A Traitor to Memory (73 page)

“Done with what?” Lynley asked, thanking Cotter when the other man set down a tray he'd been carrying and took his coat.

“God knows. Drink? Cuppa? I made fresh scones”—this with a nod at the tray—“'f you c'n be bothered to take 'em up with you. I did 'em for tea, but no one came down.”

“I'll investigate the situation.” Lynley took the tray from where Cotter had balanced it precariously on an umbrella stand. He said, “Any message for them?”

Cotter said, “Tell 'em dinner's at half eight. Beef in port wine sauce. New potatoes. Courgettes and carrots.”

“That should certainly tempt them.”

Cotter snorted. “Should do, yes. But will do? Not likely. But mind you tell 'em there's no skipping this one 'f they want to keep me cooking. Peach is up there as well, by the way. Don't give her one of them scones, no matter what she does. She's on a diet.”

“Right.” Dutifully, Lynley mounted the stairs.

He found everyone where Cotter had promised they would be: Helen and Simon were poring over a set of graphs spread out on a worktable, while Deborah was examining a string of negatives just inside her darkroom. Peach was snuffling round the floor. She was the first to spy Lynley, and the sight of the tray he was carrying caused her to prance over to him happily, tail wagging and eyes alight.

“If I were naïve, I'd think you were welcoming me,” Lynley said to the animal. “I've strict orders to refrain from feeding you, I'm afraid.”

At this, St. James looked up and Helen said, “Tommy!” and glanced at the window with a frown, adding, “Good Lord. What time is it?”

“Our results aren't making sense,” St. James said to Lynley without other explanation. “A gram as the minimum fatal dose? I'll be laughed out of the hearing.”

“And when is the hearing?”

“Tomorrow.”

“It looks like a late night, then.”

“Or ritual suicide.”

Deborah came to join them, saying, “Tommy, hello. What have you brought us?” Her face lit up. “Ah.
Brilliant
. Scones.”

“Your father's sending a message about dinner.”

“Eat or die?”

“Something along those lines.” Lynley looked at his wife. “I thought you'd be long gone by now.”

“No tea with the scones?” Deborah asked, relieving Lynley of the tray as Helen said, “We seem to have lost track of time.”

“That's not like you,” Deborah said to Helen as she set the tray next to a large book that lay open at a grisly illustration of a man apparently dead of something that had caused a glaucous-coloured vomit to discharge from his mouth and his nose. Either oblivious of this unappetising sight or completely used to it, Deborah scooped up a scone for herself. “If we can't depend on you to remind us of mealtimes, Helen, what
can
we depend upon?” She broke her scone in half and took a bite. She said, “Lovely. I hadn't realised I was famished. I can't eat one of these without something to drink, though. I'm fetching the sherry. Anyone else?”

“That sounds good.” St. James took up a scone himself as his wife left the lab and headed for the stairs. He called out, “Glasses for all, my love.”

“Will do,” Deborah called back and added, “Peach, come. Time for your dinner.” The dog obediently followed, her eyes glued to the scone in Deborah's hand.

Lynley said to Helen, “Tired?” She had very little colour in her face.

“A bit,” she said, looping a lock of hair behind one ear. “He's been rather a slave driver today.”

“When is he not?”

“I've a reputation for general beastliness to maintain,” St. James said. “But I'm a decent sort underneath the foul exterior. I'll prove it to you. Have a look at this, Tommy.”

He went to his computer table, where Lynley saw that he'd set up the terminal that he and Havers had taken from Eugenie Davies' office. A laser printer stood next to it, and from its tray, St. James took a sheaf of documents.

Lynley said, “You've tracked her internet use? Well done, Simon. I'm impressed and grateful.”

“Save impressed. You could have done it yourself if you knew the first thing about technology.”

“Be gentle with him, Simon.” Helen smiled fondly at her husband. “He's only recently been strong-armed into accepting e-mail at work. Don't rush him too madly into the future.”

“It might result in whiplash,” Lynley agreed. He pulled his spectacles from his jacket pocket. “What've we got?”

