“It's him,” Havers said. “But I don't think that's the case.”
“Why?”
“According to Sister Cecelia, she gave him up for adoption straightaway. She could have kept him with her for nine months—longer than that if she did time somewhere other than Holloway—but she didn't want that. She didn't even request it and get denied. She just handed him over in the delivery room and never took a look at him.”
Lynley said, “She wouldn't have wanted to get attached to the infant , Havers. What would be the point, facing a twenty-year sentence? It could be an indication of the strength of her maternal feelings for the baby. Had she not had him adopted, he would have spent his life in care.”
“But if she was looking for the kid, why not start with the convent?” Havers asked. “Sister Cecelia handled the adoption.”
“Could be she's not looking for him at all,” Nkata pointed out. “Twenty years later? She might know the kid wouldn't likely want to meet his real mum and find out she's a yard bird. And that could be 'xactly why she did the job on Missus Davies in the first place. Maybe she's thinking she wouldn't've been a yard bird without Missus Davies. Live with that for twenty years, and when you get out, you want to do something about settling the score.”
“I just don't buy that,” Havers insisted. “Not with this bloke Wiley sitting out there in his bookshop, knowing every move Eugenie Davies made. Convenient, wouldn't you say, that he happened to come upon our victim and a mystery man having an argument on the very night she was killed? Who's to say it was an argument at all but just the opposite? And our Major Wiley took some nasty action as a result.”
“We need to track this kid down one way or another,” Leach said. “Katja Wolff's kid. She might be on his trail and he'll need to be advised. It's messy, but there's no way round it. You handle that, Constable.”
Havers said, “Sir,” in acquiescence, but she didn't look convinced about the value of the assignment.
Winston Nkata said, “I say Katja Wolff 's the right direction. There's something off with that bird.”
He went on to describe for the others the meeting he'd had with the German woman once he'd returned to Yasmin Edwards' flat on the previous evening. Asked for her whereabouts on the night in question, Katja Wolff had claimed to be at home with Yasmin and Daniel. Watching television, she'd said, although she couldn't name the programme, and when put to the rack about this gap in her recollection, she said they'd channel-surfed all evening and she hadn't kept track where they'd touched down. What was the point of having a satellite dish and a remote if you weren't going to use both to entertain yourself?
She'd lit a cigarette as they'd spoken, and from her demeanour it looked as if she hadn't a care in the world. She'd said, “What's this about, Constable?” in apparent innocence. But her glance flicked to the door before she answered the most important questions, and Nkata had known what that glance meant: She was hiding something from him and wondering if Yasmin Edwards had told a story similar to hers.
“What did the Edwards woman claim?” Lynley asked.
“That Wolff was there. Wouldn't say anything else about it, though.”
“Old lags,” Eric Leach pointed out. “They're sure as hell not going to finger each other for anything, not on a first go-round with the local rozzers. You need to go after them again, Constable. What else have you got?”
Nkata told them of the cracked headlamp on Yasmin Edwards' Fiesta. “Claimed she didn't know how it happened or when,” he said. “But Wolff has access. She was driving it yesterday.”
“Colour?” Lynley asked.
“Red gone bad.”
“That's not helpful,” Havers pointed out.
“Any of the neighbours have either one of them leaving the flat the night in question?” Leach asked this as a uniformed female constable came into his office with a sheaf of papers that she handed over. He glanced at them, grunted his thanks, and said, “Where are we with the Audis, then?”
“Still at it,” she said. “Nearly two thousand in Brighton, sir.”
“Who would've thought that?” Leach muttered as the constable left them. “Whatever happened to buy British?” He hung on to the papers but didn't refer to them, going back to his previous topic and saying to Nkata, “The neighbours? What about it?”
“South of the river,” Nkata said with a shrug. “No one willing to talk, even to me. Just one Bible basher who wanted to bang on 'bout women who live together in sin. Said the residents'd tried to get that baby killer—these're her words—off the premises with no luck.”
