A Traitor to Memory

by Elizabeth George

  He said into the phone, “Jill? Gideon. I want to speak with Dad … No? Then where …? I'm at the flat. No, he's not here … I checked there. Did he give you any idea …?” A rather long pause while Richard's lover either wracked her brains or recited a list of possibilities, at the end of which Gideon said, “Right. MotherCare. Fine … Thanks, Jill,” and listened some more. He ended with, “No. No message. No message at all. If he rings you, in fact, don't tell him I phoned. I wouldn't want to … Right. Let's not worry him. He's got enough on his mind.” Then he rang off. “She thinks he's gone off to Oxford Street. Supplies, she says. He wants an intercom for the baby's room. She hadn't yet got one because she intended the baby to sleep with them. Or with her. Or with him. Or with someone. But she didn't intend her to be alone. Because if a baby gets left alone, Libby, if a child goes un-tended for a while, if the parents aren't vigilant, if there's a distraction when they don't expect one, if there's a window open, if someone leaves a candle lit, if anything at all, then the worst can happen. The worst will happen. And who knows that better than Dad?”

  “Let's go,” Libby said. “Let's get out of here, Gideon. Come on. I'll buy you a latte, okay? There's got to be a Starbucks nearby.”

  He shook his head. “You go. Take the car. Go home.”

  “I'm not going to leave you here. Besides, how would you get—”

  “I'll wait for Dad. He'll drive me back.”

  “That could be hours. If he goes back to Jill's and she starts labour and then she has the baby, it could be days. Come on. I don't want to leave you hanging around this place alone.”

  But she couldn't move him. He wouldn't have her there, and he wouldn't go with her. He would, however, speak with his father. “I don't care how long it takes,” he told her. “This time I don't really care at all.”

  Reluctantly, then, she agreed to the plan, not liking it but also seeing that there wasn't much she could do about it. Besides, he seemed calmer after talking to Jill. Or at least he seemed moderately more himself. She said, “Will you call me, then, if you need anything?”

  “I won't be needing a thing,” he replied.

  Helen herself answered the door when Lynley knocked at Webberly's house in Stamford Brook. He said, “Helen, why are you still here? When Hillier told me you'd come over from the hospital, I couldn't believe it. You shouldn't be doing this.”

  “Whyever not?” she asked in a perfectly reasonable voice.

  He stepped inside as Webberly's dog came bounding from the direction of the kitchen, barking at full volume. Lynley backed towards the door while Helen took the dog by the collar and said, “Alfie, no.” She gave him a shake. “He doesn't sound like a friend, but he's quite all right. All bark and bluster.”

  “So I noticed,” Lynley said.

  She looked up from the animal. “Actually, I was talking about you.” She released the Alsatian once he'd settled. The dog sniffed round Lynley's trouser turn-ups, accepted the intrusion, and trotted back towards the kitchen. “Don't lecture me, darling,” Helen said to her husband. “As you see, I have friends in high places.”

  “With dangerous teeth.”

  “That's true.” She gave a nod to the door and said, “I didn't think it would be you. I was hoping for Randie.”

  “She still won't leave him?”

  “It's a stalemate. She won't leave her father; Frances won't leave the house. I thought when we got word about the heart attack … Surely, she'll want to go to him, I thought. She'll force herself. Because he may die, and not to be there if he dies … But no.”

  “It's not your problem, Helen. And considering the kinds of days you've been having … You need to get some rest. Where's Laura Hillier?”

  “She and Frances had a row. Frances more than Laura, actually. One of those don't-look-at-me-as-if-I-were-a-monster sort of conversations that start out with one party trying to convince the other party that she's not thinking what the other party is determined to believe she thinks she's thinking because at some level—would that be subconsciously?—she actually is thinking it.”

  Lynley tried to wade through all this, saying, “Are these waters too deep for me, Helen?”

  “They may require life belts.”

  “I thought I might be of help.”

  Helen had walked into the sitting room. There, an ironing board had been set up and an iron was sending steam ceilingward, which told Lynley—much to his astonishment—that his wife was actually in the process of seeing to the family laundry. A shirt lay across the board itself, one arm the subject of Helen's most recent ministrations. From the look of the wrinkles that appeared to have been permanently applied to the garment, it seemed that Lynley's wife hadn't exactly found a new calling in life.

