A Traitor to Memory (102 page)

“Do you have that message, Acting Superintendent?”

Lynley took a deep breath and put the heightened level of Hillier's acerbity down to his understandable dread about Webberly. He did indeed have the message, he told the AC steadily. Was Miranda really all right, though? Was there anything he could …? Had Helen at least managed to get her to have a meal?

“She's gone to Frances,” Hillier said.

“Randie?”

“Your wife. Laura's got exactly nowhere, can't even budge her from her bedroom, so Helen's decided to try her hand. Good woman, there.” Hillier harrumphed. He would, Lynley knew, never venture any closer to a compliment.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Get on with things. I'm staying here. I don't want Randie alone should anything … should she be asked to decide …”

“Right. Yes, sir. That's the best idea, isn't it?”

Now Lynley watched Nkata. Curiously, the constable was protecting his phone conversation from eavesdroppers with a broad shoulder lifted to shield the mouthpiece of the receiver. Lynley frowned at this, and when Nkata rang off, he said, “Get anything?”

Rubbing his hands together, the DC said, “Hope so, man. Bird who lives with Katja Wolff's asking for another word. That's who paged. Think I ought …?” He nodded towards the doorway, but the motion seemed more a bow to obligation than an actual request for direction because the constable's fingers began tapping against the pocket of his trousers as if eager to dig out his car keys.

Lynley reflected upon what Nkata had already told him about his most recent interview with both women. “Did she say what she wanted?”

“Just a word. Said she didn't want to talk on the phone.”

“Why not?”

Nkata shrugged and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Villains, man. You know how they are. Always like to be the ones pulling the strings.”

That certainly rang an authentic note. If a convict was going to
grass on a mate, that convict generally named the time, the place, and the circumstances under which the grassing would occur. It was a power play that acted as a salve to their conscience when they lived the part of no honour among thieves. But lags rarely bore love for cops, and caution suggested that a cop be wise to the fact that a villain liked nothing better than to throw spanners if he could, with the size of the spanners generally matching the proportions of his animosity for the police.

He said, “What's she called again, Winnie?”

“Who?”

“The woman who paged you. Wolff's flat mate.” And when Nkata told him, Lynley asked what crime had sent Yasmin Edwards to prison.

“Knifed her husband,” Nkata said. “Killed him. She was in five years. But I got the 'pression he beat her up a lot. She's got a bad face, 'Spector. Scarred up. She and the German live with her son. Daniel. Ten, eleven years old. Nice kid. Should I …?” Again the anxious nod at the door.

Lynley pondered the wisdom of sending Nkata south of the river again on his own. His very zeal to take on the task gave Lynley pause. On the one hand, Nkata would be eager to make up for his earlier gaffe. On the other hand, he was inexperienced, and the appetite he had for again confronting Yasmin Edwards suggested the potential for a loss of objectivity. As long as the potential was there, Nkata—not to mention the case itself—was in jeopardy. Just as Webberly had been, Lynley realised, all those years ago in another investigation.

They kept coming full circle to that other murder, he thought. There had to be a reason for that.

He said, “Has she got an axe to grind, this Yasmin Edwards?”

“With me, you mean?”

“With cops in general.”

“Could have, yeah.”

“Mind how you go, then.”

Nkata said, “Will do,” and he hastened out of the incident room, car keys already in his palm.

When the constable was gone, Lynley sat at a desk and put on his glasses. The situation they were in was maddening. He'd been involved in cases before in which they'd had mounds of evidence but no one to whom it could be attached. He'd been involved in cases in which they'd had motives leaping out from the wallpaper in the sitting room of every suspect they questioned but no evidence they
could apply to the suspects. And he'd been involved in cases in which the means and the opportunity to kill could be applied left, right, and centre and all that was wanting was clarity on the motive. But this …

How was it possible that two people could be hit and abandoned on populated streets without
someone
seeing something other than a black vehicle? Lynley wondered. And how was it possible that the first victim could actually be dragged from point A to point B in Crediton Hill once the hit took place without someone noticing what was going on?

The moving of the body was an important detail, and Lynley fetched the latest report from forensic to examine what they'd come up with from evidence taken from Eugenie Davies' body. The forensic pathologist would have combed it, probed it, studied it, and analysed it. And if there was a trace of evidence left on it—this despite the rain of the evening—the forensic pathologst would have found it.

Lynley flipped through the paperwork. Nothing under her fingernails, all blood on the body her own, remnants of earth fallen from tyres bearing no telling characteristics like minerals peculiar to one part of the country, granules caught up in her hair similar to those on the street itself, two hairs on her body—one grey and one brown—which, under analysis—

Lynley's interest sharpened. Two hairs, two different colours, an analysis. Surely this amounted to something. He read the report, frowning, wading through descriptions of cuticle, cortex, and medulla and celebrating the initial conclusion offered by SO7: The hairs were mammalian in origin.

But when he continued, fighting his way through the morass of technical terms from
the macrofibrillar ultrastructure of the medullary cells
to
the electrophoretic variants of the structural proteins
, he found that the results of the forensic examination of the hairs was inconclusive. How the hell could that possibly be?

He reached for a phone and punched in the number of the forensic lab across the river. After speaking to three technicians and a secretary, he was finally able to pin someone down who explained in layman's terms why a study of hair, made in this century of science so advanced that a microscopic particle of
skin
—for God's sake—could identify a killer, would offer inconclusive results.

