A Traitor to Memory (121 page)

H
AVERS SAID
, “I wish the situation would stop changing direction every twenty-five minutes. If it would, we
might
actually be able to get a handle on this case.”

Lynley made a turn into Belsize Avenue and did a quick recce of the
A to Z
in his brain to plot out a decent route to Portman Street. Next to him, Havers was continuing to grouse.

“So if Davies is down, who're we on to? Leach must be right. It's got to be back to Wolff with another antique car in possession of someone she knows that we haven't sussed out yet. That someone loans the car to her—probably not knowing what she wants it for—and she goes gunning for the principals who put her into the nick. Or maybe the two of them go gunning together. We haven't considered that possibility yet.”

“That scenario argues an innocent woman going to prison for twenty years,” Lynley pointed out.

“It's been known to happen,” Havers said.

“But not with the innocent person saying nothing about
being
innocent in the first place.”

“She's from East Germany, former totalitarian state. She'd been in England … what? Two years? Three? When Sonia Davies drowned? She finds herself questioned by the local rozzers and she gets paranoid
and won't talk to them. That makes sense to me. I don't expect she had the warm fuzzies for the police where she came from, do you?”

Lynley said, “I agree that she might have been rattled by police. But she would have told
someone
she was innocent, Havers. She would have spoken to her lawyers, surely. But she didn't. What does that suggest to you?”

“Someone got to her.”

“How?”

“Hell, I don't know.” Havers pulled at her hair in frustration, as if this action would dislodge another possibility in her brain, which it did not.

Lynley thought about what Havers had suggested, however. He said, “Page Winston. He may have something for us.”

Havers used Lynley's mobile to do so. They worked their way down to Finchley Road. The wind, which had been brisk all day, had picked up in force during the late afternoon, and now it was hurtling autumn leaves and rubbish along the street. It was also carrying a storm in from the northeast, and as they made the turn into Baker Street, drops began to splatter the Bentley's windscreen. November's early darkness had fallen on London, and the lights from passing vehicles coned forward, creating a playing area for the first sheet of rain.

Lynley cursed. “This'll make a fine mess of the crime scene.”

Havers agreed. Lynley's mobile rang. Havers handed it over.

Winston Nkata reported that unless Katja Wolff's longtime lover was lying, the German woman was in the clear. Both for the murder of Eugenie Davies and for the hit-and-run of Malcolm Webberly. They were together both nights, he said.

Lynley said, “That's nothing new, Winston. You've told us that Yasmin Edwards confirms that she and Katja—”

This lover wasn't Yasmin Edwards, Nkata informed him. This lover was the deputy warden at Holloway, one Noreen McKay, who'd been involved with Katja Wolff for years. McKay hadn't wanted to come forward for obvious reasons, but put on the rack, she'd admitted to being with the German woman on both nights in question.

“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, business 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.”