A Traitor to Memory (35 page)

Her ankles, Pitchley-Pitchford saw, were a little too thick, but the rest of her was just as he liked a woman to be: a bit worn, a touch disheveled, and possessing a somewhat harried academic mien which suggested not only an agreeable level of intelligence but also the sort of lack of sexual confidence that he always found so stimulating. Chat-room women were invariably like this woman when he finally met them, which was why he was drawn to the internet, despite his own better judgement, not to mention the threat of sexually transmitted diseases. And, considering what he'd just been through at the Hampstead police station, even though the better part of his mind was lecturing him about the idiocy of future encounters with women whose names had thus far been inconsequential to him, the other part of his mind—his reptilian brain—would have no part of lessons learned or trepidation about the future. There
are
more important considerations than a bit of mess with the police, James, the lizard cerebellum declared. Dwell, for example, on the infinite pleasures to be given to and taken from the individual orifices of the female anatomy.

But that was pure madness, that kind of adolescent fantasising. What wasn't fantasy was the death of Eugenie Davies in Crediton Hill, Eugenie Davies, who had been carrying
his
address.

When he first knew Eugenie, he'd been James Pitchford, twenty-five years old, three years graduated from university and one year graduated from a bed-sit in Hammersmith the approximate size of a fingernail. A year in those lodgings had offered him access to the language school he needed where, for an exorbitant sum that took ages to recoup, he'd purchased individual instruction in his native language, suitable for business dealings, for academic purposes, for social gatherings, and for cowing doormen at fine hotels.

From there, he'd snagged his first job in the City from whose perspective a central London address had sounded so abso
lutely
right. And since he never invited office mates home for drinks, dinner, or anything else, there was no way for them to know that the letters, documents, and thick party invitations sent to a lofty address in Kensington were actually delivered to the fourth-floor bedroom he
occupied, which was even smaller than the bed-sit he'd begun with in Hammersmith.

Cramped accommodation had been a small price to pay all those years ago, not only for the address but also for the companionship the address had afforded. In the time since those days in Kensington Square, J. W. Pitchley had schooled himself not to think of that companionship. But James Pitchford, who had reveled in it and had deemed himself an unmitigated success in self-reinvention because of it, had scarcely lived a single moment without experiencing some passing thought about one member of the household or another. Especially Katja.

“You can help my talking English, please?” she had asked him. “I am here one year. I learn not as good as I wish. I will be so grateful.” All those charming V's in place of W's when she spoke were her own variation of the abhorrent missing aitch he'd worked so hard upon.

He agreed to help her because she was so earnest in supplicating him. He agreed to help her because—although she couldn't know it and he would die before telling her—they were two of a kind. Her escape from East Germany, while far more dramatic and awe-inspiring, mirrored an earlier flight of his own. And although their motivations were different, the core of them was identical.

They already spoke the same language, he and Katja. If he could help her better herself through something as simple as grammar and pronunciation, he was glad to do so.

They met in her free time, when Sonia was asleep or with her family. They used his room or hers, where they each had a table that was just large enough for the books from which Katja did her grammar exercises and for the tape recorder into which she spoke. She was earnest in her efforts at diction, enunciation, and pronunciation. She was courageous in her willingness to experiment in a language that was as foreign to her as Yorkshire pudding. Indeed, it was for her courage that James Pitchford had first learned to admire Katja Wolff. The sheer audacity that had carried her over the old Berlin Wall was the stuff of a heroism he could only hope to emulate.

I will make myself worthy of you
, he told her silently as they sat together and worked on the mystery of irregular verbs. And while the table light shone on her soft blonde hair, he visualised himself touching it, running his fingers through it, feeling it caress his naked chest as she lifted herself from their shared embrace.

On her chest of drawers across the room, the intercom broke into James Pitchford's reveries just about as often as he allowed himself to
dream them. From two floors below, the child would whimper and Katja's head would rise from her nightly lesson.

“It's nothing,” he'd say because if it was something, their shared time that was so precious to him and already too brief would be over for the evening. For if Sonia Davies' whimper escalated to a cry, the possibilities were endless as to what the trouble might be.

“The little one. I must go,” Katja said.

“Wait a moment.” He used the opportunity to cover her hand with his own.

“I cannot, James. If she weeps and Mrs. Davies hears and finds me not with her … You know how she is. And this is my job.”

Job? he thought. It was more like indentured servitude. The hours were long, and the duties were endless. Caring for a child so constantly ill required the efforts of more than one young woman with virtually no experience.

Even at twenty-five, James Pitchford could see this. Sonia Davies needed a professional nurse. Why she didn't have one was one of the mysteries of Kensington Square. He wasn't in a position to delve into this mystery, however. He needed to keep his head down and his profile obscure.

Still, when Katja hurried off to the child in the midst of an English lesson, when he heard her leap out of her bed in the middle of the night and rush down the stairs to come to the aid of the little girl, when he returned from work and found Katja feeding her, bathing her, occupying her with one stimulation or another, he thought protectively, The poor creature
has
a family, hasn't she? What are
they
doing to care for her?

