A Traitor to Memory (47 page)

But she said nothing. She merely met his eyes with defiance. And for five long seconds that felt like fifty, the only sound in the flat came from the bathroom, where Dan started singing some pop song as he scrubbed the wigs.

Then that sound was interrupted by another. A key scraped into the lock on the door. The door swung open.

And Katja was with them.

Lynley made Chelsea his final stop of the day. After leaving Richard Davies with his card and with instructions to phone should he hear from Katja Wolff or have any further information to impart, he negotiated the congestion round South Kensington station and cruised down Sloane Street, where the streetlamps glowed on an upmarket neighbourhood of restaurants, shops, and houses and the autumn leaves patterned the pavements in bronze. As he drove, he thought about connections and coincidence and whether the presence of the former obviated the possibility of the latter. It seemed very likely.
People were often in the wrong place at the wrong time, but rarely were they at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the intention of calling on someone who figured in a violent crime from their past.

He grabbed the first parking space he found in the relative vicinity of the St. James house, a tall umber brick building on the corner of Lordship Place and Cheyne Row. From the Bentley's boot, he took the computer he'd removed from Eugenie Davies' office.

When he rang the bell, he heard a dog's immediate barking. It came from the left—that would be from St. James's study, where Lynley could see through a window that a light was burning—and it approached the door with the enthusiasm of a canine doing the job properly. A woman's voice said, “Good grief, that's
enough
, Peach,” to the dog who, in best dachshund fashion, completely ignored her. A bolt slid back, the outside light above the door flicked on, and the door itself swung open.

“Tommy! Hullo. What a treat!” It was Deborah St. James who'd answered the bell, and she stood with the long-haired dachshund in her arms, a squirming barking bunch of brandy-coloured fur who wanted nothing better than to sniff Lynley's leg, hands, or face to see if he met with her canine approval. “Peach!” Deborah remonstrated with the dog. “You know very well who this is. Stop it.” She stepped back from the door, saying, “Come in, Tommy. Helen's already gone home, I'm afraid. She was tired, she said. Round four, this was. Simon accused her of keeping late nights to avoid compiling data on whatever it is they're doing—I can never keep it straight—but she swore it was because you'd had her up till dawn listening to all four parts of
The Ring
. Except I can't remember if there
are
four parts. Never mind. What have you brought us?”

Once the door was closed behind them, she put the dog on the floor. Peach gained a good whiff of Lynley's trousers, registered his scent, took a step backwards, and wagged her tail in greeting. “Thank you,” he told the dachshund solemnly. She trotted into the study where a gas fire burned and a lamp was lit on St. James's desk. There, a number of printed pages were scattered, some of them bearing black-and-white photographs and some of them bearing only script.

Deborah led Lynley into the room, saying, “Do put that thing down somewhere, Tommy. It looks heavy.”

Lynley chose a coffee table that stood in front of a sofa facing the fireplace. Peach came to investigate the computer before returning to a basket that exposed her to the best warmth of the fire. There, she
curled herself into a ball, sighed happily, and watched the proceedings in a dignified head-on-paws position from which she blinked drowsily from time to time.

“You must be wanting Simon,” Deborah said. “He's just upstairs. Let me fetch him for you.”

“In a moment.” Lynley said the words without thinking, and so quickly on the heels of her own that Deborah brought herself up short, smiled at him quizzically, and shoved a portion of her heavy hair behind one ear.

She said, “All right,” and walked to an old drinks trolley by the window. She was a tallish woman, lightly freckled across the bridge of her nose, not thin like a model, not stout, but well-shaped and completely female. She wore black jeans and a sweater that was the colour of green olives and made an attractive contrast with her coppery hair.

He saw that the room was stacked along the walls and the bookshelves at floor level with dozens of mounted and framed photographs. Some of them were dressed in bubble wrap, which reminded him of Deborah's upcoming show in a gallery on Great Newport Street.

She said, “Sherry? Whisky? We've got a new bottle of Lagavulin that Simon's telling me is nothing short of potable heaven.”

“Simon's not given to hyperbole.”

“Like the fine man of science that he is.”

“It must be good, then. I'll have the whisky. You're working on the show?”

“It's nearly ready. I'm at the catalogue stage.” Handing over the whisky, she nodded to her husband's desk and said, “I've been going over the proofs. The pictures they've selected are fine, but they've edited out some of my timeless prose”—she grinned; her nose wrinkled as it always did, making her look much younger than her twenty-six years—“and I'm finding that I don't like that much. Look at me. My fifteen minutes arrive and straightaway I become the great
artiste
.”

He smiled. “That's unlikely.”

“Which part?”

“The part about fifteen minutes.”

“You're very quick this evening.”

“I speak only the truth.”

She smiled at him fondly, then turned and poured herself a glass of sherry. She took it up, held it out, and said, “Here's to … Hmm … I don't know. What shall we drink to?”

Which was how Lynley knew that Helen had been as good as her
word, not telling Deborah about the coming baby. He was relieved at this. At the same time, he was ill at ease. Deborah would have to know sometime, and he knew that he had to be the person to tell her. He wanted to do so now, but he couldn't think of a place to begin, apart from saying outright, Let's drink to Helen. Let's drink to the baby my wife and I have made. Which was, of course, completely impossible.

He said instead, “Let's drink to the sale of every one of your pictures next month. On opening night, to members of the royal family who will summarily demonstrate they've a taste for something beyond horses and blood sport.”

“You never did get over your first fox hunt, did you?”

“‘The unspeakable in pursuit.’”

“Such a traitor to your class.”

“I like to think it's what makes me interesting.”

