A Traitor to Memory

“Eugenie didn't say?”


“She never spoke much of Gideon. And then, when she and Richard divorced, she never spoke of Gideon at all. Or of Richard. Or of any of them. Mostly, when she came, she helped me with Virginia. She loved the parks, Virginia did, the cemeteries as well. It was our special joy to take a ramble in Camberwell Old Cemetery. But I didn't like to do it without someone else with us, to help keep an eye on Virginia. If I was there with her alone, I had to fix my attention on her and I got no pleasure from the afternoon. But with Eugenie there, it was easier. She would watch her. I would watch her. We could talk, bask in the sun, read the gravestones. She was very good to us.”

“Did you speak to her the day of Virginia's funeral?” Barbara asked.

“Of course. Yes. But we didn't speak of anything that could help your enquiry, I'm afraid. Just about Virginia. The loss. How I was coping. Eugenie was a great comfort to me. Indeed, she'd been a comfort for years. And Virginia … She actually came to know Eugenie. To recognise her. To—” Lynn stopped. She rose and went to the alcove where she stood in front of the easel on which her daughter's final painting marked her quick passage from life into death. She said in a contemplative voice, “Yesterday I did several of these myself. I wanted to feel what had given her such joy. But I couldn't reach that place. I tried painting after painting till my hands were black from all the colours I'd mixed together, and still I couldn't feel it. So I finally saw how blessed she actually had been: to be eternally a child who asked so little of life.”

“There's a lesson in that,” Barbara agreed.

“Yes. Isn't there.” She studied the painting.

Barbara stirred in her seat, wanting to bring Lynn Davies back. She said, “Eugenie'd been seeing a bloke in Henley, Mrs. Davies. A retired Army bloke called Ted Wiley. He owns the bookshop across the street from her house. Did she ever speak of him?”

Lynn Davies turned from the painting. “Ted Wiley? A bookshop? No. She never talked of Ted Wiley.”

“Of anyone else she might have been involved with?”

Lynn thought about this. “She was careful with what she revealed about herself. She'd always been that way. But I think … I don't know if this is any help, but the last time we spoke—this would be before I rang to tell her about Virginia's passing—she mentioned … Well, I don't know if it actually meant anything. At least I don't know if it meant she'd become involved.”

“It might be of help,” Barbara told her. “What did she say?”

“It wasn't so much what she said but the way she said it. There was a lightness to her voice that I'd never heard before. She asked me if I believed that one could fall in love where one wasn't expecting to find love. She asked me if I thought that years could pass and one could suddenly look upon someone in a light entirely different from the way one had looked on him in the past. She asked me if I thought love could grow from that, from that new way of looking. Could she have been talking about the Army man with that? Someone she'd known for years but never thought of as a lover till now?”

Barbara wondered about this. It did seem likely. But there was something more to consider: Eugenie Davies' whereabouts at the time of her death and the address in her possession suggested something else.

She said, “Did she ever mention James Pitchford?”

Lynn shook her head.

“What about Pitchley? Or Pytches, perhaps?”

“She didn't mention anyone by name. But that's how she was: a very private person.”

A very private person who'd ended up murdered, Barbara thought. And she wondered if the dead woman's need for privacy was at the core of her killing.