A Traitor to Memory (18 page)

The nursery bathroom was on the second floor of the house along with the nursery, a loo, and another bedroom that was occupied by the other child in the family. The parents and grandparents had rooms just below on the first floor. The top floor was occupied by the nanny, a lodger, and a woman who … well, the constable supposed she'd be called a governess although the family didn't call her that.

“She teaches the children,” the constable said. “Well, perhaps just the older one, I expect.”

Webberly raised his eyebrows at the oddity of a governess in this day and age, and he went into the bathroom where the tragedy had occurred. Leach joined him there, his duty done in the drawing room below. The constable returned to his post by the front door.

The two detectives surveyed the bathroom somberly. It was a mundane location for sudden death to make its mark. And yet it happened so often that Webberly wondered when people would finally
learn not to leave a child unattended for even a second when it came to so much as an inch of water anywhere.

There was more than an inch of water in the tub, however. At least ten inches remained inside, cool now and with a plastic boat and five yellow ducklings floating motionless on its surface. A bar of soap rested on the bottom near the drain, and a stainless steel bath tray with worn rubber ends bridged the width of the tub and held a limp flannel, a comb, and a sponge. All of it looked perfectly normal. But there was also an indication that both panic and tragedy had been recent visitors to the room.

To one side, a towel rack lay overturned on the floor. A soaked bath mat was crumpled beneath a wash basin. A rattan wastepaper basket had been caved in. And across the white tiles were the footprints of the paramedics whose last concern would have been to keep the room neat and tidy as they attempted to revive a child.

Webberly could picture the scene as if he'd been there because he
had
been there before while on uniformed patrol: no panic among the 'medics but rather intense and what seemed like inhumanly impersonal calm; checks for pulse and respiration, for reaction from the pupils; the immediate initiation of CPR. They would know she was dead within moments but they would not say those words to anyone because their job was life, life at any cost, life at every cost, and they would work upon the child and whisk her from the house and continue to work upon her all the way to the hospital because there was always the chance that life could be wrung from the limp tatter that remained when the spirit left the body.

Webberly squatted by the wastepaper basket and used a pen to right it, having a look inside. Six crumpled tissues, perhaps half a yard of dental floss, a flattened tube of toothpaste. He said to Leach, “Check the medicine cabinet, Eric,” while he himself went back to the tub and looked long and hard round its sides, round its taps and its spigot, along the grout that edged it, and into its water. Nothing.

Leach said, “Baby aspirin in here, cough syrup, some prescriptions. Five of them, sir.”

“For who?”

“Made out for Sonia Davies.”

“Note them all, then. Seal off the room. I'll speak to the family.”

But it was more than the family he met in the drawing room because more than the family lived in the house, and more than only the house's inhabitants had been present when the tragedy supervened in their evening rituals. Indeed, the drawing room seemed to be bursting
with people although there were but nine individuals present: eight adults and a small boy with an appealing fall of white-blond hair across his forehead. Chalky-faced, he stood in the protective circle of the arm of an old man who was, presumably, his grandfather and whose necktie—a souvenir of some college or club by the look of it—the boy grasped and twisted in his fingers.

No one spoke. They looked in shock, and they seemed to be grouped to offer each other what support they could. Most of this was being directed at the mother, who was sitting in one corner of the room, a woman in her thirties like Webberly himself, but whey of complexion with large eyes that were haunted and seeing again and again what no mother ever ought to see: her child's limp body in the hands of strangers who fought to save her.

When Webberly introduced himself, one of the two men who were hovering near the mother rose and said he was Richard Davies, the father of the child who'd been taken to hospital. The use of the euphemism was clear when he gave a glance in the direction of the little boy, his son. Wisely, he didn't wish to speak of the other child's death in front of her brother. He said, “We were at the hospital. My wife and I. They told us—”

At this a young woman—seated on a sofa accompanied by a man of her own age with his arm round her shoulders—began to cry. It was a horrible, guttural weeping that grew to the sort of sobs that lead to hysteria. “I do not
leave
her,” she keened, and even through her lamentation Webberly could hear her heavy German accent. “I swear to God almighty that I do not leave her for even a minute.”

Which begged the question of how she had died, of course.

They all needed to be interviewed, but not simultaneously. Webberly said to the German girl, “You were responsible for the child?”

At which the mother said, “I brought this down upon us.”

“Eugenie!” Richard Davies cried, and the other man who'd been hovering over her, his face shining with a patina of sweat, said, “Don't
talk
like that, Eugenie.”

The grandfather said, “We all know who's at fault.”

The German girl wailed, “No! No! No! I do not leave her!” while her companion held her and said, “It's
okay
,” which it patently was not.

Two people said nothing: an elderly woman who kept her eyes glued onto Granddad and a tomato-haired woman in a neat pleated skirt who watched the German girl with undisguised dislike.

Too many people, too much emotion, growing confusion. Webberly told them all to disperse, save the parents. Remain in the house, he directed them. And someone stay with the little boy.

“I'll do that,” Tomato-hair said, obviously the “governess” about whom the young PC had spoken. “Come along, Gideon. Let's have a look at your maths.”

“But I'm to practise,” the boy said, looking earnestly from one adult to another. “Raphael did tell me—”

“Gideon, it's all right. Go with Sarah-Jane.” The sweat-faced man left the mother's side, going to squat before the little boy. “You're not to worry about your music just now. Go with Sarah-Jane, all right?”

“Come along, lad.” Grandfather stood, the little boy in his arms. The rest of the group followed him from the room till only the parents of the dead child remained.

