A Traitor to Memory

“My daughter was retarded from birth, Constable. She had the body of a woman and the mind of a two-year-old child.”

  “Oh. Hell. I'm sorry to hear that.”

  “Her heart wasn't right. We knew from the first it would fail her eventually. But her spirit was strong, so she surprised everyone and lived thirty-two years.”

  “Here at home with you?”

  “It wasn't an easy life for either of us. But when I consider what might have been, I have no regrets. I gained more than I lost when my marriage ended. And ultimately, I couldn't blame Richard for asking for the divorce.”

  “And then he remarried and had another …” Again, there was no useful catch phrase. Lynn supplied her own, saying, “A child imperfect as we measure perfection. Yes. Richard had another, and those who believe in a vengeful God might argue that he was being punished for having abandoned us, Virginia and me. But I don't think that's how God works. Richard wouldn't have asked us to leave in the first place if I'd only agreed to have more children.”

  “Asked you to leave?” What a prince among men, Barbara thought. Here was something for a bloke to be proud of: having asked his wife and his retarded child to find themselves new digs.

  Lynn hastened to explain. “We lived with his parents, in the house he himself had grown up in. So when it came time to part, it didn't make sense that Virginia and I should stay with Richard's parents while Richard left. And, anyway, that was part of the problem: Richard's parents. His father was completely unmoveable on the subject of Virginia. He wanted her put away. He insisted on it. And Richard was … It was so important to him to have his father's approval. So he was won over to that way of thinking, about putting Virginia into a home. But I wouldn't hear of it. After all, this was …” Her eyes again showed her pain, and she stopped for a moment before saying with simple dignity, “She was our child. She hadn't asked to be born the way she was. Who were we to think we could chuck her away? And that's what Richard himself thought at first. Until his father brought him round.” She looked again to the alcove, to the bright smeared paintings that decorated it, saying, “He was a terrible man, Jack Davies was. I know he'd suffered horribly in the war. I know his mind was a ruin and he couldn't be blamed for the ugliness inside him. But to hate an innocent child so much that she wasn't allowed to be in the room with him …? That was wrong, Constable. That was terribly wrong.”

  “It sounds like hell,” Barbara acknowledged.

  “A form of it. ‘Thank God she doesn't spring from my blood,’ he used to say. And Richard's mother would murmur, ‘Jack, Jack, you don't actually mean that,’ when all the time you could see that if there was a single way that he could wipe Virginia's existence from this planet, he would have gladly made the attempt without a second thought.” Lynn's lips trembled. “And now she's gone. Wouldn't Jack be happy now.” She shoved her hand into the pocket of her blue jeans and brought out a crumpled tissue, which she pressed beneath her eyes, saying, “I'm terribly sorry. Forgive me for running on in this way. I shouldn't be … God, how I miss her.”

  “It's okay,” Barbara said. “You're trying to cope.”

  “And now Eugenie,” Lynn Davies said. “How can I help with what's happened to Eugenie? I expect that's why you've come, isn't it? Not just to tell me but to ask for my help?”

  “You and Mrs. Davies had a bond, I expect. Through your children.”

  “Not at first. It was when her little Sonia died that we met. Eugenie simply turned up on my doorstep one day. She wanted to talk. I was happy to listen.”

  “You saw her regularly, then?”

  “Yes. She dropped round often. She needed to talk—what mother wouldn't in those circumstances?—and I was glad to be here for her. She felt she couldn't talk to Richard, you see, and while there was a Catholic nun she was close to, the nun wasn't a mother, was she? And that's what Eugenie needed: another mother to talk to, and especially the mother of a special child. She was grieving terribly, and there was no one in that household who could understand how she felt. But she knew about me and she knew about Virginia because Richard had told her shortly after they married.”

  “Not before they married? That's odd.”

  Lynn smiled resignedly. “That's Richard, Constable Havers. He paid maintenance till Virginia reached adulthood, but he never saw her once she and I left him. I did think he might come to the funeral. I let him know when she died. But he sent flowers and that was that.”

