A Traitor to Memory (52 page)

“Alone, no. I'm not saying that. But according to Wiley, she was
going to tell him something important, something
he
thought would change their relationship. So, what if she already told him? Or what if he already knew because he came across those letters? We have only his word that he doesn't know what she had to say.”

“Agreed. But you can't be thinking she wanted to speak to him about Webberly. That's ancient history.”

“Not if they'd resumed their affair. Not if they'd never lost touch with each other. Not if they'd been meeting in … say … pubs and hotels? That would have to be dealt with. And maybe it was. Only it was dealt with badly and not in the way our principals—Mrs. Davies and Webberly—thought it would be.”

“I don't see that happening. And it's far too coincidental for my liking that Eugenie Davies would be killed so soon after Katja Wolff was released from prison.”

“You're jumping on
that
horse?” Havers scoffed. “It's a non-starter. Depend on it.”

“I'm not jumping on any horse at all,” Lynley replied. “It's far too early to be doing that. And I suggest you employ the same hesitation with regard to Major Wiley. It gets us nowhere to fix our minds on one possibility and become blind to the others.”

“You're
not
doing that? Inspector, you
haven't
decided those letters from Webberly are inconsequential?”

“What I've decided is to develop my opinions based on facts, Barbara. We haven't got a lot of them so far. Until we have, we can serve the cause of justice—not to mention pursue the course of wisdom—only by keeping our eyes open and our judgements suspended. Don't you agree?”

Havers fumed. “Listen to yourself. Bloody hell. I
hate
it when you go all toffs-in-town-for-the-season on me.”

Lynley smiled. “Do you? Was I? I hope it doesn't provoke you to violence.”

“Just to smoking,” Havers informed him.

“Even worse,” Lynley sighed.

GIDEON

8 October

Last night I dreamed of her, or of someone like her. But the time and the place were both out of joint because I was on the Eurostar and we were descending beneath the English Channel. It was like going down into a mine.

Everyone was there: Dad, Raphael, my grandparents, and someone shadowy and faceless whom I recognised as my mother. And she was there as well: the German girl, looking much the way she looked in the newspaper photo. And yes, Sarah-Jane Beckett was there, with a picnic basket from which she pulled not a meal but a baby. She offered the baby round like a plate of sandwiches and everyone refused. One can't eat a baby, Granddad instructed her.

Then it was dark outside the windows. Someone said, Oh yes, we're under the water now.

And that's when it happened.

The tunnel walls broke. The water came through. It wasn't black like the inside of the tunnel, though, but rather like the bottom of a riverbed where one might swim and look up through the water at the sun.

And suddenly in that way dreams have of changing, we were no longer in a train at all. The carriage disappeared, and we were out of the water and on the shore of a lake, all of us. A picnic basket lay on a blanket, and I wanted to open it because I was famished. But I couldn't unfasten the basket's leather straps, and although I asked for someone to open it for me, no one would because they didn't hear me.

They couldn't hear me because they were all on their feet, pointing and crying out about a boat that was floating some distance from the shore. And I became aware suddenly of what they were crying: It was my sister's name. Someone said, She's been left in the boat! We must fetch her! But no one moved.

Then the leather straps from the picnic basket were gone, as if they'd never been. Exultant, relieved, I flung the top open to get at the food, but there was no food inside. There was only the baby. And I somehow knew that the baby was my sister even though I couldn't see her face. She was covered head and shoulders by a veil, the sort you see on statues of the Virgin.

I said in the dream, Sosy's here. She's right
here
. But no one on the shore would listen. Instead, they began to swim towards the boat, and I couldn't stop them no matter how I shouted. I picked the baby up from the basket to show them I was telling the truth. I cried out, She's here! Look! Sosy's right here! Come back! There's no one in the boat! But they kept swimming, one by one entering the water in a single line, and one by one disappearing beneath the surface of the lake.

I was desperate to stop them. I thought that if they could see her face, if I could hold her high enough above my shoulders, they would believe me and come back. So I tore at the veil round my sister's face. But I found another veil beneath it, Dr. Rose. And under that another. And under that another. I tore at them till I was weeping and frantic and no one was left on the shore but me. Even Sonia was gone. Then I turned to the picnic basket again to find it filled not with food but with dozens of kites that I kept pulling out and tossing to one side. And as I pulled them out, I felt a desperation like nothing I've ever felt before. Desperation and tremendous fear because everyone was gone and I was alone.

So what did you do, you ask me gently.

