A Traitor to Memory

  Richard said, “We'd tried everything else, Inspector. Aromatherapy, anti-anxiety treatments, pep talks, psychiatry, everything under the sun save having an astrologer do a reading of the stars. We'd been going those routes for several months, and Eugenie was simply the last resort.” He watched Lynley writing in his notebook, and he added, “I'd very much appreciate it if this information is kept confidential, by the way.”

  Lynley looked up. “What?”

  Richard said, “I'm no fool, Inspector. I know how you lot work. The pay's not good so you supplement it by passing along what you can without crossing the line. Fine. I understand. You've got mouths to feed. But the last thing Gideon needs right now is to see his problem displayed in the tabloids.”

  “I don't generally work with the newspapers,” Lynley replied. And after a pause during which he made a note in his book, “Unless I'm forced to, of course, Mr. Davies.”

  Richard heard the implied threat because he said hotly, “You listen here. I'm cooperating with you and you can damn well—”

  “Richard.” Jill couldn't stop herself. There was too much at risk to let him continue when continuing only promised to alienate the detective in ways that were unproductive.

  Richard clamped his jaws shut and cast a look at her. With her eyes, she appealed to his better judgement. Tell him what he needs to know and he'll leave us. This time, it seemed, he got the message.

  He said, “All right.” And then, “Sorry,” to the detective. “This has put me on edge. First Gideon, then Eugenie. After all these years and when we needed her most … I tend to fly off the handle.”

  Lynley said, “Had you arranged a meeting between them?”

  “No. I'd phoned and left a message on her machine. She'd not got back to me.”

  “When had you phoned?”

  “Earlier in the week. I don't remember which day. Tuesday, perhaps.”

  “Was it like her not to return your call?”

  “I didn't think anything of it. The message I left didn't say I was phoning her because of Gideon. I just asked her to ring me when she had the chance.”

  “And she never asked you to arrange a meeting with Gideon for reasons of her own?”

  “No. Why would she? She phoned me when Gideon had his … that difficulty he had at the performance. In July. But I believe I told you that yesterday.”

  “And when she phoned you, it was only about your son's condition?”

  “It isn't a condition,” Richard said. “It's stage fright, Inspector. Nerves. It happens. Like writer's block. Like a sculptor making a mess of a few lumps of clay. Like a painter losing his vision for a week.”

  He sounded, Jill thought, very much like a man who was desperately attempting to convince himself, and she knew that the inspector had to hear this as well. She said to Lynley, attempting to sound unlike a woman making excuses for the man she loved, “Richard's given his life to Gideon's music. He's done it the way any parent of a prodigy must do it: with no thought of himself. And when one gives one's life to something, it's painful watching the project fall to pieces.”

  “If a person is a project,” DI Lynley said.

  She flushed and bit back a need to retort. All right, she thought. Let him have his moment. She wouldn't allow it to vex her.

  Lynley said to Richard, “Did your ex-wife ever mention her brother to you in all these phone calls?”

  “Who? Doug?”

  “The other brother. Ian Staines.”

  “Ian?” Richard shook his head. “Never. As far as I know, Eugenie hadn't seen him in years.”

  “He tells me she was going to speak to Gideon about borrowing money. He's in a bad way—”

  “When the hell is Ian not in a bad way?” Richard interrupted. “He ran off from home when he was a teenager, and spent the next thirty years trying to make Doug feel responsible for it. Obviously, Doug's dried up as a source of funds if Ian turned to Eugenie. But she wouldn't help him in the past—this was when we were married and Doug was short of money—so I've little doubt she would have refused him now.” He knotted his eyebrows as he realised where the detective was heading. He said, “Why're you asking about Ian?”

  “He was seen with her the night she was killed.”

  “How awful,” Jill murmured.

  “He has a temper,” Richard said. “He came by it honestly. Their dad was a rager. No one was safe from his temper. He excused it by saying he never lifted a hand against any of them, but his was a special form of torture. And the bastard was a priest, if you can credit that.”

