A Traitor to Memory

  “Phone her name into the incident room anyway,” Lynley told Nkata. “Have them run her through the DVLA. Where's Wolff now?”

  “'Xpect she's home in Kennington,” Nkata said. “I'm heading over there now.”

  “Why?”

  There was a pause on Nkata's end before the constable said, “Thought it best to let her know she's in the clear. I was rough on her.”

  Lynley wondered exactly whom the constable meant when he said her. “First phone Leach with the McKay woman's name. Her address as well.”

  “After that?”

  “See to the Kennington situation. But, Winnie, go easy.”

  “Why's that, 'Spector?”

  “We've another hit-and-run.” Lynley brought him into the picture, telling him that he and Havers were heading to Portman Street. “With Davies down, we've got a new match. New rules, new players, and for all we know, an entirely new objective.”

  “But with the Wolff woman having an alibi—”

  “Just go easy,” Lynley cautioned. “There's more to know.”

  When Lynley rang off, he brought Havers into the picture. She said at his conclusion, “The pickings are getting slim, Inspector.”

  “Aren't they just,” Lynley replied.

  Another ten minutes and they had made the circuit to come into Portman Street, where, had they not known an accident had happened, they would have concluded as much from the flashing lights a short distance from the square and the car-park quality of the stationary traffic. They pulled to the kerb, half in a bus lane and half on the pavement.

  They trudged through the rain in the direction of the flashing lights, shouldering their way through a crowd of onlookers. The lights came from two panda cars that were blocking the bus lane and a third that was impeding the flow of traffic. The constables from one of the cars were in conversation with a traffic warden in the middle of the street, while those from the other two cars were divided between talking to people on the pavement and wedging themselves into the upper and lower parts of a bus that was itself parked at an angle with one tyre on the kerb. There was no ambulance anywhere in sight. Nor was there any sign of a scene-of-crime team. And the actual point of impact—which certainly had to be where the panda was parked in the traffic lane—had yet to be cordoned off. Which meant that what valuable evidence might be there wasn't being safeguarded and would soon be lost. Lynley muttered a curse.

  With Havers on his heels, he squeezed through the crowd and showed his identification to the nearest policeman, a bobby in an anorak. Water dripped from his helmet onto his neck. Periodically, he slapped it away.

  “What's happened?” Lynley asked the constable. “Where's the victim?”

  “Off to hospital,” the constable said.

  “He's alive, then?” Lynley glanced at Havers. She gave him a thumbs-up. “What's his condition?”

  “Damn lucky, I'd say. Last time we had something like this, we were scraping the corpse off the pavement for a week, and the driver wasn't fit to go another hundred yards.”

  “You've witnesses? We'll need to speak with them.”

  “Oh, aye? How's that?”

  “We've a similar hit-and-run in West Hampstead,” Lynley told him. “Another in Hammersmith. And a third in Maida Vale. This one today involves a man who's related to one of our earlier victims.”

  “Your facts are off.”

  “What?” Havers was the one to ask.

  “This isn't a hit-and-run.” The constable nodded at the bus, where inside, one of his colleagues was taking a statement from a woman in the seat directly behind the driver's. The driver himself was out on the pavement, gesticulating to his left front headlamp and speaking earnestly to another policeman. “Bus hit someone,” the constable clarified. “Pedestrian was shoved out from the pavement directly into its path. Lucky he wasn't killed. Mr. Nai”—here he gave a nod to the driver of the bus—“has good reflexes and the bus had its brakes serviced last week. We've got some bumps and bruises from the sudden stop—this is on the passengers inside—and the victim's got a bone or two broken, but that's the extent of it.”

  “Did anyone see who pushed him?” Lynley asked.

  “That's what we're trying to find out, mate.”

  Jill left the Humber in a spot marked clearly for ambulances only, but she didn't care. Let them tow, clamp, or fine her. She squirmed out from beneath the steering wheel and walked rapidly to the entrance for accidents and emergencies. There was no receptionist to greet her, just a guard behind a plain wooden desk.