I did nothing. Libby woke me. I found I was drenched in sweat, my heart was pounding, and I was actually weeping.

Weeping
, Dr. Rose. My God, I was weeping over a dream.

I said to Libby, “There was nothing in the basket. I couldn't make them stop. I had her but they couldn't see I had her, so they went into the lake and didn't come out.”

She said, “You were only dreaming. Here. Come here. Let me hold you, okay?”

And yes, Dr. Rose, she had spent the night the way she often spends the night. She cooks a meal or I cook a meal, we do the washing up, and we watch the television. That's what I have been reduced to: the television. If Libby notices that we no longer listen to Perlman, Rubinstein, and Menuhin—especially Yehudi, magnificent Yehudi, child of the instrument as I myself was—she does not mention it. Indeed, she's probably grateful for the television. She is, at heart, so much an American.

When we run out of programmes to watch, we drift into sleep. We sleep in the same bed and on the same bedclothes that haven't been changed for weeks. But they are not soiled with the mixture of our fluids. No. We have not managed that.

Libby held me while my heart hammered like a miner hewing coal. Her right hand fondled the back of my head while her left hand caressed the length of my spine. From my spine, she worked her way down to my bum till we were pelvis to pelvis with only the thin flannel of my pyjamas and the cotton of her knickers between us. She whispered, “It's nothing, it's all right, you're fine,” and despite those words which might have been succour under other circumstances, I knew what was supposed to happen next. Blood would rush to my cock, and I would feel the pulse of it. The pulse of it would grow and the organ would ready. I would lift my head to find her mouth or lower my mouth to find her breasts, and I would grind against her, grind against her slowly. I would pin her to the bed beneath us and take her in a silence broken only by our cries of pleasure—like no other pleasure available to men and to women, as you know—when we come. Together, of course. We come together. Anything less than simultaneous orgasm is completely unworthy of my prowess as a male.

Except, of course, that is not what happened. How could it, I being who and what I am?

Which is what? you ask me.

A carapace covering nothing, Dr. Rose. No, less even than that. With my music gone, I am nothing itself.

Libby doesn't understand this because she can't see that who I was until Wigmore Hall was the music I made. I myself was merely an extension of the instrument, and the instrument was merely the manner in which my being took form.

You say nothing at first when you hear this, Dr. Rose. You keep your eyes on me—sometimes I wonder at the discipline it must take to keep your eyes on someone so patently not even in the room with you—and you look thoughtful. But there is something more than consideration in your eyes. Is it pity? Confusion? Doubt? Frustration?

You sit unmoving, in your widow's black. You observe me over the top of your tea cup. What are you crying out in the dream? you say. When Libby wakes you, what are you crying out, Gideon?

Mummy.

But I expect you knew that before you asked.

10 October

I can see my mother now because of the newspapers in the Press Association office. I glimpsed her—on the opposite page to Sonia's picture—before I thrust the tabloid out of my sight. I knew it was my mother because she was on my father's arm, because they were on the front step of the Old Bailey, because above them a headline declared Justice for Sonia! in four-inch type.

So now at last I see her where before she was a blur. I see her blonde hair, I see the angles of her face, I see the way her chin is sharp and her lower jaw points to form it like the bottom of a heart. She is wearing black trousers and a soft grey sweater, and she comes to fetch me in the corner of my bedroom where Sarah-Jane and I are having a geography lesson. The Amazon River is what we're studying. How it coils like a snake for four thousand miles, from the Andes, through Peru and Brazil, and into the vast Atlantic Ocean.

Mother tells Sarah-Jane that she must cut short the lesson, and I know that Sarah-Jane doesn't like this plan because her lips change from lips into an incision in her face although she says, “Of course, Mrs. Davies,” and shuts our books.

I follow Mother. We go down the stairs. She takes me into the sitting room, where a man is waiting. He's a big man with lots of ginger hair.

Mother says that he's a policeman, and he wants to ask me some questions, but I'm not to be afraid because she won't leave the room while he talks to me. She sits on the sofa and pats the cushion, right next to her thigh. And when I sit, she puts her arm round my shoulders, and I can feel her trembling as she says, “Go ahead, Detective Inspector.”

She's probably told me his name, but I can't remember it. What I do remember is that he pulls a chair over close to us and he leans forward with his elbows on his knees and his arms drawn up so that he can rest his chin on his thumbs. When he's close like this, I can smell cigars. The smoke must be in his clothes and his hair. It's not a bad smell, but I'm not used to it, and I shrink back against my mother.