“Her internet use first.” St. James explained that Eugenie Davies' computer—not to mention computers in general—always kept a
record of the sites that a user visited, and he handed over a list of what Lynley was pleased to see were recognisable even to him as web addresses. “It's straightforward stuff,” St. James told him. “If you're looking for something untoward in what she was doing on the net, I don't think you're going to find it there.”

Lynley glanced through what St. James identified as the URLs he'd picked up by examining Eugenie Davies' travel history: These were the addresses she would have typed into the location bar, he said, in order to access individual web sites. If one merely chose the dropdown arrow next to the location bar and left-clicked on it, one had easy access to the trail an internet user left when he or she logged on. Vaguely listening to St. James's explanation about the source of the information he'd handed over, Lynley made noises of comprehension and ran his gaze over Eugenie Davies' chosen sites. He saw that the other man had assessed the dead woman's usage of the internet with his usual accuracy. Every site—at least by name—appeared to relate to her job as director of the Sixty Plus Club: She'd accessed everything from a site dedicated to the NHS to a location for pensioners' coach trips round the UK. She appeared to have done some newspaper browsing as well, mostly in the
Daily Mail
and the
Independent
. And those sites she'd visited with regularity, particularly in the last four months. This was possible support for Richard Davies' contention that she'd been trying to assess Gideon's condition from the newspapers.

“Not much help here,” Lynley agreed.

“No. But there's some hope with this.” St. James handed over the rest of the papers he'd been holding. “Her e-mail.”

“How much of it?”

“That's the lot. From the day she started corresponding on-line.”

“She'd saved it?”

“Not intentionally.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that people try to protect themselves on the net, but it doesn't always work. They choose passwords that turn out to be obvious to anyone who knows them—”

“As she did when she chose
Sonia
.”

“Yes. Exactly. That's their first mistake. Their second is failing to note whether their computer is set up to save all the e-mail that comes into it. They think they've got privacy, but the reality is that their world is an open book to anyone who knows which icons turn which pages. In Mrs. Davies' case, her computer dumped all the messages it
received into its trash bin whenever she deleted them, but till she emptied the trash bin itself—which she appears not to have done, ever—the messages were just stored inside it. It happens all the time. People hit the delete button and assume they've got rid of something when all the computer has actually done is to move it to another location.”

“This is everything, then?” Lynley gestured with the stack of papers.

“Every message she received. Helen's to thank for printing them out. She's also gone through them and marked the ones that look like business messages to save you some time. The rest you'll want to have a more thorough look at.”

Lynley said, “Thank you, darling,” to his wife, who had taken a scone from the tray and was nibbling its edges. He went through the stack of papers, setting aside the ones that Helen had marked as business correspondence. He read the rest of them in chronological order. He was looking for anything even moderately suspicious, something from someone with the potential to do Eugenie Davies harm. And although he admitted this only to himself, he was also looking for anything from Webberly, anything recent, anything embarrassing to the superintendent.

Although some of the senders used not their own names but, rather, monikers apparently related to their line of work or their special interests, Lynley was relieved to see that there were none among them that he could easily associate with his superior at New Scotland Yard. There was also no Scotland Yard address listed, which was even better.

Lynley breathed easier and kept on reading to find that there was also nothing among the messages from anyone identifying himself as TongueMan, Pitchley, or Pitchford. And upon a second examination of the first document St. James had handed him, none of the URLs for the web sites Eugenie Davies had visited looked as if they might be a clever cover for a chat room where sexual encounters were set up. Which might or might not, he concluded, move TongueMan-Pitchley-Pitchford off their list.

He went back to the stack of e-mail as St. James and Helen returned to their perusal of the graphs they'd been working with upon his arrival, Helen saying, “The last e-mail she received was on the morning of the day she was killed, Tommy. It's at the bottom of the pile, but you might want to have a look at it now. It caught my eye.”

Lynley saw why when he pulled it out. The message comprised
three sentences, and he felt a corresponding chill when he read them:
I must see you again, Eugenie. I'm begging. Don't ignore me after all this time.

“Damn,” he whispered.
After all this time
.

