A Traitor to Memory

  “I packed your things,” Yasmin said. “They're in the bedroom. I didn't want Dan to see … I'll tell him tomorrow. He's used to you not being here some nights anyway.”

  “Yas, it wasn't always—”

  Yasmin could hear her voice go higher as she said, “There's dirty clothes to be washed. I put them separate in a Sainsbury's bag. You can do them tomorrow or borrow a washing machine tonight or stop at a launderette or—”

  “Yasmin, you must hear me. We were not always … Noreen and I … We were not always together as you're thinking we were. This is something …” Katja moved closer again. She put her hand on Yasmin's thigh, and Yasmin felt her body go rigid at the touch and that tensing of muscles, that hardening of joints, brought too much back, brought everything back, shot her into her past, where the faces overhung her….

  She leapt to her feet. She covered her ears. “Stop it! You burn in hell!” she cried.

  Katja held out her hand but didn't rise from the sofa. She said, “Yasmin, listen to me. This is something I cannot explain. It's here inside and it's been here forever. I cannot get it out of my system. I try. It fades. Then it comes back again. With you, Yasmin, you must listen to me. With you, I thought … I hoped …”

  “You used,” Yasmin said. “No thinking, no hoping. Using, Katja. Because what you thought was if things looked like you moved on from her, she'd finally have to step forward and say who she really was. But she didn't do that when you were inside. And she didn't do that when you came out. But you keep thinking she's going to do that, so you set up with me to force her hand. Only that's not how it works 'less she knows what you're up to and with who, right? And it sure's hell don't work 'less you give her a taste now and then of what she's missing.”

  “That is not how it is.”

  “You telling me you haven't done it, the two of you? You haven't been with her since you got out? You haven't been slithering over there after work, after dinner, even after you been with me and say you can't sleep and need a walk and know I won't wake up till morning and I can see it all now, Katja. And I want you gone.”

  “Yas, I have no place to go.”

  Yasmin breathed out a laugh. “I expect one phone call'll sort that out.”

  “Please, Yasmin. Come. Sit. Let me tell you how it has been.”

  “How it's been is you waiting. Oh, I d'n't see't at first. I thought you 're trying to adjust to outside. I thought you 're getting ready to make a life for yourself—for you and me and Dan, Katja—but all the time you were waiting for her. You were always waiting. You were waiting to make yourself part of her life and once you got there, everything in yours'd be taken care of just fine.”

  “That's not how it is.”

  “No? Really? You make one move to get yourself together since you been out? You phone up design schools? You talk to anyone? You walk into one of those Knightsbridge shops and offer yourself as a 'prentice?”

  “No. I have not done that.”

  “And we both know why. You don't need to make a life for yourself if she does it for you.”

  “That is not the case.” Katja rose from the sofa, crushing out her cigarette in the ashtray, spilling ash onto the table top, where it lay like the remnants of disappointed dreams. “I make my own life as always,” she said. “It's different from the life I thought I 'd have, yes. It's different from the life I spoke of inside, yes. But Noreen doesn't make that life for me any more than you do, Yasmin. I make it myself. And that is what I have been doing since I was released. That is what Harriet is helping me to do. That is why I spent twenty years in prison and did not go mad. Because I knew—I knew—what waited for me when I got out.”

  “Her,” Yasmin said. “She waited, right? So go to her. Leave.”

  “No. You must understand. I will make you—”

  Make you, make you, make you. Too many people had made her already. Yasmin clutched her hands to her head.

  “Yasmin, I did three evil things in my life. I made Hannes take me over the wall by threatening to tell the authorities.”

  “That's ancient history.”

  “It's more than that. Listen. That was my first evil, what I did to Hannes. But I also did not speak up when I once should have spoken. That's the second thing. And then, once—only once, Yas, but once was enough—I listened when I should have covered my ears. And I paid for all of it. Twenty years I paid. Because I was lied to. And now others must pay. That's what I have been setting about.”

