A Traitor to Memory

“Are you arguing that letters more than ten years old would provoke someone to murder?”


“Alone, no. I'm not saying that. But according to Wiley, she was going to tell him something important, something he thought would change their relationship. So, what if she already told him? Or what if he already knew because he came across those letters? We have only his word that he doesn't know what she had to say.”

“Agreed. But you can't be thinking she wanted to speak to him about Webberly. That's ancient history.”

“Not if they'd resumed their affair. Not if they'd never lost touch with each other. Not if they'd been meeting in … say … pubs and hotels? That would have to be dealt with. And maybe it was. Only it was dealt with badly and not in the way our principals—Mrs. Davies and Webberly—thought it would be.”

“I don't see that happening. And it's far too coincidental for my liking that Eugenie Davies would be killed so soon after Katja Wolff was released from prison.”

“You're jumping on that horse?” Havers scoffed. “It's a non-starter. Depend on it.”

“I'm not jumping on any horse at all,” Lynley replied. “It's far too early to be doing that. And I suggest you employ the same hesitation with regard to Major Wiley. It gets us nowhere to fix our minds on one possibility and become blind to the others.”

“You're not doing that? Inspector, you haven't decided those letters from Webberly are inconsequential?”

“What I've decided is to develop my opinions based on facts, Barbara. We haven't got a lot of them so far. Until we have, we can serve the cause of justice—not to mention pursue the course of wisdom—only by keeping our eyes open and our judgements suspended. Don't you agree?”

Havers fumed. “Listen to yourself. Bloody hell. I hate it when you go all toffs-in-town-for-the-season on me.”

Lynley smiled. “Do you? Was I? I hope it doesn't provoke you to violence.”

“Just to smoking,” Havers informed him.

“Even worse,” Lynley sighed.

GIDEON





8 October





Last night I dreamed of her, or of someone like her. But the time and the place were both out of joint because I was on the Eurostar and we were descending beneath the English Channel. It was like going down into a mine.

Everyone was there: Dad, Raphael, my grandparents, and someone shadowy and faceless whom I recognised as my mother. And she was there as well: the German girl, looking much the way she looked in the newspaper photo. And yes, Sarah-Jane Beckett was there, with a picnic basket from which she pulled not a meal but a baby. She offered the baby round like a plate of sandwiches and everyone refused. One can't eat a baby, Granddad instructed her.

Then it was dark outside the windows. Someone said, Oh yes, we're under the water now.

And that's when it happened.

The tunnel walls broke. The water came through. It wasn't black like the inside of the tunnel, though, but rather like the bottom of a riverbed where one might swim and look up through the water at the sun.

And suddenly in that way dreams have of changing, we were no longer in a train at all. The carriage disappeared, and we were out of the water and on the shore of a lake, all of us. A picnic basket lay on a blanket, and I wanted to open it because I was famished. But I couldn't unfasten the basket's leather straps, and although I asked for someone to open it for me, no one would because they didn't hear me.

They couldn't hear me because they were all on their feet, pointing and crying out about a boat that was floating some distance from the shore. And I became aware suddenly of what they were crying: It was my sister's name. Someone said, She's been left in the boat! We must fetch her! But no one moved.

Then the leather straps from the picnic basket were gone, as if they'd never been. Exultant, relieved, I flung the top open to get at the food, but there was no food inside. There was only the baby. And I somehow knew that the baby was my sister even though I couldn't see her face. She was covered head and shoulders by a veil, the sort you see on statues of the Virgin.