A Traitor to Memory (114 page)

“Deputy warden,” she said. “I imagine you know that.”

“Deputy warden with a taste for the ladies. You always been bent?”

“That's none of your business.”

Nkata slapped his hand on the table and leaned towards the woman. “It's all my business,” he told her. “Now, you want me to
troll through Katja's records, find all the prisons she 'as locked up in, get all the visitors lists she filled out, see your name topping them, and put the thumbscrews to you? I c'n do that, Miss McKay, but I don't like to. It wastes my time.”

She lowered her gaze to her drink, turning the glass slowly on the mat beneath it. The pub door opened, letting in another gust of chill evening air and the smell of exhaust fumes from Parkhurst Road, and two men in the uniform of prison workers walked inside. They fixed on Noreen, then on Nkata, then back to Noreen. One smiled and made a low comment. Noreen looked up and saw them.

She breathed an oath and said, “I've got to get out of here,” beginning to rise.

Nkata closed his hand over her wrist. “Not without giving me something,” he told her. “Else I'm going to have to look through her records, Miss McKay. And 'f your name's there, I 'xpect you'll have some real 'xplaining to do to your guv.”

“Do you threaten people often?”

“Not a threat. Just a simple fact. Now, sit back down and 'tend to your drink.” He nodded towards her colleagues. “I 'xpect I'm doing your reputation some good.”

Her face flared with red. “You completely
despicable
—”

“Chill,” he said. “Let's talk about Katja. She gave me the go-ahead to talk to you, by the way.”

“I don't believe—”

“Phone her.”

“She—”

“She's a suspect in a hit-and-run murder. And a suspect in a second hit-and-run as well. 'F you can clear her name, you better set to it. She's 'bout two breaths away from getting arrested. And you think we'll be able to keep
that
from the press? Notorious baby killer ‘helping the police with their enquiries’ again? Not likely, Miss McKay. Her whole life's about to go under the microscope. And I 'xpect you know what that means.”

“I can't clear her name,” Noreen McKay said, her fingers tightening on her gin and tonic. “That's just it, don't you see? I can't clear her name.”

23

“W
ADDINGTON
,” D
CI LEACH
informed them when Lynley and Havers joined him in the incident room. He was all exultation: his face brighter than it had been in days and his step lighter as he dashed across the room to scrawl
Kathleen Waddington
at the top of one of the china boards.

“Where was she hit?” Lynley asked.

“Maida Vale. And it's the same m.o. Quiet neighbourhood. Pedestrian alone. Night. Black car.
Smash.
”

“Last night?” Barbara Havers asked. “But that would mean—”

“No, no. This was ten days ago.”

“Could be a coincidence,” Lynley said.

“Not bloody likely. She's a player from before.” Leach went on to explain precisely who Kathleen Waddington was: a sex therapist who'd left her clinic on the night in question after ten o'clock. She'd been hit on the street and left with a broken hip and a dislocated shoulder. When she was interviewed by the police, she'd said the car that hit her was big, “like a gangster car,” that it moved fast, that it was dark, possibly black. Leach said, “I went through my notes from the other case, the baby drowning. Waddington was the woman who broke Katja Wolff 's story about being out of the bathroom for a minute or less on the night that Sonia Davies drowned. The woman Wolff claimed phoned her. Without Waddington, it still might have
gone down to negligence and a few years in prison. With her showing Wolff up to be a liar … It was another nail in the coffin. We need to bring Wolff in. Pass that word to Nkata. Let him have the glory. He's been working her hard.”

“What about the car?” Lynley asked.

“That'll come in due course. You can't tell me she spent two decades inside without having formed more than one association she could depend on when she got out.”

“Someone with an old motor?” Barbara Havers asked.

“Bet on it. I've got a PC going through the significant others right now,” with a jerk of his head towards a female constable sitting at one of the terminals in the room. “She's picking up every name mentioned in every action report and running each through the system. We'll get our mitts on the prison records as well and run through everyone Wolff had contact with while she was inside. We can do that while we've got her in for questioning. D'you want to page your man and give him the message? Or shall I?” Leach rubbed his hands together briskly.

The constable at the computer terminal rose from her seat at that moment with a paper in her hand. She said, “I think I've got it, sir,” and Leach bounded to her with a happy, “Brilliant. Good work, Vanessa. What've we got?”

“A Humber,” she said.

The vehicle in question was a post-war saloon manufactured in the days when the relationship between petrol consumed and kilometers covered was not the first thing on a driver's mind. It was smaller than a Rolls-Royce, a Bentley, or a Daimler—not to mention less costly—but it was larger than the average car on the street today. And whereas the modern car was manufactured from aluminium and alloy to keep its weight low and its mileage high, the Humber was fashioned from steel and chrome with a front end comprising a toothy sneer of heavy grillwork suitable for scooping from the air everything from winged insects to small birds.

“Excellent,” Leach said.

“Whose is it?” Lynley asked.

“Belongs to a woman,” Vanessa told them. “She's called Jill Foster.”

“Richard Davies' fiancée?” Havers looked at Lynley. Her face broke into a smile. She said, “That's it. That's bloody
it
, Inspector. When you—”

But Lynley interrupted her. “Jill Foster? I can't see that, Havers.
I've met the woman. She's enormously pregnant. She's not capable of this. And even if she were, why would she go after Waddington?”

