A Traitor to Memory

A man came round the side of the house as they approached the front steps. He headed towards the Renault without noticing them. When Lynley called out, he stopped in his tracks, car keys extended to unlock his vehicle. Was he Raphael Robson? Lynley asked him, and produced his identification.

The man was an unappealing sort with a serious comb-over of dun-coloured hair that began just above his left ear and made his skull look as if someone were water-colouring a lattice across it. He was patchy-skinned from far too many holidays in the Mediterranean in August, and his shoulders bore a liberal sprinkling of dandruff. He gave a glance at Lynley's warrant card and said yes, he was Raphael Robson.

Lynley introduced Nkata and asked Robson if there was somewhere they could have a word with him, out of the noise of cars whooshing by just beyond the hedge. Robson said yes, yes, of course. If they'd follow him …?

“The front door's warped,” he said. “We haven't replaced it yet. We'll need to go in through the back.”

Through the back took them along a brick path that led into a good-sized garden. This was overgrown with weeds and grass, edged by herbaceous borders long gone to ruin and dotted with trees that hadn't been pruned in years. Beneath them, wet fallen leaves were rotting to join their brothers from seasons past in the soil. In the midst of all the chaos and decay, however, a newish building stood. Robson saw both Lynley and Nkata giving this a look-over, and he said, “That was our first project. We do furniture in there.”

“Building it?”

“Restoring it. We mean to do the house as well. Doing up furniture and selling it gives us something of a bank account to work from. Restoring a place like this”—with a nod at the imposing edifice—“takes a fortune. Whenever we get enough saved to do a room, we do it. It's taking forever, but no one's in a hurry. And there's a certain camaraderie that develops when everyone's behind a project, I think.”

Lynley wondered at the word camaraderie. He'd been thinking Robson's us referred to his wife and family, but developing camaraderie suggested something else. He considered the vehicles he'd seen in front of the building and said, “This is a commune, then?”

Robson unlocked the door and swung it open onto a passageway with a wooden bench running along its wall and adult-sized wellingtons lined up beneath it and hooks holding jackets on the wall above it. He said, “That sounds like something from the summer-of-love era. But yes, I suppose you could call it a commune. Mostly it's a group with shared interests.”

“Which are?”

“Making music and turning this house into something we can all enjoy.”

“Not restoring furniture?” Nkata asked.

“That's merely a means to an end. Musicians don't make enough money to finance a restoration like this one without something else to fall back on.”

He allowed them into the passage before him, shutting the door when they were inside and locking it scrupulously behind them. He said, “This way,” and led them into what might once have been the dining room but now was a musty combination of draughting room, storeroom, and office, with water-stained wallpaper covering the upper half of the walls and battered wainscoting covering the lower half. A computer was part of the office function that the room was serving. From where he stood, Lynley could see the telephone line that was plugged into it.

He said, “We've tracked you through a message you left on the answer machine of a woman called Eugenie Davies, Mr. Robson. This was four days ago. At eight-fifteen in the evening.”

Next to Lynley, Nkata got out his leather notebook and his propelling pencil, twisting it to produce a micro-millimeter of lead. Robson watched him do this, then walked to a worktable on which a set of blueprints were spread. He smoothed his hand over the top one as if to study it, but he answered the question with the single word. “Yes.”

“Do you know Mrs. Davies was murdered three nights ago?”

“Yes. I know.” His voice was low and his hand grasped a blueprint that lay still rolled up. His thumb played along the rubber band that held it formed into a tube. “Richard told me,” he said, lifting his gaze to Lynley. “He'd been to tell Gideon when I arrived for one of our sessions.”

“Sessions?”

“I teach the violin. Gideon's been my pupil since childhood. He isn't any longer, of course; he's no one's pupil. But we play together three hours a day when he's not recording, rehearsing, or touring. You've heard of him, doubtless.”

“I was under the impression he hasn't played in several months.”

Robson's hand had reached out to touch the opened blueprint again, but he hesitated and did nothing more with the gesture. He said on a heavy sigh, “Sit down, Inspector. You as well, Constable,” and he turned back to them. “It's important not only to keep up appearances in a situation like Gideon's, but it's also important to go on as normally as possible. So I still turn up for our daily three hours together, and we keep hoping that when enough time passes, he'll be able to go back to the music.”

“‘We’?” Nkata raised his head to look for the answer.