“Dead knackered,” Nkata told them. “They kept him awake long enough for the doc to check him over, but he fell asleep while they were washing his hair. Had to use hand soap on that, ’m afraid. You’ll want to give him a good scrubbing when you get him home.”
Luxford went to the constable and took his son in his arms. Fiona said, “Leo. Leo,” and touched his head.
Lynley said, “We’ll leave you alone for a while. When you’ve said your hellos, we’ll talk again.”
As the door closed softly, Luxford carried his son to a chair. He sat, holding him, wondering at the meagre weight of him, feeling every bone in his body as if he were touching each for the very first time. He closed his eyes and breathed in the smell of him: from the detergent pungency of his badly washed hair to the sour muck of his clothing. He kissed his son’s forehead, then both of his eyes.
These fluttered open, sky blue like his mother’s. They blinked, then adjusted. He saw who held him.
“Daddy,” he said, then automatically made the adjustment—with an altering of voice—that Luxford had long insisted upon. “Dad. Hullo. Is Mummy with you? I didn’t cry. I was scared, but I didn’t cry.”
Luxford tightened his arms round the boy. He lowered his face to the crook of Leo’s shoulder.
Fiona said, “Hello, darling,” and knelt by the chair.
“I expect that was the right thing to do,” Leo said to her stoutly. “I didn’t cry once. He kept me locked up and I was awfully scared and I wanted to cry. But I didn’t. Not once. That was good, wasn’t it? I did right, I think.” His face wrinkled round the eyes and on the forehead. He squirmed to have a better look at his father. “What’s wrong with Dad?” he asked his mother, perplexed.
“Nothing at all,” Fiona said. “Daddy’s just doing your crying for you.”
acknowledgements
WOOTTON CROSS AND the Vale of Wootton do not exist. But I thank those individuals who helped with its creation: Mr. A. E. Swaine of Great Bedwyn, Wiltshire, who shared the beauties of Wilton Windmill with me; Gordon Rogers of High Ham, Somerset, and the kind people of the National Trust who made High Ham Windmill available to me; the good police constables of Pewsey who fielded questions and who allowed their police station to stand in for Wootton Cross’s.
I’m greatly indebted to Michael Fairbairn, political correspondent from the BBC, who spent time with me at the Houses of Parliament and who graciously answered innumerable questions during the course of this novel’s creation; to David Banks, who allowed me access to the Mirror and Maggie Pringle, who answered my questions and made arrangements for me to visit the newspaper’s offices in Holburn; to Ruth and Richard Boulton, who always respond graciously to every question, no matter how trivial; to Chief Inspector Pip Lane, who keeps me at least somewhat within the boundaries of reasonable policework; to my agent Vivienne Schuster and my editor Tony Mott, who support my efforts and make encouraging noises when necessary.
In the United States, I’m grateful to Gary Bale of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department for his words of wisdom on everything from fingerprinting to toxicology; to Dr. Tom Ruben and Dr. H. M. Upton for supplying me with medical advice when necessary; to April Jackson of the Los Angeles Times for fielding miscellaneous questions on journalism; to Julie Mayer for reading yet another draft; to Ira Toibin for his kind and consistent support; to my editor Kate Miciak for listening to endless variations on plot and theme; to my agent Deborah Schneider for her wisdom and her belief in the project.
It should be remembered that this is a work of fiction. It should also be remembered that any errors or missteps in the novel are mine alone.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ELIZABETH GEORGE is the author of award-winning and internationally bestselling novels, including A Great Deliverance, Payment in Blood, and A Traitor to Memory. Her novels have been filmed for television by the BBC and broadcast in the United States on PBS’s Mystery!
She lives in Seattle and London.
If you enjoyed Elizabeth George’s IN THE PRESENCE OF THE ENEMY, you won’t want to miss any of her internationally bestselling novels of suspense. Look for them at your favorite bookseller’s, and visit the Elizabeth George website at www.ElizabethGeorgeOnline.com.
And look for the author’s stunning novels, A TRAITOR TO MEMORY, available from Bantam Books in hardcover.
