A Traitor to Memory

by Elizabeth George

  “Building it?”

  “Restoring it. We mean to do the house as well. Doing up furniture and selling it gives us something of a bank account to work from. Restoring a place like this”—with a nod at the imposing edifice—“takes a fortune. Whenever we get enough saved to do a room, we do it. It's taking forever, but no one's in a hurry. And there's a certain camaraderie that develops when everyone's behind a project, I think.”

  Lynley wondered at the word camaraderie. He'd been thinking Robson's us referred to his wife and family, but developing camaraderie suggested something else. He considered the vehicles he'd seen in front of the building and said, “This is a commune, then?”

  Robson unlocked the door and swung it open onto a passageway with a wooden bench running along its wall and adult-sized wellingtons lined up beneath it and hooks holding jackets on the wall above it. He said, “That sounds like something from the summer-of-love era. But yes, I suppose you could call it a commune. Mostly it's a group with shared interests.”

  “Which are?”

  “Making music and turning this house into something we can all enjoy.”

  “Not restoring furniture?” Nkata asked.

  “That's merely a means to an end. Musicians don't make enough money to finance a restoration like this one without something else to fall back on.”

  He allowed them into the passage before him, shutting the door when they were inside and locking it scrupulously behind them. He said, “This way,” and led them into what might once have been the dining room but now was a musty combination of draughting room, storeroom, and office, with water-stained wallpaper covering the upper half of the walls and battered wainscoting covering the lower half. A computer was part of the office function that the room was serving. From where he stood, Lynley could see the telephone line that was plugged into it.

  He said, “We've tracked you through a message you left on the answer machine of a woman called Eugenie Davies, Mr. Robson. This was four days ago. At eight-fifteen in the evening.”

  Next to Lynley, Nkata got out his leather notebook and his propelling pencil, twisting it to produce a micro-millimeter of lead. Robson watched him do this, then walked to a worktable on which a set of blueprints were spread. He smoothed his hand over the top one as if to study it, but he answered the question with the single word. “Yes.”

  “Do you know Mrs. Davies was murdered three nights ago?”

  “Yes. I know.” His voice was low and his hand grasped a blueprint that lay still rolled up. His thumb played along the rubber band that held it formed into a tube. “Richard told me,” he said, lifting his gaze to Lynley. “He'd been to tell Gideon when I arrived for one of our sessions.”

  “Sessions?”

  “I teach the violin. Gideon's been my pupil since childhood. He isn't any longer, of course; he's no one's pupil. But we play together three hours a day when he's not recording, rehearsing, or touring. You've heard of him, doubtless.”

  “I was under the impression he hasn't played in several months.”

  Robson's hand had reached out to touch the opened blueprint again, but he hesitated and did nothing more with the gesture. He said on a heavy sigh, “Sit down, Inspector. You as well, Constable,” and he turned back to them. “It's important not only to keep up appearances in a situation like Gideon's, but it's also important to go on as normally as possible. So I still turn up for our daily three hours together, and we keep hoping that when enough time passes, he'll be able to go back to the music.”

  “‘We’?” Nkata raised his head to look for the answer.

  “Richard and I. Gideon's father.”

  Somewhere in the house, a scherzo began. Dozens of energetic notes ran riot on what sounded like a harpsichord at first but then abruptly changed to an oboe and then just as abruptly altered to a flute. This was accompanied by an increase in volume and the sudden rhythmic pounding of several percussion instruments. Robson went to the door and shut it, saying, “Sorry. Janet's gone a bit mad over the electric keyboard. She's enthralled with anything a computer chip can do.”

  “And you?” Lynley asked.

  “I haven't the money for a keyboard.”

  “I meant computer chips, Mr. Robson. Do you use this computer? I see it has a telephone connection.”

  Robson's gaze flicked to it. He crossed the room and sat at a chair that he drew out from the sheet of plywood which served as a desk top. At this, Lynley and Nkata also sat, unfolding two metal chairs and swinging them into position so that, with Robson, they formed a triangle near the computer.