  He took a look at Jill and said, “Shall I ring your doctor, Madam, or is he meeting you here?”

  Jill said, “What?” before she understood the inference that the guard was drawing from her condition, her personal appearance, and her frantic state. She said, “No. No doctor,” to which the man said, “You have no doctor?” in a disapproving tone.

  Ignoring him, Jill made a lumbering dash in the direction of someone who looked like a doctor. He was consulting a clipboard and wore a stethoscope round his neck, which gave him an air of authority that the guard did not possess. Jill cried, “Richard Davies?” and the doctor looked up. “Where is Richard Davies? I was phoned. I was told to come. He's been brought in and don't tell me … you mustn't tell me he's … Please. Where is he?”

  “Jill …”

  She swung round. He was leaning against a jamb whose door opened into what appeared to be some sort of treatment room just behind the guard's desk. Beyond him, she could see trolleys with people lying upon them, covered to their chins in thin pastel blankets, and beyond the trolleys she could see cubicles formed by curtains at the bottom of which the feet of those ministering to the injured, the critically ill, or the dying were only just visible.

  Richard was from among the merely injured. Jill felt her knees grow weak at the sight of him. She cried, “Oh God, I thought you were … They said … When they phoned …” and she began to weep, which was utterly unlike her and told her just how terrified she'd been.

  He stumbled to her and they held each other. He said, “I asked them not to phone you. I told them I'd ring you myself so that you'd know, but they insisted … It's their procedure … If I'd known how upset … Here, Jill, don't cry …”

  He tried to fish out a handkerchief for her, which was how she first noticed that his right arm was in plaster. And then she noticed the rest of it: the walking cast on his right foot which she could now see beyond the ripped-open seam of his navy trousers, the ugly bruising on one side of his face, and the row of stitches beneath his right eye.

  “What happened?” she cried.

  He said, “Get me home, darling. They want me to spend the night—but I don't need … I can't think …” He gazed at her earnestly. “Jill, will you take me home?”

  She said of course. Had he ever doubted that she'd be there, do what he asked of her, tend to him, nurse him?

  He thanked her with a gratitude that she found touching. And when they gathered his things together, she was even more touched to see that he'd managed the shopping he'd gone out to do. He brought five mangled and soiled shopping bags out of the treatment room with him. “At least I found the intercom,” he said wryly.

  They made their way to the car, ignoring the protest of the young doctor and even younger nurse who tried to stop them. Their progress was slow, Richard needing to stop to rest every four paces or so. As they went out of the ambulance entrance, he told her briefly what had happened.

  He'd gone into more than one shop, he said, looking for what he had in mind. He ended up making more purchases than he'd expected, and the shopping bags were unwieldy in the crowds out on the pavement.

  “I wasn't paying attention, and I should have been,” he told her. “There were so many people.”

  He was making his way along Portman Street to where he'd left his Granada in the underground car park in Portman Square. The pavement was packed: shoppers running for one last purchase in Oxford Street before the shops closed, busi
ness people heading for home, streams of students jostling one another, the homeless eager to find doorways for the night and a handout of coins to keep them from hunger. “You know how it can be in that part of town,” he said. “It was madness to go there, but I just didn't want to put it off any longer.”

  The shove, he said, came out of nowhere just as a Number 74 bus was pulling out from its stop. Before he knew what was happening, he was hurtling straight into the vehicle's path. One tyre drove over—

  “Your arm,” Jill said. “Your arm. Oh Richard—”

  “The police said how lucky I was,” Richard finished. “It could have been … You know what might have happened.” He'd paused again in their walk to the car.

  Jill said angrily, “People don't take care any longer. They're in such a hurry all the time. They walk down the street with their mobiles fixed to their skulls and they don't even see anyone else.” She touched his bruised cheek. “Let me get you home, darling. Let me baby you a bit.” She smiled at him fondly. “I'll make you some soup and soldiers, and I'll pop you into bed.”

