A Traitor to Memory (44 page)

This was very cool. This would make him happy. And it had to be Gideon who was playing upstairs. It wouldn't, after all, be Rafe Robson, who couldn't possibly be so uncool as to torture Gid by playing the violin in front of him while Gid was having such trouble playing himself.

But just as she was celebrating the fact of Gideon Davies' return to his music, the rest of the orchestra started grinding away. A CD, Libby thought despairingly. It was Rafe's little pep talk for Gideon's ears: See how you once played the music, Gideon? You did it then. You can do it now.

Why
, Libby wondered, wouldn't they leave him the hell alone? Did they think he'd start playing if they bugged him enough? Because they sure as hell were beginning to bug her. “He's more than this stupid
music
,” she snarled at the ceiling above her.

She left the kitchen and marched to her own small CD player. There, she selected a disk that was guaranteed to drive Raphael Robson right up the wall. It was bubble gum squared, and she played it loud. Just for good measure, she opened her windows. Banging on the floor above ensued in short order. She turned the volume up to full blast. Time for a nice long bath, she thought. Bubble-gum music was, like,
so
perfect for soaking, soaping, and singing along.

Thirty minutes later, bathed and dressed and feeling that she'd made her point, Libby turned off the CD player and listened for any more sounds from above. Silence. She'd made her point.

She left the flat and popped her head above the level of the street to see if Rafe's car was still in the square. The Renault was gone, which meant Gideon might be ready for a visit from someone who cared more about him as a person than as a musician. She trotted up the stairs from her flat to his front door, where she gave a hearty knock.

No answer prompted her to turn back to the square, taking a look for Gideon's Mitsubishi and seeing the GPS five cars along. Libby frowned, gave another knock, and called out, “Gideon? You still in there? It's me.”

This roused him. The dead bolt was released from the other side of the door. The door swung open.

Libby said, “Hey, sorry about the music. I sort of lost control and—” She cut her own words off. He looked like hell. True, he hadn't looked good in weeks, but now he was positively bird-doo on a cracker. Libby's first thought was that Rafe Robson had worked Gideon over by making him listen to his own recordings. Bastard, she thought.

She said, “Where's good ol' Rafe? Gone to make his report to your dad?”

Gideon merely stepped back from the door and let her in. He went up the stairs, and she followed him. His destination was where he'd obviously been when she'd knocked on his door: the bedroom. The imprint of his head on the pillow and his body on the bed looked pretty recent.

A dim light was burning on the bedside table, and the shadows not dispelled by its glow fell on Gideon's face and made him look cadaverous. He'd been surrounded by an aura of anxiety and defeat since the Wigmore debacle, but Libby saw that there was something more edging that aura now, something that looked … what? Excruciating, she realised. So she said, “Gideon, what's wrong?”

He said simply, “My mother's been murdered.”

She blinked. Her jaw dropped. She snapped it closed. “Your
mom
? Your
mother
? Oh
no
. When? How? Holy
shit
. Sit down.” She urged him over to his bed and he sat, his hands hanging limply between his knees. “What happened?”

Gideon told her what little there was to know. He concluded with, “Dad was asked to identify her body. The police've been to see him since. A detective, Dad said. He rang a while ago.” Gideon clutched his arms around himself, bent forward, and rocked like a child. He said, “That's it, then.”

“What?” Libby asked.

“There's no hope after this.”

“Don't say that, Gideon.”

“I might as well be dead, too.”

“Jeez. Hey. Don't
say
that.”

“It's the truth.” He shivered as he said this and glanced round the room as if looking for something while he continued to rock.

Libby thought about what it meant that his mother was dead. She said, “Gideon, you're going to get through all this. You're going to get past it,” and she tried to sound like she really meant those words, like whether he played his music or not was as important to her as it was to him.

She noticed that his shivering had turned to trembling. At the foot of his bed was a knitted blanket, and she grabbed this and dropped it around his thin shoulders. “You want to talk about it?” she asked him. “About your mom? About … I don't know … anything?” She sat beside him and put her arm around him. She used her other hand to close the blanket at his throat till he grasped it as well and clutched it.

He said, “She was on her way to see James the Lodger.”

“Who?”

“James Pitchford. He lived with us when my sister was … when she died. And it's odd because I'd been thinking of him myself recently, although before that he hadn't crossed my mind in years.” Gideon grimaced then, and Libby noticed that the hand not clutching the blanket was pressed into his stomach as if something inside were burning his guts. “Someone ran her down in James Pitchford's street,” he said. “More than once, Libby. And because she was on her way to see James, Dad thinks the police are going to want to track down everyone who was involved … back then.”

“Why?”

“Because of the kind of questions they asked him, I dare say.”

“I don't mean why does he think the cops want to track down everyone. I mean why would they
want
to track down everyone. Is there a connection between then and now? I mean, obviously if your mom was going to see James Pitchford, there's some sort of connection. But if someone from twenty years ago killed her, why wait till now to do it?”

Gideon bent forward farther, his face contorted with pain. He said, “God. It feels like a coal's burning right through me.”

“Here, then.” Libby lowered him to bed. He curled on his side, his legs drawn up to his chest. She removed his shoes. His feet were sockless and as pale as milk, and he rubbed them together spasmodically, as if the friction could take his mind from the pain.

Libby lowered herself next to him, spooning her body into his beneath the blanket. She insinuated her hand beneath his arm and laid her palm on his stomach. She could feel his spine curved into her, every knob of it like a marble. He'd become so thin that she wondered how he kept his bones from poking through his papery skin.