  She saw his glance and said, “Yes. Well. I'd hoped to be helpful.”

  “It's brilliant of you. Really,” Lynley replied supportively.

  “I'm not doing it properly. I can see that. I'm sure there's a logic to it—an order or something?—but I've not yet worked it out. Sleeves first? Front? Back? Collar? I do one part and the other part—which I've already done—wrinkles up again. Can you advise?”

  “There must be a laundry nearby.”

  “That's terrifically helpful, Tommy.” Helen smiled ruefully. “Perhaps I should stick to pillowcases. At least they're flat.”

  “Where's Frances?”

  “Darling, no. We can't possibly ask her to—”

  He chuckled. “That's not what I meant. I'd like to talk to her. Is she upstairs?”

  “Oh. Yes. Once she and Laura had their argument, it was tears all round. Laura dashed out, absolutely sobbing. Frances tore up the stairs looking grim-faced. When I checked on her, she was sitting on the floor in a corner of her bedroom, clutching onto the curtains. She asked to be left alone.”

  “Randie needs to be with her. She needs to be with Randie.”

  “Believe me, Tommy, I've made that point. Carefully, subtly, straightforwardly, respectfully, cajolingly, and every other way I could think of, save belligerently.”

  “That could be what she needs. Bellicosity.”

  “Tone might work—although I doubt it—but volume I guarantee will get you nowhere. She asks to be left alone each time I go up to see her, and while I'd rather not leave her alone, I keep thinking I ought to respect her wishes.”

  “Let me have a go, then.”

  “I'll come as well. Have you any further news of Malcolm? We haven't had word from the hospital since Randie phoned, which is good, I suppose. Because surely Randie would have phoned at once if … Is there no change, Tommy?”

  “No change,” Lynley answered. “The heart complicates things. It's a waiting game.”

  “Do you think they might have to decide …?” Helen paused on the stairway above him and looked back, reading in his expression the answer to her uncompleted question. “I'm so terribly sorry for all of them,” she said. “For you as well. I do know what he means to you.”

  “Frances needs to be there. Randie can't be asked to do it alone, if it comes to that.”

  “Of course she can't,” Helen said.

  Lynley had never been above stairs in Webberly's home, so he allowed his wife to show him the way to the master bedroom. The first floor of the house was dominated by scents: potpourri from bowls on a three-tier stand that they passed at the top of the stairs, orange spice from a candle burning outside the bathroom door, lemon from polish used on the furniture. But the scents were not strong enough to cover the stronger odour of air overheated, overweighed with cigar smoke, and so long stale that it seemed only rainfall—violent and long—within the walls of the house would be enough to cleanse it.

  “Every window is shut,” Helen said quietly. “Well, of course, it's November, so one wouldn't expect … But still … It must be so difficult for them. Not just for Malcolm and Randie. They can get away. But for Frances, because she must so want to be … to be cured.”

  “One would think,” Lynley agreed. “Thro
ugh here, Helen?”

  Only one of the doors was closed and Helen nodded when he indicated it. He tapped on its white panels and said, “Frances? It's Tommy. May I come in?”

  No reply. He called out again, a little louder this time, following that with another rap on the door. When she didn't respond, he tried the knob. It turned, so he eased the door open. Behind him, Helen said, “Frances? Will you see Tommy?”

  To which Webberly's wife finally said, “Yes,” in a voice that was neither fearful nor resentful at the intrusion, just quiet and tired.

  They found her not in the corner where Helen last had seen her but sitting on an undecorated straight-backed chair that she'd drawn up to look at her reflection in a mirror that hung above a dressing table. On the table she'd laid out hairbrushes, hair slides, and ribbons. She was running two ribbons through her fingers as they entered, as if studying the effect that their colour had against her skin.

  She was undoubtedly wearing, Lynley saw, what she'd been wearing when she'd phoned her daughter on the previous night. She had on a quilted pink dressing gown belted at the waist, and an azure nightdress beneath it. She hadn't combed her hair despite the brushes laid out before her, so it was still asymmetrically flattened by her head's pressure into her pillow, as if an invisible hat were perched on it.