Even now in the garden in Stamford Brook, with Alfie barking at the birds and chasing the squirrels and waiting for his master to call him back to the lead, even now in this park Webberly could see Eugenie Davies as she had been on that long-ago evening.

Dressed simply in grey trousers and a pale blue blouse, she didn't move an inch. She didn't look at him or at her husband. She only said, “Oh my God. What's to become of us?” And even then she spoke to herself, not to the men.

Her husband said, but rather to Webberly and not in answer to her, “We went to the hospital. There was nothing they could do. They didn't tell us that here. At the house. They didn't tell us.”

“No,” Webberly said. “That's not their job. They leave that to the doctors.”

“But they knew. While they were here. They knew then, didn't they?”

“I expect so. I'm sorry.”

Neither of them wept. They would, later, when they realised that the nightmare they were currently experiencing was no nightmare at all but rather an extended reality that would colour what remained of their lives. But at the moment, they were dull with trauma: the initial panic, the crisis of frantic intervention, the invasion of strangers into their home, the agonising wait in a casualty ward, the approach of a doctor whose expression undoubtedly had said it all.

“They talked about releasing her later. The … her body,” Richard Davies said. “He said we couldn't take her, couldn't make any arrangements…. Why?”

Eugenie's head lowered. A tear dropped onto her folded hands.

Webberly drew a chair over so that he was on the same level as Eugenie and he nodded to Richard Davies to sit as well, which he did, next to his wife, whose hand he took. Webberly explained to them as best he could: When an unexpected death occurred, when someone died who was not under the care of a physician who could sign a death certificate, when someone died in an accident—like a drowning—then a post-mortem examination was required by law.

Eugenie looked up. “Are you saying they'll cut her up? Cut her open?”

Webberly skirted the question by saying, “They'll determine the exact cause of her death.”

“But we know the cause,” Richard Davies said. “She … my God, she was in the bath. And then there was shouting, the women screaming. I ran upstairs and James came tearing down from—”

“James?”

“He lodges with us. He was in his room. He came running.”

“Where was everyone else?”

Richard looked to his wife for some sort of answer. She shook her head, saying only, “Mother Davies and I were in the kitchen, starting dinner. It was Sonia's bath time and …” She hesitated, as if saying her daughter's name made more real what she could not bear to think about.

“And you don't know where everyone else was?”

Richard Davies spoke. “Dad and I were in his sitting room. We were watching that … God, that infernal, stupid football game. We were actually watching
football
while Sosy was drowning upstairs.”

It seemed the diminutive form of their daughter's name was what broke Eugenie. She finally began to weep in earnest.

Richard Davies, caught up in his own grief and despair, didn't take his wife into his arms as Webberly would have had him do. He merely said her name, telling her uselessly that it was all right, that the baby was with God, who loved her as much as they did. And Eugenie herself above all people knew that, didn't she, she whose faith in God and God's goodness was absolute?

Cold comfort, that, Webberly thought. He said, “I'll want to talk to everyone else, Mr. and Mrs. Davies.” And then to Richard Davies alone, “She might need a doctor,” in reference to his wife. “Better phone him.”

The drawing room door opened as he spoke and DS Leach entered. He nodded to indicate he'd completed his list and sealed the
bathroom off, and Webberly told him to set up the drawing room to conduct interviews with the residents of the house.

“Thank you for helping us, Inspector,” Eugenie said.

Thank you for helping us.
Webberly thought about those words now as he lumbered to his feet. How curious it was that five simple words spoken in such a wretched voice had actually managed to transform his life: from detective to knight errant in the space of a single second.

It was because of the kind of mother she was, he told himself now as he called to Alfie. The kind of mother that Frances—God forgive her—could never have hoped to be. How could anyone help admiring that? How could any man help wanting to be of service to such a mother?

“Alfie, come!” he shouted as the Alsatian loped after a terrier with a Frisbee in his mouth. “Home. Come. We won't use the lead.”

As if the dog actually understood this last promise, he dashed back to Webberly. He'd had an excellent run this morning, if his heaving sides and his dangling tongue were any indication. Webberly nodded towards the gate and the dog walked to it and sat obediently, eyes on Webberly's pockets for a treat to reward him for such a display of good manners.

“You'll have to wait till we get home,” Webberly told him, and afterwards considered his own words.

Indeed, that's the way life played out, didn't it? At the end of the day and for too many years, everything that mattered in Webberly's sorry little world had found itself put off till he got home.

Lynley noted that Helen hadn't taken more than a mouthful of tea. She'd changed her position in bed, however, and she was observing him make a mess of his tie while he was watching her in the mirror.

“So she's someone Malcolm Webberly knew?” Helen asked. “How dreadful for him, Tommy. And on his anniversary night.”

“I wouldn't go so far as to say he knew her,” Lynley replied. “She was one of the principals in the first case he ran as a DI over in Kensington.”

“That would have been years ago, then. It must have made an enormous impression on him.”

“I dare say it did.” Lynley didn't want to tell her why. Indeed, he didn't want to tell her anything else about that long-ago death that
Webberly had investigated. The drowning of a child was horrific enough to contemplate under any circumstances, but under these newly changed circumstances in their lives, it seemed to Lynley that a certain amount of discretion and delicacy was going to be in order now that his wife was carrying a child of her own.

A child of
our
own, he corrected his thinking, a child to whom no harm would ever come. So elaborating on the harm that had befallen another child seemed like tempting fate. At least that was what Lynley told himself as he went about the rituals of dressing.