A Traitor to Memory (17 page)

He very much wanted to
be
left to himself. He'd wanted that from the instant he'd heard Eric Leach say, “Malc, sorry it's so late, but I've got some news,” and go on to tell him of Eugenie Davies' death. He needed the time alone to sort through his feelings, and while a sleepless night with his wife snoring lightly beside him had given him a number of hours to consider how the words
hit-and-run
actually affected him, he'd found that all he'd been able to do was to picture Eugenie Davies as he'd last seen her: with the river wind tossing her bright blonde hair. She'd covered that hair with a scarf the moment
she'd stepped from her cottage, but during their walk the scarf had loosened and it was while she removed it, refolded it, and replaced it on her head that the wind flicked locks of hair round her shoulders.

Quickly, he'd said to her, “Why not leave it off? The light in your hair makes you look …” What? Beautiful? he'd wondered. But she'd never been a great beauty in all the years that he'd known her. Young? They were both a decade past their prime. He'd supposed the word he wanted was actually
peaceful
. The sunlight in her hair made an aureole round her head, which reminded him of seraphim, which spoke of peace. But as those thoughts came to him, he'd become conscious of the fact that he'd never seen Eugenie Davies truly at peace and that at the moment—despite that trick of the halo created by light and wind—she was not at peace still.

These thoughts in his mind once again, Webberly smeared polish industriously on his shoe. As he did so, he became aware that his wife was still talking to him. “… a lovely job, though. But thank heavens it was dark when the poor woman arrived because Lord knows how she would have functioned had she got a good look at our garden.” Frances laughed ruefully. “‘I'm still holding out for my pond and my lilies,' I told our Lady Hillier last night. She and Sir David are actually thinking of putting a hot tub in their conservatory. Did you know? I told her a conservatory hot tub is perfectly well and good if you like that sort of thing, but as for me, a little pond is all I've ever wanted. ‘And we'll have it someday,' I told her. ‘Malcolm says we'll have it, so we will.’ Naturally, we'll have to find someone to scythe through the weeds and cart off that old lawn mower out there, but I didn't mention that to our Lady Hillier—”

Your sister Laura, Webberly thought.

“—as she'd hardly understand what I was talking about. She's had that gardener of hers since … I don't know how long. But when the time's right and the money's there, you and I will have our little pond, won't we?”

“I expect so,” Webberly said.

Frances eased behind the table in the cramped little kitchen and gazed from the window into the garden. She'd stood there so often in the past ten years that she'd worn a shoe-sized place in the lino, and there were finger grooves in the window sill where she'd spent hours clutching onto the wood. What did she think as she stood there hour after hour every day? her husband wondered. What did she try—and fail—to do? A moment later he had his answer:

“The day looks quite fine,” she told him. “Radio One claimed
there's going to be more rain by this afternoon, but I think they've got it wrong. You know, I believe I'll go out and do some work in the garden this morning.”

Webberly looked up. Frances, apparently feeling his eyes on her, swung round from the window, one hand still on the sill and the other tight on the lapel of her dressing gown. “I think I can do it today,” she said. “Malcolm, I think I can do it.”

How many times had she said that before? Webberly wondered. One hundred? One thousand? And always with that same mixture of hope and delusion. She was going to work in the garden, Malcolm, she was going to walk to the shops this afternoon, she would definitely sit on a bench in Prebend Gardens or take Alfie for a romp or try the new beautician that was so well-spoken-of … so many good and honest intentions coming to naught at the final moment when the front door stood implacably in front of Frances and, try as she might and God knows she tried, she couldn't force her right hand up far enough to grasp onto the knob.

Webberly said, “Frannie—”

She cut in anxiously. “It's the party that's made all the difference. Having our friends in … being surrounded like that. I feel as right as … well, as right as can be.”

Miranda's appearance at the kitchen door saved Webberly from having to make a reply. With an “Ah. Here you are,” she dropped her trumpet case onto the floor along with a weighty rucksack, and she went to the cooker, where Alfie—the family's Alsatian mix—was having a lengthy post-party lie-in on his blanket. She gave the dog a brisk rub between his ears, which he responded to by rolling over and offering his stomach for her ministrations. She cooperated, pausing to plant a kiss on his head and to accept a wet dog kiss in return.

