A Traitor to Memory

by Elizabeth George

  Lynley dropped the man at a bus stop and told him not to disappear from Brighton. “If you move house, phone me,” he said to Staines, handing over his card. “I'll want to know.”

  Then he headed for London. Northeast of Regent's Park, Chalcot Square was yet another area of town that was undergoing gentrification. If the scaffolding on the front of several of the buildings hadn't told Lynley this much when he pulled into the square, the freshly painted façades of the rest of the residences would have filled him in on the information. The neighbourhood reminded him of Notting Hill. Here was the same bright paint in a variety of cheerful colours fronting the buildings along the streets.

  Gideon Davies' house stood tucked into a corner of the square. It was bright blue in colour with a white front door. It possessed a narrow first-floor balcony along which ran a low white balustrade, and the french windows beyond that balcony were brightly lit.

  His knock on the door was answered quickly, as if the house's owner had been waiting on the bottom step just beyond the entrance. Gideon Davies said quietly, “DI Lynley?” and when Lynley nodded, he added “Come upstairs,” and led the way. He took him to the first floor, up a staircase whose walls displayed the framed hallmarks of his career, and he led him into the room that Lynley had seen from the street, where a CD system occupied one wall and comfortable furniture scattered across the floor was punctuated by tables and music stands. Sheet music stood on these stands and lay on the table tops, but none of it was open.

  Davies said, “I've never met my uncle, Inspector Lynley. I don't know how much help I'll be to you.”

  Lynley had read the stories in the newspaper after the violinist had walked out on his concert at Wigmore Hall. He'd thought—probably like most of the public interested in the tale—that it was another instance of someone who had been feather-bedded for too many years getting his knickers in a twist about something. He'd seen the subsequent explanations put forth by the young man's publicity machine: exhaustion after a killing schedule of concerts in the spring. And he'd dismissed the entire subject as a three-day wonder that the papers needed to fill column space at a slow time of year.

  But now he saw that the virtuoso looked ill. Lynley thought immediately of Parkinson's—Davies' walk was unsteady and his hands trembled—and of what that disease could do to finish his career. That would be something that the young man's publicity machine would indeed want to keep from the public for as long as possible, calling it everything from exhaustion to nerves until it was impossible for them to call it anything else.

  Davies gestured to three overstuffed armchairs that formed a group near the fireplace. He himself sat nearest the fire itself: artificial coals between which blue and orange flames rhythmically lapped like a visual soporific. Despite his sickly appearance, Lynley could see the strong resemblance between the violinist and Richard Davies. They shared much the same body type, with an emphasis on bones and stringy muscles. The younger Davies had no spinal curvature, however, although the manner in which he kept his legs locked together and his clenched fists pressed into his stomach suggested that he had other physical problems.

  Lynley said, “How old were you when your parents divorced, Mr. Davies?”

  “When they divorced?” The violinist had to think about the question before he answered it. “I was about nine when my mother left, but they didn't divorce immediately. Well, they couldn't have done, not with the law being what it is. So it must have taken them what … four years? I don't actually know, now I think of it, Inspector. The subject never came up.”

  “The subject of their divorce or the subject of her leaving?”

  “Either. She was just gone one day.”

  “You never asked why?”

  “We never talked much about personal things in my family. There was a lot of … I suppose you could call it reticence amongst us. It wasn't just the three of us in the house, you see. There were my grandparents, my teacher, and a lodger as well. Something of a crowd. I suppose it was a way to have privacy: by letting everyone have a personal life that no one else ever mentioned. Everyone held their thinking and their feelings fairly close in. Well, that was the fashion anyway, wasn't it.”

  “And during the time of your sister's death?”

  At that, Davies moved his gaze off Lynley and fixed it on the fire, but the rest of his body remained motionless. “What about my sister's death?”

  “Did everyone hold their thinking and feelings close in when she was murdered? And during the trial that followed?”

  Davies' legs tightened against each other as if they would defend him from the questions. “No one ever talked about it. ‘Best to forget’ was like a family motto, Inspector, and we lived by it.” He raised his face towards the ceiling. He swallowed and said, “God. I expect that's why my mother finally left us. No one would ever talk about what desperately needed talking about in that house, and she just couldn't cope with it any longer.”

  “When was the last time you saw her, Mr. Davies?”

  “Then,” he said.

  “When you were nine years old?”

  “Dad and I left for a tour in Austria. When we returned, she was gone.”

  “You've not heard from her since?”

  “I've not heard from her since.”

  “She never contacted you in the last several months?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Your uncle says she intended to see you. She intended to borrow money from you. He says that she told him something came up to prevent her from asking you for money. I'm wondering if you know what that something was.”

  Davies looked guarded at that, as if a barrier had come down like a thin shield of steel to cover his eyes. “I've had … I suppose you could call it some trouble with my playing.” He let Lynley fill in the rest: A mother anxious about her son's well-being was unlikely to petition him for funds, either for herself or for a ne'er-do-well brother.