  “That's not how Mr. Staines remembers it,” Lynley said.

  “What?”

  “He mentioned beatings.”

  Richard snorted. “Beatings, is it? Ian probably said he took them personally so that the others wouldn't have to. That would be all the better to position Eugenie and Doug to feel guilty when he came calling on them for money.”

  “Perhaps he held something over them,” Lynley said. “His brother and sister. What happened to their father?”

  “What're you getting at?”

  “Whatever it was that Eugenie wished to confess to Major Wiley.”

  Richard said nothing. Jill saw the pulse beat a rapid tattoo in the vein on his temple. He said, “I hadn't seen my wife in nearly twenty years, Inspector. She might have wanted to tell her lover anything.”

  My wife. Jill heard the words like a slim lance piercing her just beneath her heart. She reached blindly for the lid of her laptop. She lowered it and fastened it with more precision than was required.

  The inspector was saying, “Did she mention this man—Major Wiley—in any of your conversations, Mr. Davies?”

  “We spoke only of Gideon.”

  “So you know nothing that might have been on her mind?” the detective pressed on.

  “For God's sake, I didn't even know she had a man in Henley, Inspector,” Richard said testily. “So how the hell could I possibly have known what she intended to speak to him about?”

  Jill tried to locate the feelings beneath his words. She laid his reaction—and whatever emotion underscored it—next to his earlier reference to Eugenie as his wife, and she excavated in the dust round both to see what fossilised emotions might remain there. She'd managed to put her hands on the Daily Mail that morning, and she'd flipped through it hungrily to find a picture of Eugenie. So she now knew that her rival had been attractive as Jill herself could never be attractive. And she wanted to ask the man she loved if that loveliness haunted him and, if so, what that haunting meant. She wouldn't share Richard with a ghost. Their marriage was going to be all or nothing and if it was meant to be nothing, then she wanted to know that so at least she could adjust her plans accordingly.

  But how to ask? How to bring the subject up?

  DI Lynley said, “She may not have identified it directly as something she wished to talk to Major Wiley about.”

  “Then I wouldn't have known what it was, Inspector. I'm not a mind read—” Richard stopped abruptly. He stood and for a moment Jill thought that, pushed to the extreme in having to talk about his former wife—my wife, he'd called her—he intended to ask the policeman to leave. But instead, he said, “What about the Wolff woman? Eugenie might have been worried about her. She must have got that letter telling her about the release. She might have been frightened. Eugenie gave evidence against her at the trial, and she might have fancied that she—Wolff—would come looking for her. D'you think that's possible?”

  “She never told you that, though?”

  “No. But him. This Wiley. He was there in Henley. If Eugenie wanted protection—or just a sense of security, of someone looking after her—he'd have been the one to give it to her. I wouldn't. And if that's what she wanted, she'd've had to explain why she wanted it in the first place.”

  Lynley nodded and looked thoughtful, saying, “That's possible. Major Wiley wasn't in England when your daughter was murdered. He did tell us that.”

  “So do you know where
she is?” Richard asked. “Wolff?”

  “Yes. We've tracked her down.” Lynley flipped his notebook closed and stood. He thanked them for their time.

  Richard said quickly, as if he suddenly didn't want the detective to leave them alone with what alone implied, “She might've been intent on settling the score, Inspector.”

  Lynley stowed his notebook in his pocket. He said, “Did you give evidence against her as well, Mr. Davies?”

  “Yes. Most of us did.”

  “Then watch yourself till we get this cleared up.”

  Jill saw Richard swallow. He said, “Of course. I will.”

  With a nod to both of them, Lynley left.

  Jill was suddenly frightened. She said, “Richard! You don't think … What if that woman killed her? If she tracked down Eugenie, there's every chance that she … You could be in danger as well.”

  “Jill. It's all right.”

  “How can you say that with Eugenie dead?”

  Richard came to her. He said, “Please don't worry. It'll be all right. I'll be all right.”

