A Traitor to Memory

“I'm ready, Malcolm, if you are,” she said.

Thus it began between them.



“So the kid was given up for adoption.” Barbara Havers concluded her recitation by flipping closed her tatty notebook and digging round in her lump of a shoulder bag for a packet of Juicy Fruit which she brought forth and generously offered round Eric Leach's Hampstead office. The DCI took a stick. Lynley and DC Nkata demurred. Havers folded one into her mouth and began to chew vigorously. Her substitute for the weed, Lynley thought. He wondered idly when she'd give up smoking altogether.

Leach played with the foil interior wrapper of the gum. He folded it into a miniature fan and placed it at the base of a photograph of his daughter. He'd apparently been on the phone to her when the Scotland Yard detectives arrived, and they'd come upon him at the end of a conversation in which he was wearily saying, “For God's sake, Esmé, this is something you need to discuss with your mum…. Of course she'll listen. She loves you…. Now you're jumping the gun. No one's getting … Esmé, listen to me … Yes. Right. Someday she … So might I, but that will never mean we don't love—” At which point, the girl had apparently hung up on him because he stood behind his desk with his mouth open on what he'd intended to say. He'd replaced the phone in its cradle with undue care and sighed heavily.

Now he went on. “That could be what's driving our killer, then. Or our killers. The adopted kid. Wolff didn't put herself in the club without assistance. Let's keep that in mind.”

The four of them continued their exchange of information. A hideous knot of traffic in Westminster had kept the Scotland Yard detectives from Leach's morning meeting with his team in the incident room, so the DCI took notes. At the conclusion of Havers' report on the Convent of the Immaculate Conception, Nkata said, “Could be the motive we're looking for, this. Wolff wants that kid and no one's giving her any help to find … is it him or her, Barb?” As was largely his habit, he hadn't taken a seat in the office. Rather, he stood not far from the doorway, lounging against the wall with one broad shoulder resting next to a framed commendation that Leach had received from the commissioner.

“It's him,” Havers said. “But I don't think that's the case.”

“Why?”

“According to Sister Cecelia, she gave him up for adoption straightaway. She could have kept him with her for nine months—longer than that if she did time somewhere other than Holloway—but she didn't want that. She didn't even request it and get denied. She just handed him over in the delivery room and never took a look at him.”

Lynley said, “She wouldn't have wanted to get attached to the infant , Havers. What would be the point, facing a twenty-year sentence? It could be an indication of the strength of her maternal feelings for the baby. Had she not had him adopted, he would have spent his life in care.”

“But if she was looking for the kid, why not start with the convent?” Havers asked. “Sister Cecelia handled the adoption.”

“Could be she's not looking for him at all,” Nkata pointed out. “Twenty years later? She might know the kid wouldn't likely want to meet his real mum and find out she's a yard bird. And that could be 'xactly why she did the job on Missus Davies in the first place. Maybe she's thinking she wouldn't've been a yard bird without Missus Davies. Live with that for twenty years, and when you get out, you want to do something about settling the score.”

“I just don't buy that,” Havers insisted. “Not with this bloke Wiley sitting out there in his bookshop, knowing every move Eugenie Davies made. Convenient, wouldn't you say, that he happened to come upon our victim and a mystery man having an argument on the very night she was killed? Who's to say it was an argument at all but just the opposite? And our Major Wiley took some nasty action as a result.”

“We need to track this kid down one way or another,” Leach said. “Katja Wolff's kid. She might be on his trail and he'll need to be advised. It's messy, but there's no way round it. You handle that, Constable.”

Havers said, “Sir,” in acquiescence, but she didn't look convinced about the value of the assignment.

Winston Nkata said, “I say Katja Wolff 's the right direction. There's something off with that bird.”