A Traitor to Memory (128 page)

28

R
ICHARD HEARD ONLY
the breath in his ears. She fell and he watched her and he heard banisters cracking when she hit them. And the sheer weight of her body increased her velocity, so even at the meagre excuse for a landing—that single inadequate slightly wider step that Jill so hated—she continued to hurtle towards the ground floor.

It didn't happen in a second. It happened in an arc of time so wide and so long that forever seemed inadequate for it. And every second that passed was a second in which Gideon, a Gideon able-bodied and unhampered by a plaster cast enclosing his leg from foot to knee, gained more distance from his father. But even more than distance, he gained certainty as well. And that could not be allowed.

Richard descended the stairs as quickly as he could. At the bottom, Jill lay sprawled and motionless. When he reached her, her eyelids—looking blue in the faint light from the entry windows—fluttered, and her lips parted in a moan.

“Mummy?” she whispered.

Her clothing rucked up, her great huge stomach was obscenely exposed. Her coat spread above her head like a monstrous fan.

“Mummy?” she whispered again. Then she groaned. And then cried out and arched her back.

Richard moved to her head. Furiously, he searched through the
pockets of the coat. He'd seen her put her keys in the coat, hadn't he? God damn it, he'd
seen
her. He had to find those keys. If he didn't, Gideon would be gone and he had to find him, had to speak to him, had to make him know….

There were no keys. Richard cursed. He shoved himself to his feet. He went back to the stairs and began to haul himself furiously upwards. Below him, Jill cried out, “Catherine,” and Richard pulled on the stair rail and breathed like a runner and thought about how he could stop his son.

Inside the flat, he looked for Jill's bag. It was by the sofa, lying on the floor. He scooped it up. He wrestled with its maddening clasp. His hands were shaking. His fingers were clumsy. He couldn't manage to—

A buzzer went off. He raised his head, looked round the room. But there was nothing. He went back to the bag. He managed to unfasten the clasp, and he jerked the bag open. He dumped its contents onto the sofa.

A buzzer went off. He ignored it. He pawed through lipsticks, powders, chequebook, purse, crumpled tissues, pens, a small notebook, and there they were. Hooked together by the familiar chrome ring: five keys, two brass, three silver. One for her flat, one for his, one for the family home in Wiltshire, and two for the Humber, ignition and boot. He grabbed them.

A buzzer went off. Long, loud, insistent this time. Demanding immediate acknowledgment.

He cursed, located the buzzing at its source. The front bell on the street. Gideon? God, Gideon? But he had his own key. He wouldn't ring.

The buzzing continued. Richard ignored it. He made for the door.

The buzzing faded. The buzzing stopped. In his ears, Richard heard only his breathing. It sounded like the shriek of lost souls, and pain began to accompany it, searing up his right leg and, simultaneously, burning and throbbing from right hand to shoulder. His side began to ache with the exertion. He didn't seem able to catch his breath.

At the top of the stairs, he paused, looked down. His heart was pounding. His chest was heaving. He drew in air, stale and damp.

He began to descend. He clutched on to the rail. Jill hadn't moved. Could she? Would she? It hardly mattered. Not with Gideon on the run.

“Mummy? Will you help?” Her voice was faint. But Mummy was not here. Mummy could not help.

But Daddy was. Daddy could. He would always be there. Not as in the past, that figure cloaked by an artful madness that came and went and stood between Daddy and yes my son you are my son. But Daddy in the present who could not did not would not fail because yes my son you are my son. You, what you do, what you're capable of doing. All of it you. You are my son.

Richard reached the landing.

Below him, he heard the entry door open.

He called out, “Gideon?”

“Bloody sodding hell!” came a woman's reply.

A squat creature in a navy pea jacket seemed to fling herself at Jill. Behind her came a raincoated figure whom Richard Davies recognised only too well. He held a credit card in his hand, the means by which he'd gained access through the warped old door to Braemar Mansions.

“Good God,” Lynley said, dashing over to kneel by Jill as well. “Phone an ambulance, Havers.” Then he raised his head.

At once his eyes came to rest on Richard, midway down the stairs, Jill's car keys in his hand.

Havers rode with Jill Foster to hospital. Lynley took Richard Davies to the nearest police station. This turned out to be on the Earl's Court Road, the same station from which Malcolm Webberly had departed more than twenty years ago on the evening he was assigned to investigate the suspicious drowning of Sonia Davies.

If Richard Davies was aware of the irony involved therein, he didn't mention it. Indeed, he said nothing, as was his right, when Lynley gave him the official caution. The duty solicitor was brought in to advise him, but the only advice Davies asked for was how he could get a message to his son.

“I must speak to Gideon,” he said to the solicitor. “Gideon Davies. You've heard of him. The violinist …?”

Other than that, he had nothing to say. He would stand by his original story, given to Lynley during earlier interviews. He knew his rights, and the police had nothing on which to build a case against the father of Gideon Davies.

