This indicated that a home computer had probably been used to communicate with Eugenie Davies, which brought Lynley at least some measure of reassurance. Because as far as he knew, Webberly had no personal computer at his home.
He said, “Simon, is there a way to trace the real name of an e-mail user if he's adopted a nickname?”
“Through the provider,” St. James replied, “although I expect you'd have to strong-arm them into giving it to you. They're not obliged to.”
“But in a murder investigation …?” Helen said.
“That might be sufficient coercion,” St. James admitted.
Deborah returned to them, carrying four glasses and a decanter. “Here we are,” she announced. “Scones and sherry.” She proceeded to pour.
Helen said quickly, “Nothing for me, Deborah. Thanks,” and helped herself to a dab of butter that she dotted on a scrap of the scone she'd taken.
“You've got to have something,” Deborah said. “We've been working like slaves. We deserve a reward. Would you rather a gin and tonic, Helen?” She wrinkled her nose. “What on earth am I thinking? Gin and tonic and scones? Now, that sounds appetising.” She handed a glass to her husband and another to Lynley. “This is quite a red-letter day. I don't think I've ever heard you turn down a sherry, Helen, especially after being run ragged by Simon. Are you all right?”
“I'm perfectly fine,” Helen said. And she glanced at Lynley.
Now was the moment, of course, Lynley thought. It was the perfect time for him to tell them. With the four of them congenially together in St. James's lab, what was to stop him from saying offhandedly, “We've an announcement, by the way, although you're probably moments away from guessing it. Have you guessed?” He could put his arm round Helen's shoulders as he spoke. He could carry on and kiss the side of her head. “Parenthood looms,” he could say jokingly. “Goodbye to late nights and Sunday morning lie-ins. Hello to nappies and baby milk.”
But he didn't say any of that. Instead, he held his glass up to St. James and declared, “Many thanks for the efforts with the computer, Simon. I'm in your debt once again,” and he threw back a mouthful of the sherry.
Deborah looked from Lynley to Helen curiously. For her part, Helen quietly stacked up the graphs as St. James drank to Lynley's toast. A tight little silence fell among them, during which Peach scooted back up the stairs, her dinner consumed. She trotted into the lab expectantly, deposited herself beneath the worktable where the scones still sat, and gave one sharp bark as her plume of a tail dusted the floor.
“Yes. Well,” Deborah said. And then brightly as the dog barked again, “No, Peach. You're not to have any scone. Simon, look at her. She's completely incorrigible.”
Focusing on the little dog got them through the moment, at the end of which Helen began gathering her belongings. She said to St. James, “Simon, dearest, while I'd love to stay and help you labour through the night on this problem …”
His reply was, “You've been a brick to stay this long. I shall muddle onward heroically alone.”
“He's worse than the dog,” Deborah remarked. “Shamelessly manipulative. You'd better be off before he traps you.”
Helen took the advice. Lynley followed her. St. James and Deborah remained in the lab.
Lynley and his wife didn't speak until they were standing on the Cheyne Row pavement with the wind whipping up the street from the river. Then Helen said only, “Well.” She spoke the word to herself, not to him. She looked a mixture of sad and tired. Lynley couldn't tell which was predominant, but he had a good idea.
Helen said, “Did it happen too soon?”
He didn't pretend to misunderstand. “No. No. Of course not.”
“Then what?”
He searched for an explanation he could give her, one that both of them could live with, which would not come back to haunt him sometime in the future. He said, “I don't want to hurt them. I picture how they'll look, creating expressions of pleasure on their faces while inside they're screaming at the inequity of it all.”
“Life's filled with inequities. You of all people know that. You can't make the playing field level for everyone, just as you can't know the future. What's in store for them. What's in store for us.”
“I know that.”
“Then …”
“It's just not as simple as knowing, Helen. Knowing doesn't take their feelings into account.”
“What about my feelings?”
“They mean everything to me. You mean everything to me.” He reached for her and fastened the top button of her coat, adjusting the scarf round her neck. “Let's get you out of the cold. Did you drive? Where's your car?”
“I want to talk about this. You've been acting as if…” She let her voice die. The only way to say it was to say it directly. No metaphor existed to describe what she feared, and he knew that.
He wanted to reassure her, but he couldn't. He'd expected joy, he'd expected excitement; he'd expected the bond of joint anticipation. What he hadn't expected was guilt and dread: the knowledge that he was obliged to bury his dead before he could wholeheartedly welcome his living.
He said, “Let's go home. It's been a long day, and you need your rest.”
She said, “More than rest, Tommy,” and she turned from him.
He watched as she walked to the end of the street where, next to the King's Head and Eight Bells, she'd left her car.
Malcolm Webberly replaced the telephone receiver in its cradle. Quarter to twelve and he shouldn't have rung them, but he couldn't stop himself. Even when his mind had said that it was late, that they would be asleep, that even if Tommy was still working at this hour, Helen would already be in bed and unlikely to be happy with a late-night phone call, he hadn't listened. Because throughout the day, he'd waited for word, and when it hadn't come, he'd realised that he wouldn't sleep that night until he spoke to Lynley.
