A Traitor to Memory (22 page)

Havers said in her usual blunt fashion, “Sir, doesn't it look like there's something wrong with this kid? And she's the one that died, right? The one the superintendent told you about? This is her, right?”

“We'll need someone to confirm it,” Lynley replied. “She could be someone else. A niece. A grandchild.”

“But what d'you
think
?”

“I think yes,” Lynley said. “I think she's the child who died.” Drowned, he thought, drowned in what could have gone down as an accident but instead turned into something far more.

The photo must have been taken not long before she died. Webberly had told him that the girl had died at two, and Lynley saw that she couldn't have been much less than that at the time of this picture. But Webberly hadn't told him everything, he realised as he studied the photo.

He felt his guard go up and his suspicions heighten.

And he didn't much like either one of those sensations.

5

M
AJOR
T
ED
W
ILEY
didn't think in terms of the police when the silver Bentley pulled to the kerb across the street from his bookshop. He was in the middle of ringing up a purchase at the till for a youthful housewife with a sleeping toddler in a push chair, and rather than concentrate on the presence of a luxury vehicle in Friday Street during non-Regatta season, he instead engaged the youthful housewife in conversation. She'd bought four books by Dahl, which clearly were not intended for herself, so it appeared she was one of the few modern young parents who understood the importance of introducing a child to reading. Along with the insidious dangers of cigarette smoking, this was one of Ted's favourite topics. He and his wife had read to all three of their girls—not that there had been a surfeit of other nighttime activities for children to engage in in Rhodesia all those years ago—and he liked to think that the early start which he and Connie had given to them resulted in everything from respect for the written word to a determination to attend first-class universities.

So seeing a young mother in possession of a stack of children's books delighted Ted. Had she herself been read to as a child? he wanted to know. What were the little one's favourites? Wasn't it astonishing how quickly children attached themselves to a story they'd been read, demanding it over and over again?

Thus, Ted saw the silver Bentley only out of the corner of his eye.
He gave it little thought other than, Fine motor, that. It was only when the car's occupants got out and approached Eugenie's house that he bade a friendly farewell to his customer and moved closer to the window to watch them.

They were an odd pair. The man was tall, athletically built, blond, and admirably dressed in the sort of well-made suit that ages over time like a fine wine. His companion wore red trainers, black trousers, and an overlarge navy pea jacket that hung to her knees. The woman lit up a fag before she had the car door closed, which made Ted's lip curl in distaste—the world's tobacco manufacturers were surely going to burn for eternity in a section of hell designed just for them—but the man walked straight to Eugenie's door.

Ted waited for him to knock, but he didn't. As his companion sucked at her cigarette like someone with a death wish, the man examined an object in his hand, which turned out to be a key to Eugenie's front door, because he inserted this key in the lock and after making a remark to his companion, they both went inside.

At this sight, Ted went numb from his feet to his earlobes. First that unfamiliar man at one in the morning, then last night's encounter between Eugenie and that same individual in the car park, and now these two strangers in possession of a key to the cottage … Ted knew he had to get over there at once.

He glanced round the shop to see if any more customers were considering purchases. There were two others. Old Mr. Horsham—Ted liked to call him Old Mr. Horsham because it was such a relief to find someone out and about who was older than he himself—had taken a volume about Egypt off the shelf and appeared to be weighing it rather than inspecting it. And Mrs. Dilday was, as usual, reading another chapter from a book she had no intention of purchasing. Part of her daily ritual was to select a best seller, carry it casually to the back of the shop, where the armchairs were, read a chapter or two, mark her place with a grocery receipt, and hide the book among secondhand volumes of Salman Rushdie, where—considering the tastes of the average citizen in Henley—it would not be noticed.

For nearly twenty minutes Ted waited for these two customers to remove themselves from the premises so that he could invent a reason to go across the road. When Old Horsham finally bought Egypt for a gratifying sum, saying, “Saw action there in the war,” as he handed over two twenty-pound notes, which he extricated from a wallet that looked old enough to have seen action with its owner, Ted then turned his hopes towards Mrs. Dilday. But this, he saw, was going to
be fruitless. She was firmly ensconced in her favourite overstuffed armchair, and she'd brought a Thermos of tea with her as well. She was pouring, sipping, and reading quite happily, just as if she were in her own home.

Public libraries exist for a reason, Ted wanted to tell her. But instead he alternated between watching her, sending her mental messages about leaving at once, and peering out of the window for any kind of indication of who the people were in Eugenie's house.

In the midst of his mental imaging of Mrs. Dilday actually purchasing her novel and trotting off to read it, the telephone rang. His eyes still on Eugenie's house, Ted felt behind him for the receiver and picked it up on the fifth double ring.

He said, “Wiley's Books,” and a woman asked, “Who's this speaking, please?”

