A Traitor to Memory (51 page)

“Malcolm,” he'd reminded her.

Summer on the river had been twelve months later and not the first time he'd found an excuse to drive to Henley-on-Thames to check on Eugenie. She was lovely that day, quiet as always but with a sense of peace that he'd not witnessed in her before. He rowed the boat and she leaned back and rested on her side, not trailing her hand in the water in the way some women might have done, hoping for a seductive pose, but merely watching the river's surface as if its depths hid something she was waiting to see. Her face reflected brightness and shadow as they glided along beneath the trees.

He was aware in a rush that he'd fallen in love with her. But they had those twelve months of chaste friendship between them: walks round town, drives in the country, lunches at pubs, the occasional dinner and the warmth of conversation, real conversation about who Eugenie Davies had been and how she'd come to be who she was.

“I believed in God when I was young,” she told him. “But I lost God along the way to adulthood. I've been a long time without Him now, and I'd like to get Him back if I can.”

“Even after what's happened?”

“Because of what's happened. But I'm afraid He won't have me, Malcolm. My sins are too great.”

“You haven't sinned. You couldn't possibly sin.”

“You of all people can't believe that.”

But Webberly couldn't see sin in her no matter what she said about herself. He saw only perfection and—ultimately—what he himself wanted. But to speak of his feelings seemed a betrayal in every direction. He was married and the father of a child. She was fragile and vulnerable. And despite the time that had passed since her daughter's murder, he couldn't bring himself to take advantage of her grief.

So he settled on saying, “Eugenie, do you know that I'm married?”

She moved her gaze from the water to him. “I assumed that you were.”

“Why?”

“Your kindness. No woman thinking straight would be foolish enough to let someone like you get away. Would you like to tell me about your wife and family?”

“No.”

“Ah. What does that mean?”

“Marriages end sometimes.”

“Sometimes they do.”

“Yours did.”

“Yes. My marriage ended.” She moved her gaze back to the water. He continued to row, and he watched her face, feeling as if in a hundred years as a man long blind he would still be able to draw from memory every line and curve of it.

They'd brought a picnic with them, and when he saw the spot he wanted, Webberly bumped the boat into the bank. He said, “Wait. Stay there. Let me tie it up,” and as he scrambled up the slippery little slope, he lost his footing and slid into the water, where he stood humiliated with the Thames lapping coolly round his thighs. The mooring rope draped over his hand, and the river ooze seeped into his shoes.

Eugenie sat up straight, saying, “Heavens, Malcolm! Are you all right?”

“I feel a perfect fool. It never happens this way in films.”

“But this way is better,” Eugenie said. And before he could speak again, she scrambled from the boat and joined him in the water.

“The mud—” he began in protest.

“Feels exquisite,” she finished. And she began to laugh. “You've blushed to the roots of your hair. Why?”

“Because I want everything perfect,” he admitted.

She said, “Malcolm, everything is.”

He was flustered, wanting and not wanting, sure and unsure. He said nothing more. They clambered from the river onto the bank. He pulled the boat close and took from it the lunch they'd brought with them. They found a spot under a willow that they liked. It was when they sank to the ground that she spoke.

“I'm ready, Malcolm, if you are,” she said.

Thus it began between them.

“So the kid was given up for adoption.” Barbara Havers concluded her recitation by flipping closed her tatty notebook and digging round
in her lump of a shoulder bag for a packet of Juicy Fruit which she brought forth and generously offered round Eric Leach's Hampstead office. The DCI took a stick. Lynley and DC Nkata demurred. Havers folded one into her mouth and began to chew vigorously. Her substitute for the weed, Lynley thought. He wondered idly when she'd give up smoking altogether.

Leach played with the foil interior wrapper of the gum. He folded it into a miniature fan and placed it at the base of a photograph of his daughter. He'd apparently been on the phone to her when the Scotland Yard detectives arrived, and they'd come upon him at the end of a conversation in which he was wearily saying, “For God's sake, Esmé, this is something you need to discuss with your mum…. Of
course
she'll listen. She loves you…. Now you're jumping the gun. No one's getting … Esmé, listen to me … Yes. Right. Someday she … So might I, but that will never mean we don't love—” At which point, the girl had apparently hung up on him because he stood behind his desk with his mouth open on what he'd intended to say. He'd replaced the phone in its cradle with undue care and sighed heavily.

Now he went on. “That could be what's driving our killer, then. Or our killers. The adopted kid. Wolff didn't put herself in the club without assistance. Let's keep that in mind.”

The four of them continued their exchange of information. A hideous knot of traffic in Westminster had kept the Scotland Yard detectives from Leach's morning meeting with his team in the incident room, so the DCI took notes. At the conclusion of Havers' report on the Convent of the Immaculate Conception, Nkata said, “Could be the motive we're looking for, this. Wolff wants that kid and no one's giving her any help to find … is it him or her, Barb?” As was largely his habit, he hadn't taken a seat in the office. Rather, he stood not far from the doorway, lounging against the wall with one broad shoulder resting next to a framed commendation that Leach had received from the commissioner.

“It's him,” Havers said. “But I don't think that's the case.”

“Why?”

“According to Sister Cecelia, she gave him up for adoption straightaway. She could have kept him with her for nine months—longer than that if she did time somewhere other than Holloway—but she didn't want that. She didn't even request it and get denied. She just handed him over in the delivery room and never took a look at him.”

Lynley said, “She wouldn't have wanted to get attached to the infant
, Havers. What would be the point, facing a twenty-year sentence? It could be an indication of the strength of her maternal feelings for the baby. Had she not had him adopted, he would have spent his life in care.”

“But if she was looking for the kid, why not start with the convent?” Havers asked. “Sister Cecelia handled the adoption.”