Turn the page for an exciting preview….
A
TRAITOR
TO
MEMORY
by
ELIZABETH
GEORGE
It was the knowledge of a touch—reserved for him but given to another—that drove Ted Wiley out into the night. He’d seen it from his window, not intending to spy but spying all the same when the moment arose. The time: just past one in the morning. The place: Friday Street, Henley-on-Thames, a mere sixty yards from the river, and in front of her house which they’d exited only moments before, both of them having to duck their heads to avoid a lintel put into a building in centuries past when men and women were shorter and when their lives were more clearly defined.
Ted Wiley liked that: the definition of roles. She did not. And if he hadn’t understood by now that Eugenie Davies would not be easily identified as his woman and placed into a convenient category in his life, Ted had certainly reached that conclusion when he saw the two of them—Eugenie and that broomstick stranger—out on the pavement and in each other’s arms.
Flagrant, he’d thought. She wants me to see this. She wants me to see the way she’s embracing him, then curving her palm to describe the shape of his cheek as he steps away. God damn the woman. She wants me to see this.
That, of course, was absolute sophistry, and had the embrace—the touch—occurred at a more reasonable hour, Ted would have talked himself out of the ominous direction his mind began taking. He would have thought, It can’t mean anything if she’s out in the street in daylight in public in a shaft of light from her sitting room window in the autumn sunshine in front of God and everyone and most of all me…. It can’t mean anything that she’s touching a stranger because she knows how easily I can see…. But instead of these thoughts, what was implied by a man’s departure from a woman’s home at one in the morning filled Ted’s head like a noxious gas whose volume continued to increase over the next seven days as he—anxious and interpreting every gesture and nuance—waited for her to say, “Ted, have I mentioned that my brother—” or my cousin or my father or my uncle or the homosexual architect who intends to redesign my kitchen—“stopped by for a chat just the other night? It went on and on into the early hours of the morning and I thought he’d never leave. By the way, you might have seen us just outside my front door if you were lurking behind your window shades as you’ve taken up doing recently.” Except, of course, there was no brother or cousin or uncle or father that Ted Wiley knew of, and if there was a homosexual architect, he’d yet to hear Eugenie mention him.
What he had heard her say, his bowels on the rumble, was that she had something to tell him. And when he’d asked her what it was and thought he’d like her to give it to him straightaway if it was going to be the blow that killed him, she’d said, Soon. I’m not quite ready yet, Ted. And she’d curved her palm to touch his cheek. Yes. Yes. That touch. Just exactly like.
So at nine o’clock on a rainy evening in late November, Ted Wiley put his ageing golden retriever on her lead and decided that a stroll was in order. Their route, he told the dog—whose arthritis and aversion to the rain did not make her the most cooperative of walkers—would take them to the top of Friday Street and a few yards beyond it to Albert Road, where if by coincidence they should run into Eugenie Davies just leaving the Sixty Plus Club where the New Year’s Eve Gala committee were still attempting to reach a compromise on the menu for the coming festivities, why that’s what it would be: a mere coincidence and a fortuitous chance for a chat. For all dogs wanted walking before they kipped down for the night. No one could argue, accuse, or even suspect over that
.
The dog—ludicrously albeit lovingly christened Precious Baby by Ted’s late wife and resolutely called PB by Ted himself—hesitated at the doorway and blinked out at the street, where the rain was falling in the sort of steady waves that presaged a lengthy and bone-chilling storm. She began to lower herself determinedly to her haunches and would have successfully attained that position had Ted not tugged her out onto the pavement with the desperation of a man whose plans have been laid and whose intentions will not be thwarted.
“Come, PB,” he ordered her, and he jerked the lead so that the choke chain tightened briefly round her neck. The retriever recognised both the tone and the gesture. With a bronchial sigh that released a gust of dog breath into wet night air, she trudged disconsolately into the rain.