And it seemed to him that the answer was nothing. Sonia Davies was left in Katja's charge while the rest of the crew hovered round Gideon.

Could he blame them? Pitchford wondered. And even if he could, had they any choice? The Davieses had embarked upon Gideon's fashioning long before Sonia's birth, hadn't they? They were already committed to a course of action, as evidenced by the presence of Raphael Robson and Sarah-Jane Beckett in their world.

Thinking of Robson and Beckett, Pitchley-Pitchford entered the railway station and dropped the required coins into a ticket machine. As he wandered out onto the platform, he reflected upon the astounding fact that he hadn't thought of either Robson or Beckett for years. Robson, of course, he might well have forgotten since the violin instructor had not lived among them. But it was strange that he
hadn't given a passing consideration to Sarah-Jane Beckett in all this time. She had been, after all, so very much a presence.

“I find my position here more than suitable,” she told him early in her employ, in that peculiar pre-Victorian manner of speaking she used when she was in full Governess Mode. “Whilst difficult at times, Gideon is a remarkable pupil, and I feel most privileged to have been chosen from nineteen candidates to be his instructor.” She'd just joined the household, and her room would be up with his among the eaves on the house's top floor. They would have to share a bathroom the size of a pin head. No bath, just a shower in which an average-size man could barely turn around. She'd seen this on the day she moved in, looked at it disapprovingly, but finally sighed with martyred acceptance.

“I don't wash garments in the bathroom,” she informed him, “and I prefer that you refrain from doing so as well. If we have consideration for each other in this small way, I dare say we shall manage quite well together. Where are you from, James? I can't quite place you. Normally, I'm very good at accents. Mrs. Davies, for instance, grew up in Hampshire. Can you tell? I quite like her. Mr. Davies as well. But the grandfather? He does seem a bit … Well. One doesn't like to speak ill,
but
…” She tapped a finger to her temple and lifted her eyes in the direction of the ceiling.

Barmy
was the word James would have chosen at another time in his life. But instead he said, “Yes. He's a queer fish, isn't he? But if you give him a wide berth, you'll find he's harmless enough.”

So for just over a year, they'd lived in harmony and with the spirit of cooperation. Daily, James left for his job in the City as Richard and Eugenie Davies took themselves to their own places of employment. The elder Davieses remained at home, where Granddad occupied himself in the garden and Gran kept house. Raphael Robson took Gideon through his sessions on the violin. Sarah-Jane Beckett gave the boy lessons in everything from literature to geology.

“It's astonishing working with a genius,” she informed him. “The child is like a sponge, James. One would think he'd be hopeless at anything but music, but that isn't the case. When I compare him to what I had my first year in North London …” Again and as always, she used her eyes to express the rest: North London, that dwelling place of society's detritus. Fully half of her students there were black, she'd informed him. And the rest of them—with a pause for effect—were
Irish
. “One doesn't wish to cast aspersions on minorities, but there are limits to what one should expect oneself to endure in one's chosen career, don't you think?”

She spent time with him when she wasn't with Gideon. She asked him out to the cinema or for a drink at the Greyhound, “just as friends.” But often on those just-as-friends evenings, her leg pressed against his in the darkness as the celluloid flickered its images on the screen, or she took his arm as they entered the pub and she slid her hand from his biceps to his elbow to his wrist so that when their fingers touched it was only natural that they clasp and remain clasped once they were seated.

“Tell me about your family, James,” she urged him. “Do tell me. I want every detail.”

So he manufactured tales for her because telling tales had long ago become his stock in trade. He was flattered by the attention that she—an educated girl from the Home Counties—was willing to show him. He had held his own counsel and kept his head down for so many years that Sarah-Jane Beckett's interest in him stirred an appetite for companionship that he'd kept suppressed for most of his life.

She wasn't the companion he was seeking, however. And while he couldn't have said exactly who that companion would be in his evenings with Sarah-Jane, he felt no heaving of the earth when her leg touched his and no pleasurable longing for the pressure of something more than her palm against his own when she took his hand.

Then Katja Wolff arrived, and with Katja the situation was different. But then, Katja Wolff had been as different from Sarah-Jane Beckett as was humanly possible to be.

7

“S
HE MIGHT HAVE
been meeting with the ex,” D
CI
Leach said in reference to the man Ted Wiley had seen in the car park of the Sixty Plus Club. “Divorce doesn't mean goodbye forever, take it from me. He's called Richard Davies. Track him down.”

“He could be the third male voice on her answer machine as well,” Lynley acknowledged.

“What did that voice say again?”

Barbara Havers read the message from her notes. “Sounded angry,” she added, and tapped her biro meditatively against the paper. “You know, I wonder if our Eugenie played men off against each other.”

“You're thinking of this other bloke … Wiley?” Leach said.

“Could be something there,” Havers noted. “We've got three separate men on her answer machine. We've got her—this is according to Wiley—arguing with a bloke in the car park. We've got her wanting to talk to Wiley, having something to tell him, something he apparently feels was important …” Havers hesitated and glanced at Lynley.