A Traitor to Memory (68 page)

“One of the detectives,” Gideon said unnecessarily. “He wants to talk to me about my uncle.”

“Something happen to your uncle, too?” Libby scooped a spoonful of sugar into her cup. She didn't really want the tea, but as she'd been the one to suggest it, she didn't see a way to get out of drinking it.

“I don't know,” Gideon told her.

“Think you should call him before the cops get here, then? Check out what's going on?”

“I've no idea where he is.”

“Brighton?” Libby felt her face get hot. “I overheard that guy say he was coming in from Brighton. On his message. When you played it.”

“It could be Brighton. But I didn't think to ask his name.”

“Whose?”

“My uncle's.”

“You don't
know
…? Oh. Well. Never mind, I guess.” It was just another twist in his family history, Libby thought. Lots of people didn't know their relatives. As her father would have said, it was a sign of the times. “You couldn't put him off till tomorrow?”

“I didn't want to put him off. I want to know what's happening.”

“Oh. Sure.” She was disappointed, seeing herself ministering to him throughout the long evening, figuring inanely that ministering to him now that he was at his lowest might lead to something more between them, making a final breakthrough somehow. She said, “If you can trust him, I guess.”

“Trust him how?”

“Trust him to tell you the truth. He's a cop, after all.” She shrugged and scooped up a handful of the Japanese mix.

Gideon sat. He pulled his tea cup towards him, but he didn't drink. He said, “It doesn't matter one way or another.”

“What doesn't?”

“Whether he tells me the truth or not.”

“No? Why not?” Libby asked.

Gideon looked her square in the face when he delivered the blow. “Because I can't trust anyone with the truth. I didn't know that before. But I know that now.”

Things were moving from bad to worse.

J. W Pitchley AKA TongueMan, AKA James Pitchford, logged off the internet, stared at the blank screen, and cursed it to hell. He'd finally managed to get CreamPants on the net for some cybertalk, but despite a good half hour of reasoning with her, she wasn't going to cooperate. All she had to do was walk into the Hampstead police station and have a five-minute conversation with DCI Leach and she wouldn't do it. She merely needed to confirm that she and a man she knew only as TongueMan had spent the evening together, first in a South Kensington restaurant and then in a claustrophobic little room above Cromwell Road where the ceaseless traffic noise disguised the frantic creaking of bedsprings and the cries of pleasure that he coaxed from her when he performed the services implied by his moniker. But no, she couldn't do that for him. No matter that he'd brought her off six times in under two hours, no matter that he'd held off taking his own satisfaction till she was weak, sodden, and limp with having taken hers, no matter that he'd fulfilled her every seamy fantasy about the rewards of anonymous sex. She wasn't going to step forward and “face the humiliation of having a complete stranger know the sort of woman I can be under certain unusual circumstances.”

I'm
a bloody stranger, you filthy bitch! Pitchley had roared, if only in his head. You didn't think twice about letting
me
know what you like to get up to when you're panting for it.

She'd seemed to know what he was thinking, though, despite the fact that he didn't communicate it on the screen. She'd written
They'd want my name, you see. I can't have that, Tongue. Not my name. Not with tabloids being what they are. I'm sorry, but you understand that, don't you?

Which was how he'd come to realise that she wasn't divorced. She
wasn't a woman in her declining years who was desperate for a man to prove she still had It. She was a woman in her declining years who was looking for a thrill to balance against the tedium of marriage.

That marriage had to be a longtime covenant, one made not with an Everyman or an Anyman but with a Somebody, an important Somebody, a politician, perhaps, or an entertainer, or a successful and well-known entrepreneur. And if she gave her name to DCI Leach, it would quickly leak through the porous substance that was the hierarchy of power at the police station. Having leaked through that, it would find its way to the ears of an informant from within, a snout who accepted cash from a journalist eager to make his name by outing someone on the front page of his filthy scream sheet.

Bitch, Pitchley thought. Bitch, bitch, bitch. She might have thought of that before she'd met him at the Valley of Kings, Mrs. Butter-Wouldn't-Melt-If-You-Put-It-On-Coals. She might have thought of all the potential consequences before she walked in, dressed to be seen as Mrs. Demure, Mrs. Out-Of-Style, Mrs. I've-Got-No-Experience-With-Men, Mrs. Please-Please-Show-Me-I'm-Still-Desirable-Because-I've-Been-So-Low-On-Myself-For-So-Long. She might have thought it could actually come to having to say Okay, I was there in the Valley of Kings, having drinks and then dinner with an utter stranger whom I met on-line in a chat room where people hide their identities while sharing their fantasies about wild, wet, and lubricious sex. She might have thought she could be asked to admit to hours lying splayed on a thin-mattressed bed above the South Kensington traffic, naked on that bed with a man whose name she didn't know, didn't ask to know, and didn't want to know. She might have
thought
, the rotten little cow.

Pitchley pushed away from his computer and sank his elbows onto his knees. He took his forehead into his hands and dug into it with his fingertips. She could have helped. She wouldn't have been the complete solution to his problem—there was still that long period between the Comfort Inn and his arrival in Crediton Hill to be accounted for—but she would have been a bloody good start. As it was, he had only his story, his willingness to stick to his story, the unlikely possibility that the evening clerk at the Comfort Inn would confirm his presence two nights ago without confusing that night with the dozens of other nights he'd passed the requisite cash across the counter, and the hope that his face was guileless enough to convince the police to believe his story.

It didn't help matters that he knew the woman who'd died in his
street in possession of his address. And it truly didn't help matters one iota that he'd once been involved—no matter how peripherally—with a heinous crime that had taken place when he'd lived under her roof.