  “I'll need to be at my own place tonight,” he said. “Forgive me, Jill, but I couldn't face sleeping on your sofa.”

  “Of course you couldn't,” she said. “Let's get you home.” She repositioned the five shopping bags that she had taken from him in Casualty. They were heavy and awkward, she thought. It was no wonder he'd been distracted by them.

  She said, “What did the police do with the person who pushed you?”

  “They don't know who it was.”

  “Don't know …? How is that possible, Richard?”

  He shrugged. She knew him well enough to understand at once that he wasn't telling her everything.

  She said, “Richard?”

  “Whoever it was, he didn't come forward once I was hit. For all I know, he—or she—didn't even know I fell into the traffic. It happened so fast, and just as the bus was pulling away from the kerb. If they were in a rush …” He adjusted his jacket over his shoulder, where it hung cape-like because he could not fit it over the cast on his arm. “I just want to forget it happened.”

  Jill said, “Surely someone would have seen something.”

  “They were interviewing people when the ambulance fetched me.” He spied the Humber where Jill had left it and lurched towards it in silence. Jill followed him, saying, “Richard, are you telling me everything?”

  He didn't reply until they were at the car. Then he said, “They think it was deliberate, Jill,” and then, “Where's Gideon? He needs to be warned.”

  Jill hardly knew what she was doing as she opened the car door, flipped the seat forward, and deposited Richard's packages in the back. Jill saw her lover safely into his seat and then joined him behind the wheel of the car. She said, “What do you mean, deliberate?” and she looked straight ahead at the worm tracks that the rain was making on her windscreen and she tried to hide her fear.

  He made no reply. She turned to him. She said, “Richard, what do you mean by deliberate? Is this connected to—” and then she saw that he was holding in his lap the frame she'd found beneath her seat.

  He said, “Where did you get this?”

  She told him and added, “But I can't understand … Where did it come from? Who is she? I don't know her. I don't recognise … And surely she can't be …” Jill hesitated, not wanting to say it.

  Richard did so for her. “This is Sonia. My daughter.”

  And Jill felt a ring of ice take a sudden position round her heart. In the half light coming from the hospital entrance, she reached for the picture and tilted it towards her. In it, a child—blonde as her brother had been in childhood—held a stuffed panda up to her cheek. She laughed at the camera as if she hadn't a care in the world. Which she probably hadn't known that she did have, Jill thought as she looked at the picture again.

  She said, “Richard, you never mentioned that Sonia … Why has no one ever told me …? Richard. Why didn't you tell me your daughter was Down's Syndrome?”

  He looked at her then. “I don't talk about Sonia,” he said evenly. “I never talk about Sonia. You know that.”

  “But I needed to know. I ought to have known. I deserved to know.”

  “You sound like Gideon.”

  “What's Gideon to do with …? Richard, why haven't you spoken to me about her before? And what's this picture doing in my car?” The stresses of the evening—the conversation with her mother, the phone call from the hospital, the frantic drive—all of it descended upon Jill at once. “Are you trying to frighten me?” she cried. “Are you hoping that if I see what happened to Sonia, I'll agree to have Catherine in hospital and not at my mother's? Is that what you're doing? Is that what this is all about?”

  Richard tossed the picture into the back seat, where it landed on one of the packages. He said, “Don't be absurd. Gideon wants a picture of her—God only knows why—and I dug that one out to have it reframed. It needs to be, as you probably saw. The frame's banged up and the glass … You've seen for yourself. That's it, Jill. Nothing more than that.”

  “But why didn't you tell me? Don't you see the risk we were running? If she was Down's Syndrome because of something genetic … We could have gone to a doctor. We could have had blood tests or something. Something. Whatever they do. But instead you let me become pregnant and I never knew that there was a chance …”

  “I knew,” he said. “There was no chance. I knew you'd have the amnio test. And once we were told Cara's fine, what would've been the point of upsetting you?”

