A Traitor to Memory

  He swung out of bed, swilling down the rest of the tea. He could smell the sweat on his pyjamas, and the feel of them was clammy against his skin. He felt weak, oddly off balance, as if he'd come through a long period of fever and was only now recovering from it.

  Frances said, “I'm going to make you a proper breakfast, Malcolm Webberly. None of this cornflakes nonsense today.”

  “I need a shower,” he said in reply.

  “Brilliant. That'll give me just enough time.” She headed to the door.

  He said, “Fran,” to stop her. And when she paused, “There's no need for all that.”

  “No need?” Her head tilted to one side. She'd combed her red hair—dyed with the colour that she sent him to Boots once a month to fetch so that it would match their daughter's hair, which it never did—and she wore her pink dressing gown precisely belted, with a perfect bow.

  “It's all right,” he said. “You don't need to …” To what? Saying the words would take them somewhere neither wanted to go. Webberly settled on, “You don't need to coddle me. I can manage with cornflakes.”

  She smiled. “Of course you can manage with them, darling. But every once in a while, it's lovely to have a proper breakfast. You've the time, haven't you?”

  “There's the dog to walk.”

  I'll walk him, Malcolm. But that was an announcement she could not make. Not after yesterday's proclamation about gardening. Two defeats in a row would be an injury that she wouldn't want to risk inflicting on herself. Webberly understood that. The hell of it was, he'd always understood it. So he was unsurprised when she said, “Let's see how the time goes, shall we? I expect there's enough. And if there's not, you can cut short Alfie's walk. Just down to the corner and back. He'll survive.”

  She crossed the room, kissed him fondly on the top of the head, and left. In less than a minute, he could hear her banging about in the kitchen. She started to sing.

  He pushed himself off the edge of the bed and plodded along the corridor to the bathroom. It smelled of mildew from grout round the tub that needed cleaning and a shower curtain that needed replacing, and Webberly shoved open the window fully and stood in front of it, breathing in the sodden morning air. It was the heavy, tubercular air of an approaching winter that promised to be long, cold, wet, and grey. He thought of Spain, of Italy, of Greece, of the countless sundrenched environments round the world that he would never see.

  Roughly, he shook off the mental pictures of these places, turning from the window and shedding his pyjamas. He twisted the hot water tap in the tub till the steam rose like an optimist's hope, and when he'd added enough cold water to the mix to make it bearable, he stepped inside and began to work lather vigorously round his body.

  He thought of his daughter's reasonable question about insisting that Frances return to the psychiatrist. He asked himself what harm it could do simply to make the suggestion to his wife. He hadn't mentioned her problem for the past two years. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of their marriage—with retirement looming—how unforgivable would it be to imply that the opportunity for a different life was fast approaching them, and in order to have that different life, Frances might want to consider how best to address her problem? We'll want to do some traveling, Frannie, he could tell her. Think of seeing Spain again. Think of Italy. Think of Crete. Why, we could even sell up and move to the country as we once talked of doing.

  Her lips would form a smile as he spoke, but her eyes would show the incipient panic. “Why, Malcolm,” she'd say, and her fingers would clutch: the edge of her apron, the belt of her dressing gown, the cuff of her shirt. “Why, Malcolm,” she'd say.

  Perhaps she'd make the attempt at that point, seeing that he was in earnest. But she'd make the attempt that she'd made two years ago, and it would doubtless end where that attempt had ended: with panic, tears, a phone call by strangers on the street to nine-nine-nine, paramedics and ambulance and police dispatched to Tesco's, where she'd taken herself by taxi to prove she could do it, darling … and afterwards a hospital, a period of sedation, and reinforcement for every terror she felt. She'd forced herself out of the house to please him. It hadn't worked then. It wouldn't work now.

  “She has to want to get well,” the psychiatrist had told him. “Without desire, there is no exigency. And the internal exigency that demands recovery cannot be manufactured.”

  So it had been, year after year. The world went on while her world shrank. His world was joined inextricably to her world; sometimes Webberly thought he would suffocate in its smallness.

  He rinsed long in the water. He washed his thinning hair. When he was done, he stepped out of the tub into the bone chill of the bathroom where the window still gaped, letting in a last few minutes of the morning air.

  Downstairs, he found that Frances had been as good as her word. A full breakfast was laid out on the kitchen table and the air was redolent with the scent of bacon. Alfie was sitting at the corner of the cooker, looking hopefully at the frying pan from which Frances was removing the rashers. The table, however, was laid only for one.

  “You aren't eating?” Webberly asked his wife.

  “I live to serve you.” She gestured with the frying pan. “One word from you and the eggs go on. When you're ready for them. Any way you want them. Any way you want anything.”

  “D'you mean that, Fran?” He pulled out his chair.

  “Scrambled, fried, or poached,” she declared. “I'll even do them deviled for you, if you've a mind for that.”

  “If I've a mind for it,” he said.

  He didn't feel like eating, but he shoveled the food into his mouth. He chewed and swallowed without tasting much. Only the acidic tang of orange juice made the journey from his tongue to his brain.