  “No! I won't hear!” In panic, Yasmin dashed to the bedroom, where she'd packed up Katja's small wardrobe of bright secondhand clothes—all those clothes that defined who Katja was, a woman who would never wear black in a city where black was everywhere—into a duffel bag that she'd bought for that purpose, laying out her own money as a way of paying for every mistake she'd made in trust. She didn't want to hear, but more than that, she knew she couldn't afford to hear. Hearing what Katja had to say put her at risk, put her future with Daniel at risk, and she wouldn't do that.

  She grabbed the duffel bag and slung it out into the sitting room. She followed it with the Sainsbury bag of dirty laundry and then the single cardboard box that contained the toiletries and other supplies Katja had brought with her when she'd first moved into the flat. She cried out, “I told him, Katja. He knows. You got that? I told him. I told.”

  She said, “Who?”

  “You know who. Him.” Yasmin drew her fingers down her cheek to indicate the scar that marked the black detective's face. “You weren't here watching the telly, and he knows.”

  “But he is … they are … all of them … Yas, you know they are your enemy. What they did to you when you defended yourself against Roger … What they put you through? How could you trust—”

  “That's what you were depending on, wasn't it? Old Yas won't ever trust a copper, no matter what he says, no matter what I do. So I'll just set myself up with good old Yas, and she'll protect me when they come calling. She'll follow my lead, just like she did inside. But that's over, Katja. Whatever it was, and I don't much care. It's over.”

  Katja looked down at the bags. She said quietly, “We are so close to ending things after all these—”

  Yasmin slammed the bedroom door to cut off her words and to cut herself off from further danger. And then, finally, she began to weep. Over her tears, she could hear the sound of Katja gathering up her belongings. When the flat door opened and closed a moment later, Yasmin Edwards knew her lover was gone.

  “So it's not about the kid,” Havers said to Lynley concluding the update of her second visit to the Convent of the Immaculate Conception. “He's called Jeremy Watts, by the way. The nun's always known where he was; Katja Wolff's always known that she's known. She's gone twenty years without asking about him. She's gone twenty years without talking to Sister Cecilia at all. So it's not about the kid.”

  “There's something not natural in that,” Lynley said reflectively. “There's plenty not natural in all of her,” Havers replied. “In all of them. I mean, what's going on with Richard Davies, Inspector? Okay, all right. Virginia was retarded. He was cut up about that. Who wouldn't be? But never even to see her again … and to let his dad dictate … And why the hell were he and Lynn living with his dad anyway? Sure, those were impressive digs in Kensington and maybe Richard's a bloke who likes to make an impression. And p'rhaps Mum and Dad might've lost the ancestral pile or something if Richard didn't contribute by living there and paying through the nose or whatever, but still …”

  “The relationship between fathers and sons is always complicated,” Lynley said.

  “More than mothers and daughters?” “Indeed. Because so much more goes unspoken.” They were in a café on Hampstead High Street, not far from the station on Downshire Hill. They'd rendezvoused there by prior arrangement, Havers phoning Lynley on his mobile as he was setting out from Stamford Brook. He'd told her about Webberly's heart attack, and she'd cursed fervently and asked what she could do. His answer had been what Ran
die's had been when she'd phoned the house from the hospital to share an update with her mother not long before Lynley left: They could do nothing but pray; the doctors were watching him.

  She'd said, “What the hell does ‘watching him’ mean?”

  Lynley hadn't replied because it seemed to him that “watching the patient's progress” was a medical euphemism for waiting for an appropriate moment to pull the plug. Now, across the table from Havers with an undoctored espresso (his) and a coffee loaded with milk and sugar not to mention a pain au chocolat (both hers) between them, Lynley dug out his handkerchief from his pocket and spread it out on the table, disclosing its contents.

  He said, “We may be down to this,” and indicated the shards of glass he'd taken from the edge of the pavement in Crediton Hill.

  Havers scrutinised them. “Headlamp?” she asked.

  “Not considering where I found them. Swept under a hedge.”

  “Could be nothing, sir.”

  “I know,” Lynley said gloomily.

  “Where's Winnie? What's he come up with, Inspector?”