  “Brilliant,” Barbara muttered.

  “He is who he is. Not a bad man, but not a man equipped to cope with a handicapped child. And not everyone is. At least I'd had some practical training in nursing, while Richard … well, what did he have but his brief career in the Army? And anyway, he wanted to carry on the family name, which meant, naturally, that he would have to find a second wife. And that actually turned out to be the right thing to do, didn't it, because Eugenie gave him Gideon.”

  “The jackpot.”

  “In a way. But I expect the burden of giving birth to a prodigy is an enormous one. A different set of responsibilities but just as heavy.”

  “Eugenie didn't say?”

  “She never spoke much of Gideon. And then, when she and Richard divorced, she never spoke of Gideon at all. Or of Richard. Or of any of them. Mostly, when she came, she helped me with Virginia. She loved the parks, Virginia did, the cemeteries as well. It was our special joy to take a ramble in Camberwell Old Cemetery. But I didn't like to do it without someone else with us, to help keep an eye on Virginia. If I was there with her alone, I had to fix my attention on her and I got no pleasure from the afternoon. But with Eugenie there, it was easier. She would watch her. I would watch her. We could talk, bask in the sun, read the gravestones. She was very good to us.”

  “Did you speak to her the day of Virginia's funeral?” Barbara asked.

  “Of course. Yes. But we didn't speak of anything that could help your enquiry, I'm afraid. Just about Virginia. The loss. How I was coping. Eugenie was a great comfort to me. Indeed, she'd been a comfort for years. And Virginia … She actually came to know Eugenie. To recognise her. To—” Lynn stopped. She rose and went to the alcove where she stood in front of the easel on which her daughter's final painting marked her quick passage from life into death. She said in a contemplative voice, “Yesterday I did several of these myself. I wanted to feel what had given her such joy. But I couldn't reach that place. I tried painting after painting till my hands were black from all the colours I'd mixed together, and still I couldn't feel it. So I finally saw how blessed she actually had been: to be eternally a child who asked so little of life.”

  “There's a lesson in that,” Barbara agreed.

  “Yes. Isn't there.” She studied the painting.

  Barbara stirred in her seat, wanting to bring Lynn Davies back. She said, “Eugenie'd been seeing a bloke in Henley, Mrs. Davies. A retired Army bloke called Ted Wiley. He owns the bookshop across the street from her house. Did she ever speak of him?”

  Lynn Davies turned from the painting. “Ted Wiley? A bookshop? No. She never talked of Ted Wiley.”

  “Of anyone else she might have been involved with?”

  Lynn thought about this. “She was careful with what she revealed about herself. She'd always been that way. But I think … I don't know if this is any help, but the last time we spoke—this would be before I rang to tell her about Virginia's passing—she mentioned … Well, I don't know if it actually meant anything. At least I don't know if it meant she'd become involved.”

  “It might be of help,” Barbara told her. “What did she say?”

  “It wasn't so much what she said but the way she said it. There was a lightness to her voice that I'd never heard before. She asked me if I believed that one could fall in love where one wasn't expecting to find love. She asked me if I thought that years could pass and one could suddenly look upon someone in a light entirely different from the way one had looked on him in the past. She asked me if I thought love could grow from that, from
that new way of looking. Could she have been talking about the Army man with that? Someone she'd known for years but never thought of as a lover till now?”

  Barbara wondered about this. It did seem likely. But there was something more to consider: Eugenie Davies' whereabouts at the time of her death and the address in her possession suggested something else.

  She said, “Did she ever mention James Pitchford?”

  Lynn shook her head.

  “What about Pitchley? Or Pytches, perhaps?”

  “She didn't mention anyone by name. But that's how she was: a very private person.”

  A very private person who'd ended up murdered, Barbara thought. And she wondered if the dead woman's need for privacy was at the core of her killing.