“We've got some more digging to do out there, then,” Leach noted. “See to it. Edwards might crack if you have a decent go. You said she has a boy, right? Bring him into the picture if you need to. Accessory to murder could get her arse in a sling, so point that out to her. In the meantime”—he rooted through some paperwork on his desk and brought out a photograph—“Holloway couriered this over last night. It needs to get taken round Henley-on-Thames.” He handed it to Lynley, who saw by the line of typing beneath it that it was a photograph of Wolff. The picture wasn't flattering. She was ill-lit, looking haggard and unkempt. Looking, he thought, just like a convicted murderer . “If she did do the job on the Davies woman,” Leach continued, “she would have had to begin by tracking her down to Henley. If she did that, someone was bound to see her. Check it out.”
In the meantime, Leach concluded, they'd got a list of all phone calls made into and out of Eugenie Davies' cottage in the past three months. That list was being compared with the names in the dead woman's address book. The names and numbers in the address book were being matched to the calls on her answer machine. A few more hours and they should have some details as to who was last in contact with her.
“And we've got a name for the Cellnet number,” Leach informed them. “One Ian Staines.”
“That could be her brother,” Lynley said. “Richard Davies mentioned that she had two brothers, one called Ian.”
Leach jotted this down. He said, “D'we know our assignments, then, lads and lasses?” as a sign their meeting was at an end.
Havers and Lynley rose. Nkata disengaged from the wall. Leach stopped them before they left the office. He said, “Speak to Webberly, any of you?”
It was a casual enough question, Lynley thought. But its air of nonchalance didn't feel genuine. “He wasn't in this morning when we left the Yard,” Lynley answered.
“Give him my best when you see him,” Leach said. “Tell him I'll be in touch very soon.”
“We will. When we see him.”
Out on the street and once Nkata had gone on his way, Havers said to Lynley, “In touch about what? That's what I want to know.”
“They're old friends.”
“Hmmph. What've you done with those letters?”
“Nothing, as yet.”
“Are you still planning to …” Havers peered at him. “You are, aren't you? Damn it, Inspector, if you'd listen for a minute—”
“I'm listening, Barbara.”
“Good. Hear this: I know you, and I know how you think. ‘Decent bloke, Webberly. He made a little mistake. But there's no sense letting one little mistake become a catastrophe.’ Except it has done, Inspector. She's dead and those letters just might be why. We've got to face that. We've got to deal with it.”
“Are you arguing that letters more than ten years old would provoke someone to murder?”
“Alone, no. I'm not saying that. But according to Wiley, she was going to tell him something important, something he thought would change their relationship. So, what if she already told him? Or what if he already knew because he came across those letters? We have only his word that he doesn't know what she had to say.”
“Agreed. But you can't be thinking she wanted to speak to him about Webberly. That's ancient history.”
“Not if they'd resumed their affair. Not if they'd never lost touch with each other. Not if they'd been meeting in … say … pubs and hot
els? That would have to be dealt with. And maybe it was. Only it was dealt with badly and not in the way our principals—Mrs. Davies and Webberly—thought it would be.”
“I don't see that happening. And it's far too coincidental for my liking that Eugenie Davies would be killed so soon after Katja Wolff was released from prison.”
“You're jumping on that horse?” Havers scoffed. “It's a non-starter. Depend on it.”
“I'm not jumping on any horse at all,” Lynley replied. “It's far too early to be doing that. And I suggest you employ the same hesitation with regard to Major Wiley. It gets us nowhere to fix our minds on one possibility and become blind to the others.”
“You're not doing that? Inspector, you haven't decided those letters from Webberly are inconsequential?”
“What I've decided is to develop my opinions based on facts, Barbara. We haven't got a lot of them so far. Until we have, we can serve the cause of justice—not to mention pursue the course of wisdom—only by keeping our eyes open and our judgements suspended. Don't you agree?”
