A Traitor to Memory (117 page)

His utter calm rubbed against the sore of Barbara's apprehension. Their progress to his car had been so rapid after leaving Leach's office that she hadn't had a chance for a cigarette, and she was itching for a hit of tobacco to steady her nerves, which made her irritable along with afraid. “You know that, do you?” she asked him. “And what about those letters? From the superintendent to her? If we need those letters to build a case against Richard Davies … for why he went after Webberly … for why he made it look like Wolff was after people …” She ran her hand through her hair and felt it bristle. She
needed to cut it. She'd do that tonight, take the nail scissors to it and do a proper job. Maybe she'd hack it all off and punk it up with hair goo.
That
should serve to distract AC Hillier from the rôle she'd played in evidence tampering.

“You can't have it all ways,” Lynley said.

“What's that s'posed to mean when it's home with its mother?”

“He can't have killed Eugenie because she threatened Gideon's career, Havers, and then gone after Webberly because he'd been harbouring jealousy over his affair with Eugenie. If you go that direction, where does that put Kathleen Waddington?”

“So maybe I'm wrong about Gideon's career,” she said. “Maybe he ran down Eugenie because she'd taken up with Webberly.”

“No. You're right. His objective was Eugenie, the only person he killed. But he went after Webberly and Waddington as well to focus our attention onto Katja Wolff.” Lynley sounded so certain, so completely unfazed by the danger they were in, that Barbara wanted to smack him. He could afford to be unruffled, she decided. Out from New Scotland Yard on
his
ear, he'd just motor down to the family pile in Cornwall and live out his days like the landed gentry. She, on the other hand, didn't have that option.

“You sound dead bloody sure of yourself,” she groused.

“Davies had the letter, Havers.”

“What letter?” she demanded.

“The letter telling him Katja Wolff was out of prison. He knew I'd suspect her once he showed me that letter.”

“So he knocks down the superintendent and this Waddington bird to make it look like Eugenie's death was for revenge? Katja going after the crowd who sent her away?”

“That's my guess.”

“But maybe it
is
revenge, Inspector. Not Katja's but his. P'rhaps he knew about Eugenie and Webberly. P'rhaps he's always known but just bided his time and eaten himself up with jealousy and vowed that someday—”

“It doesn't work, Havers. Webberly's letters to Eugenie Davies are addressed to Henley. They all postdate her separation from her husband. Davies had no reason to be jealous. He probably never even knew about them.”

“So
why
choose Webberly? Why not someone else from the trial? The Crown Prosecutor, the judge, another witness.”

“I expect Webberly was easier to locate. He's lived in the same house for twenty-five years.”

“But Davies has to know where the others lived if he found Waddington.”

“What others do you mean?”

“The people who testified against her. Robson, for instance. What about Robson?”

“Robson served Gideon. He told me that himself. I don't see Davies doing anything that might hurt his son, do you? Your entire scenario—the one you came up with in Leach's office—depends on the contention that Davies acted to save his son.”

“Okay. All right. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's all to do with Eugenie and Webberly and their affair. Maybe the letters and the computer are pieces of evidence we could've used to prove it. And maybe we're buggered.”

He glanced over at her. “Barbara, we're not.” Lynley looked at her hands, and she realised she was actually wringing them, like the unfortunate, impotent heroine in a melodrama featuring Simon Legree. He said, “Have one.”

She said, “What?”

“A cigarette. Have one. You're owed. I can cope.” He even punched in the Bentley's cigarette lighter, and when it popped out, he handed it over, saying, “Light up. This is a situation you're not likely to find yourself in again.”

“I bloody well hope not,” Havers muttered.

He shot her a look. “I was talking about smoking in the Bentley, Barbara.”

“Yeah. Well, I wasn't.” She dug out her Players and used the hot coil of the lighter against one. She inhaled deeply and grudgingly thanked her superior for humouring her vice for once. They inched their way south along the high street, and Lynley glanced at his pocket watch. He handed his mobile over to Barbara and said, “Phone St. James and ask him to have the computer ready.”

Barbara was about to do as he asked, when the mobile rang in her hand. She flipped it on and Lynley nodded at her to take the call, so she said, “Havers here.”

“Constable?” It was DCI Leach, speaking not so much in a tone as in a snarl. “Where the hell are you?”

“Heading to fetch the computer, sir.”
Leach
, she mouthed to Lynley,
in another twist
.