  “But you've got to be careful. You must watch … Promise me.”

  “Yes. All right. I do promise that.” He touched her cheek. “Good God. You've gone white as a ghost. You're not worried, are you?”

  “Of course I'm worried. He as good as said—”

  “Don't. We've had enough of this. I'm taking you home. No arguments, all right?” He helped her to her feet and lingered nearby as she made her preparations to leave. He said, “You told him an untruth, Jill. At least a partial untruth. I let it go when you said it, but I 'd like to correct it now.”

  Jill slid her laptop into its carrying case and looked up as she closed its zip. She said, “Correct what?”

  “What you said: that I've given my life to Gideon.”

  “Oh. That.”

  “Yes, that. It was true enough once; a year ago even, it was true. But not now. Oh, he'll always be important to me. How can he be otherwise? He's my son. But while he was the centre of my world for more than two decades, there's more to my life now, because of you.”

  He held out her coat. She slid her arms into it and turned to him. She said, “You are happy, aren't you? About us, the baby?”

  “Happy?” He placed one hand on the mountain of her stomach. “If I could climb inside you and reside with our little Cara, I would. That's the only way the three of us could be any closer than we already are.”

  “Thank you,” Jill said, and she kissed him, raising her mouth for the familiar joining to his, parting her lips, feeling his tongue, and experiencing the answering heat of desire.

  Catherine, she thought. Her name is Catherine. But she kissed him with both longing and hunger, and she felt embarrassed: to be so hugely pregnant and still to want him sexually. But she suddenly possessed such a longing for him that the heat within her turned into an ache.

  “Make love to me,” she said against his mouth.

  “Here?” he murmured. “In my lumpy bed?”

  “No. At home. In Shepherd's Bush. Let's go. Make love to me, darling.”

  “Hmm.” His fingers found her nipples. He squeezed them gently. She sighed. He squeezed harder, and she felt her body shoot fire to her genitals in reply.

  “Please,” she murmured. “Richard. God.”

  He chuckled. “Are you certain that's what you want?”

  “I'm dying for you.”

  “Well, we can't have that.” He released her, held his hands on her shoulders, and examined her face. “But you do look completely done in.”

  Jill felt her spirits plummet. “Richard—”

  He cut in. “So you must swear to me that you'll go to sleep and not open an eye for at least ten hours afterwards. Is that a deal?”

  Love—or something she took for love—flooded her. She smiled. “Then take me home this instant, and have your way with me. If you don't do both, I won't answer for the consequences to your lumpy bed.”

  There were times when you had to operate on instinct. DC Winston Nkata had seen that often enough while working an investigation in the company of one DI or another, and he recognised that inclination in himself.

  He'd had that uneasy feeling for the entire afternoon once he'd visited Yasmin Edwards in her shop. It informed him that she wasn't telling him everything. So he stationed himself on Kennington Park Road and settled back with a lamb samosa in one hand and a carton of take-away dal as a dipping sauce in the other. His mum would keep his dinner warm, but it might be hours before he could put his lips round the jerk chicken she'd promised him for that night's meal. In the meantime he needed something to settle the growling in his stomach.

  He munched and kept his attention on the steamed-up windows of Crushley's Laundry just across the street and down three doors from where he'd parked. He'd sauntered by and taken a glimpse inside when the door swung open, and he'd seen her big as life in the back, labouring over an ironing board with steam rising round her.

  “She in today?” he'd asked her employer earlier over the phone not long after leaving Yasmin's shop. “Just a routine check, this is. No need to tell her I'm on the blower.”

  “Yeah,” Betty Crushley had said, sounding like a woman talking round a cigar. “Got her mug where it ought to be for once.”

  “Good to hear, that.”

  “If good's enough.”

  So he was waiting for Katja Wolff to leave her place of employment for the evening. If she walked the short distance to the Doddington Grove Estate, his instinct would require adjustment. If she went somewhere else, he'd know his feeling about her was right.