  “He's on Katja Wolff 's trail.” Lynley filled her in on what Nkata had reported to him earlier.

  She said, “So are you leaning towards Wolff? Because like I said—”

  “I know. If she's our killer, it's not about her son. So what's her motive?”

  “Revenge? Could they have framed her, Inspector?”

  “With Webberly part of the they? Christ. I don't want to think so.”

  “But with him involved with Eugenie Davies …” Havers had brought her coffee to her lips, but she didn't drink, instead, looking at him over the top of it. “I'm not saying he would've done it deliberately, sir. But if he was involved, he could've been blinded, could've been … well, led to believe … You know.”

  “That presupposes the CPS, a jury, and a judge were all led to believe as well,” Lynley said.

  “It's happened,” Havers pointed out. “And more than once. You know that.”

  “All right. Accepted. But why didn't she speak? If evidence was altered, if testimony was false, why didn't she speak?”

  “There's that,” Havers sighed. “We always come back to it.”

  “We do.” Lynley took a pencil from his breast pocket. With it, he moved about the pieces of glass at the centre of his handkerchief. “Too thin for a headlamp,” he told Havers. “The first pebble that hit it—on the motorway, for instance—would have smashed to bits a headlamp made of this sort of glass.”

  “Broken glass in a hedgerow? It's probably from a bottle. Someone coming out of a party with a bottle of plonk under his arm. He's had a few and he staggers. It drops, breaks, and he kicks the shards to one side.”

  “But there's no curve, Havers. Look at the larger pieces. They're straight.”

  “Okay. They're straight. But if you expect to tie these to one of our principals, I think you're going to be wandering in the outback without a guide.”

  Lynley knew she was right. He gathered the handkerchief together again, slipped it into his pocket, and brooded. His fingers played with the top of his espresso cup as his eyes examined the ring of sludge left in it. For her part, Havers polished off her pain au chocolat, emerging from the exercise with flakes of pastry on her lips.

  He said, “You're hardening your arteries, Constable.”

  “And now I'm going after my lungs.” She wiped her mouth with a paper napkin and dug out her packet of Players. She said in advance of his protest, “I'm owed this. It's been a long day. I'll blow it over my shoulder, okay?”

  Lynley was too dispirited to argue. Webberly's condition was heavy in his mind, weighing only slightly less than Frances's knowledge of her husband's affair. He forced himself away from these thoughts, saying, “All right. Let's look at everyone again. Notes?”

  Havers blew out a lungful of smoke impatiently. “We've done this, Inspector. We don't have a thing.”

  “We've got to have something,” Lynley said, putting on his reading glasses. “Notes, Havers.”

  She groused but brought them out of her shoulder bag. Lynley took his from his jacket pocket. They started with those individuals without alibis that could be corroborated.

  Ian Staines was Lynley's first offering. He was desperate for money, which his sister had promised to request from her son. But she'd reneged on that promise, leaving Staines in dangerous straits. “He looks about to lose his home,” Lynley said. “The night of the death, they rowed. He could have followed her up to London. He didn't get home till after one.”

  “But the car's not right,” Havers said. “Unless he had a second vehicle with him in Henley.”

  “Which he may have done,” Lynley noted. “Parked there previously just in case. Someone has access to a second vehicle, Havers.”

  They went on to the multi-named J. W. Pitchley, Havers' prime candidate at this point. “What the hell,” she wanted to know, “was his address doing in Eugenie's possession? Why was she heading to see him? Staines says she told him something came up. Was that something Pitchley?”

  “Possibly, save for the fact that we can establish no tie between them. No phone tie, internet tie—”

  “Snail mail?”

  “How did she track him down?”

  “Same way I did, Inspector. She figured he'd changed identities once, why not again?”

  “All right. But why would she arrange to see him?”

  Havers took a different tack from all the possibilities she'd offered earlier in the case. She said, “Maybe he arranged to see her once she'd located him. And she contacted him because …” Havers considered the potential reasons, settling on, “because Katja Wolff just got out of the slammer. If the whole boiling lot of them framed her and she was finally out of prison, they'd have plans to lay, right? About how to deal with her if she came calling?”