  “We all use it,” Robson said.

  “For e-mail? Chat rooms? Surfing the net?”

  “I mostly use it for e-mail. My sister's in Los Angeles. My brother's in Birmingham. My parents have a house on the Costa del Sol. It's an easy way for us to stay in contact.”

  “Your address is …?”

  “Why?”

  “Curiosity,” Lynley said.

  Robson recited it, looking puzzled. Lynley heard what he'd suspected he'd hear when he saw the computer sitting in the room. Jete was Robson's on-line name and consequently part of his e-mail address.

  “You've been fairly wrung out about Mrs. Davies, it seems,” he said to the violinist. “Your message on her answer machine was agitated, Mr. Robson, and the last e-mail you sent her looked a bit frantic as well. ‘I must see you. I'm begging.’ Had you had some sort of falling-out?”

  Robson's seat was a desk chair that swiveled, and he used it to rotate, to examine the computer's empty staring screen as if he could see his last message to Eugenie Davies there. He said, “You'd be checking everything. Of course. I see that,” as if speaking to himself and not to them. Then he went on in a normal tone with, “We parted quite badly. I said some things that …” He removed a handkerchief from his pocket, pressing it to his forehead, where perspiration had begun to bead. “I expected I'd have a chance to apologise. Even as I drove away from the restaurant—and I was in a real fury, I admit it—I didn't drive off thinking, That's it, I'm done with this business forever, she's a blind silly cow and that's the end of it. What I thought was, Oh God, she looks rotten, she's thinner than ever, why can't she see what that means, for God's sake.”

  “Which was what?” Lynley asked.

  “That she'd made a decision in her head, yes, and it probably sounded like a sensible one to her. But her body was rebelling against that decision, which was her … I don't know … I suppose it was her spirit's way of trying to tell her to stop, to carry things not one inch farther. And you could see the rebellion in her. Believe me, you could actually see it. It wasn't just that she'd let herself go. God knows she'd done that years ago. She'd been quite lovely, but to see her—especially as she was in these last few years—you'd never have realised how men would at one time slow down on the street as they passed her.”

  “What decision had she made, Mr. Robson?”

  Robson said, “Come with me. I want to show you something,” by way of answer. He took them from the house, out the same way they'd come in, out into the garden. He headed towards the building where he'd said the commune worked on their furniture.

  The building comprised a single large room in which battered pieces stood in various stages of restoration. It smelled strongly of sawdust, turpentine, and wood stains, and a patina of the dust that comes from heavy sanding lay like a gauze veil on everything. Footprints tracked back and forth across the dirty floor, from a workbench above which a set of newly cleaned tools gleamed with oil to a three-legged wardrobe that listed tiredly, sanded down to bare walnut, disemboweled, and awaiting the next stage of rejuvenation.

  “Here's my guess,” Robson said. “Tell me how it matches to reality. I did a wardrobe for her. Cherry wood, it was. First rate. Beautiful. Not the sort of thing you see every day. I did her a commode as well, early eighteenth century. Oak. And a washstand. Victorian. Ebony with a marble top. One of the drawer pulls is missing, but you wouldn't want to replace it because y
ou couldn't match it and anyway leaving it without the pull actually gives it more character. The wardrobe took the longest, because you don't ever want to refinish a piece unless there is no hope for it. You just want to restore it. So it was six months before I had it the way I wanted it and no one”—he nodded at the house to indicate his housemates—“was pleased that I was working on that instead of something we could get a profit from.”

  Lynley frowned at this, knowing that there were lines upon lines being written by Robson and wondering how adept he himself could be to read between them in the time they had. He said, “You had a falling-out with Mrs. Davies because of a decision she'd made. But I can't think her decision was about selling the pieces of furniture you'd done for her. Am I right?”

