A Traitor to Memory (65 page)

“That's it,” Pitchley said. “I've cooperated with you. Leave or I'll phone my solicitor.”

“Who's Robert?” she asked. “Is that his jacket out there and his after shave in here?”

In reply, Pitchley headed for a swinging door. He said over his shoulder, “I'm finished with your questions.”

But Barbara wasn't finished with him. She was hot on his heels into the kitchen.

He said, “Keep out of here.”

“Why?”

A gust of cold air answered her as she entered. She saw that the window was open wide. From the garden beyond it, a clatter sounded. Barbara dashed to investigate while Pitchley dived for the phone. As he punched in numbers behind her, Barbara saw the source of the noise outside. A rake that had been leaning against the house near the kitchen window had been knocked over onto the flagstones. And the visitors to Pitchley's home who had done the knocking-over were at that moment slip-sliding down a narrow slope that separated the garden from a park behind it.

“Stop right there, you two!” Barbara shouted at the men. They were burly and badly dressed in crusty-looking blue jeans and muddy boots. One of them had on a leather bomber jacket. The other wore only a pullover against the cold.

Both flashed looks back over their shoulders when they heard Barbara's shout. Pullover grinned and gave her an insolent salute. Bomber Jacket shouted, “Have at her, Jay,” and both laughed as they slipped in the mud, scrambled back to their feet, and took off at a run across the park.

Barbara said, “Damn,” and turned back to the kitchen.

Pitchley had his solicitor on the line. He was babbling, “I want you over here now. I swear, Azoff, if you're not at the house in the next ten minutes—”

Barbara snatched the phone from his hand. He said, “You
bloody
little—”

“Take a stress pill, Pitchley,” Barbara said. She said into the phone, “Save yourself the trip, Mr. Azoff. I'm leaving. I have what I need,” and without waiting to hear the solicitor's reply, she handed the phone back to Pitchley. She said, “I don't know what you're up to, fast man, but I'm going to find out. And when I do, I'll be back with a warrant and a team to tear this house to shreds. If we find anything that connects you to Eugenie Davies, you're meat on a skewer.
My
skewer. Got it?”

“I have no connection with Eugenie Davies,” he said stiffly, although some of the colour was gone from his cheeks and the rest of
his face had gone nearly white, “other than what I've already told Chief Inspector Leach.”

“Fine,” she said. “So be it, Mr. Pitchley. You'd best hope that's what my spadework turns up.”

She strode from the kitchen and made her way to the front door. Once outside, she went directly to her car. There was no point to trying to track down the two blokes, who'd leapt from Pitchley's kitchen window. By the time she worked her way round West Hampstead over to the other side of the park, they'd be either long gone or well in hiding.

Barbara fired up the Mini's engine and revved it a few times to let off steam. She'd been ready to go through the motions of taking Pitchley's photo and Eugenie Davies' photo back to the Valley of Kings and the Comfort Inn without the hope of gaining anything from the exercise. Indeed, she'd been nearly ready to dismiss J. W. Pitchley, AKA James Pitchford, AKA TongueMan from their list of suspects altogether. But now she wondered. He sure as hell wasn't acting like a man with nothing smelly on his conscience. He was acting like a man up to his neck in manure. And with a cheque for three thousand pounds half-written in his dining room and two gorilla-size yobbos climbing out of his kitchen window … Things no longer looked so cut-and-dried for Pitchley, Pitchford, TongueMan, or whoever the hell he was supposed to be.

Barbara reflected on this final idea as she reversed the Mini into the street. Pitchley, Pitchford, and TongueMan, she thought. There was something in that. She wondered idly if there was another name somewhere that the man from West Hampstead used for something.

She knew exactly how to suss that out.

Lynley found the home of Ian Staines on a quiet street not far from St. Ann's Well Gardens. Using the motorways, he'd made the drive down to Brighton from Henley-on-Thames in fairly good time, but the brief daylight of November was fast fading when he pulled up to the correct address.

The door was opened by a woman holding a cat like an infant against her shoulder. The cat was Persian, an insolent-looking pedigree who cast baleful blue eyes upon Lynley as he produced his identification. The woman was a striking Eurasian, no longer young and no longer beautiful as she once might have been, but difficult to look away from all the same because of a subtle hardness beneath her skin.

She took note of Lynley's identification and said, “Yes,” and nothing more when he asked her if she was Mrs. Ian Staines. She waited for whatever was forthcoming from him, although a certain narrowing to her eyes suggested to Lynley that she had little doubt about who the subject of this visit was. He asked if he could have a word, and she stepped back from the doorway and led him to a partially furnished sitting room. Noting the deep impression of furniture feet left on the carpet, he asked if the Staineses were moving house. She said no, they were not moving house, and after the most minute of pauses, she added
yet
in such a way that Lynley felt the undercurrent of her contempt.

She didn't gesture him to one of the two remaining chairs in the sparsely furnished room, both of which were currently occupied with one cat apiece of the same breed as the feline she held. Neither of these was sleeping as one might expect of a cat perched on a comfortable chair. Rather, they were watchful, as if Lynley were a specimen of something in which they might become interested should a sudden burst of energy come upon them.

Mrs. Staines set the cat she held on to the floor. Bloomer-legged by fur that shone with careful grooming, he sauntered to one of the chairs, leapt effortlessly to its seat, and dispossessed his housemate of it. That cat joined the other and settled down on its haunches.

“They're beautiful animals,” Lynley said. “Are you a breeder, Mrs. Staines?”

She didn't reply. She wasn't very different from the cats themselves: observing, withholding, and palpably hostile.