  Nkata was dipping the last bite of his samosa into the dal when the German woman finally came out of the laundry, carrying a jacket over her arm. He crammed the pastry into his mouth, ready for action, but Katja Wolff merely stood on the pavement for a minute, just outside the laundry's front door. It was cold, with a sharp wind blowing the smells of diesel fuel against the pedestrians' cheeks, but the temperature didn't appear to bother her.

  She took a moment to don her jacket and pulled from its pocket a blue beret into which she tucked her short blonde hair. Then she turned up the collar of her coat and set off along Kennington Park Road in the direction of home.

  Nkata was about to curse his instincts for wasting his time, when Katja did the unexpected. Instead of turning into Braganza Street, which led to the Doddington Grove Estate, she crossed and continued down Kennington Park Road without so much as a regretful glance in the direction in which she should have been heading. She passed a pub, the take-away where he'd bought his snack, a hairdresser, and a stationery shop, coming to rest at a bus stop where she lit a cigarette and waited among a small crowd of other potential passengers. She rejected the first two buses that stopped, finally climbing onto the third after she tossed her cigarette into the street. As the bus lumbered into the traffic, Nkata set off after it, glad that he wasn't in a panda car and grateful for the dark.

  He didn't make himself popular with his fellow drivers as he tailed the bus, pulling to the kerb when it did, keeping an eye peeled at its every stop to make sure he didn't lose Katja Wolff in the growing gloom. More than one driver gave him two fingers as he wove in and out of the traffic, and he nearly hit a cyclist in a gas mask when a request stop loomed up faster than he was prepared for the bus to lurch over to it.

  In this fashion, he halted across South London. Katja Wolff had taken a window seat on the street side of the bus, so Nkata could get a glimpse of her blue beret when the street curved ahead of him. He was fairly confident that he'd be able to pick her out when she disembarked, and that proved to be the case when, after suffering through the worst of the rush hour traffic, the bus pulled into Clapham station.

  He thought she meant to get a train there, and he wondered how conspicuous he'd be if he had to get on the same carriage as she. Very, he decided. But there was no help for it and no time to consider any other option. He looked desperately for a place to park.
r />   He kept one eye on her as she worked her way through the crowd outside the station. Instead of moving inside as he'd expected her to do, however, she went to a second bus stop, where, after a five-minute wait, she embarked on another ride through South London.

  She had no window seat this time, so Nkata was forced to keep an eye peeled each time passengers disembarked. It was anxiety-producing—not to mention maddening to other drivers—but he ignored the rest of the traffic and kept his attention where it belonged.

  At Putney Station, he was rewarded. Katja Wolff hopped off and, without a glance right or left, she set off along the Upper Richmond Road.

  There was no way Nkata could tail her in a car and not stick out like an ostrich in Alaska or become the victim of a commuter's road rage, so he drove past her and, some fifty yards farther along, he found a section of double yellow just beyond a bus stop across the street. He veered over and parked there. Then he waited, his eyes on the rearview mirror, adjusting it to take in the pavement opposite.

  In due course, Katja Wolff came into view. She had her head down and her collar up against the wind, so she didn't notice him. An illegally parked car in London was no anomaly. Even if she glimpsed him, in the fading light he would be just a bloke waiting to fetch someone from the bus stop.

  When she'd gained some twenty yards past him, Nkata eased his car door open and took up after her. He shrugged his large frame into his overcoat as he trailed her, tucking a scarf round his neck and thanking his stars that his mum had insisted upon his wearing it that morning. He faded into the shadows created by the trunk of an aged sycamore as up ahead of him Katja Wolff paused, turned her back to the wind, and lit a cigarette. Then she strode to the kerb, waited for a break in the traffic, and dashed across to the opposite side.

  At this point, the road opened into a commercial area comprising an assortment of businesses that were fashioned with residences off-set above them. Here were the sort of enterprises local residents would patronise: video shops, newsagents, restaurants, florists, and the like.