  Frances chatted. What did he think about Randie's weight? She hated to talk to their daughter about it, but didn't he think she was getting just a bit too chunky for a girl her age? And what of this recent plan of hers to have a year in Turkey? Turkey, of all places. She was always coming up with a new plan, so of course one didn't want to get oneself in a dither over something that she might not even do, but a girl her age … on her own … in Turkey …? It wasn't wise, it wasn't safe, it wasn't sensible, Malcolm. Last month she was talking about a year in Australia, which was bad enough … all that distance without her family. But this? No. They had to talk her out of this. And wasn't Helen Lynley looking lovely the other night? She's one of those women who can wear anything. Naturally, it's the expense of the clothes that tells the tale. Buy French and you look like a … well, just like a countess, Malcolm. And she can buy French, can't she? No one's watching to see who she buys from. Not like the poor old dowdy Queen, who's always dressed by some English upholsterer by the look of her. Clothes do so make a woman, don't they?

  Chat. Chat. Chat. It filled a silence that might otherwise be used for a conversation too painful to be endured. It simultaneously wore the guise of warmth and of closeness, offering a portrayal of the long-married couple breaking their fast à deux.

  Webberly shoved his chair back abruptly. He scrubbed the paper napkin across his mouth. “Alfie,” he commanded. “Come. Let's go.” He grabbed the lead from the hook near the door, and the dog padded after him, through the sitting room and out of the front door.

  Alfie came to life as soon as paws hit pavement. His tail began to wag, and his ears perked up. He was all at once on the alert for his sworn enemies—cats—and as he and his master headed down the street to Emlyn Road, the Alsatian kept an eye out for anything potentially feline at which he could bark. He sat obediently, as he always did when they came to Stamford Brook Road. Here, the traffic could be heavy depending upon the time of day, and even a zebra crossing didn't guarantee a driver's seeing a pedestrian.

  They crossed and made their way to the garden.

  The night's rain had made the garden thoroughly sodden. The grass was heavily bent with moisture, tree limbs dripped, and the benches along the perimeter path were shining slickly wit
h water. This was no matter to Webberly. He didn't want to sit beneath the trees, and he had no interest in the lawn across which Alfie gamboled as soon as Webberly had him off the lead. Instead, he took to the perimeter path. He walked determinedly, gravel crunching beneath his soles, but while his body was in the Stamford Brook neighbourhood in which he'd lived for more than twenty years, his mind was centred on Henley-on-Thames.

  He'd come this far into his day without thinking once of Eugenie. It seemed something of a miracle to him. She hadn't left his thoughts for an instant during the previous twenty-four hours. He hadn't heard from Eric Leach yet, and he hadn't seen Tommy Lynley at the Yard. He accepted the latter's request for DC Winston Nkata as a sign that progress was being made, but he wanted to know what that progress was, because knowing something—anything at this point—was better than being left with nothing but images best forgotten from the past.

  Without that contact with his fellow officers, though, the images came to him. Unprotected by the claustrophobic confines of his house, by Frances's chatter, by the duties that faced him once he got to work, he was assailed by mental pictures, pictures so distant now as to be fragments only, pieces of a puzzle he'd not been able to complete.

  It was summer, sometime after the Regatta. He and Eugenie were rowing on the sluggish river.

  Hers had not been the first marriage that had not survived the horror of a violent death in the family. It would not be the last that cracked irreparably under the combined weight of investigation-and-trial and the powerful load of guilt attendant to losing a child to someone in whom trust had been mistakenly placed. But Webberly had felt more at the dissolution of this particular marriage. It was many months before he admitted why.

  After the trial, the tabloids had gone after her with the same rapacity that had driven their stories about Katja Wolff. Where the Wolff girl had been the reincarnation of every beast, from Mengele to Himmler, responsible in the eyes of the press for everything from the Holocaust to the Blitz, Eugenie had been the indifferent mother: she who worked outside the home, she who had employed an unskilled girl untutored in English and in the ways of the English to care for a badly disabled child. If Katja Wolff had been vilified in the press—and deservedly so, considering her crime—Eugenie had been pilloried.

  She'd accepted this public scourging as her due. “I'm to blame,” she'd said. “This is the least I deserve.” She spoke with simple dignity, with neither hope nor desire of being contradicted. Indeed, she would not allow contradiction. “I just want it to end,” she'd said.

  He saw her again, two years after the trial, quite by chance at Paddington Station. He was on his way to a conference in Exeter. She was coming into town, she said, for an engagement with someone she did not name.

  “Just coming in?” he'd said. “You've moved house, then? To the country? That's good for your boy, I expect.”

  But no, they hadn't moved to the country. She'd just moved herself, alone.

  He'd said, “Oh. I'm sorry.”

  She'd said, “Thank you, Inspector Webberly.”

  He'd said, “Malcolm. Please, it's plain Malcolm.”

  She'd said, “Plain Malcolm, then,” and her smile was infinitely sad.

  He'd said impulsively and in a rush because it was mere minutes before his train left the station, “Would you give me your number, Eugenie? I'd like to check how you're doing now and then. As a friend. If that's all right with you.”

  She'd written it on the newspaper he'd been carrying. She'd said, “Thank you for your kindness, Inspector.”