Deborah laughed, said, “Cheers, then,” and took a sip of sherry.

For his part, Lynley took a deep gulp of the Lagavulin and considered everything that was going unsaid between them. What a thing it was to come face-to-face with one's cowardice and indecision, he thought.

He said, “What will you do after the show is mounted? Have you another project in mind?”

Deborah looked round at the photographs piled in their serried ranks and considered the question, head cocked and eyes thoughtful. “Bit frightening, that is,” she admitted frankly. “I've been working on this since January. Eleven months now. And I suppose what I'd
like
to do if the gods allow it …” Her head tilted upwards to indicate not only the heavens but her husband, who'd probably be given his say in the matter. “I'd like to do something foreign, I think. Portraits still, I do love portraits. But foreign faces this time. Not foreign-in-London faces, because obviously I could find hundreds of thousands of those but they've been Britished, haven't they, even if they don't think so themselves. So what I'd like is something quite different. Africa? India? Turkey? Russia? I don't quite know.”

“But portraits all the same?”

“People don't hide from the camera when the picture's not for their own use. That's what I like about it: the openness, the candour with which they gaze at the lens. It's rather addictive, looking at all those faces being real for once.” She took another swallow of sherry and said, “But you can't have come to talk about my pictures.”

He took the opportunity for escape even as he loathed himself for doing so. He said, “Is Simon in the lab?”

“Shall I fetch him for you?”

“I'll just go up if that's all right.”

She said that it was, of course it was, he knew the way. And she crossed back to the desk where she'd been working, set down her glass, and came back to him. He finished his whisky, thinking she meant to have his own glass back, but she squeezed his arm and kissed him on the cheek. “Lovely to see you. D'you need help with that computer?”

“I can manage,” he said. And he did just that, not feeling particularly proud of himself for accepting the escape route she offered, but telling himself that there was work to be done and work came first, which was certainly a fact that Deborah St. James understood.

Her husband was on the fourth floor of the house, where he had a work room that had long been called his laboratory, and Deborah had a darkroom adjacent to it. Lynley climbed to this floor, pausing at the top of the stairs to say, “Simon? Are you in the middle of something?” before he walked across the landing to the open door.

Simon St. James was at his own computer, where he appeared to be studying a complicated structure that resembled a three-dimensional graph. When he tapped a few keys, the graphic altered. When he tapped a few more, it revolved on its side. He murmured, “That's damn curious,” and then turned to the door. “Tommy. I thought I heard someone come in a few minutes ago.”

“Deb offered me a glass of your Lagavulin. She was seeking confirmation as to its quality.”

“And?”

“Pretty damn good. May I …?” He nodded down at the computer.

St. James said, “Sorry. Here. Let me move…. Well, something can be moved, I think.”

He rolled his chair back from his computer table and hit the side of his leg brace at the knee with a metal ruler when it didn't adjust properly as he rose. He said, “I've been having the most blasted trouble with this thing. It's worse than arthritis. As soon as the rain starts, the knee hinge doesn't want to work properly. It's time for an overhaul. That or a visit to Oz.” He spoke with an utter lack of concern that Lynley knew he felt but could not feel himself. Whenever St. James had taken a step in Lynley's line of vision in the last thirteen
years, it had required every ounce of control he had not to avert his eyes in abject shame for having wreaked such physical devastation on his friend.

St. James cleared a space on the worktable nearest to the door by stacking up papers and manila folders and moving several scientific journals to one side. He said casually, “Is Helen all right? She was looking rather ill when she left this afternoon. All day, in fact, now that I think of it.”

“She was fine this morning,” Lynley said, and he told himself that the statement comprised the approximate if not the literal truth. She
was
fine. Morning sickness did not constitute illness in the usual sense. “Bit tired, I expect. We were out late at Web—” But that wasn't, he recalled, the story his wife had told Deborah and Simon earlier, was it? Blast Helen, he thought, for being so creative when it came to spinning tales. “No. Sorry. That was the other night, wasn't it. Christ. I can't keep anything straight. Anyway, she's fine. I expect it was a late night catching up with her.”

“Right. Well. Yes,” St. James said, but his examination of Lynley was rather too lengthy for Lynley's comfort. In the small silence that ensued, rain began to fall outside. It hit the window like timpani in miniature, and it was accompanied by a sudden gust of wind that rattled the casement like an unspoken accusation. St. James said, “What've you brought me?” with a nod at the computer.

“Some detective work.”

“That's your bailiwick, isn't it?”

“This requires a more delicate touch.”

St. James hadn't known Lynley for more than twenty years to find himself suddenly incapable of reading between the lines. He said, “Are we on thin ice, Tommy?”

Lynley said honestly, “A singular pronoun is all that's required. You're clean. If you'll help me, that is.”

“That's remarkably reassuring,” St. James said dryly. “Why do I picture myself in an unpleasant future scenario, sitting in the dock or standing in the witness box, but in either case sweating like a fat man in Miami?”

“That's your natural sense of fair play among men, a quality I deeply admire in you, by the way, if I've not mentioned the fact before. It's also, however, one of the first things that gets tossed out of the window after a few years dealing with the criminal element.”

“This is from a case, then?” St. James said.

“You didn't hear that from me.”

St. James fingered his upper lip thoughtfully as he gazed at the computer. He would know what Lynley ought to be doing with the piece of machinery. But as to why he wasn't doing it … That was something he'd be better off not asking. He finally drew a breath and let it out, giving a shake of his head that indicated it was against his better judgement to say, “What do you need?”

“All internet activity. Her use of e-mail particularly.”