A Traitor to Memory (107 page)

Lynley said, “In the middle of the night when you have a shock, you don't weigh your words, Frances. Nurses, doctors, orderlies, and everyone else in hospitals know that.”

“‘He's your
husband
,’ she said. ‘He's cared for you all these miserable years and you
owe
this to him. And to Miranda. Frances, you owe it to her. You must pull yourself together, because if you don't and if something should happen to Malcolm while you're not there … and if, God, if he should actually die … Get up, get up, get
up
, Frances Louise, because you and I know there is nothing God help me
nothing at all
that's wrong with you. The spotlight's
off
you. Accept that fact.’ As if she knew what it's like. As if she's actually spent time in my world, in this world, right inside here”—savagely, she rapped her temple—“instead of in her own little space, where everything's perfect, always has been, always will be world without end amen. But it's not like that for me. That is not how it is.”

“Of course,” Lynley said. “We all look at the world through the prisms of our own experiences, don't we? But sometimes in a moment of crisis, people forget that. So they say things and do things … It's all for an end that everyone wants but no one knows how to reach. How can I help you?”

Helen came back into the room then, a wine glass in her hand. It
was half-filled with brandy, and she placed it on the dressing table and looked towards Lynley with “What now?” on her face. He wished he knew. He had very little doubt that with every decent intention in the world Frances's sister had already run through the repertoire. Certainly, Laura Hillier had tried reasoning with Frances first, manipulating her second, inducing guilt in her third, and uttering threats fourth. What was probably needed—a slow process of getting the poor woman once again used to an external environment of which she'd been terrified for years—was something that none of them could manage and something for which they had no time.

What now? Lynley wondered along with his wife.
A miracle, Helen.

He said, “Drink some of this, Frances,” and lifted the glass for her. When she'd done so, he laid his hand on hers. He said, “What exactly have they told you about Malcolm?”

Frances murmured, “‘The doctors want to speak with you,’ she said. ‘You must go to the hospital. You must be with him. You must be with Randie.’” For the first time, Frances moved her gaze from her reflection. She looked at the joining of her hand with Lynley's. She said, “If Randie's with him, that's nearly all he would want. ‘What a brave, new world that's been given to us,’ he said when she was born. That's why he said she'd be called Miranda. And she was perfect to him. Every way perfect. Perfect as I couldn't hope to be. Ever. Not ever. Daddy's got a princess.” She reached for the wine glass where Lynley had placed it. She started to pick it up but stopped herself and said, “No. No. That's not it. Not a princess. Not at all. Daddy's found a queen.” Her eyes remained motionless, on the brandy in the glass, but their rims slowly reddened as tears pooled against them.

Lynley's glance met Helen's where she stood just beyond Frances's right shoulder. He could read her reaction to this and he knew it matched his own. Escape was called for. To be in the presence of a maternal jealousy so strong that it wouldn't loosen its grip upon someone even in the midst of a life-and-death crisis … It was more than disconcerting, Lynley thought. It was obscene. He felt like a voyeur.

Helen said, “If Malcolm's anything at all like my father, Frances, I expect what he's felt is a special responsibility towards Randie, because she's a daughter and not a son.”

To which Lynley added, “I saw that in my own family. The way my father was with my older sister wasn't in the least the way he was
with me. Or with my younger brother, for that matter. We weren't as vulnerable, in his eyes. We needed toughening up. But I think what all that means is—”

Frances moved the hand that had been beneath his. She said, “No. They're right. What they're thinking at the hospital. The queen is dead and he can't cope now. He threw himself into the traffic last night.” Then for the first time she looked directly at Lynley. She said it again, “The queen is finally dead. There's no one to replace her. Certainly not me.”

And Lynley suddenly understood. He said, “You knew,” as Helen began to say, “Frances, you must
never
believe—” but Frances stopped her by getting to her feet. She went to one of the two bedside tables, and she opened its drawer and set it on the bed. From the very back, tucked away as far as possible from the other contents, she took a small white square of linen. She unfolded it like a priest in a ritual, shaking it first, then smoothing it out against the counterpane on the bed.

Lynley joined her there. Helen did likewise. The three of them looked down on what was a handkerchief, ordinary save for two details: In one corner were twined the initials
E
and
D
, and directly in the centre of the material lay a rusty smear which described a little drama from the past. He cuts his finger his palm the back of his hand doing something for her … sawing a board pounding a nail drying a glass picking up the pieces of a jar accidentally smashed on the floor … and she quickly removes a handkerchief from her pocket her handbag the sleeve of her sweater the cup of her bra and she presses it upon him because he never remembers to carry one himself. This piece of linen finds its way into the pocket of his trousers his jacket the breast of his coat where he forgets about it till his wife preparing the laundry the dry cleaning the sorting of old things to go to Oxfam finds it sees it knows it for what it is and keeps it. For how many years? Lynley wondered. For how many blasted god-awful years in which she asked nothing about what it meant, giving her husband the opportunity to tell the truth, whatever that truth was, or to lie, fabricating a reason that might have been perfectly believable or at least something that she could cling to in order to lie to herself.

Helen said, “Frances, will you let me get rid of this?” and she placed her fingers not on the handkerchief itself but right next to it, as if it were a relic and she a novitiate in some obscure religion in which only the ordained could touch the blessed.