“Bugger the computer,” Leach said. “Get over to Portman Street. Between Oxford Street and Portman Square. You'll see the action when you get there.”

“Portman Street?” Barbara said. “But, sir, don't you want—”

“Is your hearing as bad as your judgement?”

“I—”

“We've got another hit-and-run,” Leach snapped.

“
What?
” Barbara said. “Another? Who is it?”

“Richard Davies. But there're witnesses this time. And I want you and Lynley over there shaking the lot of them through a sieve before they disappear.”

GIDEON

10 November

Confrontation is the only answer. He has lied to me. For nearly three quarters of my life, my father has lied. He's lied not with what he said but with what he's allowed me to believe by saying nothing for twenty years: that we—he and I—were the injured parties when my mother left us. But all the time the truth was that she left us because she'd realised why Katja had murdered my sister and why she kept silent about having done so.

11 November

So this is how it happened, Dr. Rose. No memories now, if you will forgive me, no traveling back through time. Just this:

I phoned him. I said, “I know why Sonia died. I know why Katja refused to talk. You bastard, Dad.”

He said nothing.

I said, “I know why my mother left us. I know what happened. Do you understand me? Say something, Dad. It's time for the truth. I
know
what happened.”

I could hear Jill's voice in the background. I could hear her question, and both the tone and the manner of her question—“Richard? Darling, who on earth
is
it?”—told me something of Dad's reaction to what I was saying. So I was not surprised when he said harshly, “I'm coming over there. Don't leave the house.”

How he got to me so quickly, I don't know. All I can say is that when he entered the house and came up the stairs at a decisive pace, it seemed that mere minutes had passed since I had rung off from our conversation.

But I'd seen the two of them in those minutes: Katja Wolff, who grabbed at life, who used a deadly threat to get out of East Germany, and who would have used death itself if necessary to achieve the end that she had in mind; and my father, who had impregnated her, perhaps in the hope of producing a perfect specimen to carry on a family line that began with himself. He, after all, discarded women when they failed to produce something healthy. He'd done that to his first wife, and he'd been more than likely setting up to do the same to my mother. But he hadn't been moving fast enough for Katja. Katja Katja, who
grabbed
at life and who did not wait for what life provided her.

They argued about it.

When will you tell her about us, Richard?

When the time is right.

But we have no time! You
know
we have no time.

Katja, don't act like an hysterical fool.

And then, when the moment came when he could have taken a stand, he wouldn't speak up to defend her, excuse her, or commit himself as my mother confronted the German girl with the fact of her pregnancy and with the fact of her failure to perform her duties towards my sister
because
of her pregnancy. So Katja had finally taken matters into her own hands. Exhausted with arguing and with attempting to defend herself, ill from her pregnancy, and feeling deeply betrayed on all sides, she had snapped. She had drowned Sonia.

What did she hope to gain?

Perhaps she hoped to free my father from a burden she believed was keeping them apart. Perhaps she saw drowning Sonia as her way of making a statement that needed to be made. Perhaps she wished to punish my mother for having a hold on my father that seemed unbreakable. But kill Sonia she did, and then she refused, by means of a stoic silence, to acknowledge her crime, my sister's brief life, or what sins of her own had led to the taking of that life.

Why, though? Because she was protecting the man she loved? Or because she was punishing him?

All this I saw, and all this I thought of as I waited for my father's arrival.

“What is this cock, Gideon?”

Those were his first words to me as he strode into the music room, where I was sitting in the window seat, fighting off the first tentative stabs in my gut that proclaimed me frightened, childish, and cowardly as the time for our final engagement approached. I gestured to the notebook I'd been writing in all these weeks, and I hated the fact that my voice was strained. I hated what that strain revealed: about myself, about him, about what I feared.

“I know what happened,” I said. “I've remembered what happened.”

“Have you picked up your instrument?”

“You thought I wouldn't work it out, didn't you?”

“Have you picked up the Guarnerius, Gideon?”

“You thought you could pretend for the rest of your life.”

“Damn it. Have you played? Have you tried to play? Have you even
looked
at your violin?”

“You thought I'd do what I've always done.”

“I've had enough of this.” He began to move, but not to the violin case. Instead, he walked to the stereo system, and as he did so he removed a new CD from his pocket.

“You thought I'd go along with anything you told me because that's what I've always done, right? Throw out something that resembles an acceptable tale and he'll swallow it: hook, line, and sinker.”