail.

  “But isn't the good open to interpretation?” Lynley asked. “And isn't it the case that man's time line and God's time line to reaching the good may be running on different calendars?”

  “It's abundance,” Staines said, and he spoke through his teeth. “We define it and it comes.”

  “And if it doesn't, we're in debt,” Lynley said.

  Abruptly, Staines reached forward and pressed a button on the monitor. The screen faded. He directed his words to it, and his tone underscored a rage that he held at bay. “I hadn't seen her for years. I hadn't bothered her for years. Last time was at our mother's funeral, and even then I held back because I knew if I talked to her, I'd have to talk to him as well, and I hated the bastard. I'd read the obituaries every day from the time I ran off, hoping to see his, waiting to read that the great man of God had finally left the hell he'd made for everyone round him and gone to his own. They stayed, though. Doug and Eugenie stayed. They sat like good little soldiers of Christ and listened to him preach on Sundays and felt the strap on their backs the rest of the week. But I ran off when I was fifteen and I never went back.” He looked at Lynley. “I never asked my sister for a God damn thing. All those years with the drugs, the drink, the horses, I never asked. I thought, She was the youngest, she stayed, she took the brunt of the bastard's fury so she's owed the life she made for herself. And it didn't matter to me that I lost it all—everything I ever owned or loved—because she was my sister and we were his victims and my time would come. So I went to Doug and he helped me when he could. But this last time he said, ‘Can't do it, old man. Have a look at the chequebook if you don't believe me.' So what was I supposed to do?”

  “You asked your sister for money to pay down your debt. What's it from, Mr. Staines? Selling short? Day trading? Buying futures? What?”

  Staines swung away from the monitor, as if the sight of it now offended him. He said, “We've sold what we can. We have only a bed left in our room. We're eating from a card table in the kitchen. The silver's gone. Lydia's lost her jewellery. And all I need is a decent break, which she could have helped me to get, which she promised to help me to get. I told her I'd pay her back. I'd pay him back. He's got thousands, millions. He has to have.”

  “Gideon. Your nephew.”

  “I trusted her to speak to him. She changed her mind. Something's come up, she said. She couldn't ask him for money.”

  “Did she tell you this the other night when you saw her?”

  “That's when she told me.”

  “Not earlier?”

  “No.”

  “Did she tell you what the ‘something’ was?”

  “We argued like hell. I begged. Begged my own sister, but … no. She didn't tell me.”

  Lynley wondered why the man was admitting so much. Addicts, he knew from personal experience, were themselves virtuosos when it came to playing the music that their intimates danced to. His own brother had played the tune for years. But he was no intimate of Eugenie Davies' brother, not a close relative whose overpowering sense of responsibility for something that was not in fact his responsibility was nevertheless going to compel him to hand over the cash that was needed “just this once.” Yet he knew with the assurance of long experience that Staines was saying nothing without being fully aware of what it was.

  “Where did you go when you left your sister, Mr. Staines?”

  “Drove round till half past one in the morning, till I knew Lydia would be asleep when I got home.”

  “Is there anyone who can confirm that? Did you stop for petrol somewhere?”

  “Didn't need to.”

  “I'll ask you to take me to the dealership where your car's being serviced, then.”

  “I didn't run Eugenie down. I didn't kill her. That would have gained me nothing.”

  “It's routine, Mr. Staines.”

  “She said she'd talk to him. I just needed a break.”

  What he needed, Lynley thought, was a cure for his delusions.

  13

  LIBBY NEALE TOOK the corner into Chalcot Square so sharply that she had to put out a foot to prevent the Suzuki from going into a skid. She'd decided to take a break from her delivery route by scoring an English version of a BLT at a Pret à Manger on Victoria Street, and while she'd been munching at one of the stand-up counters, she'd spied a tabloid that a previous customer had left lying by an empty Evian bottle. She'd flipped it over to see that it was the Sun, the paper she loathed most due to the taunting presence of the Page Three Girl, who served as a daily reminder to Libby Neale of all she was not. She was about to shove it to one side, when the headline grabbed her attention. Virtuoso's Mother Murdered took up about four inches of space. Beneath it was a grainy picture that was dated by the hairstyle and the clothing of the woman in it: Gideon's mother.