Havers said, “Sir—”

Leach cut in, “There's got to be another car, then. Another old one.”

“How likely is that?” the PC said doubtfully.

“Page Nkata,” Leach told Lynley. And to Vanessa, “Get Wolff's prison records. We need to go through them. There's got to be a car—”

“Hang
on
!” Havers said explosively. “There's another way to look at this, you lot. Listen. He said Pytches. Richard Davies said Pytches. Not Pitchley or Pitchford, but
Pytches
.” She grasped Lynley's arm for emphasis. “You said he said Pytches when we were having coffee. You said you had Pytches in your notes. When you interviewed Richard Davies? Yes?”

Lynley said, “Pytches? What's Jimmy Pytches have to do with this, Havers?”

“It was a slip of the tongue, don't you see?”

“Constable,” Leach said irritably, “what the hell are you on about?”

Havers went on, directing her comments to Lynley. “Richard Davies wouldn't have made that kind of verbal mistake when he'd just been told his former wife was murdered. He couldn't have
known
J. W. Pitchley was Jimmy Pytches right at that moment. He might have known James Pitchford was Jimmy Pytches, yes, all right, but he didn't think of him as Pytches, he'd never known him as Pytches, so why the hell would he call him that in front of you, since you yourself didn't know who Pytches even was at that point? Why would he
ever
call him that, in fact? He wouldn't unless it was on his mind because he'd had to go through what I'd gone through: the records in St. Catherine's. And why? In order to locate James Pitchford himself.”

“What is this?” Leach demanded.

Lynley held up a hand, saying, “Hang on a moment, sir. She's got something. Havers, go on.”

“Too right I've got something,” Havers asserted. “He'd been speaking to Eugenie for months. You've got that in your notes. He said it and the BT records corroborate.”

“They do,” Lynley said.

“And Gideon told you they were supposed to meet, he and his mother. Right?”

“Yes.”

“Eugenie was supposed to be able to help him get over his stage fright. That's what he said. That's also in your notes. Only they didn't meet, did they? They weren't able to meet because she was killed first. So what if she was killed to
prevent
them from meeting? She didn't know where Gideon lived, did she? The only way she could have found out was from Richard.”

Lynley said thoughtfully, “Davies wants to kill her, and he sees a way. Give her what she thinks is Gideon's address, arrange a time when they're supposed to meet, lie in wait for her—”

“—and when she goes wandering down the street with the address in her hand or wherever it was,
blam
. He runs her down,” Havers concluded. “Then he drives over her to finish her off. But he makes it look like it's related to the older crime by taking Waddington out first and Webberly afterwards.”

“Why?” Leach asked.

“That's the question,” Lynley acknowledged. He said to Havers, “It works, Barbara. I do see that it works. But if Eugenie Davies could help her son regain his music, why would Richard Davies want to stop her? From talking to the man—not to mention from seeing his flat, which is a virtual shrine to Gideon's accomplishments—the only reasonable conclusion is that Richard Davies was determined to get his son playing again.”

“So what if we've been looking at it wrong?” Havers asked.

“In what way?”

“I accept that Richard Davies wants Gideon to play again. If he had an issue with his playing—like jealousy or something, like his kid being more of a success than he is and how can he handle that—then he probably would have done something a long time ago to stop him. But from what we know, the kid's been playing since he was just out of nappies. So what if Eugenie Davies was going to meet Gideon in order to
stop
him ever playing again?”

“Why would she do that?”

“What about
quid pro quo
to Richard? If their marriage ended because of something he'd done—”

“Like putting the nanny in the club?” Leach suggested.

“Or devoting his every waking moment to Gideon and forgetting he had a wife at all, a woman in mourning, a woman with needs … Eugenie loses a child and instead of having someone to lean on, she has Richard, and all he cares about is getting
Gideon
through the trauma so he doesn't freak out and stop playing his music and stop being the son who's admired so much and on the edge of being famous
and gratifying his daddy's every dream and what about
her
through all this? What about his mum? She's been forgotten, left to cope on her own, and she never forgets what it was like, so when she has the chance to put the screws on Richard, she knows just how to do it: when
he
needs her just like she needed him.” Havers drew a deep breath at the end of all this, looking from the DCI to Lynley for their reaction.

Leach was the one to give it. “How?”

“How what?”

“How's she supposed to be able to stop her son playing? What's she going to do, Constable: break his fingers? Run
him
down?”

Havers drew a second breath, but she let it out on a sigh. “I don't know,” she said, her shoulders sagging.

“Right,” Leach snorted. “Well, when you do—”

“No,” Lynley cut in. “There's some sense to this, sir.”

“You're joking,” Leach said.

“There's something in it. Following Havers' line of thinking, we've got an explanation of why Eugenie Davies was carrying Pitchley's address that night, and nothing else we've come up with so far gets anywhere near explaining that.”

“Bollocks,” Leach said.

“What other explanation can we come up with? Nothing ties her to Pitchley. No letter, no phone call, no e-mail.”

“She had e-mail?” Leach demanded.

Havers said, “Right. And her computer—” But she stopped herself abruptly, swallowing the rest of her sentence with a wince.

“
Computer?
” Leach echoed. “Where the hell's her computer? There's no computer mentioned in your reports.”