A Traitor to Memory

But he didn't say any of that. Instead, he held his glass up to St. James and declared, “Many thanks for the efforts with the computer, Simon. I'm in your debt once again,” and he threw back a mouthful of the sherry.

Deborah looked from Lynley to Helen curiously. For her part, Helen quietly stacked up the graphs as St. James drank to Lynley's toast. A tight little silence fell among them, during which Peach scooted back up the stairs, her dinner consumed. She trotted into the lab expectantly, deposited herself beneath the worktable where the scones still sat, and gave one sharp bark as her plume of a tail dusted the floor.

“Yes. Well,” Deborah said. And then brightly as the dog barked again, “No, Peach. You're not to have any scone. Simon, look at her. She's completely incorrigible.”

Focusing on the little dog got them through the moment, at the end of which Helen began gathering her belongings. She said to St. James, “Simon, dearest, while I'd love to stay and help you labour through the night on this problem …”

His reply was, “You've been a brick to stay this long. I shall muddle onward heroically alone.”

“He's worse than the dog,” Deborah remarked. “Shamelessly manipulative. You'd better be off before he traps you.”

Helen took the advice. Lynley followed her. St. James and Deborah remained in the lab.

Lynley and his wife didn't speak until they were standing on the Cheyne Row pavement with the wind whipping up the street from the river. Then Helen said only, “Well.” She spoke the word to herself, not to him. She looked a mixture of sad and tired. Lynley couldn't tell which was predominant, but he had a good idea.

Helen said, “Did it happen too soon?”

He didn't pretend to misunderstand. “No. No. Of course not.”

“Then what?”

He searched for an explanation he could give her, one that both of them could live with, which would not come back to haunt him sometime in the future. He said, “I don't want to hurt them. I picture how they'll look, creating expressions of pleasure on their faces while inside they're screaming at the inequity of it all.”

“Life's filled with inequities. You of all people know that. You can't make the playing field level for everyone, just as you can't know the future. What's in store for them. What's in store for us.”

“I know that.”

“Then …”

“It's just not as simple as knowing, Helen. Knowing doesn't take their feelings into account.”

“What about my feelings?”

“They mean everything to me. You mean everything to me.” He reached for her and fastened the top button of her coat, adjusting the scarf round her neck. “Let's get you out of the cold. Did you drive? Where's your car?”

“I want to talk about this. You've been acting as if…” She let her voice die. The only way to say it was to say it directly. No metaphor existed to describe what she feared, and he knew that.

He wanted to reassure her, but he couldn't. He'd expected joy, he'd expected excitement; he'd expected the bond of joint anticipation. What he hadn't expected was guilt and dread: the knowledge that he was obliged to bury his dead before he could wholeheartedly welcome his living.

He said, “Let's go home. It's been a long day, and you need your rest.”

She said, “More than rest, Tommy,” and she turned from him.

He watched as she walked to the end of the street where, next to the King's Head and Eight Bells, she'd left her car.



Malcolm Webberly replaced the telephone receiver in its cradle. Quarter to twelve and he shouldn't have rung them, but he couldn't stop himself. Even when his mind had said that it was late, that they would be asleep, that even if Tommy was still working at this hour, Helen would already be in bed and unlikely to be happy with a late-night phone call, he hadn't listened. Because throughout the day, he'd waited for word, and when it hadn't come, he'd realised that he wouldn't sleep that night until he spoke to Lynley.

He could have phoned Eric Leach. He could have asked for an update on the investigation, and Eric would have given him everything he had. But involving Eric would have brought everything back to Webberly with more piercing clarity than he could afford. For Eric had been too close to it all: there in the house in Kensington Square where it had all begun, there at nearly every interview he'd conducted, there to give evidence at the trial. He'd even been there—standing right beside Webberly—when they'd had their first look at the dead baby's body, an unmarried man then who had no idea what it was even to have to consider the loss of a child.