The weather was a misery, Ted acknowledged, but that couldn’t be helped. Besides, the old dog needed to walk. She’d gotten far too lazy in the five years that had passed since her mistress’s death, and Ted himself had not done much to keep her exercised, fit, and trim. Well, that would change now. He’d promised Connie he’d look after the dog, and so he would, with a new regime that began this very night. No more sniffing round the back garden before bedtime, my friend, he silently informed PB. It’s walkies and nothing else from now on.
He double checked to make sure the bookshop’s door was secure, and he adjusted the collar of his old waxed jacket against the wet and the chill. He should have brought an umbrella, he realised as he stepped out of the doorway and the first splash of rainwater hit his neck. A peaked cap was insufficient protection, no matter how well it suited him. But why the hell was he even thinking about what suited him? he pondered. Fire and ice, if anyone wormed a way inside his head these days, it would be to find cobwebs and rot floating round there.
Ted harrumphed, spat in the street, and began to give himself a pep talk as he and the dog plodded past the Royal Marine Reserve, where a broken gutter along the roof erupted rainwater in a silver plume. He was a catch, was he, he told himself. Major Ted Wiley, retired from the Army and widowed after forty-two years of blissful marriage, was one bloody fine catch for any woman, and don’t you forget it. Weren’t available men scarce as uncut diamonds in Henley-on-Thames? Yes. They were. Weren’t available men without unsightly nose hairs, overgrown eyebrows, and copious ear hairs scarcer still? Yes and yes. And weren’t men who were clean, in possession of their faculties, in excellent health, dexterous in the kitchen, and of an uxorious disposition so rare in town as to find themselves victims of something akin to a feeding frenzy the very moment they chose to show themselves at a social gathering? Damn right, they were. And he was one of them. Everyone knew it.
Including Eugenie, he reminded himself. Including his own Eugenie.
Hadn’t she said to him on more than one occasion, You’re a fine man, Ted Wiley? Yes. She had.
Hadn’t she spent the last three years willingly accepting his company with what he knew was pleasure? Yes. She had.
Hadn’t she smiled and flushed and looked away when they’d visited his mother at the Quiet Pines Nursing Home and heard her announce in that imperious way, I’d like a wedding before I die, you two birds. Yes, yes, and yes. She had, she had.
So what did a touch on a stranger’s face mean in light of all that? And why could he not expunge it from his mind, as if it had become a brand and not what it was: an unpleasant memory that he wouldn’t even have had had he not taken to watching, to wondering, to lurking, to having to know, to insisting upon battening down the hatches in his life as if it weren’t a life at all but a sailing vessel that might lose its cargo if he wasn’t vigilant?
Eugenie herself was the answer to that: serene and silent, spiritual and sincere. Eugenie whose spectral-thin body begged for nurture; whose neat blonde hair—thickly silvered though it was with grey—asked to be freed from the hair slides that held it; whose cloudy eyes were blue then green then grey then blue but always guarded and in need of protection; whose modest but nonetheless provocative femininity awakened in Ted a stirring in the groin that called him to an action he hadn’t been capable of taking since Connie’s death. Eugenie was the answer.
And he—Ted Wiley—was the man for Eugenie, the man to protect her, to bring her back to life and to love. For what had gone unspoken between the two of them these past three years was the extent to which Eugenie Davies had been denying herself the very communion of her fellow men for God only knew how long. Yet that denial had declared itself openly when he’d first invited her to join him for a simple evening’s glass of sherry at the Catherine Wheel.
Why, she’s not had a man ask her to join him in years, Ted Wiley had thought at her flustered reaction to his invitation. And he’d wondered why.
Now, perhaps, he knew. She had secrets from him, had Eugenie Davies. I have something I want to tell you, Ted.
Well, there was no time like the present. Confidences sprang from spontaneity. And what was more spontaneous than a chance encounter and a walk in the rain?
At the top of Friday Street, Ted waited for the traffic light to change, PB shivering—for dramatic effect, Ted decided—close at his side. Duke Street was also the A4155, the main thoroughfare to either Reading or Marlow, and as such it carried all manner of vehicles rumbling through town. A wet night like this one did little to decrease the volume of traffic in a society that was becoming depressingly more reliant upon cars and even more depressingly desirous of a commuter lifestyle defined by work in the city and life in the country. So even at nine o’clock at night, cars and lorries splashed along the wet street, their headlamps creating ochroid fans that reflected against windows and in pools of standing water.