Havers fumed. “Listen to yourself. Bloody hell. I hate it when you go all toffs-in-town-for-the-season on me.”
Lynley smiled. “Do you? Was I? I hope it doesn't provoke you to violence.”
“Just to smoking,” Havers informed him.
“Even worse,” Lynley sighed.
GIDEON
8 October
Last night I dreamed of her, or of someone like her. But the time and the place were both out of joint because I was on the Eurostar and we were descending beneath the English Channel. It was like going down into a mine.
Everyone was there: Dad, Raphael, my grandparents, and someone shadowy and faceless whom I recognised as my mother. And she was there as well: the German girl, looking much the way she looked in the newspaper photo. And yes, Sarah-Jane Beckett was there, with a picnic basket from which she pulled not a meal but a baby. She offered the baby round like a plate of sandwiches and everyone refused. One can't eat a baby, Granddad instructed her.
Then it was dark outside the windows. Someone said, Oh yes, we're under the water now.
And that's when it happened.
The tunnel walls broke. The water came through. It wasn't black like the inside of the tunnel, though, but rather like the bottom of a riverbed where one might swim and look up through the water at the sun.
And suddenly in that way dreams have of changing, we were no longer in a train at all. The carriage disappeared, and we were out of the water and on the shore of a lake, all of us. A picnic basket lay on a blanket, and I wanted to open it because I was famished. But I couldn't unfasten the basket's leather straps, and although I asked for someone to open it for me, no one would because they didn't hear me.
They couldn't hear me because they were all on their feet, pointing and crying out about a boat that was floating some distance from the shore. And I became aware suddenly of what they were crying: It was my sister's name. Someone said, She's been left in the boat! We must fetch her! But no one moved.
Then the leather straps from the picnic basket were gone, as if they'd never been. Exultant, relieved, I flung the top open to get at the food, but there was no food inside. There was only the baby. And I somehow knew that the baby was my sister even though I couldn't see her face. She was covered head and shoulders by a veil, the sort you see on statues of the Virgin.
I said in the dream, Sosy's here. She's right here. But no one on the shore would listen. Instead, they began to swim towards the boat, and I couldn't stop them no matter how I shouted. I picked the baby up from the basket to show them I was telling the truth. I cried out, She's here! Look! Sosy's right here! Come back! There's no one in the boat! But they kept swimming, one by one entering the water in a single line, and one by one disappearing beneath the surface of the lake.
I was desperate to stop them. I thought that if they could see her face, if I could hold her high enough above my shoulders, they would believe me and come back. So I tore at the veil round my sister's face. But I found another veil beneath it, Dr. Rose. And under that another. And under that another. I tore at them till I was weeping and frantic and no one was left on the shore but me. Even Sonia was gone. Then I turned to the picnic basket again to find it filled not with food but with dozens of kites that I kept pulling out and tossing to one side. And as I pulled them out, I felt a desperation like nothing I've ever felt before. Desperation and tremendous fear because everyone was gone and I was alone.
So what did you do, you ask me gently.
I did nothing. Libby woke me. I found I was drenched in sweat, my heart was pounding, and I was actually weeping.
Weeping, Dr. Rose. My God, I was weeping over a dream.
I said to Libby, “There was nothing in the basket. I couldn't make them stop. I had her but they couldn't see I had her, so they went into the lake and didn't come out.”
She said, “You were only dreaming. Here. Come here. Let me hold you, okay?”
And yes, Dr. Rose, she had spent the night the way she often spends the night. She cooks a meal or I cook a meal, we do the washing up, and we watch the television. That's what I have been reduced to: the television. If Libby notices that we no longer listen to Perlman, Rubinstein, and Menuhin—especially Yehudi, magnificent Yehudi, child of the instrument as I myself was—she does not mention it. Indeed, she's probably grateful for the television. She is, at heart, so much an American.
When we run out of programmes to watch, we drift into sleep. We sleep in the same bed and on the same bedclothes that haven't been changed for weeks. But they are not soiled with the mixture of our fluids. No. We have not managed that.