  She looked so colourless that Lynley thought at once of spirits despite the hour of the day: gin, brandy, whisky, vodka, or anything else to bring some blood to her face. He said to Helen, “Would you bring up a drink, darling?” And to Webberly's wife, “Frances, you could do with a brandy. I'd like you to have one.”

  She said, “Yes. All right. A brandy.”

  Helen left them. Lynley saw that a linen chest extended across the foot of the bed, and he dragged this over to where Frances sat so that he could speak at her level rather than down at her like a lecturing uncle. He didn't know where to begin. He didn't know what would do any good. Considering the length of time that Frances Webberly had spent inside the walls of this house, paralysed by inexplicable terrors, it didn't seem likely that a simple declaration of her husband's peril and her daughter's need could convince her that her fears were groundless. He was wise enough to know that the human mind did not work that way. Common logic did not suffice to obliterate demons that lived within the tortuous caves of a woman's psyche.

  He said, “Can I do anything, Frances? I know you want to go to him.”

  She'd raised one of the ribbons against her cheek, and she lowered this slowly to the top of the table. “Do you know that,” she said, not a question but a statement. “If I had the heart of a woman who knows how to love her husband properly, I would have gone to him already. Directly they phoned from Casualty. Directly they said, ‘Is this Mrs. Webberly? We're phoning you from Charing Cross Hospital. Casualty. Is this a relative of Malcolm Webberly that I'm speaking to?’ I would have gone. I wouldn't have waited to hear a word more. No woman who loves her husband would have done that. No real woman—no adequate woman—would have said, ‘What's happened? Oh God. Why's he not here? Please tell me. The dog came home but Malcolm wasn't with him and he's left me, hasn't he? He's left me, he's left me at last.’ And they said, ‘Mrs. Webberly, your husband's alive. But we would like to speak to you. Here, Mrs. Webberly. Can we send a taxi for you? Is there someone who can bring you down to the hospital?’ And that was good of them, wasn't it, to pretend like that? To ignore what I'd said. But when they rang off, they said, ‘We've got a real nutter here. Poor bloke, this Webberly. No wonder the old sod was out on the streets. Probably threw himself in front of the car.’” Her fingers curled round a navy ribbon, and her nails sank into it, making gullies in the satin.

  Lynley said, “In the middle of the night when you have a shock, you don't weigh your words, Frances. Nurses, doctors, orderlies, and everyone else in hospitals know that.”

  “‘He's your husband,’ she said. ‘He's cared for you all these miserable years and you owe this to him. And to Miranda. Frances, you owe it to her. You must pull yourself together, because if you don't and if something should happen to Malcolm while you're not there … and if, God, if he should actually die … Get up, get up, get up, Frances Louise, because you and I know there is nothing God help me nothing at all that's wrong with you. The spotlight's off you. Accept that fact.’ As if she knew what it's like. As if she's actually spent time in my world, in this world, right inside here”—savagely, she rapped her temple—“instead of in her own little space, where everything's perfect, always has been, always will be world without end amen. But it's not like that for me. That is not how it is.”

  “Of course,” Lynley said. “We all look at the world through the prisms of our own experiences, don't we? But sometimes in a moment of crisis, people forget that. So they say things and do things … It's all for an end that everyone wants but no one knows how to reach. How can I help you?”

  Helen came back into the room then, a wine glass in her hand. It was half-filled with brandy, and she placed it on the dressing table and looked towards Lynley with “What now?” on her face. He wished he knew. He had very little doubt that with every decent intention in the world Frances's sister had already run through the repertoire. Certainly, Laura Hillier had tried reasoning with Frances first, manipulating her second, inducing guilt in her third, and uttering threats fourth. What was probably needed—a slow process of getting the poor woman once again used to an external environment of which she'd been terrified for years—was something that none of them could manage and something for which they had no time.

  What now? Lynley wondered along with his wife. A miracle, Helen.

  He said, “Drink some of this, Frances,” and lifted the glass for her. When she'd done so, he laid his hand on hers. He said, “What exactly have they told you about Malcolm?”