He could have phoned Eric Leach. He could have asked for an update on the investigation, and Eric would have given him everything he had. But involving Eric would have brought everything back to Webberly with more piercing clarity than he could afford. For Eric had been too close to it all: there in the house in Kensington Square where it had all begun, there at nearly every interview he'd conducted, there to give evidence at the trial. He'd even been there—standing right beside Webberly—when they'd had their first look at the dead baby's body, an unmarried man then who had no idea what it was even to have to consider the loss of a child.
He'd not been able to stop himself thinking of his own Miranda when he'd seen the lifeless body of Sonia Davies lying on the postmortem table. And as the first cut into her flesh was made, that telltale Y-incision that could never be disguised as anything other than the brutal but necessary mutilation it was, he'd flinched and held back a cry of protest that such a cruelty had to be practised where such a cruelty had gone before.
There was cruelty not only in the manner of Sonia Davies' death, though. There was cruelty in her life as well, even if it was only a natural cruelty, a minuscule blip on the genetic screen that had resulted in her condition.
He'd seen the doctors' reports. He'd marveled at the succession of operations and illnesses that such a tiny child had managed to endure in her first two years of life. He'd blessed his own luck in having produced with his wife a miracle of health and vitality in his daughter Miranda, and he wondered how individuals actually coped when what they were given demanded of them more than they'd ever thought they'd be asked to produce.
Eric Leach had wondered the same himself, saying, “Okay, I see why they had a nanny. It was too much to handle, with Granddad half a loon and the son another Mozart or whatever he is. But why'd they not get someone qualified to see to her? They needed a nurse, not a refugee.”
“It was a bad decision,” Webberly had agreed. “And they're going to take a beating for it. But no beating they take in court or in the press will match the beating they'll be giving themselves.”
“Unle
ss …” Leach hadn't completed his remark. He'd looked down at his feet and shuffled them, instead.
“Unless what, Sergeant?”
“Unless the choice was deliberate, sir. Unless they didn't really want proper care for the baby. For reasons of their own.”
Webberly had allowed his face to reveal the disgust he felt. “You don't know what you're talking about. Wait till you have a kid and then see how it feels. No. Don't wait. I'll tell you myself. It feels like killing anyone who'd even look at her sideways.”
And as more information came in over the next few weeks, that's how he'd felt—like killing—because he'd not been able to get away from seeing his own Miranda in the death of this child, who was so unlike her. She was toddling round the house at that point, always with her tattered Eeyore clutched under her arm, and he started seeing danger to her everywhere. In every corner there was something that could claim her, ripping out his heart and gnawing at his entrails. So he'd begun to want to avenge the death of Sonia Davies as a way to ensure his own child's safety. If I bring her killer to an unquestioned justice, he told himself, I will buy God's protection for Randie with the studied coin of my righteousness.
Of course, he hadn't known there was a killer at all, at first. Like everyone else, he'd thought a moment of negligence had resulted in a tragedy that would haunt the lives of everyone concerned. But when the post-mortem uncovered the old fractures on her skeleton and when a closer examination of the body revealed the contusions along her shoulders and her neck that spoke of her being held down and deliberately drowned, he'd felt the blossoming of vengeance within him. It was vengeance for the death of this child, imperfect though she had been born. But it was also vengeance for the mother who had given birth to her.
There were no eyewitnesses and little enough evidence, which troubled Leach but did not worry Webberly. For the crime scene told a tale of its own, and he knew that he could use that tale to support a theory that was quick in coming. There was the bathtub itself with its tray so placidly undisturbed, disavowing the claim that a terrified nursemaid had come upon her charge slipped under the water and frantically called for help as she pulled her out of the tub and attempted to save her. There were the medicines—a cabinet of them—and afterwards the extensive medical records and the story both told about the burden of caring for a child in Sonia's condition. There were the arguments between the nanny and the parents, sworn to by more than one member of the household. And there were the statements given by the parents, the elder child, the grandparents, the teacher, the friend who was supposed to have phoned the nanny on the night in question, and the lodger, who was the only person who tried to avoid any discussion of the German girl at all. And then there was Katja Wolff herself, her preliminary statement, and after that her unbelievable and enduring silence.
Because she wouldn't speak, he had to rely on others who lived with her. I didn't actually see anything that night, I'm afraid … Of course, there were moments of tension when she was dealing with the baby … She wasn't always as patient as she might have been but the circumstances were terribly difficult, weren't they … She seemed eager enough to please at first … It was an argument among the three of them because she'd overslept again … We 'd decided to sack her … She didn't think it was fair … We weren't willing to give her a reference because we didn't think she was suited to childcare. From the others if not from Wolff herself, a pattern of behaviour emerged. With the pattern had come the story, a stitched-together fabric of what had been seen, what had been heard, and what could be concluded from both.
“It's still a weak case,” Leach had said respectfully during a pause in the proceedings at the magistrate's court.