She walked to a table that stood by itself, next to the carpet impressions of what must have been a sofa. The table held nothing but a tortoiseshell box whose lid Mrs. Staines flipped open with one manicured finger. She took a cigarette out and from the pocket of her slender-legged trousers, she scooped up a lighter. She put flame to tobacco, inhaled, and said, “What's he done?” in the tone of a woman who very much wanted to add
this time
to the question.

There were no newspapers in the room. But their absence didn't mean that the Staineses were unaware of Eugenie Davies' death. Lynley said, “There's a situation in London that I'd like to speak to your husband about, Mrs. Staines. Is he at home or still at work?”

“At work?” She gave a short, breathy laugh before saying, “London, is it? Ian doesn't like cities, Inspector. He can barely cope with the congestion in Brighton.”

“The traffic?”

“The people. Misanthropy is one of his less admirable qualities,
although he manages to hide it most of the time.” She inhaled from her cigarette in the studied manner of an old film star, her head tilted back so that her hair—thick, stylishly cut, with the occasional strand of grey highlighting it—hung free from her shoulders. She walked to the window in front of which were yet more carpet impressions of furniture now removed. She said, “He wasn't here when she died. He'd gone to see her. They'd had a row, as you must have been told by someone, or why else would you have come. But he didn't kill her.”

“You've heard about what happened to Mrs. Davies, then.”

“
Daily Mail
,” she said. “We didn't know about it until this morning.”

“Someone was seen having an argument with Mrs. Davies in Henley-on-Thames, someone who took off in an Audi with Brighton number plates. Was that man your husband?”

“Yes,” she said. “That would be Ian, in the midst of yet another fine plan going awry.”

“A plan?”

“Ian always has plans. And if he hasn't a plan, he has a promise. Plans and promises, promises and plans. All of which generally amount to nothing.”

“That'll do, Lydia.”

The statement, sharply spoken, came from the doorway. Lynley turned to see that they had been joined by a lanky man with the weathered and yellowing skin of a chronic smoker. He did as his wife had done, crossing the room to the tortoiseshell box and taking a cigarette. He jerked his head at his wife. This apparently communicated a desire to her, for in response she brought out her lighter a second time. She passed it to him and he used it, saying to Lynley, “What can I do for you?”

“He's come about your sister,” Lydia Staines said. “I told you that you should expect him, Ian.”

“Leave us.” He lifted his chin in the direction of the two chairs to indicate the cats, adding, “And take them with you before they get turned into someone's new coat.”

Lydia Staines threw her cigarette still smouldering into the fireplace. She scooped up a cat in each arm and said, “Come along, Caesar,” to the one who remained. She went on with, “I'll leave you to your fun, then,” and accompanied by the animals, she left the room.

Staines watched her go, something in his eyes of an animal's hunger as his glance traveled over her body, something round his mouth of a man's loathing for a woman with too much power over him. When he heard a radio click on somewhere in the back of the
house, he gave his attention to Lynley. He said, “I saw Eugenie, yes. Twice. In Henley. We had a row. She'd given me her word, her promise that she'd speak to Gideon—that's her son, but I expect you know that already, don't you?—and I was depending on her to do it. But she said she'd changed her mind, said something had come up that made it impossible for her to ask him … And that was it. I took off out of there in a dead blind rage. But someone saw us, I take it. Saw me. Saw the car.”

“Where is it?” Lynley asked.

“Being serviced.”

“Where?”

“Local dealership. Why?”

“I'll need the address. I'll need to see it, to talk to the people at the dealership as well. They do body work there, I expect.”

Staines' cigarette tip glowed, long and bright, as he took in enough smoke to see him through the moment. He said, “What's your name?”

“DI Lynley. New Scotland Yard.”

“I didn't knock down my sister, DI Lynley. I was angry. I was damn well desperate. But running her over wouldn't take me an inch towards what I need, so I planned to wait a few days—a few weeks if it took that and if I could hold out—and try her again.”

“Try her for what?”

Like his wife, he tossed his cigarette into the fireplace. He said, “Come with me,” and headed out of the sitting room.

Lynley followed him. They went to the first floor of the house, up stairs so well-carpeted that their footfalls were soundless. They walked along a corridor where rectangles of darker paper on the walls indicated paintings or prints had been removed. They entered a darkened room that was set up as an office with a desk holding a computer monitor that glowed with text and numerical information. Lynley examined this and saw that Staines had logged on to the internet, having chosen an on-line stock broker as his reading or research material.

“You play the market,” Lynley said.

“Abundance.”

“What?”

“Abundance. It's all about thinking and living abundance. Thinking and living abundance
effects
abundance, and that abundance produces more of the same.”

Lynley frowned, trying to piece this together with what he saw on the screen. Staines continued.

“It's all about thinking in the first place. Most people stay stuck in paucity because that's the only thing they know and that's what they've been taught. I was like that myself once. I was damn
bloody
like that.” He came to join Lynley at the desk and laid his hand on a thick book that was open next to his computer's keyboard. This was heavily highlighted in a variety of colours, as if the reader had studied it for years and had taken something new from each perusal of its words. It looked like a text—Lynley thought vaguely of economics—but Staines' words sounded more like a new age philosophy. The man continued in a low, intense voice.

“We attract to our lives that which closely resembles our thoughts,” he said insistently. “Think beauty, and we're beautiful. Think ugliness, and we're ugly. Think success, and we become successful.”

“Think mastery of the international market, and we have it?” Lynley said.

“Yes.
Yes.
If you spend your life contemplating your limits, you can expect no freedom from limitation.” Staines' eyes fixed on the glowing monitor. In its light, Lynley saw that his left eye was milky with a cataract, and the skin was puffy beneath it. He went on. “I used to live only within my limits. I was bound by drugs, by drink, by horses, by cards. If it wasn't one thing, it was another. I lost everything that way—my wife, my children, my home—but that'll not happen to me again. I swear it. Abundance will come. I
live
abundance.”