  “Malcolm,” he'd reminded her.

  Summer on the river had been twelve months later and not the first time he'd found an excuse to drive to Henley-on-Thames to check on Eugenie. She was lovely that day, quiet as always but with a sense of peace that he'd not witnessed in her before. He rowed the boat and she leaned back and rested on her side, not trailing her hand in the water in the way some women might have done, hoping for a seductive pose, but merely watching the river's surface as if its depths hid something she was waiting to see. Her face reflected brightness and shadow as they glided along beneath the trees.

  He was aware in a rush that he'd fallen in love with her. But they had those twelve months of chaste friendship between them: walks round town, drives in the country, lunches at pubs, the occasional dinner and the warmth of conversation, real conversation about who Eugenie Davies had been and how she'd come to be who she was.

  “I believed in God when I was young,” she told him. “But I lost God along the way to adulthood. I've been a long time without Him now, and I'd like to get Him back if I can.”

  “Even after what's happened?”

  “Because of what's happened. But I'm afraid He won't have me, Malcolm. My sins are too great.”

  “You haven't sinned. You couldn't possibly sin.”

  “You of all people can't believe that.”

  But Webberly couldn't see sin in her no matter what she said about herself. He saw only perfection and—ultimately—what he himself wanted. But to speak of his feelings seemed a betrayal in every direction. He was married and the father of a child. She was fragile and vulnerable. And despite the time that had passed since her daughter's murder, he couldn't bring himself to take advantage of her grief.

  So he settled on saying, “Eugenie, do you know that I'm married?”

  She moved her gaze from the water to him. “I assumed that you were.”

  “Why?”

  “Your kindness. No woman thinking straight would be foolish enough to let someone like you get away. Would you like to tell me about your wife and family?”

  “No.”

  “Ah. What does that mean?”

  “Marriages end sometimes.”

  “Sometimes they do.”

  “Yours did.”

  “Yes. My marriage ended.” She moved her gaze back to the water. He continued to row, and he watched her face, feeling as if in a hundred years as a man long blind he would still be able to draw from memory every line and curve of it.

  They'd brought a picnic with them, and when he saw the spot he wanted, Webberly bumped the boat into the bank. He said, “Wait. Stay there. Let me tie it up,” and as he scrambled up the slippery little slope, he lost his footing and slid into the water, where he stood humiliated with the Thames lapping coolly round his thighs. The mooring rope draped over his hand, and the river ooze seeped into his shoes.

  Eugenie sat up straight, saying, “Heavens, Malcolm! Are you all right?”

  “I feel a perfect fool. It never happens this way in films.”

  “But this way is better,” Eugenie said. And before he could speak again, she scrambled from the boat and joined him in the water.

  “The mud—” he began in protest.

  “Feels exquisite,” she finished. And she began to laugh. “You've blushed to the roots of your hair. Why?”

  “Because I want everything perfect,” he admitted.

  She said, “Malcolm, everything is.”

  He was flustered, wanting and not wanting, sure and unsure. He said nothing more. They clambered from the river onto the bank. He pulled the boat close and took from it the lunch they'd brought with them. They found a spot under a willow that they liked. It was when they sank to the ground that she spoke.

  “I'm ready, Malcolm, if you are,” she said.

  Thus it began between them.

  “So the kid was given up for adoption.” Barbara Havers concluded her recitation by flipping closed her tatty notebook and digging round in her lump of a shoulder bag for a packet of Juicy Fruit which she brought forth and generously offered round Eric Leach's Hampstead office. The DCI took a stick. Lynley and DC Nkata demurred. Havers folded one into her mouth and began to chew vigorously. Her substitute for the weed, Lynley thought. He wondered idly when she'd give up smoking altogether.

  Leach played with the foil interior wrapper of the gum. He folded it into a miniature fan and placed it at the base of a photograph of hi
s daughter. He'd apparently been on the phone to her when the Scotland Yard detectives arrived, and they'd come upon him at the end of a conversation in which he was wearily saying, “For God's sake, Esmé, this is something you need to discuss with your mum…. Of course she'll listen. She loves you…. Now you're jumping the gun. No one's getting … Esmé, listen to me … Yes. Right. Someday she … So might I, but that will never mean we don't love—” At which point, the girl had apparently hung up on him because he stood behind his desk with his mouth open on what he'd intended to say. He'd replaced the phone in its cradle with undue care and sighed heavily.

  Now he went on. “That could be what's driving our killer, then. Or our killers. The adopted kid. Wolff didn't put herself in the club without assistance. Let's keep that in mind.”

  The four of them continued their exchange of information. A hideous knot of traffic in Westminster had kept the Scotland Yard detectives from Leach's morning meeting with his team in the incident room, so the DCI took notes. At the conclusion of Havers' report on the Convent of the Immaculate Conception, Nkata said, “Could be the motive we're looking for, this. Wolff wants that kid and no one's giving her any help to find … is it him or her, Barb?” As was largely his habit, he hadn't taken a seat in the office. Rather, he stood not far from the doorway, lounging against the wall with one broad shoulder resting next to a framed commendation that Leach had received from the commissioner.