  “But when we decided to try for a baby, I had the right … Because if the tests had shown that something was wrong, I would have had to decide … Don't you see that I needed to know from the start? I needed to know the risk so that I'd have the time to think it through, in case I had to decide … Richard, I can't believe you kept this from me.”

  He said, “Start the car, Jill. I want to go home.”

  “You can't think I can dismiss this so easily.”

  He sighed, raised his head towards the roof, and took a deep breath. He said, “Jill, I've been hit by a bus. The police think someone pushed me deliberately. That means someone intended me dead. Now, I understand that you're upset. You argue that you've a right to be and I'll accept that for now. But if you'd look beyond your own concerns for one moment, you'll see that I need to get home. My face hurts, my ankle's throbbing, and my arm is swelling. We can thrash this out in the car and I can end up back in Casualty, asking to see a doctor, or we can go home and revisit this situation in the morning. Have it either way.”

  Jill stared at him till he turned his head and met her gaze. She said, “Not telling me about her is tantamount to lying.”

  She started the car before he could reply, putting it into gear with a jerk. He winced. “Had I known you'd react this way, I would have told you. Do you think I actually want anything to estrange us? Now? With the baby due any moment? Do you think I want that? For the love of God, we nearly lost each other tonight.”

  Jill moved the car out into Grafton Way. She knew intuitively that something wasn't right, but what she couldn't intuit was whether that something was wrong within her or wrong within the man she loved.

  Richard didn't speak till they'd crisscrossed over into Portland Place and headed through the rain in the direction of Cavendish Square. And then he said, “I must speak with Gideon as soon as possible. He could be in danger as well. If something happens to him … after everything else …”

  The as well told Jill volumes. She said, “This is connected to what happened to Eugenie, isn't it?”

  His silence comprised an eloquent response. Fear began to eat away at her again.

  Too late Jill saw that the route she'd chosen was going to take them directly past Wigmore Hall. And the worst of it was that there was apparently a concert on this night, because a glut of taxis were crowding the street there, all of them jockeying to disgorge their passengers directly under the glass marquee. She saw Richard tur
n from the sight of it.

  He said, “She's out of prison. And twelve weeks to the day that she got out of prison, Eugenie was murdered.”

  “You think that German woman …? The woman who killed …?” And then it was all back before her again, rendering any other discussion impossible: the image of that pitiable baby and the fact that her condition had been hidden, hidden from Jill Foster, who'd had a serious and vested interest in knowing all there was to know about Richard Davies and his fathering of children. She said, “Were you afraid to tell me? Is that it?”

  “You knew Katja Wolff was out of prison. We even spoke of that with the detective the other day.”

  “I'm not talking about Katja Wolff. I'm talking about … You know what I'm talking about.” She swung the car into Portman Square and from there dropped down and over to Park Lane, saying, “You were afraid that I wouldn't want to try for a baby if I knew. I'd have too many fears. You were afraid of that, so you didn't tell me because you didn't trust me.”

  “How did you expect me to give you the information?” Richard asked. “Was I supposed to say, ‘Oh, by the way, my ex-wife gave birth to a handicapped child’? It wasn't relevant.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Because we weren't trying for a baby, you and I. We were having sex. Good sex. The best. And we were in love. But we weren't—”

  “I wasn't taking precautions. You knew that.”

  “But what I didn't know was that you weren't aware that Sonia had been … My God, it was in all the papers when she died: the fact that she was drowned, that she was Down's Syndrome and that she was drowned. I never thought I had to mention it.”

  “I didn't know it. She died over twenty years ago, Richard. I was sixteen years old. What sixteen-year-old do you know who reads the newspaper and remembers what she's read two decades later?”

  “I'm not responsible for what you can and can't remember.”

  “But you are responsible for making me aware of something that could affect my future and our baby's future.”

  “You were going at it without precautions. I assumed you had your future planned out.”