“Darling, that's terribly unhygienic,” Frances said.

“That's doggy love,” Miranda replied. “Which, as we know, is the purest kind. Isn't it, Alf?”

Alfie yawned.

Miranda said, over her shoulder to her parents, “I'm off, then. I've two papers to hand in next week.”

“So soon?” Webberly set his shoes to one side. “We've had you barely forty-eight hours. Cambridge can wait another day, can't it?”

“Duty calls, Dad. Not to mention the odd exam or two. You still want me to try for a first, I take it?”

“Hang on, then. Let me finish with these shoes and I'll drive you up to King's Cross Station.”

“No need. I'll go by tube.”

“Then I'll run you up to the Underground.”

“Dad.” Her voice was a model of patience. They'd walked this path often in her twenty-two years, so she was well-used to its twists and turns. “I need the exercise. Explain it to him, Mum.”

Webberly protested. “But if it begins to rain on your way—”

“Heavens, Malcolm, she's not going to melt.”

But they do, Webberly countered, in his mind. They melt, they break, they disappear in an instant. And always when melting, breaking, or disappearing is the very last possibility in your head. Still, he knew the wisdom of compromise in a situation in which two females were beginning to join forces against him. So he said, “I'll walk a bit with you, then.” And he added, “Alf needs his morning toddle, Randie,” when Miranda rolled her eyes and was about to remonstrate against the idea of a father chaperoning his adult daughter down the street in broad daylight as if she were incapable of using a zebra crossing on her own.

“Mum?” Miranda looked to her mother for support. Frances said with a regretful shrug, “You've not taken Alfie yet yourself, have you, darling?”

Miranda surrendered with good-natured exasperation. “Oh, come along then, you twit. But I'm not waiting for the shoe polish routine to be done.”

“I'll see to the shoes,” Frances said.

Webberly fetched the dog's lead and followed his daughter out of the house. Outside, Alfie rooted an old tennis ball from the shrubbery. He knew the routine when Webberly was on the other end of the lead: It would be a stroll to Prebend Gardens, where his master would unhook the lead from his collar and throw the tennis ball across the grass, whereupon Alfie would dash after it, refuse to return it, and run wildly around for at least a quarter of an hour.

“I don't know who has less imagination,” Miranda said as she watched the dog snuffle through the hydrangeas, “you or the dog. Just look at him, Dad. He
knows
what's up. There's not the least bit of surprise in store for him.”

“Dogs like routine,” Webberly told her as Alfie emerged triumphant, a hairy old ball in his jaws.

“Dogs, yes. But what about you? Do you
always
take him to the gardens, for God's sake?”

“It's my walking meditation twice a day,” he told her. “Morning and night. Doesn't that satisfy?”

“Walking meditation,” she scoffed. “Dad, you're such a fibber. Really.” They set off to the right once beyond the front gate, following the dog to the end of Palgrave Street, where he made the expected left turn that would take them up to Stamford Brook Road and Prebend Gardens that lay just on the other side of it.

“It was a good party,” Miranda said, linking her arm through her father's. “Mum seemed to like it. And no one mentioned … or wondered … at least not to me …”

“It was fine,” Webberly said, squeezing his arm to his side to hold her closer. “Your mother enjoyed herself so much she was talking about working in the garden today.” He felt his daughter looking at him but he kept his own eyes resolutely forward.

Miranda said, “She won't. You know she won't. Dad, why don't you insist she go back to that doctor? There's help for people like Mum.”

“I can't force her to do more.”

“No. But you could …” Miranda sighed. “I don't know. Something.
Some
thing. I don't understand why you won't take a stand, why you've never taken a stand with Mum.”

“What d'you have in mind?”

“If she thought you meant to … well, if you said, ‘This is it, Frances. I'm at my limit. I want you to go back to that psychiatrist or else.’”

“Or else? What?”

