A Traitor to Memory

Because she wouldn't speak, he had to rely on others who lived with her. I didn't actually see anything that night, I'm afraid … Of course, there were moments of tension when she was dealing with the baby … She wasn't always as patient as she might have been but the circumstances were terribly difficult, weren't they … She seemed eager enough to please at first … It was an argument among the three of them because she'd overslept again … We 'd decided to sack her … She didn't think it was fair … We weren't willing to give her a reference because we didn't think she was suited to childcare. From the others if not from Wolff herself, a pattern of behaviour emerged. With the pattern had come the story, a stitched-together fabric of what had been seen, what had been heard, and what could be concluded from both.

“It's still a weak case,” Leach had said respectfully during a pause in the proceedings at the magistrate's court.

“It's a case all the same,” Webberly had replied. “As long as she keeps her lips locked up, she's doing half our job for us and hanging herself for good measure. I can't think her brief hasn't told her that.”

“She's getting crucified in the press, sir. They're reporting the hearing verbatim, and every time you're talking about interviewing her, when you say ‘she refused to answer the question,’ it's making her look—”

“Eric, what's your bloody point?” Webberly had asked the other officer. “I can't help what the press are printing. That's not our problem. If she's worried how silence might look to potential jurors, then she might consider breaking it for us, mightn't she?”

Their concern, he told Leach, and their job, was to bring justice into an ugly equation, to lay out facts so the magistrate's court could decide to hold her over for trial. And that's what he had done. That was all he had done. He had made justice possible for Sonia Davies' family. He could not have brought them peace or an end to their nightmares. But he could have brought—and did bring—them that.

Now, in the kitchen of his home in Stamford Brook, Webberly sat at the table with a cup of Horlicks fast cooling in front of him, and he thought about what he'd learned in his late-night phone call to Tommy Lynley. Central to his thoughts was one item: that Eugenie Davies had found a man. He was glad of it. For the fact of Eugenie's finding a man might go some distance towards alleviating the remorse he'd never ceased to feel for the cowardly manner in which he'd ended the love between them.

He'd had the best of intentions towards her, right up until the day he knew their relationship could not continue. He'd begun as a dispassionate professional entering into her life to bring justice to her family, and when that r?le had begun to alter upon their chance encounter at Paddington Station, it had at first altered merely to the r?le of friend, and he'd convinced himself that he could maintain it, ignoring that part of him that soon wanted more. She's vulnerable, he'd told himself in a vain effort to hold his feelings in check. She's lost a child and she's lost a marriage, and you must never tread on ground that's so soft and insubstantial.

Had she not been the one to speak what should have remained unspoken, he wouldn't have ventured further. Or at least that was what he told himself during the long period of their affair. She wants this, he claimed, as much as I do, and there are instances when the shackles of social convention must be thrown off in order to embrace that which is obviously a higher good.

The only way for him to justify an affair such as theirs had been to see it in spiritual terms. She completes me, he told himself. What I share with her happens on the level of the soul, not just on the level of the body. And how is a man to live a full life if he has no nurture on the level of the soul?

He didn't have that with his wife. Their relationship, he decided, was the stuff of the temporal, ordinary world. It was a social contract founded on the largely outdated idea of sharing property, having traceable bloodlines for potential offspring, and possessing a mutual interest in cohabitation. Under the agreements of the contract, a man and a woman were to live together, to reproduce if possible, and to provide each other with a lifestyle mutually satisfactory to them both. But nowhere was it written or implied that they were to give succour to each other's imprisoned and earthbound spirit, and that, he told himself, was the problem with marriage. It effected in its participants a sense of complacency. That complacency effected a form of oblivion in which the man and the woman so joined together lost sight of themselves and each other as sentient individuals.

So it had happened in his own marriage. So, he determined, it would not happen within the amorphously described marriage of spirits that he had with Eugenie Davies.