A Traitor to Memory

It's identical to the door I've seen in my mind: bright blue, cerulean blue, the blue of a Highland summer sky. It has a silver ring in the centre, two security locks, and a fanlight above it. Beneath that window is a lighting fixture, mounted centrally above the door. There is a railing along the stairs, and this is painted like the door itself: that bright, clear, unforgettable blue that I had forgotten nonetheless.

I saw that the door appeared to lead to a residence: There were windows next to it, with curtains hanging in them, and from below in Welbeck Way I could see that there were pictures of some sort hanging high on the walls. I felt a surge of excitement the likes of which I haven't felt in months—perhaps in years—as I realised that behind that door might very well lie the explanation for what had happened to me, the cause of my troubles, and the cure.

I jerked myself out of Dad's grasp and bounded up those steps. Just as you have told me to do in my imagination, Dr. Rose, I tried that door, although I could see before I did so that it could be opened only from the exterior by means of a key. So I knocked upon it. I pounded upon it.

There my hopes for rescue ended. For the door was opened by a Chinese woman so small that at first I thought she was a child. I also thought she was wearing gloves till I saw that her hands were covered in flour. I had never seen her before.

She said, “Yes?” and looked at me politely. When I said nothing, her gaze shifted down to my father, who waited at the foot of the steps. “May I help you?” she asked, and she moved subtly as she spoke, placing her hip and the bulk of her weight—what little of it there was—behind the door.

I had no idea what to ask her. I had no idea why her front door had been haunting me. I had no idea why I'd gone bolting up the steps so sure of myself, so damnably certain that I was nearing an end to my troubles.

So I said, “Sorry. Sorry. There's been a mistake,” although I added in what I already knew was a fruitless possibility, “Do you live here alone?”





Certainly, I knew this was the wrong question the moment after I asked it. What woman in her right mind is going to tell a strange man on her doorstep that she lives alone even if she does? But before she could offer a reply to the question, I heard a man's voice asking from somewhere behind her, “Who is that, Sylvia?” and I had my answer. I had more than that, because a moment after he asked the question, the man swung the door open wider and peered out. And I didn't know him any more than I knew Sylvia: a large, bald gentleman with hands the size of most people's skulls.

“Sorry. Wrong address,” I told him.

“Who d'you want?” he asked.

“I don't know,” I replied.

Like Sylvia, he looked from me to my father. He said, “Not the way it sounded from the thrashing you gave to the door just now.”





“Yes. I'd thought …” What had I thought? That I was about to be given the gift of clarity? I suppose so.

But there was no clarity in Welbeck Way. And when I said to Dad later, once the blue door was closed upon us, “It's part of the answer. I swear that it's part,” his reply was a thoroughly disgusted, “You don't even know the damn question.”





18





“LYNN DAVIES?” BARBARA Havers produced her warrant card for the woman who'd answered the door of the yellow stucco building. It stood at the end of a line of terraced houses in Therapia Road, a split-level Victorian conversion in an East Dulwich quadrant that Barbara had discovered was defined by two cemeteries, a park, and a golf course.

“Yes,” the woman replied, but she said the word as a question, and she cocked her head to one side, puzzled, when she looked at Barbara's identification. She was Barbara's own height—which made her short—but her body looked fit under her simple clothing of blue jeans, trainers, and a fisherman's sweater. She would be the sister-in-law of Eugenie Davies, Barbara concluded, for Lynn looked about the same age as the dead woman, although the wiry hair that spilled round her shoulders and down her back was only just beginning to grey.

“Could I have a word?” Barbara asked her.

“Yes, yes, of course.” Lynn Davies opened the door wider and admitted Barbara into an entrance whose floor was covered by a small hooked rug. An umbrella stand stood in a corner there, next to it a rattan coat rack from which two identical rain slickers hung, both bright yellow and edged in black. She led Barbara to a sitting room, where a bay window overlooked the street. In the alcove that the window comprised, an easel held a heavy sheet of white paper that bore smears of colour in the unmistakable style of finger painting. More sheets of paper—these completed works of art—hung on the walls of the alcove, stuck higgledy piggledy with drawing pins. The sheet on the easel was not a finished work, but it was dry, and it looked as if the artist had been startled in the midst of its creation, for three fingers of paint lurched down towards one corner while the rest of the piece was done in happy, irregular swirls.

Lynn Davies said nothing as Barbara gave a look towards the alcove. She merely waited quietly.