What they had, however, was the Humber, and Lynley went back to Cornwall Gardens with the official team to oversee the acquisition
of that vehicle. As Winston Nkata had predicted, what damage the car had sustained in striking two—and probably three—individuals was centred round its front chrome bumper, which was fairly mangled. But this was something that any adroit defence lawyer would be able to argue away, and consequently Lynley was not depending upon it to build a case against Richard Davies. What he was depending upon and what that same adroit barrister would find difficult to discount was trace evidence both beneath the bumper and upon the undercarriage of the Humber. For it was hardly possible that Davies could strike Kathleen Waddington and Malcolm Webberly and run over his former wife three times and leave not a deposit of blood, a fragment of skin, or the kind of hair they desperately needed—hair with human scalp attached to it—on the underside of the car. To get rid of that sort of evidence, Davies would have had to think of that possibility. And Lynley was betting that he hadn't done so. No killer, he knew from long experience, ever thought of everything.

He phoned the news to DCI Leach and asked him to pass the message along to AC Hillier. He would wait in Cornwall Gardens to see the Humber safely off the street, he said, after which he'd fetch Eugenie Davies' computer, as had been his original destination. Did DCI Leach still wish him to fetch that computer?

He did, Leach told him. Despite the arrest, Lynley was still out of order for having taken it and it needed to be logged among the belongings of the victim. “Anything else you lifted, while we're at it?” Leach asked shrewdly.

Lynley replied there was nothing else belonging to Eugenie Davies that he had taken, nothing at all. And he was content with the truth of this answer. For he had come to understand for better or worse that the words born of passion which a man puts on paper and sends to a woman—indeed, even those words that he speaks—are on loan to her only, for whatever length of time serves their purpose. The words themselves always belong to the man.

“He didn't push me,” was what Jill Foster said to Barbara Havers in the ambulance. “You mustn't think that he pushed me.” Her voice was faint, a weak murmur only, and her lower body was soiled from the pool of urine, water, and blood that had been spreading out beneath her when Barbara knelt by her side at the foot of the stairs. But that was all she was able to say, because pain was taking her, or at least that was how it seemed to Barbara as she heard Jill cry out and she
watched the paramedic monitor the woman's vital signs and listened to him say to the driver, “Hit the sirens, Cliff,” which was explanation enough of Jill Foster's condition.

“The baby?” Barbara asked the medic in a low voice.

He cast her a look, said nothing, and moved his gaze to the IV bag he'd fixed to a pole above his patient.

Even with the siren, the ride to the nearest hospital with a casualty ward seemed endless to Barbara. But once they arrived, the response was immediate and gratifying. The paramedics trundled their charge inside the building at a run. There, she was met by a swarm of personnel, who whisked her away, calling out for equipment, for phone calls to be made to Obstetrics, for obscure drugs and arcane procedures with names that camouflaged their purposes.

“Is she going to make it?” Barbara asked anyone who would listen. “She's in labour, right? She's okay? The baby?”

“This is not how babies are intended to get born,” was the only reply she was able to obtain.

She remained in Casualty, pacing the waiting area, till Jill Foster was taken in a rush to an operating theatre. “She's been through enough trauma,” was the explanation she was given and “Are you family?” was the reason that nothing else was revealed. Barbara couldn't have said why she felt it was important for her to know that the woman was going to be all right. She put it down to an unusual sisterhood she found herself feeling for Jill Foster. It had not, after all, been so many months since Barbara herself had been whisked away by an ambulance after her own encounter with a killer.

She didn't believe that Richard Davies had not pushed Jill Foster down the stairs. But that was something to be sorted out later, once a recovery period gave the other woman time to learn what else her fiancé had been up to. And she
would
recover, Barbara learned within the hour. She'd been delivered of a daughter: healthy despite her precipitate entry into the world.

Barbara felt she could leave at that point, and she was doing so—indeed, she was out in front of the hospital and sussing out what buses, if any, served Fulham Palace Road—when she saw that she was standing in front of Charing Cross Hospital, where Superintendent Webberly was a patient. She ducked back inside.

On the eleventh floor, she waylaid a nurse just outside the intensive care ward.
Critical
and
unchanged
were the words the nurse used to describe the superintendent's condition, from which Barbara inferred
that he was still in a coma, still on life support, and still in so much danger of so many further complications that praying for his recovery seemed as risky a business as thinking about the possibility of his death. When people were struck by cars, when they sustained injuries to the brain, more often than not they emerged from the crisis radically altered. Barbara didn't know if she wished such a change upon her superior officer. She didn't want him to die. She dreaded the thought of it. But she couldn't imagine him caught up in months or years of torturous convalescence.

She said to the nurse, “Is his family with him? I'm one of the officers investigating what happened. I've news for them. If they'd like to hear it, that is.”