  Robson's shoulders dropped slightly, as if he'd been hoping that Lynley wouldn't be able to confirm what he himself suspected. He'd been clutching his handkerchief, and now he looked down at it as he said, “So she didn't keep them, did she? She didn't keep any of the pieces I gave to her. She sold them all and gave the money to charity. Or she just gave the furniture itself away. But she didn't keep it. That's what you're telling me.”

  “She had no antiques in her house in Henley, if that's what you're wondering,” Lynley said. “Her furniture was—” He looked for the right word to convey the manner in which Eugenie Davies' house in Friday Street had been furnished. “Spartan,” he said.

  “Just like a nun's cell, I expect.” Robson's words were bitter. “That's how she punished herself. But it wasn't enough, that sort of deprivation, so she was ready to take it to the next level.”

  “What would that be?” Nkata had given up writing during Robson's recitation of the antiques he'd given to Eugenie Davies. The next level, however, clearly promised more.

  “Wiley,” Robson said. “The bloke from the bookshop. She'd been seeing him for several years, but she'd decided it was time to …” Robson shoved his handkerchief into his pocket and gave his attention to the listing wardrobe. To Lynley's eyes, the piece didn't look even salvageable, with its missing leg and its gaping interior that showed a large jagged hole in its back, very much as if someone had taken an axe to it. “She was going to marry him if he asked her. She said that she believed—she felt, she said, with women's bloody intuition, she said—that they were heading towards it. I told her that if a man didn't bother to make an attempt … In three years, if he didn't try to make a move on her … God, I'm not talking about rape. Not shoving her into a wall and feeling her up. But just … He hadn't even tried to get close to her. He hadn't even talked about why he hadn't tried. They just went on their picnics, took their walks, rode the bus on those stupid pensioners' days out…. And I tried to tell her that it wasn't normal. It wasn't red-blooded. So if she made it permanent with him, if she actually made herself his partner and took herself out of the sodding running …” Robson ran out of steam. His eyes became red-rimmed. “But I suppose that's what she wanted. To take up life with someone who couldn't begin to give her anything complete, who couldn't begin to give her what a man can give to a woman when she means everything to him.”

  Lynley examined Robson as he spoke, saw the misery in the lines that etched their painful history on his patchy-skinned face. “When was the last time you saw Mrs. Davies?”

  “A fortnight ago. Thursday.”

  “Where?”

  “Marlow. The Swan and Three Roses. Just outside of town.”

  “And you didn't see her again? Did you speak to her?”

  “On the phone twice. I was trying to … I'd reacted badly to what she'd told me about Wiley, and I knew it. I wanted to make things right between us. But it just got worse, because I still wanted to talk to her about it, about him, about what it meant that he never … never once in three years … But she didn't want to hear. She didn't want to see. ‘He's a good man, Raphael,’ she kept saying, ‘and it's time now.’”

  “Time for what?”

  Robson continued as if Nkata hasn't asked the question, as if he himself were a silent Cyrano who'd waited long for an opportunity to unburden himself. He said, “I didn't disagree that it was time. She'd punished herself for years. She wasn't in prison, but she may as well have been because she made her life a prison anyway. She lived one step away from solitary confinement, in complete self-denial, surrounding herself with people with whom she had nothing in common, always volunteering for the worst jobs, and all of it so that she could pay and pay and pay.”

  “For what?” Nkata had been standing close to the door as he wrote, as if hoping a near contact with the outside environment might spare his fine wool charcoal suit from the worst of the dust that permeated the work room's air. But now he took a step closer to Robson, and he cast a glance towards Lynley, who indicated with his hand that they would wait for the violinist to continue. Silence on their part was as useful a tool as silence on his part was revealing.

  Robson finally said, “When she was born, Eugenie didn't love her instantly the way she thought she was supposed to love her. At first she was just exhausted because the birth had been difficult and all she wanted was to recover from it. And that's not unnatural, when a woman's been in labour so long—thirty hours, it was—and she's got nothing left in her even to cuddle a newborn. That is not a sin.”