  That supposition didn't conflict with what Richard Davies had told Lynley about his former wife phoning him to learn more about their son's condition. But the timing was off if the musician's condition was supposed to be what had kept his mother from making her request for funds. Indeed, it was off by several months. For Gideon Davies had undergone his trauma at Wigmore Hall in July. It was now November. And according to Ian Staines, his sister's change of heart concerning asking her son for money had occurred in the more immediate past than had Gideon's musical difficulties. It was a small point only, but it could not be overlooked.

  “Your father tells me she'd been phoning him regularly about you, so she did know that something was wrong,” Lynley said in agreement. “But he made no mention of her wanting to see you or asking to see you. You're certain she didn't contact you directly?”

  “I think I'd remember my own mother contacting me, Inspector. She didn't, and she couldn't have done. My number's ex-directory, so the only way she had to contact me would have been through my agent, through Dad, or by turning up at a concert and sending a note backstage.”

  “She did none of those things?”

  “She did none of those things.”

  “And she passed no message to you through your father?”

  “She passed no message,” Davies said. “So perhaps my uncle's lying to you about my mother's intention of seeing me to ask for money. Or perhaps my mother lied to my uncle about her intention of seeing me to ask for money. Or perhaps my father's lying to you about her phone calls to him in the first place. But that last is unlikely.”

  “You sound sure of that. Why?”

  “Because Dad himself wanted us to meet. He thought she could help me out.”

  “With what?”

  “The trouble I've had with my playing. He thought she could …” Here, Davies went back to looking at the fire, his assurance of a moment before quite gone. His legs trembled. He said, more to the fire than to Lynley, “I don't really believe that she could have helped me, though. I don't believe anyone can help me at this point. But
I was willing to try. Before she was killed. I was willing to try anything.”

  An artist, Lynley thought, who was being kept from his art due to fear. The violinist would be looking for a talisman of some sort. He would want to believe his mother was the charm that could get him back to his instrument. Lynley said to make certain, “How, Mr. Davies?”

  “What?”

  “How could your mother have helped you?”

  “By agreeing with Dad.”

  “Agreeing? About what?”

  Davies considered the question, and when he answered, he told Lynley volumes about the difference between what was going on in his professional life and what the public was being told about it. “Agreeing that there's nothing wrong with me. Agreeing that my head's playing me for a fool. That's what Dad wanted her to do. He has to have her agree with him, you see. Anything else is unthinkable. Now, unspeakable would be par for the course in my family. But unthinkable …? That would take too much effort.” He laughed weakly, a brief note that was as humourless as it was bitter. “I'd have seen her, though. And I'd have tried to believe her.”

  So he would have reason to want his mother alive, not dead. Especially if he held fast to the conviction that she was the cure for what ailed his playing. Nonetheless, Lynley said, “This is routine, Mr. Davies, but I need to ask it: Where were you two nights ago when your mother was killed? This would have been between ten and midnight.”

  “Here,” Davies said. “In bed. Alone.”

  “And since he left your home, have you had contact with a man called James Pitchford?”

  Davies looked honestly surprised. “James the Lodger? No. Why?” The question seemed ingenuous enough.

  “Your mother was on her way to see him when she was killed.”

  “On her way to see James? That doesn't make sense.”

  “No,” Lynley said. “It doesn't.”

  Nor, he thought, did some of her other actions. Lynley wondered which of them had led to her death.

  14

  JILL FOSTER COULD see that Richard wasn't pleased at having to entertain another visit from the police. He was even less pleased to learn that the detective had just come from seeing Gideon. He took in this information politely enough as he motioned DI Lynley to a chair, but the manner in which his mouth tightened as the detective imparted his facts told Jill that he wasn't happy.

  DI Lynley was watching Richard closely, as if gauging his most minute reaction. This gave Jill a sense of disquiet. She knew about the police from years of having read newspaper accounts of famously botched cases and even more famous miscarriages of justice, so she was fairly well-versed in the extremes they would go to in order to pin a crime on a suspect. When it came to murder, the police were more interested in building a strong case against someone—against anyone—than they were in getting to the bottom of what happened because building a case against someone meant putting an investigation to rest, which meant getting home to their wives and their families at a reasonable hour for once. That desire underlay every move they made in a murder enquiry, and it behooved anyone being questioned by them to be wise to that fact.

  The police are not our friends, Richard, she told her fiancé silently. Don't say a word that they can twist round and use against you later.

  And surely that's what the detective was doing. He fastened his dark eyes—brown they were, not blue as one would have expected in a blond—on Richard and waited patiently for a reply to his statement, a neat notebook open in his large, handsome hand. “When we met yesterday, you didn't mention you'd been advocating a meeting between Gideon and his mother, Mr. Davies. I'm wondering why.”

  Richard sat on a straight-backed chair that he'd swung round from the table on which he and Jill took their meals. He'd made no offer of tea this time. That suggested welcome, which the detective definitely was not. Richard had said upon his arrival and prior to DI Lynley's mentioning the call he'd made on Gideon, “I do want to be helpful, Inspector, but I must ask you to be reasonable with your visits. Jill needs her rest and if we can reserve our interactions for daylight hours, I'd be very grateful.”

