A Traitor to Memory

Davies considered the question, and when he answered, he told Lynley volumes about the difference between what was going on in his professional life and what the public was being told about it. “Agreeing that there's nothing wrong with me. Agreeing that my head's playing me for a fool. That's what Dad wanted her to do. He has to have her agree with him, you see. Anything else is unthinkable. Now, unspeakable would be par for the course in my family. But unthinkable …? That would take too much effort.” He laughed weakly, a brief note that was as humourless as it was bitter. “I'd have seen her, though. And I'd have tried to believe her.”


So he would have reason to want his mother alive, not dead. Especially if he held fast to the conviction that she was the cure for what ailed his playing. Nonetheless, Lynley said, “This is routine, Mr. Davies, but I need to ask it: Where were you two nights ago when your mother was killed? This would have been between ten and midnight.”

“Here,” Davies said. “In bed. Alone.”

“And since he left your home, have you had contact with a man called James Pitchford?”

Davies looked honestly surprised. “James the Lodger? No. Why?” The question seemed ingenuous enough.

“Your mother was on her way to see him when she was killed.”

“On her way to see James? That doesn't make sense.”

“No,” Lynley said. “It doesn't.”

Nor, he thought, did some of her other actions. Lynley wondered which of them had led to her death.

14





JILL FOSTER COULD see that Richard wasn't pleased at having to entertain another visit from the police. He was even less pleased to learn that the detective had just come from seeing Gideon. He took in this information politely enough as he motioned DI Lynley to a chair, but the manner in which his mouth tightened as the detective imparted his facts told Jill that he wasn't happy.

DI Lynley was watching Richard closely, as if gauging his most minute reaction. This gave Jill a sense of disquiet. She knew about the police from years of having read newspaper accounts of famously botched cases and even more famous miscarriages of justice, so she was fairly well-versed in the extremes they would go to in order to pin a crime on a suspect. When it came to murder, the police were more interested in building a strong case against someone—against anyone—than they were in getting to the bottom of what happened because building a case against someone meant putting an investigation to rest, which meant getting home to their wives and their families at a reasonable hour for once. That desire underlay every move they made in a murder enquiry, and it behooved anyone being questioned by them to be wise to that fact.

The police are not our friends, Richard, she told her fiancé silently. Don't say a word that they can twist round and use against you later.

And surely that's what the detective was doing. He fastened his dark eyes—brown they were, not blue as one would have expected in a blond—on Richard and waited patiently for a reply to his statement, a neat notebook open in his large, handsome hand. “When we met yesterday, you didn't mention you'd been advocating a meeting between Gideon and his mother, Mr. Davies. I'm wondering why.”

Richard sat on a straight-backed chair that he'd swung round from the table on which he and Jill took their meals. He'd made no offer of tea this time. That suggested welcome, which the detective definitely was not. Richard had said upon his arrival and prior to DI Lynley's mentioning the call he'd made on Gideon, “I do want to be helpful, Inspector, but I must ask you to be reasonable with your visits. Jill needs her rest and if we can reserve our interactions for daylight hours, I'd be very grateful.”

The detective's lips had moved in what the na?ve might have concluded was a smile. But his gaze took in Richard in such a way as to suggest he wasn't the sort of man used to being told what was expected of him, and he didn't apologise for his appearance in South Kensington or make routine noises about not taking up too much of their time.

“Mr. Davies?” Lynley repeated.

“I didn't mention that I was attempting to arrange a meeting between Gideon and his mother because you didn't ask me,” Richard said. He looked to where Jill was sitting at one end of the table, her laptop open and her fifth attempt at Act III, Scene I of her television adaptation of The Beautiful and Damned taking up space on her screen. He said, “You'll probably want to continue working, Jill. There's the desk in the study …?”

Jill wasn't about to be condemned to a sentence in that mausoleum-cum-memorial to his father that posed as Richard's study. She said, “I've gone about as far as I can with this just now,” and she went through the exercise of saving and then backing up what she'd written. If Eugenie was going to be discussed, she intended to be present.

“Had she asked to see Gideon?” the detective asked Richard.

“No, she hadn't.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I'm sure. She didn't want to see either of us. That's the choice she made years ago when she left without bothering to mention where she was going.”

“What about why?” DI Lynley asked.

“Why what?”