  DCI Eric Leach listened to the sister in charge of the intensive care unit at Charing Cross Hospital as she essentially told him the worst. No change was what they said when the doctors were handing over the reins of someone's condition to God, fate, nature, or time. It was not what they said when someone made some sort of gain, side-stepped the grim reaper, or achieved a sudden and miraculous recovery. Leach hung up the phone and turned from his desk, brooding. He brooded not only over what had happened to Malcolm Webberly but also over his own inadequacies and what they were doing to his ability to anticipate the investigation's twists and turns.

  He had to deal with the problem of Esmé. That much was clear. How to deal with it would come to him soon. But that he had to deal with it was obvious. Because had he not been distracted by Esmé’s fears about her mum's new boyfriend—not to mention by his own feelings about Bridget having found a replacement for him—he surely would have remembered that J. W. Pitchley, AKA James Pitchford, had also once been Jimmy Pytches, whose ties to an infant's death in Tower Hamlets had long ago been the subject of the London tabloids' delight. Not when that infant died, of course, that situation having sorted itself out soon enough after the post-mortem. But years later, after another child died in Kensington.

  Once that pug-like Yard woman had revealed this titbit, Leach had remembered it all. He'd tried to tell himself that he'd deleted the information from his memory banks because it hadn't amounted to anything but aggro for Pitchford during the investigation into the Davies baby's death. But the truth was, he should have remembered it, and it was down to Bridget and Bridget's boyfriend and especially Esmé’s anxiety over Bridget's boyfriend that he hadn't. And he couldn't afford not to remember what he needed to remember about that long-ago case. Because it was seeming to him more and more probable that that case had a link to this one, which was unlikely to be easily severed.

  A PC popped his head into his office doorway, saying, “We've got that bloke from West Hampstead you were asking for, sir. D'you want him in an interview room?”

  “Got his brief with him?”

  “What else? I don't expect he takes a dump in the morning without checking with his solicitor to see how many sheets of toilet paper he's got a right to use.”

  “Make it an interview room, then,” Leach said. He didn't like allowing solicitors to think they'd somehow intimidated him, and showing Pitchley-Pitchford-Pytches into his office felt like something that would do just that.

  He took a few minutes to make the call that would release Pitchley's motor to him. There was nothing more to be gained by holding the Boxter, and it seemed to Leach that their possession of past details about James Pitchford and Jimmy Pytches was more likely to chisel information from the man than was their continuing to hold on to his car.

  After the call, he grabbed a cup of coffee and went to the interview room where Pitchley-Pitchford-Pytches—Leach was beginning to think of him as P-Man for simple ease of keeping track of all his names—and his solicitor were waiting, seated at the interview table. Azoff was smoking despite the posted sign expressly forbidding it, his way of sneering “bugger you for ten pence,” while P-Man was working his hands through his hair like someone trying to rolf his brain.

  “I've advised my client to say nothing,” Azoff began, eschewing anything that might have done for a greeting. “He's cooperated thus far with no sign on your part of recompensing him in any way.”

  “Recompensing?” Leach said incredulously. “What d'you think this is, man? We're running a murder enquiry here, and if we need your boy to assist us, we're going to bloody well have him.”

  “I see no reason to carry on with these meetings if he's not going to be charged with something,” Azoff countered.

  At which P-Man looked up, mouth open, his face a veritable picture of “what the hell are you saying, you berk?” Leach liked this, because a man who was innocent of everything even remotely related to a case under investigation would hardly look at his solicitor like a back-alley thug with a garrote in his hand just because the lawyer said the words “charge him.” A man who was innocent would wear an expression saying, “Yeah. Got that, Jack?” and he'd direct that expression at the cop. But P-Man wasn't doing that, which made Leach more certain than ever that he needed to be broken. He wasn't sure what breaking him would actually gain them, but he was more than willing to try it.

  He said, “Well. Right. Mr. Pytches,” quite affably.

  To which Azoff said, “Pitchley,” with an irritation that he underscored with a gust of tobacco smoke blown into the air, carrying on it the accompanying olfactory tincture of advanced halitosis.

  Leach said, “Ah. Doesn't know it all, then, does he?” to P-Man with a nod at the solicitor. “Got some nooks and crannies in the skeleton cupboard you've not shone a torch into, yes?”