“It's a case all the same,” Webberly had replied. “As long as she keeps her lips locked up, she's doing half our job for us and hanging herself for good measure. I can't think her brief hasn't told her that.”
“She's getting crucified in the press, sir. They're reporting the hearing verbatim, and every time you're talking about interviewing her, when you say ‘she refused to answer the question,’ it's making her look—”
“Eric, what's your bloody point?” Webberly had asked the other officer. “I can't help what the press are printing. That's not our problem. If she's worried how silence might look to potential jurors, then she might consider breaking it for us, mightn't she?”
Their concern, he told Leach, and their job, was to bring justice into an ugly equation, to lay out facts so the magistrate's court could decide to hold her over for trial. And that's what he had done. That was all he had done. He had made justice possible for Sonia Davies' family. He could not have brought them peace or an end to their nightmares. But he could have brought—and did bring—them that.
Now, in the kitchen of his home in Stamford Brook, Webberly sat at the table with a cup of Horlicks fast cooling in front of him, and he thought about what he'd learned in his late-night phone call to Tommy Lynley. Central to his thoughts was one item: that Eugenie Davies had found a man. He was glad of it. For the fact of Eugenie's finding a man might go some distance towards alleviating the remorse he'd never ceased to feel for the cowardly manner in which he'd ended the love between them.
He'd had the best of intentions towards her, right up until the day he knew their relationship could not continue. He'd begun as a dispassionate professional entering into her life to bring justice to her family, and when that rôle had begun to alter upon their chance encounter at Paddington Station, it had at first altered merely to the rôle of friend, and he'd convinced himself that he could maintain it, ignoring that part of him that soon wanted more. She's vulnerable, he'd told himself in a vain effort to hold his feelings in check. She's lost a child and she's lost a marriage, and you must never tread on ground that's so soft and insubstantial.
Had she not been the one to speak what should have remained unspoken, he wouldn't have ventured further. Or at least that was what he told himself during the long period of their affair. She wants this, he claimed, as much as I do, and there are instances when the shackles of social convention must be thrown off in order to embrace that which is obviously a higher good.
The only way for him to justify an affair such as theirs had been to see it in spiritual terms. She completes me, he told himself. What I share with her happens on the level of the soul, not just on the level of the body. And how is a man to live a full life if he has no nurture on the level of the soul?
He didn't have that with his wife. Their relationship, he decided, was the stuff of the temporal, ordinary world. It was a social contract founded on the largely outdated idea of sharing property, having traceable bloodlines for potential offspring, and possessing a mutual interest in cohabitation. Under the agreements of the contract, a man and a woman were to live together, to reproduce if possible, and to provide each other with a lifestyle mutually satisfactory to them both. But nowhere was it written or implied that they were to give succour to each other's imprisoned and earthbound spirit, and that, he told himself, was the problem with marriage. It effected in its participants a sense of complacency. That complacency effected a form of oblivion in which the man and the woman so joined together lost sight of themselves and each other as sentient individuals.
So it had happened in his own marriage. So, he determined, it would not happen within the amorphously described marriage of spirits that he had with Eugenie Davies.
He went further down the path of self-delusion as time passed and he continued to see her. He told himself that his chosen career was tailor-made to support the infidelity that he began to label his God-given right. His job had always called for late and unstructured hours, for entire weekends given to cases under investigation, for sudden absences resulting from phone calls in the night. Why had fate or God or coincidence brought him to such a line of work if he was not intended to use it to further his growth and development as a human being? Thus he persuaded himself to continue, acting the part of his own Mephistopheles, launching a thou
sand ships of faithlessness onto the sea of his life. The fact that he could maintain a virtual double existence by assigning responsibility for his absences to the Met began to convince him that such a double existence was his due.
But mankind's fatal failing is the desire for more of everything. And Webberly's desire had ultimately come to haunt what had begun as a celestial love, rendering it as temporal as everything else but simultaneously making it no less compelling. She'd ended her marriage, after all. He could end his. It would be a matter of a few uncomfortable conversations with his wife, and he would be free.
But he'd never managed to have those conversations with Frances. Her phobias had conversed with him instead, and he'd discovered that he, his love, and all the rightness he could muster to defend that love were no match for the affliction that possessed his wife and that ultimately came to possess them both.
He'd never told Eugenie. He'd written one final letter, asking her to wait, and he'd never written to her again. He'd never phoned her. He'd never seen her. Instead, he'd placed his life on hold, telling himself that he owed it to Frances to gauge each step of her recovery, anticipating the moment when she'd be well enough for him to tell her that he wanted to leave.
By the time he'd understood that his wife's condition would not be something that was easily vanquished, too many months had passed and he could not bear the thought of seeing Eugenie again, only to have to tear himself from her permanently. Cowardice stilled the hand that might have held the pen or dialed the phone number. Better to tell himself that they'd really had nothing—just a few years of passionate interludes that wore the guise of loving unity—than to face her, to have to release her, and to recognise that the rest of his life would be without the meaning he longed to give it. So he just let things go, let them drift away, and he allowed her to think of him what she would.