“That's not what happened,” Richard said.
“Which part of it?”
Richard said nothing for a moment, then, “Please,” and Jill saw that he was caught between the two choices that Gideon's accusations had brought him to facing. And no matter which way he chose to go, both choices amounted to a single one in the end. Either he killed his child. Or he killed his child.
Gideon apparently saw the answer he wanted within his father's silence. He said, “Yes. Right, then,” and dropped the picture of his sister onto the floor.
He strode to the door. He drew it open.
“For God's sake, I did it,” Richard cried out. “Gideon! Stop! Listen to me. Believe what I say. She was still alive when you left her. I held her down in the bath. I was the one who drowned Sonia.”
Jill caught herself in a wail of horror. It was all too logical. She knew. She saw. He was talking to his son but he was doing more: He was finally explaining to Jill what was keeping him from marriage.
Gideon said, “Those are lies,” and he began to leave.
Richard started to go after him, hampered by his injuries. Jill struggled to her feet. She said, “They're all daughters. That's it, isn't it? Virginia. Sonia. And now Catherine.”
Richard stumbled to the door, leaned against the jamb. He roared, “Gideon! God damn it! Listen!” He shoved himself out into the corridor.
Jill staggered after him. She cried, “You didn't want to marry because it's a daughter.” She grabbed on to his arm. He was hobbling towards the staircase, and heavy as she was, he dragged her with him. She could hear Gideon clattering downwards. His footsteps pounded across the tiled entry.
“Gideon!” Richard shouted. “Wait!”
“You're afraid she'll be like the other two, aren't you?” Jill cried, clinging to Richard's arm. “You created Virginia. You created Sonia and you think our baby's going to be damaged as well. That's why you haven't wanted to marry me, isn't it?”
The front door opened. Richard and Jill reached the top of the stairs. Richard shouted, “Gideon! Listen to me.”
“I've listened long enough,” came the reply. Then the front door banged closed. Richard bellowed as if struck in the chest. He started to descend.
Jill dragged down on his arm. “That's why. Isn't it? You've been waiting to see if the baby's normal before you're willing to—”
He shook her off. She grabbed at him again. “Get away!” he cried. “Get off me. Go! Don't you see I've got to stop him?”
“Answer me. Tell me. You've thought there was something wrong because she's a daughter and if we married, then you'd be stuck. With me. With her. Just like before.”
“You don't know what you're saying.”
“Then tell me I'm wrong.”
“Gideon!” he shouted. “God damn it, Jill. I'm his father. He needs me. You don't know … Let me go.”
“I won't! Not until you—”
“I. Said. Let. Me …” His teeth were clenched. His face was rigid. Jill felt his hand—his good hand—climb up her chest and push at her savagely.
She clung to him harder, crying, “No! What are you doing? Talk to me!”
She pulled him towards her, but he swung away. He jerked free and as he did so, their positions shifted precariously. He was now above her. She was below. And so she blocked him, blocked his passage to Gideon and his re-entry into a life she could not afford to understand.
Both of them were panting. The smell of their sweat was rank in the air. “That's why, isn't it?” Jill demanded. “I want to hear it from you, Richard.”
But instead of replying, he gave an inarticulate cry. Before she could move to safety, he was trying to get past her. He used his good arm against her breasts. She backed away in reflex. She lost her footing. In an instant she was tumbling down the stairs.
28
RICHARD HEARD ONLY the breath in his ears. She fell and he watched her and he heard banisters cracking when she hit them. And the sheer weight of her body increased her velocity, so even at the meagre excuse for a landing—that single inadequate slightly wider step that Jill so hated—she continued to hurtle towards the ground floor.
It didn't happen in a second. It happened in an arc of time so wide and so long that forever seemed inadequate for it. And every second that passed was a second in which Gideon, a Gideon able-bodied and unhampered by a plaster cast enclosing his leg from foot to knee, gained more distance from his father. But even more than distance, he gained certainty as well. And that could not be allowed.