  Libby snatched up the paper and read it as she ate. She made the jump to page four, where the story continued, and what she saw on that page made her mouthful of sandwich begin to taste like wood shavings. The entire spread covered not the death of Gideon's mother—about which only a limited amount of information was currently available—but another death entirely.

  Shit, Libby thought. The Fleet Street dickheads were digging everything up all over again. And tabloids being what they were, it was only a matter of time before they started hounding Gideon himself. In fact, they probably were already hounding him. A sidebar about Gideon blowing his concert at Wigmore Hall was a feature just begging for further exploration. And as if the poor dude didn't have enough messing up his mind, the paper looked like it was trying to make some sort of connection between Gideon's tough time at that concert and the hit-and-run in West Hampstead!

  As if, Libby thought contemptuously. Like Gideon would even recognise his mother if he'd seen her on the street or something!

  Uncharacteristically, she'd thrown half her sandwich away and stuffed the tabloid down the front of her leathers. She had another two deliveries to make, but to hell with that noise. She needed to see Gideon.

  In Chalcot Square, she roared counterclockwise around the street and skidded to a stop right in front of the house. She pulled the motorcycle onto the sidewalk without bothering to chain it to the railing. Up the front steps in three strides, she banged on the door, then followed that with a long ring on the bell. He didn't answer, so she looked around the square to see if she could spy his Mitsubishi. She picked it out in front of a yellow house a few doors down on the right. He was at home. So come on, she thought, answer the door.

  Within the house, she heard his telephone begin ringing. Four rings and it was abruptly cut off, which made her think he was at home and just not answering the door, but then a distant disembodied voice that she couldn't recognise told her that Gideon's answer machine was taking a message.

  “Damn,” she muttered. He must have gone off somewhere. He must have learned that the papers were digging up everything about his sister's death and decided to split for a while. She couldn't blame him. Most people had to live through shit only once. But it looked like he was going to have to live through everything connected with her murder a second time.

  She went down to her flat. The day's mail lay on the mat, and she picked this up, unlocked her door, and looked through the letters as she stepped inside. Among the BT bill, a bank statement showing that her account was in dire need of an emergency transfusion, and a circular for a home alarm system, there was also a legal-sized envelope from her mother, which Libby dreaded opening
because of the possibility of being confronted with yet another of her sister's success stories. But she tore the end off it anyway, and as she removed her helmet with one hand, with the other she shook out the single sheet of purple paper that her mother had sent.

  Have What You Want … Be Everything You Dream ran in heavy black script across the page. It seemed that Equality Neale—CEO of Neale Publicity and recently a Money magazine cover girl—was giving a seminar in Boston on the topic of Self-Assertion and Achievement in Business, which she would follow with another appearance in Amsterdam. Mrs. Neale had written in the precise hand that would have done proud the nuns who'd taught her, Wouldn't it be nice if the two of you could get together? Ali could arrange for a stopover on her way back. How far is Amsterdam from London?

  Not far enough, Libby thought, and balled up the announcement. Still, the very idea of Ali and everything so righteously irritating about her that made her Ali caused Libby to bypass the refrigerator, where she'd normally have headed after being thwarted in her intentions to see Gideon. Instead, she poured herself a virtuous glass of Highland water in lieu of the six cheddar quesadillas she was feeling like scarfing down. As she drank it, she looked out the window. Against the wall that marked the side boundary of Gideon's backyard stood his kite-making shed, and its door was ajar, a light within throwing a wedge of illumination onto the ground in front of it.

  She set her water glass on the counter and ducked outside, bounding up steps that were grey-green with lichen. She called out, “Hey, Gideon!” as she strode down the path in his direction. “You in there?”

  There was no response, which gave Libby a qualm and slowed her steps for a moment. She hadn't seen Richard Davies' Granada out in the square, but she hadn't been looking for it. He might've come calling for another one of those pain-in-the-butt father/son talks of his that he appeared to be addicted to. And if he'd managed to piss off Gideon just enough, Gideon might've left on foot and Richard might even now be getting some vengeance on that leaving by wrecking Gideon's kites. That would be just like him, Libby thought. The one thing Gid did that wasn't connected to that stupid violin—besides gliding, which Richard also despised—and his father wouldn't hesitate a second to smash them to smithereens. He'd even come up with a good excuse afterwards. “It was taking you away from your music, son.”