“What do you think?” Helen asked although the tone of her voice indicated that she'd already reached her own conclusion in the matter.

“I don't know.” There was no closing to the message, and the sender was among the group who used a handle rather than a Christian name.
Jete
was the word that preceded the provider's identification. The provider itself was Claranet, with no business name associated with it.

This indicated that a home computer had probably been used to communicate with Eugenie Davies, which brought Lynley at least some measure of reassurance. Because as far as he knew, Webberly had no personal computer at his home.

He said, “Simon, is there a way to trace the real name of an e-mail user if he's adopted a nickname?”

“Through the provider,” St. James replied, “although I expect you'd have to strong-arm them into giving it to you. They're not obliged to.”

“But in a murder investigation …?” Helen said.

“That might be sufficient coercion,” St. James admitted.

Deborah returned to them, carrying four glasses and a decanter. “Here we are,” she announced. “Scones and sherry.” She proceeded to pour.

Helen said quickly, “Nothing for me, Deborah. Thanks,” and helped herself to a dab of butter that she dotted on a scrap of the scone she'd taken.

“You've got to have something,” Deborah said. “We've been working like slaves. We deserve a reward. Would you rather a gin and tonic, Helen?” She wrinkled her nose. “What on earth am I thinking? Gin and tonic and scones? Now,
that
sounds appetising.” She handed a glass to her husband and another to Lynley. “This is quite a red-letter day. I don't think I've ever heard you turn down a sherry, Helen, especially after being run ragged by Simon. Are you all right?”

“I'm perfectly fine,” Helen said. And she glanced at Lynley.

Now was the moment, of course, Lynley thought. It was the perfect time for him to tell them. With the four of them congenially together in St. James's lab, what was to stop him from saying offhandedly, “We've an announcement, by the way, although you're
probably moments away from guessing it.
Have
you guessed?” He could put his arm round Helen's shoulders as he spoke. He could carry on and kiss the side of her head. “Parenthood looms,” he could say jokingly. “Goodbye to late nights and Sunday morning lie-ins. Hello to nappies and baby milk.”

But he didn't say any of that. Instead, he held his glass up to St. James and declared, “Many thanks for the efforts with the computer, Simon. I'm in your debt once again,” and he threw back a mouthful of the sherry.

Deborah looked from Lynley to Helen curiously. For her part, Helen quietly stacked up the graphs as St. James drank to Lynley's toast. A tight little silence fell among them, during which Peach scooted back up the stairs, her dinner consumed. She trotted into the lab expectantly, deposited herself beneath the worktable where the scones still sat, and gave one sharp bark as her plume of a tail dusted the floor.

“Yes. Well,” Deborah said. And then brightly as the dog barked again, “No, Peach. You're not to have any scone. Simon, look at her. She's completely incorrigible.”

Focusing on the little dog got them through the moment, at the end of which Helen began gathering her belongings. She said to St. James, “Simon, dearest, while I'd love to stay and help you labour through the night on this problem …”

His reply was, “You've been a brick to stay this long. I shall muddle onward heroically alone.”

“He's worse than the dog,” Deborah remarked. “Shamelessly manipulative. You'd better be off before he traps you.”

Helen took the advice. Lynley followed her. St. James and Deborah remained in the lab.

Lynley and his wife didn't speak until they were standing on the Cheyne Row pavement with the wind whipping up the street from the river. Then Helen said only, “Well.” She spoke the word to herself, not to him. She looked a mixture of sad and tired. Lynley couldn't tell which was predominant, but he had a good idea.

Helen said, “Did it happen too soon?”

He didn't pretend to misunderstand. “No.
No
. Of course not.”

“Then what?”

He searched for an explanation he could give her, one that both of them could live with, which would not come back to haunt him sometime in the future. He said, “I don't want to hurt them. I picture how they'll look, creating expressions of pleasure on their faces while inside they're screaming at the inequity of it all.”

“Life's filled with inequities. You of all people know that. You can't make the playing field level for everyone, just as you can't know the future. What's in store for them. What's in store for us.”