Richard descended the stairs as quickly as he could. At the bottom, Jill lay sprawled and motionless. When he reached her, her eyelids—looking blue in the faint light from the entry windows—fluttered, and her lips parted in a moan.
“Mummy?” she whispered.
Her clothing rucked up, her great huge stomach was obscenely exposed. Her coat spread above her head like a monstrous fan.
“Mummy?” she whispered again. Then she groaned. And then cried out and arched her back.
Richard moved to her head. Furiously, he searched through the pockets of the coat. He'd seen her put her keys in the coat, hadn't he? God damn it, he'd seen her. He had to find those keys. If he didn't, Gideon would be gone and he had to find him, had to speak to him, had to make him know….
There were no keys. Richard cursed. He shoved himself to his feet. He went back to the stairs and began to haul himself furiously upwards. Below him, Jill cried out, “Catherine,” and Richard pulled on the stair rail and breathed like a runner and thought about how he could stop his son.
Inside the flat, he looked for Jill's bag. It was by the sofa, lying on the floor. He scooped it up. He wrestled with its maddening clasp. His hands were shaking. His fingers were clumsy. He couldn't manage to—
A buzzer went off. He raised his head, looked round the room. But there was nothing. He went back to the bag. He managed to unfasten the clasp, and he jerked the bag open. He dumped its contents onto the sofa.
A buzzer went off. He ignored it. He pawed through lipsticks, powders, chequebook, purse, crumpled tissues, pens, a small notebook, and there they were. Hooked together by the familiar chrome ring: five keys, two brass, three silver. One for her flat, one for his, one for the family home in Wiltshire, and two for the Humber, ignition and boot. He grabbed them.
A buzzer went off. Long, loud, insistent this time. Demanding immediate acknowledgment.
He cursed, located the buzzing at its source. The front bell on the street. Gideon? God, Gideon? But he had his own key. He wouldn't ring.
The buzzing continued. Richard ignored it. He made for the door.
The buzzing faded. The buzzing stopped. In his ears, Richard heard only his breathing. It sounded like the shriek of lost souls, and pain began to accompany it, searing up his right leg and, simultaneously, burning and throbbing from right hand to shoulder. His side began to ache with the exertion. He didn't seem able to catch his breath.
At the top of the stairs, he paused, looked down. His heart was pounding. His chest was heaving. He drew in air, stale and damp.
He began to descend. He clutched on to the rail. Jill hadn't moved. Could she? Would she? It hardly mattered. Not with Gideon on the run.
“Mummy? Will you help?” Her voice was faint. But Mummy was not here. Mummy could not help.
But Daddy was. Daddy could. He would always be there. Not as in the past, that figure cloaked by an artful madness that came and went and stood between Daddy and yes my son you are my son. But Daddy in the present who could not did not would not fail because yes my son you are my son. You, what you do, what you're capable of doing. All of it you. You are my son.
Richard reached the landing.
Below him, he heard the entry door open.
He called out, “Gideon?”
“Bloody sodding hell!” came a woman's reply.
A squat creature in a navy pea jacket seemed to fling herself at Jill. Behind her came a raincoated figure whom Richard Davie
s recognised only too well. He held a credit card in his hand, the means by which he'd gained access through the warped old door to Braemar Mansions.
“Good God,” Lynley said, dashing over to kneel by Jill as well. “Phone an ambulance, Havers.” Then he raised his head.
At once his eyes came to rest on Richard, midway down the stairs, Jill's car keys in his hand.
Havers rode with Jill Foster to hospital. Lynley took Richard Davies to the nearest police station. This turned out to be on the Earl's Court Road, the same station from which Malcolm Webberly had departed more than twenty years ago on the evening he was assigned to investigate the suspicious drowning of Sonia Davies.
If Richard Davies was aware of the irony involved therein, he didn't mention it. Indeed, he said nothing, as was his right, when Lynley gave him the official caution. The duty solicitor was brought in to advise him, but the only advice Davies asked for was how he could get a message to his son.
