A Traitor to Memory (36 page)

He knew what she was thinking and what she wanted to say:
We've also got love letters from a married man and a computer with access to the internet.
She was clearly waiting for him to give her the go-ahead to say this, but he held his tongue, so she finished lamely with,
“We've got reason to look closely at every bloke who knew her, 'f you ask me.”

Leach nodded. “Have at Richard Davies, then. Get what you can.”

They were in the incident room, where detective constables were reporting in on the activities to which they'd been assigned. Following Lynley's phone call to the DCI on the way back into town, Leach had allocated further manpower to the PNC in order to trace all navy and black Audis with number plates ending in ADY. He'd put a constable on to BT for a list of the incoming and outgoing phone calls from Doll Cottage in Henley, and another constable was getting on to Cellnet to track down the mobile phone whose owner had left a message on Eugenie Davies' answer machine.

Of the activities reported as being completed so far that day, only the DC with the responsibility for gathering information from forensic had offered a useful detail: A number of minute paint particles had been found on the dead woman's clothing when it was examined. Further particles had also been found on her body, specifically upon her mangled legs.

“They're putting the paint under analysis,” Leach said. “Broken down, it might well give us the make of the car that hit her. But that'll take time. You know the dance.”

“Have you got a colour on the paint?” Lynley asked.

“Black.”

“What colour is the Boxter you're holding?”

“As to that …” Leach told his team to get on with their work and he led the way back to his office, saying, “Car's silver. And it's clean. Not that I'd expect some bloke—no matter how much he's rolling in bunce—to run down a woman in a motor that cost more than my mum's house. We're still holding the car, though. It's proving useful.”

He paused at a coffee machine and plugged in a few coins. A viscous liquid drizzled pathetically into a plastic cup. Leach said, “You?” and held the cup up in offer. Havers accepted, although she looked as if she regretted the decision once she tasted the brew; Lynley chose the course of wisdom and demurred. Leach purchased another cup for himself and took them into his office, where he used his elbow to shoot the door home. His phone was ringing, and he barked “Leach” into it as he set down his coffee and sank into his desk chair, nodding Lynley and Havers to chairs of their own. “Hello, love,” he said to his caller, his face brightening. “Nope … Nope … She's what?” With a glance at the other detectives, “Esmé, I can't actually talk at the moment. But let me say this:
No one
has said anything at all about getting remarried,
okay? … Yes. Right. We'll speak later, love.” He dropped the receiver back into place, saying, “Kids. Divorce. It's a real nightmare.”

Lynley and Havers made noises of sympathy. Leach slurped coffee and dismissed the phone call. He said, “Our bloke Pitchley came by for a little chat this morning, solicitor in tow” and he brought them up to date on what the man from Crediton Hill had revealed: that he not only had recognised the name of the hit-and-run victim, that he not only had once known the hit-and-run victim, but that he'd also lived in the very same house with the hit-and-run victim at the time of the murder of said victim's daughter. “He's changed his name from Pitchford to Pitchley for reasons he's not talking about,” Leach concluded. “I like to think I would have twigged his identity eventually, but it's been twenty years since I last saw the bloke and a hell of a lot of fish have swum under the bridge in the meantime.”

“Not surprising,” Lynley said.

“Now that I know who he is, though, I've got to tell you he smells sweet to me for this business, Boxter or not. He's got something the size of a T-Rex marching through his conscience. I can feel it.”

“Was he a suspect in the child's death?” Lynley asked. Havers, he noted, had flipped over a new page in her notebook and was jotting the information down on a sheet that looked stained with brown sauce.

“No one was a suspect at first. Until all the reports came in, it looked like a case of negligence. You know what I mean: A flaming idiot goes to take a phone call while the toddler's in the bath. The kid tries to reach for a rubber ducky. She slips, knocks herself on the head, and the rest is academic. Unfortunate and tragic, but it happens.” Leach slurped more coffee and picked up a document from his desk, which he used to gesture with. “But when the reports came in on the child's body, there were bruises and fractures no one could explain, so everyone became a suspect. It all came down to the nanny dead quick. And she was a real piece of work, she was. I might've forgotten Pitchford's face, but as to that German cow … There's not a chance in hell I'd ever forget her. Cold as a cod, that woman was. Gave us one interview—
one
interview, mind you, about a toddler that died in her care—and she never said another word. Not to CID, not to her solicitor, not to her barrister. Not to anyone. Took her right to silence straight to Holloway. Never shed a tear either. But then, what else could you expect from a Kraut? Family were mad to engage her in the first place.”

From the corner of his eye, Lynley saw Havers tap her biro
against the paper she was writing on. He glanced her way to see her eyes had narrowed at Leach. She wasn't a woman who put up with bigotry in any of its forms—from xenophobia to misogyny—and he could tell she was about to make a comment that wouldn't endear her to the detective chief inspector. He interceded, saying, “The German girl's origins worked against her, then.”

“Her flaming Kraut personality worked against her.”

“‘We will fight them on the beaches,’” Havers murmured.

Lynley shot her a look. She shot him one back.

Leach either didn't hear or chose to ignore Havers, for which Lynley was grateful. The last thing they needed was a division among them, with lines being drawn on the issue of political correctness.

The DCI leaned back in his chair and said, “The diary and phone messages are all you came up with?”

“So far,” Lynley answered. “There was also a card from a woman called Lynn, but that doesn't appear to be germane at the moment. Her child died and Mrs. Davies went to the funeral, apparently.”

“There was no other correspondence?” Leach asked. “Letters, bills, the like?”

Lynley said, “No. There was no other correspondence,” and he didn't look Havers' way. “She had a sea chest filled with materials relating to her son, though. Newspapers, magazines, concert programmes. Major Wiley said that Gideon and Mrs. Davies were estranged, but from the look of her collection, I'd guess it wasn't Mrs. Davies who wanted the estrangement.”