Frances said, “No!” and grabbed it. “He loved her,” she said. “He loved her and I knew it. I saw it happening. I saw how it happened, as
if it was a study of the whole
process
of love being played out in front of me. Like a television drama. And I kept waiting, you see, because right from the first I knew how he felt. He had to talk about it, he said. Because of Randie … because these poor people had lost a little girl not so much younger than our own Randie, and he could see how horrible it was for them, how much they suffered, especially the mother and ‘No one seems to want to
talk
to her about it, Frances. She has no one. She's existing in a bubble of grief—no, an infected boil of grief—and not one of them is trying to lance it. It feels inhuman, Frances,
inhuman
. Someone must help her before she breaks.’ So he decided to be the one. He would put that killer in gaol, by God, and he would not rest, Frances dear, till he had that killer signed, sealed, and delivered to justice. Because how would
we
feel if some-one—God forbid—harmed our Randie? We would stay up nights, wouldn't we, we would search the streets, we would not sleep and we would not eat and we would not even darken our own doorstep for days on end if that's what it took to find the monster that hurt her.”

Lynley released a slow breath, realising that he'd been holding it the entire time that Frances had been speaking. He felt so far out of his depth that drowning looked like the only option. He glanced at his wife for some sort of guidance and saw that she'd raised her fingers to her lips. And he knew it was sorrow that Helen felt, sorrow for the words that had gone too long unspoken between the Webberlys. He found himself wondering what was actually worse: years of enduring the iron maiden of imagining or seconds of experiencing the quick death of knowing.

Helen said, “Frances, if Malcolm hadn't loved you—”

“Duty.” Frances began to refold the handkerchief carefully. She said nothing more.

Lynley said, “I think that's part of love, Frances. It's not the easy part. It's not that first rush of excitement: wanting and believing something's been written in the stars and aren't we the lucky ones because we've just looked heavenwards and got the message. It's the part that's the choice to stay the course.”

“I gave him no choice,” Frances said.

“Frances,” Helen murmured, and Lynley could tell from her voice just exactly how much her next words cost her, “believe me when I say that you don't have that power.”

Frances looked at Helen then, but of course could not see beyond the structure that Helen had built to live in the world she'd long ago created for herself: the fashionable haircut, the carefully tended and
unblemished skin, the manicured hands, the perfect slim body weekly massaged, in the clothes designed for women who knew what elegance meant and how to use it. But as to seeing Helen herself, as to knowing her as the woman who'd once taken the quickest route out of the life of a man she'd dearly loved because she could not cope with staying a course that had altered too radically for her resources and her liking … Frances Webberly did not know that Helen and thus could not know that no one understood better than Helen that one person's condition—mental, spiritual, psychological, social, emotional, physical, or any combination thereof—could never really control the choices another person made.

Lynley said, “You need to know this, Frances. Malcolm didn't throw himself into traffic. Eric Leach phoned him to tell him about Eugenie Davies, yes, and I expect you read about her death in the paper.”

“He was distraught. I thought he'd
forgotten
about her and then I knew he hadn't. All these years.”

“Not forgotten her, true,” Lynley said, “but not for the reasons you think. Frances, we don't forget. We can't forget. We don't walk away untouched when we hand our documents to the CPS. It doesn't work that way. But the fact of our remembering is just that: because that's what the mind does. It just remembers. And if we're lucky, the remembering doesn't turn into nightmares. But that's the best we can hope for. That's part of the job.”

Lynley knew he was walking a fine line between truth and falsehood. He knew that whatever Webberly had experienced in his affair with Eugenie Davies and in the years that had followed that affair probably went far beyond mere memory. But that couldn't be allowed to matter at the moment. All that mattered was that the man's wife understand one part of the last forty-eight hours. So he repeated that part for her. “Frances, he didn't throw himself into the traffic. He was hit by a car. He was hit deliberately. Someone tried to kill him. And within the next few hours or days, we're going to know if that someone succeeded, because he may well die. He's had a serious heart attack as well. You've been told that, haven't you?”

A sound escaped her. It was something between the excruciating groan of a woman giving birth and the fearful moan of an abandoned child. “I don't want Malcolm to die,” she said. “I'm so afraid.”

“You're not alone in that,” Lynley replied.

The fact that she had an appointment at a women's shelter was what kept Yasmin Edwards steady between the time she phoned the pager number on Constable Nkata's card and the time she was able to meet him at the shop. He'd said he'd have to drive down from Hampstead to see her, so he couldn't swear what time he'd get there but he would come as soon as possible, madam, and in the meantime if she began to worry that he wasn't coming at all or he'd forgotten or had got waylaid in some way, she could ring his pager again and he'd let her know where he was on the route, if that would suit her. She'd said she could come to him or meet him somewhere. She said, in fact, she'd prefer it that way. He'd said no, it was best that he come to her.

She'd nearly changed her mind then. But she thought about Number Fifty-five, about Katja's mouth closing over hers, about what it meant that Katja could still slide down and down and down to love her. And she said, “Right. I'll be at the shop, then.”

In the meantime, she kept her appointment at the shelter in Camberwell. Three sisters in their thirties, an Asian lady, and an old bag married for forty-six years were the residents. Among them were shared countless bruises along with two black eyes, four split lips, a stitched-up cheek, a broken wrist, one dislocated shoulder, and a pierced eardrum. They were like beaten dogs recently let off the chain: cowering and undecided between flight and attack.

Do
not
let anyone do this to you, Yasmin wanted to shout at the women. The only thing that kept her from shouting was the scar on her own face and her badly set nose, both of which told the tale of what she herself had once allowed to be done to her.

So she flashed them a smile, said, “C'mon over here, you gorgeous tomatoes.” She spent two hours at the women's shelter, with her make-up and her colour swatches, with her scarves, her scents, and her wigs. And when she finally left them, three of the residents had got used to smiling again, the fourth had actually managed a laugh, and the fifth had begun to raise her eyes from the floor. Yasmin considered it a good day's work.