He'd heard the shrieking that evening and he'd come running because he'd recognised who was crying out. When he'd got there, everyone else was there as well: the child's father and mother, the grandparents, the brother, Sarah-Jane Beckett, and Katja Wolff. “I do not leave her for more than a minute,” she shrieked, frantically laying this information in front of everyone milling round the closed bathroom door. “I swear. I do not leave her for more than a minute!” And then looming behind her was Robson, the violin master, who grasped her by the shoulders and pulled her away. “You must believe me,” she cried, and continued to cry as he pulled her with him down the stairs and out of sight.

He hadn't known at first what was going on. He hadn't wanted to know and couldn't afford to know. He'd heard the argument between her and the parents, she'd told him she'd been sacked, and the last thing he wanted to consider was whether the argument, the sacking, and the reason for the sacking—which he suspected but could not bear to contemplate—were in any way related to what lay behind that bathroom door.

“James, what's going
on
?” Sarah-Jane Beckett's hand had slipped into his, clutching at him as she breathed the whisper. “Oh God, something hasn't happened to Sonia, has it?”

He'd looked at her and saw that her eyes were glittering despite her sombre tone. But he hadn't wondered what that glitter meant. He'd only wondered how he could manage to get away from her and go to Katja.

“Take the boy,” Richard Davies had instructed Sarah-Jane. “For God's sake, get Gideon out of here, Sarah.”

She'd done as he commanded, taking the little white-faced boy into his bedroom, where music was playing, issuing blithely forth as if nothing terrible was going on in the house.

He himself went seeking Katja and he found her in the kitchen, where Robson was forcing a glass of brandy on her. She was trying to refuse, crying, “No. No. I cannot drink it,” looking wild-haired, wild-eyed, and completely wrong for the part of loving, protective nanny to a child who was … what? He was afraid to ask, afraid because he already knew but didn't want to face because of what it might mean in his
own
life if what he thought and dreaded proved to be true.

“Drink this,” Robson was saying. “Katja. For the love of God, pull yourself together. The paramedics will be here in a moment and you can't afford to be seen like this.”

“I did not, I did not!” She swung round in her chair and grabbed onto his shirt, the collar of which she grasped and twisted. “You must
say
, Raphael! Say to them that I did not leave her.”

“You're getting hysterical. It may be nothing.”

But that did not prove to be the case.

He should have gone to her then, but he hadn't because he'd been afraid. The mere thought that something might have happened to that child, might have happened to
any
child within a house in which he was a resident, had paralysed him. And then later, when he could have talked to her and when he tried to talk to her, in order to declare himself the friend she needed and clearly did not have, she would not speak to him. It was as if the subtle flaying she was taking in the press in the immediate aftermath of Sonia's death had driven her into a corner and the only way she could survive was to become tiny and silent, like a pebble on a path. Every story about the unfolding drama in Kensington Square began with the reminder that Sonia Davies' nanny was the German whose famed escape from East Germany—previously considered laudable and miraculous—had cost a vital young man his life, and that the luxurious environment in which she found herself in England was a dire and bleak contrast to the situation to which her ostentatious asylum-seeking had condemned the rest of her family. Everything about her that was remotely questionable or potentially interpretable was dug up by the press. And anyone close to her was liable to the same treatment. So he'd kept his distance, till it was too late.

When she was finally charged and brought to trial, the van that had taken her from Holloway to the Old Bailey had been pelted with eggs and rotten fruit, and shouts of “baby killer” greeted her when that same van returned her to the prison at night and she had to make the few yards' walk to the prison's door. Public passion was aroused by the crime she had allegedly committed: because the victim was a child, because the child was handicapped, and because—although no one would say it directly—her putative killer was German.

And now he was back in it all, Pitchley thought as he rubbed his forehead. He was mixed up in it as effectively as if he'd never managed to put twenty years between himself and what had happened in that miserable house. He'd changed his name, he'd switched jobs five times, but all his best efforts to remake himself were going to be
brought to nothing if he couldn't get CreamPants to see that her statement was crucial to his survival.

Not that CreamPants' statement was the only thing he needed to put his house in order. He also needed to deal with Robbie and Brent, those two loose cannons who were about to fire.

He'd assumed they wanted money again when they'd shown up a second time in Crediton Hill. No matter that he'd already given them a cheque, he knew them well enough to realise there was a decent possibility that Robbie had been inspired by the sight of a Ladbrokes to deposit those funds not in a bank account but on the head of a horse whose name he rather fancied. This assumption on Pitchley's part was ratified when Robbie said, “Show 'im, Brent,” not five minutes after the two of them had hulked through his front door, carrying with them the stench of their poor bathing habits. Accepting the instruction, Brent brought forth from his jacket a copy of
The Source
, which he opened like someone shaking out bed sheets.

“Look who it was got mashed on your doorstep, Jay,” Brent said with a grin as he showed the scabrous paper's front page. And of course it would be
The Source
, Pitchley thought. God forbid that either Brent or Robbie would elevate their taste to something less sensational.

He couldn't avoid seeing what Brent dangled in front of him: the garish headline, the photograph of Eugenie Davies, the inset photograph of the street in which he himself lived, and the second inset photograph of the boy no longer a boy but a man now and a celebrity. It was all down to
him
that this death was taking up newsprint at all, Pitchley thought bitterly. If Gideon Davies hadn't achieved fame, fortune, and success in a world that increasingly valued those accomplishments, then the papers wouldn't even be covering this situation. It would simply be an unfortunate hit-and-run that the police were in the process of investigating. Full stop and end of story.