  “But we're back to that, Havers. An entire household of people framing an individual who then doesn't utter a word in her own defence? Why?”

  “Fear of what they could do to her? The granddad sounds like a real terror. P'rhaps he got to her in some way. He said, ‘Play our game or we'll let the world know …’” Havers considered this and rejected her own idea, saying, “Know what? That she was in the club? Big deal. Like anyone cared at that point? It came out that she was pregnant anyway.”

  Lynley held up a hand to stop her from dismissing the thought. He said, “But you could be on to something, Barbara. It could have been ‘Play our game or we'll let it out who the father of your baby is.’”

  “Big deal again.”

  “Yes, big deal,” Lynley argued, “if it's not a case of letting the world know who the father is but letting Eugenie Davies know.”

  “Richard?”

  “It wouldn't be the first time the man of the house got entangled with the nanny.”

  “What about him, then?” Havers said. “What about Davies knocking off Eugenie?”

  “Motive and alibi,” Lynley pointed out. “He doesn't have one. He has the other. Although the reverse could be said of Robson.”

  “But where does Webberly fit in? In fact, where does he fit in no matter who we go with?”

  “He fits in only with Wolff. And that takes us back to the original crime: the murder of Sonia Davies. And that takes us back to the initial group who were involved in the subsequent investigation.”

  “P'rhaps someone's just making it look like everything's connected to that period of time, sir. Because isn't it the truth that a more profound connection exists: the romantic one between Webberly and Eugenie Davies? And that takes us to Richard, doesn't it? To Richard or to Frances Webberly.”

  Lynley didn't want to think of Frances. He said, “Or to Gideon, blaming Webberly for the end of his parents' marriage.”

  “That's weak.”

  “But something's going on with him, Havers. If you met him, you'd agree. And he has no alibi other than being home alone.”

  “Where was his dad?”

  Lynl
ey referred to his notes once again. “With the fiancée. She confirms.”

  “But he's got a much better motive than Gideon if the Webberly-Eugenie connection's behind this.”

  “Hmm. Yes. I do see that. But to assign him the motive of rubbing out his wife and Webberly begs the question of why he would wait all these years to see to the job.”

  “He had to wait till now. This is when Katja Wolff was released. He'd know we'd establish a trail to her.”

  “That's nursing a grievance for a hell of a long time.”

  “So maybe it's a more recent grievance.”

  “More recent …? Are you arguing he's fallen in love with her a second time in his life?” Lynley considered his question. “All right. I think it's unlikely, but for the sake of argument, I'll go with it. Let's consider the possibility that he's had his love for his former wife reawakened. We begin with him divorced from her.”

  “Destroyed by the fact that she walked out on him,” Havers added.

  “Right. Now, Gideon has trouble with the violin. His mother reads about that trouble in the papers or hears it from Robson. She gets back in touch with Davies.”

  “They talk often. They begin to reminisce. He thinks they're going to make a go of it again, and he's hot to trot—”

  “This is, of course, ignoring the entire question of Jill Foster,” Lynley pointed out.

  “Hang on, Inspector. Richard and Eugenie talk about Gideon. They talk about old times, their marriage, whatever. Everything he's felt gets fired up again. He becomes a potato all hot for the oven, only to find out that Eugenie's got someone lined up in her knickers already: Wiley.”

  “Not Wiley,” Lynley said. “He's too old. Davies wouldn't see him as competition. Besides, Wiley told us she had something she wanted to reveal to him. She'd said as much. But she didn't want to reveal it three nights ago—”

  “Because she was headed to London,” Havers said. “To Crediton Hill.”

  “To Pitchley-Pitchford-Pytches,” Lynley said. “The end is always the beginning, isn't it?” He found the reference in his notes that supplied a single piece of information that had been there all along, just waiting for the correct interpretation. He said, “Wait. When I brought up the idea of another man, Havers, Davies went straight to him. By name, in fact. Without a doubt in his mind. I've got him naming Pytches right here in my notes.”