  Frances murmured, “‘The doctors want to speak with you,’ she said. ‘You must go to the hospital. You must be with him. You must be with Randie.’” For the first time, Frances moved her gaze from her reflection. She looked at the joining of her hand with Lynley's. She said, “If Randie's with him, that's nearly all he would want. ‘What a brave, new world that's been given to us,’ he said when she was born. That's why he said she'd be called Miranda. And she was perfect to him. Every way perfect. Perfect as I couldn't hope to be. Ever. Not ever. Daddy's got a princess.” She reached for the wine glass where Lynley had placed it. She started to pick it up but stopped herself and said, “No. No. That's not it. Not a princess. Not at all. Daddy's found a queen.” Her eyes remained motionless, on the brandy in the glass, but their rims slowly reddened as tears pooled against them.

  Lynley's glance met Helen's where she stood just beyond Frances's right shoulder. He could read her reaction to this and he knew it matched his own. Escape was called for. To be in the presence of a maternal jealousy so strong that it wouldn't loosen its grip upon someone even in the midst of a life-and-death crisis … It was more than disconcerting, Lynley thought. It was obscene. He felt like a voyeur.

  Helen said, “If Malcolm's anything at all like my father, Frances, I expect what he's felt is a special responsibility towards Randie, because she's a daughter and not a son.”

  To which Lynley added, “I saw that in my own family. The way my father was with my older sister wasn't in the least the way he was with me. Or with my younger brother, for that matter. We weren't as vulnerable, in his eyes. We needed toughening up. But I think what all that means is—”

  Frances moved the hand that had been beneath his. She said, “No. They're right. What they're thinking at the hospital. The queen is dead and he can't cope now. He threw himself into the traffic last night.” Then for the first time she looked directly at Lynley. She said it again, “The queen is finally dead. There's no one to replace her. Certainly not me.”

  And Lynley suddenly understood. He said, “You knew,” as Helen began to say, “Frances, you must never believe—” but Frances stopped her by getting to her feet. She went to one of the two beds
ide tables, and she opened its drawer and set it on the bed. From the very back, tucked away as far as possible from the other contents, she took a small white square of linen. She unfolded it like a priest in a ritual, shaking it first, then smoothing it out against the counterpane on the bed.

  Lynley joined her there. Helen did likewise. The three of them looked down on what was a handkerchief, ordinary save for two details: In one corner were twined the initials E and D, and directly in the centre of the material lay a rusty smear which described a little drama from the past. He cuts his finger his palm the back of his hand doing something for her … sawing a board pounding a nail drying a glass picking up the pieces of a jar accidentally smashed on the floor … and she quickly removes a handkerchief from her pocket her handbag the sleeve of her sweater the cup of her bra and she presses it upon him because he never remembers to carry one himself. This piece of linen finds its way into the pocket of his trousers his jacket the breast of his coat where he forgets about it till his wife preparing the laundry the dry cleaning the sorting of old things to go to Oxfam finds it sees it knows it for what it is and keeps it. For how many years? Lynley wondered. For how many blasted god-awful years in which she asked nothing about what it meant, giving her husband the opportunity to tell the truth, whatever that truth was, or to lie, fabricating a reason that might have been perfectly believable or at least something that she could cling to in order to lie to herself.

  Helen said, “Frances, will you let me get rid of this?” and she placed her fingers not on the handkerchief itself but right next to it, as if it were a relic and she a novitiate in some obscure religion in which only the ordained could touch the blessed.

  Frances said, “No!” and grabbed it. “He loved her,” she said. “He loved her and I knew it. I saw it happening. I saw how it happened, as if it was a study of the whole process of love being played out in front of me. Like a television drama. And I kept waiting, you see, because right from the first I knew how he felt. He had to talk about it, he said. Because of Randie … because these poor people had lost a little girl not so much younger than our own Randie, and he could see how horrible it was for them, how much they suffered, especially the mother and ‘No one seems to want to talk to her about it, Frances. She has no one. She's existing in a bubble of grief—no, an infected boil of grief—and not one of them is trying to lance it. It feels inhuman, Frances, inhuman. Someone must help her before she breaks.’ So he decided to be the one. He would put that killer in gaol, by God, and he would not rest, Frances dear, till he had that killer signed, sealed, and delivered to justice. Because how would we feel if some-one—God forbid—harmed our Randie? We would stay up nights, wouldn't we, we would search the streets, we would not sleep and we would not eat and we would not even darken our own doorstep for days on end if that's what it took to find the monster that hurt her.”