“Could be she's not looking for him at all,” Nkata pointed out. “Twenty years later? She might know the kid wouldn't likely want to meet his real mum and find out she's a yard bird. And that could be 'xactly why she did the job on Missus Davies in the first place. Maybe she's thinking she wouldn't've
been
a yard bird without Missus Davies. Live with that for twenty years, and when you get out, you want to do something about settling the score.”

“I just don't buy that,” Havers insisted. “Not with this bloke Wiley sitting out there in his bookshop, knowing every move Eugenie Davies made. Convenient, wouldn't you say, that he happened to come upon our victim and a mystery man having an argument on the very night she was killed? Who's to say it was an argument at all but just the opposite? And our Major Wiley took some nasty action as a result.”

“We need to track this kid down one way or another,” Leach said. “Katja Wolff's kid. She might be on his trail and he'll need to be advised. It's messy, but there's no way round it. You handle that, Constable.”

Havers said, “Sir,” in acquiescence, but she didn't look convinced about the value of the assignment.

Winston Nkata said, “I say Katja Wolff 's the right direction. There's something off with that bird.”

He went on to describe for the others the meeting he'd had with the German woman once he'd returned to Yasmin Edwards' flat on the previous evening. Asked for her whereabouts on the night in question, Katja Wolff had claimed to be at home with Yasmin and Daniel. Watching television, she'd said, although she couldn't name the programme, and when put to the rack about this gap in her recollection, she said they'd channel-surfed all evening and she hadn't kept track where they'd touched down. What was the point of having a satellite dish and a remote if you weren't going to use both to entertain yourself?

She'd lit a cigarette as they'd spoken, and from her demeanour it looked as if she hadn't a care in the world. She'd said, “What's this about, Constable?” in apparent innocence. But her glance flicked to
the door before she answered the most important questions, and Nkata had known what that glance meant: She was hiding something from him and wondering if Yasmin Edwards had told a story similar to hers.

“What did the Edwards woman claim?” Lynley asked.

“That Wolff was there. Wouldn't say anything else about it, though.”

“Old lags,” Eric Leach pointed out. “They're sure as hell not going to finger each other for anything, not on a first go-round with the local rozzers. You need to go after them again, Constable. What else have you got?”

Nkata told them of the cracked headlamp on Yasmin Edwards' Fiesta. “Claimed she didn't know how it happened or when,” he said. “But Wolff has access. She was driving it yesterday.”

“Colour?” Lynley asked.

“Red gone bad.”

“That's not helpful,” Havers pointed out.

“Any of the neighbours have either one of them leaving the flat the night in question?” Leach asked this as a uniformed female constable came into his office with a sheaf of papers that she handed over. He glanced at them, grunted his thanks, and said, “Where are we with the Audis, then?”

“Still at it,” she said. “Nearly two thousand in Brighton, sir.”

“Who would've thought that?” Leach muttered as the constable left them. “Whatever happened to
buy British
?” He hung on to the papers but didn't refer to them, going back to his previous topic and saying to Nkata, “The neighbours? What about it?”

“South of the river,” Nkata said with a shrug. “No one willing to talk, even to me. Just one Bible basher who wanted to bang on 'bout women who live together in sin. Said the residents'd tried to get that baby killer—these're her words—off the premises with no luck.”

“We've got some more digging to do out there, then,” Leach noted. “See to it. Edwards might crack if you have a decent go. You said she has a boy, right? Bring him into the picture if you need to. Accessory to murder could get her arse in a sling, so point that out to her. In the meantime”—he rooted through some paperwork on his desk and brought out a photograph—“Holloway couriered this over last night. It needs to get taken round Henley-on-Thames.” He handed it to Lynley, who saw by the line of typing beneath it that it was a photograph of Wolff. The picture wasn't flattering. She was ill-lit, looking haggard and unkempt. Looking, he thought, just like a convicted murderer
. “If she did do the job on the Davies woman,” Leach continued, “she would have had to begin by tracking her down to Henley. If she did that, someone was bound to see her. Check it out.”

In the meantime, Leach concluded, they'd got a list of all phone calls made into and out of Eugenie Davies' cottage in the past three months. That list was being compared with the names in the dead woman's address book. The names and numbers in the address book were being matched to the calls on her answer machine. A few more hours and they should have some details as to who was last in contact with her.

“And we've got a name for the Cellnet number,” Leach informed them. “One Ian Staines.”

“That could be her brother,” Lynley said. “Richard Davies mentioned that she had two brothers, one called Ian.”

Leach jotted this down. He said, “D'we know our assignments, then, lads and lasses?” as a sign their meeting was at an end.

Havers and Lynley rose. Nkata disengaged from the wall. Leach stopped them before they left the office. He said, “Speak to Webberly, any of you?”

It was a casual enough question, Lynley thought. But its air of nonchalance didn't feel genuine. “He wasn't in this morning when we left the Yard,” Lynley answered.

“Give him my best when you see him,” Leach said. “Tell him I'll be in touch very soon.”

“We will. When we see him.”

Out on the street and once Nkata had gone on his way, Havers said to Lynley, “In touch about what? That's what I want to know.”

“They're old friends.”

“Hmmph. What've you done with those letters?”

“Nothing, as yet.”

“Are you still planning to …” Havers peered at him. “You are, aren't you? Damn it, Inspector, if you'd listen for a minute—”

“I'm listening, Barbara.”

“Good. Hear this: I know you, and I know how you think. ‘Decent bloke, Webberly. He made a little mistake. But there's no sense letting one little mistake become a catastrophe.’ Except it has done, Inspector. She's dead and those letters just might be why. We've got to face that. We've got to deal with it.”

“Are you arguing that letters more than ten years old would provoke someone to murder?”