A Traitor to Memory

DCI Eric Leach listened to the sister in charge of the intensive care unit at Charing Cross Hospital as she essentially told him the worst. No change was what they said when the doctors were handing over the reins of someone's condition to God, fate, nature, or time. It was not what they said when someone made some sort of gain, sidestepped the grim reaper, or achieved a sudden and miraculous recovery. Leach hung up the phone and turned from his desk, brooding. He brooded not only over what had happened to Malcolm Webberly but also over his own inadequacies and what they were doing to his ability to anticipate the investigation's twists and turns.

He had to deal with the problem of Esmé. That much was clear. How to deal with it would come to him soon. But that he had to deal with it was obvious. Because had he not been distracted by Esmé’s fears about her mum's new boyfriend—not to mention by his own feelings about Bridget having found a replacement for him—he surely would have remembered that J. W. Pitchley, AKA James Pitchford, had also once been Jimmy Pytches, whose ties to an infant's death in Tower Hamlets had long ago been the subject of the London tabloids' delight. Not when that infant died, of course, that situation having sorted itself out soon enough after the post-mortem. But years later, after another child died in Kensington.

Once that pug-like Yard woman had revealed this titbit, Leach had remembered it all. He'd tried to tell himself that he'd deleted the information from his memory banks because it hadn't amounted to anything but aggro for Pitchford during the investigation into the Davies baby's death. But the truth was, he should have remembered it, and it was down to Bridget and Bridget's boyfriend and especially Esmé’s anxiety over Bridget's boyfriend that he hadn't. And he couldn't afford not to remember what he needed to remember about that long-ago case. Because it was seeming to him more and more probable that that case had a link to this one, which was unlikely to be easily severed.

A PC popped his head into his office doorway, saying, “We've got that bloke from West Hampstead you were asking for, sir. D'you want him in an interview room?”

“Got his brief with him?”

“What else? I don't expect he takes a dump in the morning without checking with his solicitor to see how many sheets of toilet paper he's got a right to use.”

“Make it an interview room, then,” Leach said. He didn't like allowing solicitors to think they'd somehow intimidated him, and showing Pitchley-Pitchford-Pytches into his office felt like something that would do just that.

He took a few minutes to make the call that would release Pitchley's motor to him. There was nothing more to be gained by holding the Boxter, and it seemed to Leach that their possession of past details about James Pitchford and Jimmy Pytches was more likely to chisel information from the man than was their continuing to hold on to his car.

After the call, he grabbed a cup of coffee and went to the interview room where Pitchley-Pitchford-Pytches—Leach was beginning to think of him as P-Man for simple ease of keeping track of all his names—and his solicitor were waiting, seated at the interview table. Azoff was smoking despite the posted sign expressly forbidding it, his way of sneering “bugger you for ten pence,” while P-Man was working his hands through his hair like someone trying to rolf his brain.

“I've advised my client to say nothing,” Azoff began, eschewing anything that might have done for a greeting. “He's cooperated thus far with no sign on your part of recompensing him in any way.”

“Recompensing?” Leach said incredulously. “What d'you think this is, man? We're running a murder enquiry here, and if we need your boy to assist us, we're going to bloody well have him.”

“I see no reason to carry on with these meetings if he's not going to be charged with something,” Azoff countered.

At which P-Man looked up, mouth open, his face a veritable picture of “what the hell are you saying, you berk?” Leach liked this, because a man who was innocent of everything even remotely related to a case under investigation would hardly look at his solicitor like a back-alley thug with a garrote in his hand just because the lawyer said the words “charge him.” A man who was innocent would wear an expression saying, “Yeah. Got that, Jack?” and he'd direct that expression at the cop. But P-Man wasn't doing that, which made Leach more certain than ever that he needed to be broken. He wasn't sure what breaking him would actually gain them, but he was more than willing to try it.

He said, “Well. Right. Mr. Pytches,” quite affably.

To which Azoff said, “Pitchley,” with an irritation that he underscored with a gust of tobacco smoke blown into the air, carrying on it the accompanying olfactory tincture of advanced halitosis.

Leach said, “Ah. Doesn't know it all, then, does he?” to P-Man with a nod at the solicitor. “Got some nooks and crannies in the skeleton cupboard you've not shone a torch into, yes?”