“The son?” Leach asked.

“Or the father.”

“We're back to the argument in the car park, then.”

“We could be. Yes.”

Leach swallowed the rest of his drink and crushed the plastic cup. He said, “But it's odd, don't you think, to have found so little information about her in the woman's own home?”

“It was a fairly monastic environment, sir.”

Leach studied Lynley. Lynley studied Leach. Barbara Havers scribbled furiously into her notebook. A moment passed during which no one admitted to anything. Lynley waited for the DCI to give him the information he wanted. Leach didn't do it. He merely said, “Have at Davies, then. He shouldn't be tough to track down.”

So the plans were set and the assignments made, and in short order Lynley and Havers were back in the street and heading for their
respective cars. Havers lit a cigarette and said, “What're you going to do with those letters, Inspector?”

Lynley didn't pretend to need clarification. “I'm giving them back to Webberly,” he said, “eventually.”

“
Giving
them …” Havers drew in on her cigarette and blew the smoke out in a burst of frustration. “If word gets out that you've taken them from the scene and not turned them in … That
we've
taken them from the scene and not turned them in … Bloody hell, do you know where that puts us, Inspector? And on top of it, there's that computer. Why didn't you tell Leach about that computer?”

“I'll tell him, Havers,” Lynley said. “Once I know exactly what's on it.”

“Jesus in a basket!” Havers cried. “That's suppressing—”

“Listen, Barbara. There's only one way it would come to light right now that we've got the computer and those letters, and we both know what that one way is.” He looked at her evenly and waited for her to connect the dots.

Her expression altered. She said, “Hey. I don't grass, Inspector,” and he could see the affront she'd taken.

He said, “That's why I work with you, Barbara,” and he disarmed the Bentley's security system. He opened the door before he spoke to her again, over the car's roof. “If I've been brought in on this case to keep Webberly protected, I'd like to know that and I'd like it said to my face for once. Wouldn't you?”

“I'd like to keep my nose clean is what I'd like,” Havers replied. “One of us got demoted two months ago, Inspector, and if memory serves me right, it wasn't you.” She was white-faced, watching Lynley with an expression that was completely unlike the belligerent officer he'd worked with for the past several years. She'd taken a professional and psychological beating in the last five months, and Lynley realised that he owed her the opportunity to avoid another one. He said, “Havers, would you prefer to be out of this? That's not a problem. One phone call and—”

“I don't want to be out.”

“But it could get dicey. It's
already
dicey. I more than understand how you might—”

“Don't talk rubbish. I'm in, Inspector. I'd just like us to have a little care with what we're doing.”

“I'm taking care,” Lynley assured her. “Those letters from Webberly are not an issue in this case.”

“You'd better hope that's true,” Havers replied. She pushed away from the Bentley. “Let's get on with it, then. What's next?”

Lynley accepted her words and dwelt for a moment on how best to approach the next phase of their job. “You've the look of a woman in need of spiritual guidance,” he said. “Track down the Convent of the Immaculate Conception.”

“What about you?”

“I'll follow our DCI's suggestion. Richard Davies. If he's seen or talked to his former wife recently, he might know what she wanted to confess to Wiley.”

“He might
be
what she wanted to confess to Wiley,” Havers pointed out.

“There's that as well,” Lynley said.

Jill Foster had never run into a serious snag while she was ticking off accomplishments from the Master List that she'd first compiled as a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl. Reading all of Shakespeare (done by age twenty), hitchhiking the length of Ireland (done by twenty-one), taking a double first at Cambridge (by age twenty-two), traveling alone in India (by twenty-three), exploring the Amazon River (twenty-six), kayaking the Nile (twenty-seven), writing a definitive study of Proust (still in progress), adapting the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald for television (also in the works) … From athleticism to intellectualism, Jill Foster hadn't experienced even a hiccup on her progress through life.

In the personal realm, however, she'd had more difficulty. She'd placed the achievement of marriage and children before her thirty-fifth birthday, but she'd found it more challenging than she'd anticipated to attain a goal that involved the enthusiastic cooperation of another person. And it was marriage and children that she'd wanted: in that order. Yes, it was trendy to be “partners” with someone. Every third pop singer, film star, or professional athlete was living proof of that, congratulated in the tabloids on a daily basis for their mindless ability to reproduce, as if the act of reproduction itself took some sort of talent that only they possessed. But Jill was not a woman easily swayed by what bore the appearance of a trend, particularly when it came to her Master List of Accomplishments. One did not achieve one's goals by taking shortcuts that were nothing but passing vogues.

The aftermath of her affair with Jonathon had for a time seriously undermined her confidence in her ability to reach her marital and
maternal objective. But then Richard had come into her life, and she'd quickly seen that an accomplishment that had so far eluded her was finally within her reach. In the world of her grandparents—even of her parents—to have become lovers with Richard before a formal commitment had been made between them would have been both foolhardy and ruinous. Indeed, even today there were probably a dozen agony aunts whose advice—considering Jill's ultimate objective—would have been to wait for the ring, the church bells, and the confetti before embarking on any kind of intimacy with one's intended bridegroom, or at least to have used what were euphemistically called “precautions” until such a time as the deal was signed, sealed, and registered in the customary way. But Richard's earnest pursuit of her in the aftermath of Jonathon's failure to leave his wife constituted a phase in Jill's life that was both flattering and essential. His desire
for
her had aroused an equal desire
in
her, and she was deeply gratified to feel it since, after Jonathon, she'd begun to wonder if she would ever feel that hot aching hunger—unlike any other hunger—for a man again.