A Traitor to Memory (23 page)

Barbara rolled her eyes at the purple phrasing. She lowered the letter and gave herself a moment to react to it and, more important, to what it implied. Read more or not, Barb? she asked herself. Read more and she felt something akin to unclean. Not and she felt unprofessional.

She went back to the letter. He'd gone home, she read, intending to tell his wife everything. He'd screwed his courage to the sticking place—Barbara winced at the pilfering from Shakespeare—and held the image of Eugenie in his mind to give him the strength to deal a mortal blow to a perfectly good and decent woman. But he'd found
her unwell, Eugenie darling, unwell in a manner that he couldn't explain in a mere letter, but that he would explain, would lay before her in all its desperate detail, when next they met. This didn't mean they would not be together at the end of the day, darling Eugenie. This didn't mean they had no future. Above all, this didn't mean everything that had passed between them counted for nothing, because that was not the case.

He'd concluded with, “Wait for me. I beg you. I'm coming to you, darling.” And he'd signed it with the scrawl that Barbara had seen on notes, on Christmas cards, on departmental letters, and on memos for years.

At least she now knew what had seemed off at the Webberly party, she thought as she stuffed the letter back into its envelope. All that jolly-good-fellowing to celebrate twenty-five years of sham.

“Havers?” Lynley was in the doorway, spectacles sliding down his nose and a greeting card in his hand. “Here's something that fits in with one of the phone messages. What've you found?”

“Swap,” she said, and handed over her envelope in exchange for what he was carrying.

This card was from someone called Lynn, with an envelope that bore a London postmark but no sender's address. Its message was simple:

Thank you so much for the floral tribute, dearest Eugenie, and for your presence which meant so much to me. Life will go on. I know that. But, of course, it will never be the same.

Fondly
,

Lynn

Barbara examined the date: a week ago. She agreed with Lynley. Thematically, it sounded like the same woman who'd left the message on the answer machine.

“Damn.” This was Lynley's reaction to the letter Barbara had handed to him. He gestured to the other letters that lay across Eugenie Davies' bed. “What about those?”

“All from him, Inspector, if the writing on the envelopes is anything to go by.”

Barbara watched the play of reactions as they crossed Lynley's face. She knew that her superior officer and she had to be thinking along the same lines: Had Webberly known these letters—so embarrassing and potentially damaging to him—would be in Eugenie Davies'
possession? Had he merely suspected or feared that they might be? And in either case, had he arranged to have Lynley—and by extension Havers as well—work the case in order to run interference no matter which circumstance arose?

“D'you think Leach knows about them?” Barbara asked.

“He phoned Webberly when he had a potential i.d. on the body. At one in the morning, Havers. What does that suggest to you?”

“And guess who he asked to go to Henley this morning.” Barbara took the letter that Lynley handed back to her. “What's to do, then, sir?”

Lynley walked to the window. She watched as he gazed down at the street. She expected the regulation reply from him. Asking the question in the first place had been merely rote.

“We'll take them with us,” he said.

She got to her feet. “Right. You've got evidence bags in the boot, haven't you? I'll fetch—”

“Not like that,” Lynley said.

Barbara said, “What? But you just said take—”

“Yes. We'll take them with us.” He turned back to her from the window.

Barbara stared at him. She didn't want to think what he was implying.
We'll take them with us.
Not, We'll bag them and log them as evidence, Havers. Not, Have a care with them, Barbara. Not, We'll have forensic check them for fingerprints, for the prints of someone other than the recipient who might have found them, might have read them, might have become consumed with jealousy because of them and despite their age, someone who might have looked for vengeance because of them….

She said, “Hang on, Inspector. You can't mean—”

But she wasn't able to complete her protest.

Below them, someone knocked on the door.

Lynley answered it to find an elderly gentleman in a waxed jacket and peaked cap standing on the pavement, his hands sunk into his pockets. His ruddy face was mapped with the markings of broken capillaries, and his nose was just that shade of rose that would deepen and grow purple over time. But it was his eyes that Lynley took note of most closely. They were blue, intense, and wary.

He introduced himself as Major Ted Wiley, Army, retired.
“Someone from the police … You must be one of them. I had a call …?”

Lynley asked the man to step inside. He introduced himself and then introduced Havers, who descended the stairs as Wiley moved tentatively into the room. The old gentleman looked round him, glanced at the stairs, then lifted his eyes to the ceiling as if he were trying to determine what Barbara Havers had been looking for or had found on the floor above.

“What's happened?” Wiley removed neither his hat nor his jacket.

“You're a friend of Mrs. Davies?” Lynley asked him.

The man didn't respond at once. It was as if he were trying to decide what the word
friend
actually meant in reference to his relationship with Eugenie Davies. He finally said, looking from Lynley to Havers and back again to Lynley, “Something's happened to her. You wouldn't be here otherwise.”

“That was you on the phone, that last message on her machine? A man talking about plans for tonight?” Havers asked this. She remained by the stairs.

“We were …” Wiley seemed to hear the past tense and made the adjustment. “We're supposed to have dinner. Tonight. She said … You're from the Met and she went to London last night. So something's happened to her. Please tell me what.”

“Sit down, Major Wiley,” Lynley said. The old man didn't seem frail, but there was no telling the condition of his heart or his blood pressure from just one look at him, and Lynley didn't like to take risks with someone when he had bad news to pass on.

“It was raining hard last night,” Wiley said, more to himself than to either Lynley or Havers. “I talked to her about driving in the rain. And the dark. Dark's bad enough but rain makes it worse.”

Havers crossed the few feet to Wiley and took him by the arm. “Have a seat, Major,” she said.

“It's bad,” he responded.

“I'm afraid so,” Lynley said.