He said, “Major Ted Wiley. Retired. Who's this?”

“Are you the only person who uses this line, sir?”

“What …? Is this BT? Is there a problem?”

“Your phone number registers on one-four-seven-one as the last to have called this number that I'm speaking from, sir. It belongs to a woman called Eugenie Davies.”

“Right. I phoned her this morning,” Ted informed his caller, trying to keep his voice as steady as he could. “We've a dinner engagement.” And then because he had to ask it although he already knew the answer, “Is something wrong? Has something happened? Who are you?”

The receiver at the other end was covered for a moment as the woman spoke to someone else in the room. She said, “Metropolitan police, sir.”

Metropolitan … that meant London. And suddenly Ted could see it again: Eugenie driving into London last night with the rain beating down against the roof of the Polo and the spray from the tyres arcing out into the road. “London police?” he asked nonetheless.

“That's right,” the woman told him. “Where are you, exactly, sir?”

“Across from Eugenie's house. I've a bookshop …”

Another consultation. Then, “Would you mind stepping over here, sir? We've one or two questions we'd like to ask you.”

“Has something …” Ted could barely force himself to say the words, but they had to be said. If nothing else, the police would expect to hear them. “Has something happened to Eugenie?”

“We can come to you if that's more convenient.”

“No. No. I'll be there at once. I must close up first, but I'll—”

“Fine, Major Wiley. We'll be here for quite some time.”

Ted walked to the back, where he told Mrs. Dilday that an emergency required him to shut up shop for a time. She said, “Dear me. I hope it's not your mum?” because that was indeed the most rational emergency: his mother's death, although at eighty-nine it was only the stroke that was preventing her from taking up kick-boxing in her declining years.

He said, “No, no. Just … There's something I need to take care of.”

She peered at him intently but accepted the vague excuse. In a welter of nerves, Ted waited as she drank down the rest of her tea, donned her wool coat, thrust her hands into her gloves, and—without the least attempt to disguise her actions—put the novel she was reading behind a copy of
The Satanic Verses.

Once she was gone, Ted hurried up the stairs to his flat. He found that his heart was alternately fluttering then pounding, and he was going rather light in the head. With the lightness came voices, so real that he swung round without thinking, anticipating a presence that was not there.

First the woman's voice again: “Metropolitan police. We've one or two questions we'd like to ask …”

Then Eugenie's: “We'll talk. There's so much to say.”

And then, unaccountably, his own Connie's murmur coming to him from the grave itself, Connie, who'd known him as no one else had: “You're a match for any man alive, Ted Wiley.”

Why now? he wondered. Why Connie now?

But there was no answer, only the question. And there was also what had to be faced and dealt with across the street.

As Lynley began going through the letters he'd pulled from the papier-mâché holder, Barbara Havers went up the narrowest staircase she'd ever seen to the first floor of the tiny house. There, two very small bedrooms and an antiquated bathroom opened off a landing that wasn't much larger than a drawing pin's head. Both bedrooms continued the theme of monastic simplicity bordering on shabbiness that began in the sitting room below. The first room contained three pieces of furniture: a single bed covered by a plain counterpane, a chest of drawers, and a bedside table on which stood yet another tasseled lamp. The second bedroom had been turned into a sewing room and contained, aside from the answer machine, the only remotely modern appliance in the
entire building: an advanced sewing machine next to which lay a considerable pile of tiny garments. Barbara fingered through these and saw that they were dolls' clothes, elaborately designed and more elaborately fashioned with everything from beadwork to faux fur. There were no dolls anywhere in the sewing room nor were there any in the bedroom next door.

There Barbara went first to a chest of drawers, where she found a humble paucity of clothing, even by her own indifferent standards of dress: threadbare knickers, equally worn brassieres, a few jumpers, a limp collection of tights. There was neither a fitted clothes cupboard nor a wardrobe in the room, so the few skirts, trousers, and dresses that the woman had owned were folded carefully into the chest of drawers as well.

Among the trousers and the skirts, at the back of the drawer, Barbara saw that a bundle of letters had been tucked. She fished these out, removed the rubber band that held them together, laid them out across the single bed, and saw that they had all been written in the same hand. She blinked at this hand. She took a moment to assimilate the fact that she recognised the black, decisive scrawl.

The envelopes bore postmarks as old as seventeen years. The most recent, she saw, had been sent just over one decade ago. She reached for this one and slid the contents out.

He called her “Eugenie my darling.” He wrote that he didn't know where to begin. He said those things that men always say when they claim to have reached the decision that they no doubt intended to reach all along: She must never doubt that he loved her more than life itself; she must know, remember, and hold to her heart the fact that the hours they had spent together had made him feel alive—truly and wonderfully alive, my darling—for the first time in years; indeed, the feeling of her skin beneath his fingers had been like liquid silk shot through with lightning….