Too many people going too many places, Ted thought morosely. Too many people without the slightest idea of why they’re rushing headlong through their lives.
The traffic light changed and Ted crossed over, making the little jog into Greys Road with PB bumping along next to him. Despite the fact that they’d not walked even a quarter of a mile, the old dog was wheezing, and Ted stepped into the shallow doorway of Mirabelle’s Antiques to give the poor retriever a breather. Their destination was almost in sight, he reassured her. Surely she could make it just a few more yards up to Albert Road.
There, a car park served as courtyard for the Sixty Plus Club, an organisation attending to the social needs of Henley’s ever-growing community of pensioners. There, too, Eugenie Davies worked as Director. And there Ted had met her, upon relocating to the town on the Thames when he could no longer bear in Maidstone the chaffing memories of his wife’s lengthy death.
“Major Wiley, how lovely. You’re on Friday Street,” she’d said to him, reviewing his membership form. “You and I are neighbours. I’m at number 65. The pink house? Doll’s Cottage? It’s called that because of its size, of course. I’ve been there for years. And you’re at…”
“The bookshop,” he’d said. “Just across the street. The flat’s above it. Yes. But I’d no idea…I mean, I’ve not seen you.”
“I’m always out early and back quite late. I know your shop, of course. I’ve been in many times. At least when your mother was running it. Before the stroke, that is. And she’s still well, which is lovely. Improving, isn’t she.”
He’d thought Eugenie was asking, but when he realised she wasn’t—indeed, she was merely affirming information that she already had—then he also realised where he’d seen her before: at Quiet Pines Nursing Home, where three times each week Ted visited his mother. She volunteered there in the mornings, did Eugenie. To her apparently fell the tasks that no one else could bear to do. “They call her Angel,” Ted’s mother informed him as together they watched her entering a reeking cubicle with an adult-sized nappie folded over her wrist and a washing basin under her arm. “She hasn’t any relative here, and the Home don’t pay her a penny, Ted.”
Then why, Ted wanted to know at the time. Why?
Secrets, he thought now. Still waters and secrets.
He looked down a
t the dog, who’d sagged against him, out of the rain and determined to snooze while she had the chance. He said, “Come along, PB. Not much farther now,” and upon speaking he looked across the street and saw through the bare trees that there was not much more time either.
For from where he and the dog hunkered out of the rain, he could see that the Sixty Plus Club was disgorging its New Year’s Eve Gala committee. Raising their umbrellas and stepping through puddles like neophyte high-wire artists, the committee members called out their good-nights to one another with enough good cheer to suggest that a compromise on comestibles had been finally achieved. Eugenie would be pleased at this. Pleased, she’d no doubt be feeling expansive and ready to talk.
Ted crossed the street, eager to intercept her, a reluctant golden retriever in tow. He reached the low wall between the pavement and the car park just as the last of the committee members drove away. The lights in the Sixty Plus Club went out and the entry porch became bathed in shadow. A moment later, Eugenie herself stepped into the misty penumbra between the building and the car park, working upon the tie of a black umbrella. Ted opened his mouth to call her name, sing out a hearty hello and make the offer of a personal escort back to her cottage. No time of night for a lovely lady to be alone on the streets, my dearest girl. Care for the arm of an ardent admirer? With dog, I’m afraid. PB and I were out for a final recce of the town.
He could have said all this, he would have said all this, and he was indeed drawing breath to do so when he suddenly heard it. A man’s voice called out Eugenie’s name. She swung to her left, and Ted looked beyond her where a figure was getting out of a dark saloon car. Backlit by one of the streetlamps that dotted the car park, he was mostly shadow. But the shape of his head and that gull’s beak nose were enough to tell Ted that Eugenie’s visitor of one in the morning had returned to town.