“Actually,” Dr. Claudia Knowles told him, “we have no way of telling if the hairs even came from the killer, Inspector. They could well be from the victim, you know.”

“How can that be?”

“First, because we have no scalp attached to either of them. Second—and here's the trickier part—because there's a vast variation in features even within hairs that come from
one
individual. So we could take dozens of samples of your victim's hair and still not be able to match them to the two hairs found on her body. And all the time they could still be hers. Because of the possible variations. Do you see what I mean?”

“But what about DNA typing? What's the point of combing for hairs in the first place if we can't use them—”

“It's not that we can't use them,” Dr. Knowles interrupted. “We can and we will. But even then, what we'll learn—and this isn't done overnight, which I'm sure you're already aware of—is whether the hairs did come from your victim. Which will help you, of course. But if the hairs
didn't
come from her, you'll be helped only as far as knowing that someone was close enough to her body either before or after her death to have left a hair or two on it.”

“What about two people being close enough to her body to leave a hair? Since one hair was grey and one was brown?”

“That could have happened. But even then, you see, we can't discount the possibility that prior to her death she embraced someone who quite innocently left a hair behind in the process. And even if we
have
the DNA typing in front of us, to prove that she couldn't have embraced anyone who is currently in her life, what do we do with that typing, Inspector, without someone on the other end giving us a sample to match it to?”

God. Yes. That was the problem. That would always be the blasted problem. Lynley thanked Dr. Knowles and rang off, flinging the report to one side. They needed a break.

He read through the notes of his interviews again: what Wiley had said, what Staines had said, what Davies, Robson, and the younger Davies had said. There had to be something he was overlooking. But he couldn't dig it out of what he had written.

All right, he thought. Time to try another tack.

He left the station and made the quick drive to West Hampstead. He found Crediton Hill a short distance from Finchley Road, and he parked at the top end, got out, and began to pace. The street was lined with cars, and it possessed that uninhabited air of a place where all the occupants leave for work each morning, not to return till night.

Chalk marks on the tarmac indicated the spot where Eugenie Davies' body had lain, and Lynley stood upon these and gazed down
the street in the direction the deadly vehicle would have come. She'd been hit and then driven over several times, which seemed to indicate that she'd either not been thrown as Webberly had or that she'd been thrown directly in front of the car, making the act of driving back and forth over her an easy piece of business. Then she'd been dragged to one side, her body half shoved beneath a Vauxhall.

But why? Why would her killer risk being seen? Why not just drive off and leave her lying in the middle of the road? Of course, putting her to one side might have served the purpose of keeping her from being noticed at once in the dark and the rain, thereby assuring she'd be dead when someone finally did find her. But it was such a risk to get out of the car at all. Unless the killer had a reason for doing so …

Such as living in the neighbourhood? Yes. It was possible.

But was anything else?

Lynley went onto the pavement, pacing along and thinking about every variation he could come up with on the theme of killer-victim-motive, killer-moving-the-broken-body, and killer-getting-out-of-the-car. All he could come up with was her handbag: something she'd carried inside it, something the killer had wanted, had known she'd have with her, had needed to obtain.

But the bag had been found beneath another car on the street, in a spot where it was unlikely that a killer—working in haste and in the darkness—would have seen it. And its contents were in order as far as anyone could tell. Unless, of course, the killer had removed a single item—like a letter, perhaps?—and then thrown the bag beneath the car, where it ultimately had been found.

Lynley paced and considered this and felt as if a Greek chorus had taken up residence in his head, reciting not only all the possibilities but also the consequences of his choosing one of them and investing an ounce of belief in it. He walked several yards past several houses, past the autumn-coloured hedges that edged their gardens. He was just about to turn back and walk to his car, when something glittering on the pavement caught his eye, quite near to a yew hedge that looked more recently planted than the others on the street.

He bent to this like Sherlock Holmes redeemed. But it proved to be just a shard of glass that, along with a few other shards, had been swept from the pavement into the flower bed where the hedge was planted. He took a pencil from his jacket pocket and turned the shards over, then dug round in the earth and found a few more. And because
he'd never felt quite so much without resources as he was feeling in this investigation, he took out his handkerchief and collected them all.

Back in his car, he phoned home, seeking Helen. It was hours since she'd turned up at Charing Cross Hospital, hours since she'd trekked to Webberly's house to see what could be made of Frances. But she wasn't there. And she wasn't at work in Chelsea with St. James. This, he decided, was not a good sign.

He drove to Stamford Brook.

In Kensington Square, Barbara Havers parked where she'd parked before: by the line of bollards that prevented traffic entering the square from the north on Derry Street. She walked to the Convent of the Immaculate Conception, but instead of going to the door straightaway and requesting to speak with Sister Cecilia Mahoney once again, she lit a cigarette and ventured farther along the pavement to the distinguished brick Dutch-gabled house where so much had happened two decades in the past.

It was the tallest building on its side of the street: five floors with a lower ground floor which was accessed by a narrow stairway that curved down from the flagstone-covered front garden. Two brick pillars topped with white stone finials sided the wrought iron entrance gate, and Barbara swung this gate open, entered, closed it behind her, and stood looking up at the house.

It was quite a contrast to Lynn Davies' small dwelling on the other side of the river. With its french windows and balconies, its creamy woodwork, its solemn pediments and dog-toothed cornices, its fanlights and its stained glass windows, it—and the neighbourhood that surrounded it—couldn't have been more different to the environment in which Virginia Davies had lived her life.