A Traitor to Memory

Once again on the pavement in Friday Street, Havers offered another possibility. “She could have posted it somewhere. To the husband, d'you think? Did he have pictures of the girl in his flat when you spoke to him, Inspector?”

“None that I saw. There were only snapshots of Gideon.” “There you go, then. They'd been speaking, hadn't they? About Gideon's stage fright? Why not about the little girl as well? So he asked Eugenie for a picture of her, and she sent it along. That's easy enough to find out, isn't it?”

“But it's odd that he had no pictures of the daughter already, Havers.”

“Human nature's odd,” Havers said. “This long on the force, I'd think you'd know that.”

Lynley couldn't argue. He said, “Let's have another look at her house to make sure the photo's not there.”

It was a matter of only a few minutes to double-check and to prove Major Wiley right. The twelve photographs in the kitchen were all that were left in the house.

Lynley and Havers were standing in the sitting room, mulling this over, when Lynley's mobile began to ring. It was Eric Leach phoning from the Hampstead incident room.

“We've got a match,” he told Lynley without preamble, sounding pleased. “We've got the Brighton Audi and the Cellnet customer rolled into one pretty package.”

“Ian Staines?” Lynley said, recalling the name connected to the Cellnet number. “Her brother?”

“The same.” Leach recited the address and Lynley wrote it down on the back of one of his business cards. “Get on to him,” Leach said. “What've you got on Wolff?”

“Nothing.” Lynley reported briefly on their conversations with the Sixty Plus Club's members as well as with Major Wiley, and he went on to tell Leach of the missing photograph.

The DCI offered another interpretation. “She could have brought it with her to London.”

“To show someone?”

“That takes us back to Pitchley.”

“But why would she want to show him the picture? Or give it to him?”

“There's more to that story than we're hearing, I say,” Leach pointed out. “Dig up a picture of the Davies woman. There's got to be a snapshot somewhere in her house. Or Wiley'll have one. Take it to the Valley of Kings and the Comfort Inn. There's a chance that someone remembers her there.”

“With Pitchley?”

“He likes them older, doesn't he?”



When the police departed, Ted Wiley left Mrs. Dilday watching over the shop. It had been a slow morning and was shaping up to be a slow afternoon, so he felt no compunction about putting his engrossed customer in charge of things. It was about time that she did something to earn the privilege of reading every best seller without ever making a purchase other than a greeting card, so he rousted her from her favourite armchair and gave her instructions on working the till. Then he went upstairs to his flat.

There, he found P.B. snoozing in a patch of weak sunlight. He stepped over the retriever and put himself at Connie's old davenport beneath whose sloping surface he'd stowed the brochures from the forthcoming opera seasons in Vienna, Santa Fe, and Sydney. It had been his hope that one of those seasons would serve as a backdrop to his broadened relationship with Eugenie. They would travel to Austria, America, or Australia and enjoy Rossini, Verdi, or Mozart as they enriched the joy they took in each other's company and deepened the nature of their love. They'd moved slowly towards this destination for three long and careful years together, building a structure comprising tenderness, devotion, affection, and support. They'd told each other that everything else that went with a man and a woman linking themselves together—most particularly sex—would find its way into the equation with time.

It had been a relief for Ted after Connie's death, not to mention after the esurient pursuing by other women to which he'd been exposed, to find himself in the company of a woman who wanted to build a structure first before taking up residence within it. But now, after the police had left him, Ted finally forced himself to acknowledge the reality that he'd not been able to bear even thinking about before this moment: that Eugenie's hesitation, her gentle and always kind “I'm not ready yet, Ted,” were in actuality evidence that she was not ready for him. For what else could it mean that a man had phoned and left a message rife with desperation on her answer machine? that a man had left her house at one in the morning? that a man had accosted her in the car park of the Sixty Plus Club and pleaded with her the way a man pleads when everything—and most particularly his heart—is at stake? There was only one answer to these questions, and Ted knew what that answer was.