  P-Man sank his head into his hands, body language for his sudden realisation that his bollixed-up life had just become a degree more bollixed up. “I've told you everything I can tell you,” he said, sidestepping the Jimmy Pytches issue. “I've not seen that woman—I've not seen any of them—since six months after the trial. I moved on. Well, what else could I do? New house, new life—”

  “New name,” Leach said. “Just like before. But Mr. Azoff here doesn't seem to know that a bloke like you with a past like yours has a way of getting sucked into events, Mr. Pytches. Even when he thinks he's weighted that past in concrete boots and chucked it into the Thames.”

  “What the hell are you on about, Leach?” Azoff said.

  “Get rid of that shit burner you've got in your mouth, and I'll do what I can to elucidate,” Leach answered. “This is a non-smoking area, and I presume that reading is one of your talents, Mr. Azoff.”

  Azoff took his time about removing the cigarette from his mouth, and he took even more time to dislodge its ash against the sole of his shoe, carefully so as to preserve the remaining tobacco for his later pleasure. During this performance, P-Man, unbidden, unspooled most of his story for the solicitor. At the end of a recitation that was as brief and as positively slanted as possible, P-Man said, “I've not mentioned this cot-death business before because there was no need, Lou. And there's still no need. Or at least there wouldn't be if this”—a jerk of his head at Leach indicated that the demonstrative pronoun was as close as P-Man intended to come to dignifying Leach's presence by actually giving him a name—“hadn't made up his mind to something that bears no relationship whatsoever to the truth.”

  “Pytches,” Azoff said, and while he sounded thoughtful as he said the name, his narrowing eyes suggested that his thoughts had less to do with absorbing a new piece of information than they had to do with what he planned as a disciplinary measure for a client who continued to withhold facts from him, making him look like a fool each time he was forced to face the police. “You say another kid who died, Jay?”

  “Two kids and a woman,” Leach reminded him. “And counting, by the way. Another victim got hit last night. Where were you, Pytches?”

  “That's not fair!” P-Man cried. “I haven't seen a single one of those people … I haven't talked to … I don't know why she had my address with her … And I certainly don't believe—”

  “Last night,” Leach repeated.


  “Nothing. Nowhere. At home. Where the hell else would I be when you've got my car?”

  “Picked up by someone, perhaps,” Leach said.

  “Who? Someone I supposedly joined for a nice dash round London for a quick hit-and-run?”

  “I don't think I mentioned it was hit-and-run.”

  “Don't make yourself out to be so bloody clever. You said another victim. You said another hit. You can't expect me to think you meant hitting someone with a cricket bat, can you? Else why would I be here?”

  He was getting hot under the collar. Leach liked that. He also liked the fact that P-Man's brief was just cheesed off enough to let him twist in the wind for a minute or two. That could be distinctly useful.

  He said, “Good question, Mr. Pytches.”

  “Pitchley,” P-Man said.

  “What have you seen of Katja Wolff lately?”

  “Kat—” P-Man halted himself. “What about Katja Wolff?” he asked, quietly cautious.

  “I had a look through ancient history this morning and I found you never gave evidence at her trial.”

  “I wasn't asked to give evidence. I was in the house, but I didn't see anything and there was no reason—”

  “But the Beckett woman did. The boy's teacher. Sarah-Jane she was called. My notes—have I mentioned that I keep all my records from investigations?—show that you and she were together when the kid got the chop. You were together, which must mean you both saw everything or nothing at all, but in any event—”

  “I didn't see anything.”

  “—in any event,” Leach continued forcefully, “Beckett gave evidence while you stayed mum. Why was that?”

  “She was the boy's teacher. Gideon. The brother. She saw more of the family. She saw more of the little girl. She saw what kind of care Katja gave her, so she must have thought she had something to contribute. And listen, I wasn't asked to give evidence. I spoke to the police, I gave my statement, I waited for more but I wasn't asked.”

  “Convenient, that.”

  “Why? Are you trying to suggest—”