  The detective's lips had moved in what the naïve might have concluded was a smile. But his gaze took in Richard in such a way as to suggest he wasn't the sort of man used to being told what was expected of him, and he didn't apologise for his appearance in South Kensington or make routine noises about not taking up too much of their time.

  “Mr. Davies?” Lynley repeated.

  “I didn't mention that I was attempting to arrange a meeting between Gideon and his mother because you didn't ask me,” Richard said. He looked to where Jill was sitting at one end of the table, her laptop open and her fifth attempt at Act III, Scene I of her television adaptation of The Beautiful and Damned taking up space on her screen. He said, “You'll probably want to continue working, Jill. There's the desk in the study …?”

  Jill wasn't about to be condemned to a sentence in that mausoleum-cum-memorial to his father that posed as Richard's study. She said, “I've gone about as far as I can with this just now,” and she went through the exercise of saving and then backing up what she'd written. If Eugenie was going to be discussed, she intended to be present.

  “Had she asked to see Gideon?” the detective asked Richard.

  “No, she hadn't.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I'm sure. She didn't want to see either of us. That's the choice she made years ago when she left without bothering to mention where she was going.”

  “What about why?” DI Lynley asked.

  “Why what?”

  “Why she was going, Mr. Davies. Did your wife mention that?”

  Richard bristled. Jill held her breath, trying to ignore the stab she felt in her breast at those words: your wife. How she felt about hearing anyone other than herself referred to with that term could not be allowed to matter at the moment because the detective's question got right to the crux of the topic that was of interest to her. She longed to know not only why Richard's wife had left him but also how he'd felt about her leaving him, how he'd felt then and, much more importantly, how he felt now.

  “Inspector,” Richard said evenly, “have you ever lost a child? lost a child to violence? lost a child at the hands of someone who's living right inside your own home? No? You haven't? Well, then, I suggest you think about what a loss like that can do to a marriage. I didn't need Eugenie to give me chapter and verse on why she was leaving. Some marriages survive a trauma. Others do not.”

  “You didn't try to find her once she was gone?”

  “I didn't see the point. I didn't want to keep Eugenie where she didn't want to be. There was Gideon to consider, and I'm not of the school who believe that two parents for a child are better than one no matter the condition of their marriage. If the marriage goes bad, it has to end. Children survive that better than living in a house that's little more than an armed encampment.”

  “Your break-up was hostile?”

  “You're inferring.”

  “It's part of the job.”

  “It's taking you in the wrong direction. I'm sorry to disappoint you, but there was no bad blood between Eugenie and me.”

  Richard was irritated. Jill could hear it in his tone, and she was fairly sure that the detective could hear it also. This worried her, and she stirred on her seat and tried to get her lover's attention, to throw him a warning look that he would interpret and act upon, altering if not the substance of his replies then at least their timbre. She well understood the source of his irritation: Gideon, Gideon, always Gideon, what Gideon did and did not do, what Gideon said and did not say. Richard was upset because Gideon hadn't phoned and reported the detective's visit. But the detective wouldn't see it that way. He'd be far more likely to note it as Richard's reaction to being questioned too closely about Eugenie.

  She said, “Richard, I'm sorry. If you could help me for a moment …?” And to the detective, with an exasperated smile, “I'm running to th
e loo every fifteen minutes these days. Oh, thank you, darling. Heavens, I'm not quite right on my feet.” She held on to Richard's arm for a moment, acting the part of a woman lightheaded, waiting for Richard to say that he'd help her along to the loo, which would thus buy him some time to regroup. But to her frustration, he just fastened his arm round her waist for a moment to steady her and said, “Do take care,” but made no move to assist her from the room.

  She tried to telegraph her intentions to him. Come with me. But he either ignored or didn't get the message, because once she was apparently solid in her stance, he let go of her and gave his attention back to the detective.

  There was nothing for it but to go to the loo, which Jill did with as much dispatch as she could muster, considering her size. She needed to pee anyway—she always needed to pee now—and she squatted over the toilet while trying to hear what was going on in the room she'd just left.

  Richard was speaking when she returned. Jill was gratified to see that he'd managed to wrest his quick temper under control. He was saying calmly, “My son is suffering from stage fright, Inspector, as I've already told you. He's completely lost his nerve. If you've seen him, you've no doubt also seen that something's badly wrong with the boy. Now, if Eugenie could have helped with that problem in any way, I was willing to try it. I was willing to try anything. I love my son. The last thing I want to see is his life's destruction brought about by an irrational fear.”

  “So you asked her to meet with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why so long after the event?”

  “The event?”

  “The concert at Wigmore Hall.”

  Richard flushed. He hated, Jill knew, any mention of the venue. She had little doubt that, should Gideon ever regain his music, his father would never again allow him so much as to pass over its threshold. It was the scene of his public humiliation, after all. Better to burn it to the ground.