“I must speak to Gideon,” he said to the solicitor. “Gideon Davies. You've heard of him. The violinist …?”
Other than that, he had nothing to say. He would stand by his original story, given to Lynley during earlier interviews. He knew his rights, and the police had nothing on which to build a case against the father of Gideon Davies.
What they had, however, was the Humber, and Lynley went back to Cornwall Gardens with the official team to oversee the acquisition of that vehicle. As Winston Nkata had predicted, what damage the car had sustained in striking two—and probably three—individuals was centred round its front chrome bumper, which was fairly mangled. But this was something that any adroit defence lawyer would be able to argue away, and consequently Lynley was not depending upon it to build a case against Richard Davies. What he was depending upon and what that same adroit barrister would find difficult to discount was trace evidence both beneath the bumper and upon the undercarriage of the Humber. For it was hardly possible that Davies could strike Kathleen Waddington and Malcolm Webberly and run over his former wife three times and leave not a deposit of blood, a fragment of skin, or the kind of hair they desperately needed—hair with human scalp attached to it—on the underside of the car. To get rid of that sort of evidence, Davies would have had to think of that possibility. And Lynley was betting that he hadn't done so. No killer, he knew from long experience, ever thought of everything.
He phoned the news to DCI Leach and asked him to pass the message along to AC Hillier. He would wait in Cornwall Gardens to see the Humber safely off the street, he said, after which he'd fetch Eugenie Davies' computer, as had been his original destination. Did DCI Leach still wish him to fetch that computer?
He did, Leach told him. Despite the arrest, Lynley was still out of order for having taken it and it needed to be logged among the belongings of the victim. “Anything else you lifted, while we're at it?” Leach asked shrewdly.
Lynley replied there was nothing else belonging to Eugenie Davies that he had taken, nothing at all. And he was content with the truth of this answer. For he had come to understand for better or worse that the words born of passion which a man puts on paper and sends to a woman—indeed, even those words that he speaks—are on loan to her only, for whatever length of time serves their purpose. The words themselves always belong to the man.
“He didn't push me,” was what Jill Foster said to Barbara Havers in the ambulance. “You mustn't think that he pushed me.” Her voice was faint, a weak murmur only, and her lower body was soiled from the pool of urine, water, and blood that had been spreading out beneath her when Barbara knelt by her side at the foot of the stairs. But that was all she was able to say, because pain was taking her, or at least that was how it seemed to Barbara as she heard Jill cry out and she watched the paramedic monitor the woman's vital signs and listened to him say to the driver, “Hit the sirens, Cliff,” which was explanation enough of Jill Foster's condition.
“The baby?” Barbara asked the medic in a low voice.
He cast her a look, said nothing, and moved his gaze to the IV bag he'd fixed to a pole above his patient.
Even with the siren, the ride to the nearest hospital with a casualty ward seemed endless to Barbara. But once they arrived, the response was immediate and gratifying. The paramedics trundled their charge inside the building at a run. There, she was met by a swarm of personnel, who whisked her away, calling out for equipment, for phone calls to be made to Obstetrics, for obscure drugs and arcane procedures with names that camouflaged their purposes.
“Is she going to make it?” Barbara asked anyone who would listen. “She's in labour, right? She's okay? The baby?”
“This is not how babies are intended to get born,” was the only reply she was able to obtain.
She remained in Casualty, pacing the waiting area, till Jill Foster was taken in a rush to an operating theatre. “She's been through enough trauma,” was the explanation she was given and “Are you family?” was the reason that nothing else was revealed. Barbara couldn't have said why she felt it was important for her to know that the woman was going to be all right. She put it down to an unusual sisterhood she found herself feeling for Jill Foster. It had not, after all, been so many months since Barbara herself had been whisked away by an ambulance after her own encounter with a killer.
She didn't believe that Richard Davies had not pushed Jill Foster down the stairs. But that was something to be sorted out later, once a recovery period gave the other woman time to learn what else her fiancé had been up to. And she would recover, Barbara learned within the hour. She'd been delivered of a daughter: healthy despite her precipitate entry into the world.
