A Traitor to Memory

Lynley paced and considered this and felt as if a Greek chorus had taken up residence in his head, reciting not only all the possibilities but also the consequences of his choosing one of them and investing an ounce of belief in it. He walked several yards past several houses, past the autumn-coloured hedges that edged their gardens. He was just about to turn back and walk to his car, when something glittering on the pavement caught his eye, quite near to a yew hedge that looked more recently planted than the others on the street.

He bent to this like Sherlock Holmes redeemed. But it proved to be just a shard of glass that, along with a few other shards, had been swept from the pavement into the flower bed where the hedge was planted. He took a pencil from his jacket pocket and turned the shards over, then dug round in the earth and found a few more. And because he'd never felt quite so much without resources as he was feeling in this investigation, he took out his handkerchief and collected them all.

Back in his car, he phoned home, seeking Helen. It was hours since she'd turned up at Charing Cross Hospital, hours since she'd trekked to Webberly's house to see what could be made of Frances. But she wasn't there. And she wasn't at work in Chelsea with St. James. This, he decided, was not a good sign.

He drove to Stamford Brook.



In Kensington Square, Barbara Havers parked where she'd parked before: by the line of bollards that prevented traffic entering the square from the north on Derry Street. She walked to the Convent of the Immaculate Conception, but instead of going to the door straightaway and requesting to speak with Sister Cecilia Mahoney once again, she lit a cigarette and ventured farther along the pavement to the distinguished brick Dutch-gabled house where so much had happened two decades in the past.

It was the tallest building on its side of the street: five floors with a lower ground floor which was accessed by a narrow stairway that curved down from the flagstone-covered front garden. Two brick pillars topped with white stone finials sided the wrought iron entrance gate, and Barbara swung this gate open, entered, closed it behind her, and stood looking up at the house.

It was quite a contrast to Lynn Davies' small dwelling on the other side of the river. With its french windows and balconies, its creamy woodwork, its solemn pediments and dog-toothed cornices, its fanlights and its stained glass windows, it—and the neighbourhood that surrounded it—couldn't have been more different to the environment in which Virginia Davies had lived her life.

But there was another difference besides the obvious physical one, and Barbara thought about it as she surveyed the house. Inside had lived a terrible man, in Lynn Davies' words, a man who couldn't bear to be in the same room as a grandchild who was, in his eyes, not what she should have been. The child had been unwelcome in this house, she'd been an object of continual loathing, so her mother had taken her away forever. And old Jack Davies—terrible Jack Davies—had been appeased. More, he'd been gratified, as things turned out, because when his son got round to marrying again, Jack's next grandchild turned out to be a musical genius.

Delight all round at that one, Barbara thought. The kid picked up a fiddle, made his mark, and gave the name Davies the glory it deserved. But then came the next grandchild's birth, and old Jack Davies—terrible Jack Davies—was made to look imperfection in the face another time.

But on this second go with a defective child, things were more dicey for Jack. Because if old Jack Davies drove this mother off with his relentless demands to “keep her out of my sight, put that creature away somewhere,” chances were that this mother would take her other child with her. And that would mean goodbye Gideon and goodbye to basking vicariously in the glory of everything Gideon stood to accomplish.

When Sonia Davies was drowned in her bath, had the police even known about Virginia? Barbara wondered. And if they had, had the family managed to keep old Jack's attitude to her under wraps? Probably.

He'd gone through a horrific time in the war, he'd never recovered, he was a military hero. But he also sounded like a man who was five notes short of a full sonata, and how was anyone to know how far a man like that would go when he'd been thwarted?

Barbara went back to the pavement, closing the gate behind her. She flipped her cigarette into the street and retraced her steps to the Convent of the Immaculate Conception.

This time round, she found Sister Cecilia Mahoney in the enormous garden behind the main building. With another nun, she was raking up leaves from a mammoth sycamore tree that could have shaded an entire hamlet. They'd so far made five piles of leaves, which formed colourful mounds across the lawn. In the distance where a wall marked the end of the convent's property and protected it from the trains of the District line that rumbled above ground throughout the day, a man in a boiler suit and a knitted hat was tending a fire where some of the gathered leaves were burning.