“The motorway? She said she'd be careful. She said not to worry. She said we'd talk. Tonight. We'd talk. She wanted to talk.” He was speaking not so much to them but to the coffee table in front of the sofa on which Havers had deposited him. She sat next to him, perched on the edge.

Lynley took the armchair. He said gently, “I'm afraid Eugenie Davies was killed last night.”

Wiley turned his head to Lynley in what looked like slow motion. “The motorway,” he said. “The rain. I didn't want her to go.”

For the moment, Lynley didn't disabuse him of the notion that there had been a motorway car crash. The BBC early morning news had carried the story of the hit-and-run, but no mention had been made of Eugenie Davies' name at that time since her body had yet to be identified and her family had yet to be tracked down. Lynley said, “She left after dark, then? What time was this?”

Wiley said numbly, “Half past nine, I think? Ten? We were walking back from St. Mary the Virgin—”

“Evensong?” Havers had taken out her notebook and was jotting down the information.

“No, no,” Wiley said. “There was no service. She'd gone in … to pray? I don't actually know because …” He removed his cap then, as if he were in church himself. He held it with both hands. “I didn't go in with her. I had my dog. My golden. P.B.? That's her name. We waited in the church yard.”

“This was in the rain?” Lynley asked.

Wiley twisted the cap. “Dogs don't mind rain. And it was time for her last walk of the evening. P.B.'s last walk.”

Lynley said, “Can you tell us why she was going to London?”

Wiley gave the cap another twist. “She said she had an appointment there.”

“With whom? Where?”

“I don't know. She said we'd talk tonight.”

“About the appointment?”

“I don't know. God. I don't
know
.” His voice fractured but Ted Wiley wasn't a retired Army man for nothing. He regained control within a second. Then he said, “How did it happen? Where? Did she skid? Hit a lorry?”

Lynley gave the facts to him, offering just enough details to tell Wiley where and how she had died. He didn't use the word
murder
in his explanation. And Wiley didn't interrupt to ask why the Metropolitan police were trolling through the belongings of a woman who, to all intents and purposes, was the victim of a simple hit-and-run.

But a moment after Lynley had finished his explanation, Wiley made the leap. He seemed to take measure of the fact that Havers had descended the stairs upon his arrival wearing latex gloves. He put this together with the police punching one-four-seven-one on Eugenie's
phone. He added to this what they had said about Eugenie's answer machine. And he said, “This can't have been an accident. Because why would you … the two of you coming out here from London …” His eyes focused on something else, perhaps someone else, a vision in the distance that seemed to prompt him to say, “That bloke in the car park last night. This isn't an accident, is it?” And he rose.

Havers rose as well and urged him back down. He cooperated, but now he was changed, as if an unnamed purpose had begun to consume him. From twisting his cap, he went to slapping it against his palm. He said, quite as if he were giving an order to a subordinate, “Tell me what happened to Eugenie.”

There seemed little risk that he would have a heart attack or stroke, so Lynley told him that he and Havers were part of a murder squad, leaving him to fill in the rest of the blanks. He went on to say, “Tell us about the man in the car park,” which Wiley did without hesitation.

He'd walked up to the Sixty Plus Club, where Eugenie worked. He went with P.B. to accompany Eugenie home in the rain. When he got there, he observed her in an altercation with a man. Not a local man, Wiley said. This was someone from Brighton.

“She told you that?” Lynley asked.

Wiley shook his head. He'd got a glimpse of the number plate as the car sped off. He couldn't get it all, but he saw the letters: ADY. “I was worried about her. She'd been acting a little peculiar for several days, so I looked the letters up in the registration mark guide. I saw ADY is Brighton. The car was an Audi. Navy or black. I couldn't tell in the dark.”

“You keep a copy handy?” Havers asked. “The registration mark guide? Is this a hobby or something?”

“It's in the bookshop. Travel section. I sell a copy now and then. People who want to give their kids something to do in the car. That sort of thing.”

“Ah.”

Lynley knew Havers'
ah
. She was watching Wiley curiously. He said, “You didn't intercede in the altercation between Mrs. Davies and this man, Major Wiley?”

“I came into the car park only at the end of it. I heard a few shouted words—on his part, this was. He got into the car. Took off before I was close enough to say anything. That was it.”

“Who did Mrs. Davies say this man was?”

“I didn't ask her.”

Lynley and Havers exchanged a look. Havers was the one to ask, “Why not?”

“As I said. She'd been acting peculiar, different from usual, for several days. I assumed there was something on her mind and …” Wiley shifted his eyes to his cap and seemed surprised to find it still in his hands. He stuffed it into his pocket. “See here. I'm not the sort who pries. I decided to wait for her to tell me whatever she wanted to tell me.”

“Had you ever seen this man before?”

Wiley said no, no, he didn't know the man. He hadn't seen him before that moment, he didn't recognise the man at all, but he'd got a good look at him if the detectives wanted a description. When they said that they did, he provided it: the approximate age, the height, the iron-grey hair, the dominant hawk-like nose. “He called her Eugenie,” Wiley concluded. “They knew each other.” This, he said, he'd assumed from what he'd seen in the car park: Eugenie had touched the man's face, but he'd pulled away.

“But you still didn't ask her who he was?” Lynley said. “Why was that, Major Wiley?”

“It seemed … too personal, somehow. I thought she'd tell me when she was ready. If he was important.”

“And she did say she had something she wanted to talk to you about,” Havers noted.

Wiley nodded and let out a slow breath. “She did say that. She talked about confessing her sins.”

“Sins,” Havers said.

Lynley leaned forward, avoiding Havers' meaningful look in his direction. He said, “May we assume from all this that you and Mrs. Davies had a close relationship, Major Wiley? Were you friends? Lovers? Engaged?”