Barbara felt she could leave at that point, and she was doing so—indeed, she was out in front of the hospital and sussing out what buses, if any, served Fulham Palace Road—when she saw that she was standing in front of Charing Cross Hospital, where Superintendent Webberly was a patient. She ducked back inside.
On the eleventh floor, she waylaid a nurse just outside the intensive care ward. Critical and unchanged were the words the nurse used to describe the superintendent's condition, from which Barbara inferred that he was still in a coma, still on life support, and still in so much danger of so many further complications that praying for his recovery seemed as risky a business as thinking about the possibility of his death. When people were struck by cars, when they sustained injuries to the brain, more often than not they emerged from the crisis radically altered. Barbara didn't know if she wished such a change upon her superior officer. She didn't want him to die. She dreaded the thought of it. But she couldn't imagine him caught up in months or years of torturous convalescence.
She said to the nurse, “Is his family with him? I'm one of the officers investigating what happened. I've news for them. If they'd like to hear it, that is.”
The nurse eyed Barbara doubtfully. Barbara sighed and fished out her warrant card. The nurse squinted at it and said, “Wait here, then,” leaving Barbara waiting to see what would happen next.
Barbara expected AC Hillier to emerge from the ward, but instead it was Webberly's daughter who came to greet her. Miranda looked just about done in, but she smiled and said, “Barbara! Hello! How very good of you to come. You can't still be on duty at this hour.”
Barbara said, “We've made an arrest. Will you tell your dad? I mean, I know he can't hear you or anything … Still, you know …”
“Oh, but he can hear,” Miranda said.
Barbara's hopes rose. “He's come out of it?”
“No. Not that. But the doctors say that people in comas can hear what's being said round them. And he'll certainly want to know that you've caught who hit him, won't he?”
“How is he?” Barbara asked. “I talked to a nurse, but I couldn't get much. Just that there wasn't any change yet.”
Miranda smiled, but it seemed a response that was generated to soothe Barbara's worries more than a reflection of what the girl herself was feeling. “There isn't, really. But he hasn't had another heart
attack, which everyone considers a very good sign. So far he's been stable, and we're … well, we're very hopeful. Yes. We're quite hopeful.”
Her eyes were too bright, too frightened. Barbara wanted to tell Miranda that she had no need to play the part for her sake, but she understood that the girl's attempt at optimism was more for herself than anyone else. She said, “Then I'll be hopeful as well. We all will. D'you need anything?”
“Oh gosh, no. At least, I don't think so. I did come from Cambridge in a terrible rush and I've left a paper behind that I have due for a supervision. But that's not till next week and perhaps by then … Well, perhaps.”
“Yeah. Perhaps.”
Footsteps coming along the corridor diverted their attention. They turned to see AC Hillier and his wife approaching. Between them, they were supporting Frances Webberly.
Miranda cried out, “Mum!”
“Randie,” Frances said. “Randie, darling …”
Miranda said again, “Mum! I'm so glad. Oh, Mum.” She went to her and hugged her long and hard. And then, perhaps feeling a weight lifting off her that she should never have had to bear in the first place, she began to cry. She said, “The doctors said if he has another heart attack, he might … He really might—”
“Hush. Yes,” Frances Webberly said, her cheek pressed against her daughter's hair. “Take me in to see Daddy, won't you, dear? We'll sit with him together.”
When Miranda and her mother had gone through the door, AC Hillier said to his wife, “Stay with them, Laura. Please. Make sure …” and nodded meaningfully. Laura Hillier followed them.
The AC eyed Barbara with a degree less than his usual level of disapproval. She became acutely aware of her clothing. She'd been doing her best to stay out of his way for months now, and when she'd known she'd be running into him, she'd always managed to dress with that expectation in mind. But now … She felt her high-top red trainers take on neon proportions, and the green stirrup trousers she'd donned that morning seemed only marginally less inappropriate.