Libby held me while my heart hammered like a miner hewing coal. Her right hand fondled the back of my head while her left hand caressed the length of my spine. From my spine, she worked her way down to my bum till we were pelvis to pelvis with only the thin flannel of my pyjamas and the cotton of her knickers between us. She whispered, “It's nothing, it's all right, you're fine,” and despite those words which might have been succour under other circumstances, I knew what was supposed to happen next. Blood would rush to my cock, and I would feel the pulse of it. The pulse of it would grow and the organ would ready. I would lift my head to find her mouth or lower my mouth to find her breasts, and I would grind against her, grind against her slowly. I would pin her to the bed beneath us and take her in a silence broken only by our cries of pleasure—like no other pleasure available to men and to women, as you know—when we come. Together, of course. We come together. Anything less than simultaneous orgasm is completely unworthy of my prowess as a male.
Except, of course, that is not what happened. How could it, I being who and what I am?
Which is what? you ask me.
A carapace covering nothing, Dr. Rose. No, less even than that. With my music gone, I am nothing itself.
Libby doesn't understand this because she can't see that who I was until Wigmore Hall was the music I made. I myself was merely an extension of the instrument, and the instrument was merely the manner in which my being took form.
You say nothing at first when you hear this, Dr. Rose. You keep your eyes on me—sometimes I wonder at the discipline it must take to keep your eyes on someone so patently not even in the room with you—and you look thoughtful. But there is something more than consideration in your eyes. Is it pity? Confusion? Doubt? Frustration?
You sit unmoving, in your widow's black. You observe me over the top of your tea cup. What are you crying out in the dream? you say. When Libby wakes you, what are you crying out, Gideon?
Mummy.
But I expect you knew that before you asked.
10 October
I can see my mother now because of the newspapers in the Press Association office. I glimpsed her—on the opposite page to Sonia's picture—before I thrust the tabloid out of my sight. I knew it was my mother because she was on my father's arm, because they were on the front step of the Old Bailey, because abov
e them a headline declared Justice for Sonia! in four-inch type.
So now at last I see her where before she was a blur. I see her blonde hair, I see the angles of her face, I see the way her chin is sharp and her lower jaw points to form it like the bottom of a heart. She is wearing black trousers and a soft grey sweater, and she comes to fetch me in the corner of my bedroom where Sarah-Jane and I are having a geography lesson. The Amazon River is what we're studying. How it coils like a snake for four thousand miles, from the Andes, through Peru and Brazil, and into the vast Atlantic Ocean.
Mother tells Sarah-Jane that she must cut short the lesson, and I know that Sarah-Jane doesn't like this plan because her lips change from lips into an incision in her face although she says, “Of course, Mrs. Davies,” and shuts our books.
I follow Mother. We go down the stairs. She takes me into the sitting room, where a man is waiting. He's a big man with lots of ginger hair.
Mother says that he's a policeman, and he wants to ask me some questions, but I'm not to be afraid because she won't leave the room while he talks to me. She sits on the sofa and pats the cushion, right next to her thigh. And when I sit, she puts her arm round my shoulders, and I can feel her trembling as she says, “Go ahead, Detective Inspector.”
She's probably told me his name, but I can't remember it. What I do remember is that he pulls a chair over close to us and he leans forward with his elbows on his knees and his arms drawn up so that he can rest his chin on his thumbs. When he's close like this, I can smell cigars. The smoke must be in his clothes and his hair. It's not a bad smell, but I'm not used to it, and I shrink back against my mother.
He says, “Your mum's right, lad. You've no reason to be frightened. No one is going to hurt you.” When he speaks, I twist to gaze up at my mother, and I see that she's looking only at her lap. In her lap lie our hands, hers and mine, because she's taken my hand so that we're connected there as well: by her arm round my shoulders, by our fingers linking. And she squeezes my fingers but makes no reply to what the ginger-haired policeman has said.