He could feel her deflate. “Yes. That's just it, isn't it? I know you'd never leave her. Well, of course, how could you and live with yourself? But there's got to be something you—we—haven't thought of yet.” And then apparently to spare him from having to answer, she noted that Alfie was eyeing a cat up ahead of them with too much interest. She took the lead from her father and said, “Don't even
think
of it, Alfred,” with a little jerk.

At the corner, they crossed and there they parted fondly, Miranda heading to the left, which would ultimately take her in the direction of Stamford Brook Underground station and Webberly striding onward along the green iron railings that formed the east boundary of Prebend Gardens.

Inside the wrought iron gate, Webberly took the dog off his lead and wrested the tennis ball from his jaws. He flung it as far as he could down the length of the green and watched as Alfie raced after it. Once the ball was in the dog's possession, Alfie did his usual: He loped to the far end of the lawn and began to race round the perimeter
of the green. Webberly watched his progress from bench to bush to tree to path, but he himself remained where they'd entered, moving only to the paint-chipped black bench a short distance from the notice board on which announcements of coming events in the community were posted.

These he read without actually assimilating them: Christmas fêtes, antiques fairs, car boot sales. He noted with approval that the phone number of the local police station was prominently displayed and that a committee hoping to organise a Neighbourhood Watch programme was going to assemble in the basement of one of the churches. He saw all this but he couldn't have testified to any of it later. Because although he perceived those six or seven pieces of paper pinned behind the glass of the notice board, and although he went through the motions of reading each one of them, what he actually observed was Frances standing at the kitchen window while his daughter said kindly and with absolute faith in him,
Of course you'd never leave her … how could you?
That last especially seemed to reverberate round his skull like an echo with a killing sense of irony.

Leaving Frances had been the last thing on his mind that night he'd got the call to go to Kensington Square. The call had come via the Earl's Court Road station, where he was a recently promoted detective inspector with a newly assigned sergeant—Eric Leach—as his partner. Leach did the driving down Kensington High Street, which in those days was moderately less jammed than it tended to be now. Leach was new to the borough, so they overshot the mark and ended up winding through Thackery Street, with its small-village feel so at odds with a huge city, and coming into the square from its southeast end. This put them directly in front of the house they were seeking: a red brick Victorian affair with a white medallion at the gable's peak giving the date of construction: 1879, relatively new in an area where the oldest building had been raised nearly two hundred years earlier.

A panda car, a tandem arrival at the scene along with the paramedics when the emergency call had first come through, still sat at the kerb although its lights were no longer flashing. The paramedics themselves were long since gone, as were the neighbours, who had doubtless assembled as neighbours will do when sirens scream into a residential area.

Webberly shoved open his door and walked to the house, where a low brick wall surmounted by black wrought iron fenced in a flagstone area with a central planter. An ornamental cherry tree grew
there, and at that time of year it created a roseate blossom pool on the ground.

The front door was closed, but someone inside must have been waiting for them, because no sooner had Webberly put his foot on the bottom step than the door swung open and the uniformed constable who'd placed the call to the station admitted them into the house. He looked shaken. This was his first call to a child's death, he told them. He'd arrived in the wake of the ambulance.

“Two years old,” he informed them in a hollow voice. “Dad'd been giving her kiss of life and the 'medics tried everything they could.” He shook his head, looking stricken. “No chance. She was gone. Sorry, sir. I've a baby at home. Makes you think …”

“Right,” Webberly said. “It's okay, son. I've a little one myself.” He needed no reminding how fleeting life was, how vigilant a parent needed to be against anything that might snuff that life out. His own Miranda had just turned two.

“Where'd it happen?” Webberly asked.

“In the bath. Upstairs. But don't you want to talk to …? The family're in the drawing room.”

Webberly didn't need a young PC to tell him his business, but the boy was rattled, so there was no point sorting him out right then. He looked at Leach instead. “Tell them we'll be with them shortly. Then …” He jerked his head towards the stairs. He said to the constable, “Show me,” and he followed him up a staircase that curved round an ornate oak plant stand from which an enormous fern drooped fronds towards the floor.