  “I wouldn't disagree,” Lynley said.

  “And they didn't know at first anyway, about the baby. Yes, of course, there were signs, but the birth had been rough. She didn't come out pink and perfect like a birth that's been orchestrated for a Hollywood production. So the doctors didn't know till she was examined and then … Good God, anyone would be slaughtered by the news. Anyone would have to adjust and that takes time. But she thought she should have been different, Eugenie. She thought she should have loved her at once, felt like a fighter, had plans how to care for her, known what to do, what to expect, how to be. When she couldn't do that, she hated herself. And the rest of them didn't make it easier for her to accept the baby, did they, especially Richard's father—that mad bastard—who expected another prodigy from them, and when he got the reverse—there was just too much for Eugenie to cope with. Sonia's physical problems, Gideon's needs—which were mounting daily and what else could you expect when it comes to dealing with a prodigy?—mad Jack's raving, Richard's second failure—”

  “Second failure?”

  “Another damaged child, if you can believe it. He'd had an earlier one. From another marriage. So when a second one was born … It was terrible for all of them, but Eugenie couldn't see that it was normal to feel the anguish at first, to curse God, to do whatever one has to do to get through a bad time. Instead, she heard her bloody father's voice, ‘God speaks to us directly. There is no mystery in His message. Examine your soul and your conscience to read God's handwriting therein, Eugenie.’ That's what he wrote to her, if you can believe it. That was his blessing and comfort upon the birth of that pathetic little baby. As if an infant were a punishment from God. And there was no one to talk her out of feeling like that, do you see? Oh there was the nun, but she talked about God's will as if the entire situation were predetermined and Eugenie was meant to understand that, accept it, not to rage against it, grieve about it, feel whatever despair she needed to feel and then just get on with life. So then when the baby died … and the way she died … I expect there were moments when Eugenie had actually thought, ‘better she be dead than have to live like this, with doctors and operations and lungs going bad and heart barely beating and stomach not working and ears not hearing and not even being able to shit properly for the love of God … Better she be dead.’ And then, she actually was dead. It was as if someone had heard her and granted a wish that wasn't a real wish at all but just an expression of one moment's despair. So what was she to feel but guilt? And what was she to do to make reparation but deny herself everything that might mean comfort?”

  “Until Major Wiley came along,” Lynley noted.

  “I suppose so.” Robson's words were hollow. “Wiley was a
new beginning for her. Or at least that's how she said she thought of it.”

  “But you disagreed.”

  “I think he was just another form of imprisonment. But worse than before because he'd be wearing the guise of something new.”

  “So you argued about it.”

  “And then I wanted to apologise,” Robson added. “I was desperate to apologise—don't you see—because we'd shared years of friendship, the two of us, Eugenie and I, and I couldn't see sending them down the drain because of Wiley. I wanted her to know that. That's all. For whatever it was worth.”

  Lynley set these words against what he'd learned from both Gideon and Richard Davies. “She ended contact with her family long ago, but not with you, then? Were you once lovers with Mrs. Davies, Mr. Robson?”

  Colour flared into Robson's face, an unattractive smearing of crimson that battled with the various patches of his damaged skin. “We met twice a month,” he said in answer.

  “Where?”

  “In London. In the country. Wherever she wanted. She asked for news of Gideon, and I provided it. That was the extent of what she and I had together.”

  The pubs and hotels in her diary, Lynley thought. Twice each month. But it didn't make sense. Her meetings with Robson didn't follow the pattern that Robson himself described as being the path of Eugenie Davies' life. If she had been intent upon punishing herself for the transgression of human despair, for the unspoken wish—so horribly granted—to be delivered from the struggle to care for a fragile daughter, why had she even allowed herself news of her son, news that might comfort her, might keep her in touch? Wouldn't she have denied herself that?

  There was a piece missing somewhere, Lynley concluded. And his instincts told him that Raphael Robson knew exactly what that missing piece was.