A Traitor to Memory

“No tea with the scones?” Deborah asked, relieving Lynley of the tray as Helen said, “We seem to have lost track of time.”


“That's not like you,” Deborah said to Helen as she set the tray next to a large book that lay open at a grisly illustration of a man apparently dead of something that had caused a glaucous-coloured vomit to discharge from his mouth and his nose. Either oblivious of this unappetising sight or completely used to it, Deborah scooped up a scone for herself. “If we can't depend on you to remind us of mealtimes, Helen, what can we depend upon?” She broke her scone in half and took a bite. She said, “Lovely. I hadn't realised I was famished. I can't eat one of these without something to drink, though. I'm fetching the sherry. Anyone else?”

“That sounds good.” St. James took up a scone himself as his wife left the lab and headed for the stairs. He called out, “Glasses for all, my love.”

“Will do,” Deborah called back and added, “Peach, come. Time for your dinner.” The dog obediently followed, her eyes glued to the scone in Deborah's hand.

Lynley said to Helen, “Tired?” She had very little colour in her face.

“A bit,” she said, looping a lock of hair behind one ear. “He's been rather a slave driver today.”

“When is he not?”

“I've a reputation for general beastliness to maintain,” St. James said. “But I'm a decent sort underneath the foul exterior. I'll prove it to you. Have a look at this, Tommy.”

He went to his computer table, where Lynley saw that he'd set up the terminal that he and Havers had taken from Eugenie Davies' office. A laser printer stood next to it, and from its tray, St. James took a sheaf of documents.

Lynley said, “You've tracked her internet use? Well done, Simon. I'm impressed and grateful.”

“Save impressed. You could have done it yourself if you knew the first thing about technology.”

“Be gentle with him, Simon.” Helen smiled fondly at her husband. “He's only recently been strong-armed into accepting e-mail at work. Don't rush him too madly into the future.”

“It might result in whiplash,” Lynley agreed. He pulled his spectacles from his jacket pocket. “What've we got?”

“Her internet use first.” St. James explained that Eugenie Davies' computer—not to mention computers in general—always kept a record of the sites that a user visited, and he handed over a list of what Lynley was pleased to see were recognisable even to him as web addresses. “It's straightforward stuff,” St. James told him. “If you're looking for something untoward in what she was doing on the net, I don't think you're going to find it there.”

Lynley glanced through what St. James identified as the URLs he'd picked up by examining Eugenie Davies' travel history: These were the addresses she would have typed into the location bar, he said, in order to access individual web sites. If one merely chose the dropdown arrow next to the location bar and left-clicked on it, one had easy access to the trail an internet user left when he or she logged on. Vaguely listening to St. James's explanation about the source of the information he'd handed over, Lynley made noises of comprehension and ran his gaze over Eugenie Davies' chosen sites. He saw that the other man had assessed the dead woman's usage of the internet with his usual accuracy. Every site—at least by name—appeared to relate to her job as director of the Sixty Plus Club: She'd accessed everything from a site dedicated to the NHS to a location for pensioners' coach trips round the UK. She appeared to have done some newspaper browsing as well, mostly in the Daily Mail and the Independent. And those sites she'd visited with regularity, particularly in the last four months. This was possible support for Richard Davies' contention that she'd been trying to assess Gideon's condition from the newspapers.

“Not much help here,” Lynley agreed.

“No. But there's some hope with this.” St. James handed over the rest of the papers he'd been holding. “Her e-mail.”

“How much of it?”

“That's the lot. From the day she started corresponding on-line.”

“She'd saved it?”

“Not intentionally.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that people try to protect themselves on the net, but it doesn't always work. They choose passwords that turn out to be obvious to anyone who knows them—”

“As she did when she chose Sonia.”