She said, “I bet you've had a brain lock on this stuff, huh? Well, forget about it. Not for always. Just for now. Lay here with me and just forget.”

“I can't,” he said, and he gave a bitter laugh. “Remembering everything is my assignment.” His feet rubbed. He curled into himself further still. Libby held him closer. He finally said, “She's out of gaol, Libby. Dad knew, but he didn't tell me. That's why the police want to look at twenty years ago. She's out of gaol.”

“Who is? You mean …?”

“Katja Wolff.”

“Do they think she might have run down your mom?”

“I don't know.”

“Why would she? It makes more sense that your mom would want to run down her.”

“In the normal way of things,” Gideon said. “Except nothing about my life has been normal, so there's no reason why my mother's death should be normal either.”

“Your mom must have testified against her,” Libby said. “And she could have spent her time locked up planning to get everyone who put her there. But if she did, how'd she find your mom, Gideon? I mean, you didn't even know where she was. How could this Wolff chick have tracked her down? And if she
did
track her down, and if she did kill her, why'd she kill her on this Pitchford guy's street?”

Libby thought about her questions and then answered them herself. “To give Pitchford a message?” “Or to give someone else one.”

A phone call relayed to Barbara Havers what Lynley had learned from Richard Davies, including the name she needed to gain access to the Convent of the Immaculate Conception. There, he told her, she should find someone who could give her the whereabouts of a Sister Cecilia Mahoney.

The convent sat on a piece of land that was probably worth a king's ransom, tucked among a host of listed properties dating from the 1690s. This would have been where the movers and shakers had built their rural retreats during the time that William and Mary had built their own little humble country cottage in Kensington Gardens. Now the movers and shakers in the square were the employees of several business establishments that had shoe-horned themselves into the historic buildings, denizens of a second convent—where the bloody hell did
nuns
get the lolly to have digs round here? Barbara wondered—and inhabitants of a number of homes that had probably been handed down through families for more than three hundred years. Unlike some of the city squares that had suffered bomb damage or the ravages of greed from consecutive Tory governments with big business, vast profits, and the privatisation of everything in mind, Kensington Square stood largely untouched, with four sides of distinguished buildings overlooking a central garden where the fallen autumn leaves made an umber skirt on the lawn beneath each tree.

Parking was impossible, so Barbara pulled her Mini onto the pavement at the northwest edge of the square, where a strategically placed bollard prevented the traffic from the distant high street from creating a short cut and disturbing the quiet of the neighbourhood. She shoved her police identification onto what went for the Mini's dashboard. She clambered out and in short order found herself in the company of Sister Cecilia Mahoney, who was still a resident of the convent and who was, when Barbara called, at work in the chapel next door.

Barbara's first thought upon encountering the nun was that she didn't look much like one. Nuns were supposed to be women two or three decades past their prime who wore heavy black robes, clanking rosary beads, and veils and wimples from the Middle Ages.

Cecilia Mahoney didn't fit this picture. In fact, when Barbara was
directed to the chapel to find her, her first assumption when she saw the figure up on a small step ladder with a can of marble polish in her hand was that she was a tartan-skirted cleaning woman, since cleaning an altar that featured a statue of Jesus pointing to His own exposed, anatomically incorrect, and partially gilded heart was what she was doing. Barbara told this woman that, pardon me but she was looking for Sister Cecilia Mahoney, whereupon the woman turned and said with a smile, “Then it's me you're looking for,” in a brogue that sounded as if she'd just landed from Killarney.

Barbara identified herself, and the nun took some care in climbing down from the steps. She said, “Police, is it? Why, you haven't the look of a policeman at all. Is there some sort of trouble, Constable?”

The chapel was dimly lit, but down from the steps Sister Cecilia put herself into a pool of rose light created by a single votive candle that burned on the altar she was polishing. It did much to flatter her, smoothing away the lines on her middle-aged face and casting highlights into hair that was short but whose curls—as black and as shiny as obsidian—couldn't be disciplined even by the slides she used to manage them. She had violet eyes, darkly lashed, and they looked upon Barbara kindly.

Barbara said, “Is there somewhere we can go to have a word?”

The nun said, “Sad to say, Constable, it's unlikely that we'll be disturbed in here if it's privacy you're wanting. Time was that would have been out of the question. But these days … even the students who live in our dormitory frequent the chapel only when they've got an exam and are hoping for God's intervention in the matter. Come. Let's go up here and you can tell me what it is that you're wanting to know.” She smiled, revealing perfect white teeth, and went on to say, as if in explanation of her smile, “Or is it that you're wanting to join us in the convent, Constable Havers?”

“It might give me the fashion make-over I need,” Barbara admitted.

Sister Cecilia laughed. “Come this way. It'll be a bit warmer by the main altar. I've an electric fire there for the Monsignor when he says Mass in the morning. He's become a bit arthritic, poor man.”

Taking her cleaning supplies in hand, she led Barbara up the single centre aisle in the chapel, beneath a deep blue ceiling punctuated by gilded stars. Barbara saw that it was a church of women: Apart from the statue of Jesus and a stained glass window dedicated to St. Michael, all other windows and statues were female: St. Theresa of Lisieux, St. Clare, St. Catherine, St. Margaret. And atop the ornamental pillars on either side of each of the windows were carvings of even more women.

“Here we are.” Sister Cecilia went to one side of the altar and switched on a large electric fire. As it began to heat, the nun explained that she'd continue her work right here in the sanctuary if the constable didn't mind. There was this altar to be seen to as well: the candlesticks and the marble to be polished, a reredos to be dusted, and altar cloths to be replaced. “But you might wish to sit by the fire, my dear. The cold seeps in.”