A Traitor to Memory

Lynley's glance met Helen's where she stood just beyond Frances's right shoulder. He could read her reaction to this and he knew it matched his own. Escape was called for. To be in the presence of a maternal jealousy so strong that it wouldn't loosen its grip upon someone even in the midst of a life-and-death crisis … It was more than disconcerting, Lynley thought. It was obscene. He felt like a voyeur.

Helen said, “If Malcolm's anything at all like my father, Frances, I expect what he's felt is a special responsibility towards Randie, because she's a daughter and not a son.”

To which Lynley added, “I saw that in my own family. The way my father was with my older sister wasn't in the least the way he was with me. Or with my younger brother, for that matter. We weren't as vulnerable, in his eyes. We needed toughening up. But I think what all that means is—”

Frances moved the hand that had been beneath his. She said, “No. They're right. What they're thinking at the hospital. The queen is dead and he can't cope now. He threw himself into the traffic last night.” Then for the first time she looked directly at Lynley. She said it again, “The queen is finally dead. There's no one to replace her. Certainly not me.”

And Lynley suddenly understood. He said, “You knew,” as Helen began to say, “Frances, you must never believe—” but Frances stopped her by getting to her feet. She went to one of the two bedside tables, and she opened its drawer and set it on the bed. From the very back, tucked away as far as possible from the other contents, she took a small white square of linen. She unfolded it like a priest in a ritual, shaking it first, then smoothing it out against the counterpane on the bed.

Lynley joined her there. Helen did likewise. The three of them looked down on what was a handkerchief, ordinary save for two details: In one corner were twined the initials E and D, and directly in the centre of the material lay a rusty smear which described a little drama from the past. He cuts his finger his palm the back of his hand doing something for her … sawing a board pounding a nail drying a glass picking up the pieces of a jar accidentally smashed on the floor … and she quickly removes a handkerchief from her pocket her handbag the sleeve of her sweater the cup of her bra and she presses it upon him because he never remembers to carry one himself. This piece of linen finds its way into the pocket of his trousers his jacket the breast of his coat where he forgets about it till his wife preparing the laundry the dry cleaning the sorting of old things to go to Oxfam finds it sees it knows it for what it is and keeps it. For how many years? Lynley wondered. For how many blasted god-awful years in which she asked nothing about what it meant, giving her husband the opportunity to tell the truth, whatever that truth was, or to lie, fabricating a reason that might have been perfectly believable or at least something that she could cling to in order to lie to herself.

Helen said, “Frances, will you let me get rid of this?” and she placed her fingers not on the handkerchief itself but right next to it, as if it were a relic and she a novitiate in some obscure religion in which only the ordained could touch the blessed.

Frances said, “No!” and grabbed it. “He loved her,” she said. “He loved her and I knew it. I saw it happening. I saw how it happened, as if it was a study of the whole process of love being played out in front of me. Like a television drama. And I kept waiting, you see, because right from the first I knew how he felt. He had to talk about it, he said. Because of Randie … because these poor people had lost a little girl not so much younger than our own Randie, and he could see how horrible it was for them, how much they suffered, especially the mother and ‘No one seems to want to talk to her about it, Frances. She has no one. She's existing in a bubble of grief—no, an infected boil of grief—and not one of them is trying to lance it. It feels inhuman, Frances, inhuman. Someone must help her before she breaks.’ So he decided to be the one. He would put that killer in gaol, by God, and he would not rest, Frances dear, till he had that killer signed, sealed, and delivered to justice. Because how would we feel if someone—God forbid—harmed our Randie? We would stay up nights, wouldn't we, we would search the streets, we would not sleep and we would not eat and we would not even darken our own doorstep for days on end if that's what it took to find the monster that hurt her.”

Lynley released a slow breath, realising that he'd been holding it the entire time that Frances had been speaking. He felt so far out of his depth that drowning looked like the only option. He glanced at his wife for some sort of guidance and saw that she'd raised her fingers to her lips. And he knew it was sorrow that Helen felt, sorrow for the words that had gone too long unspoken between the Webberlys. He found himself wondering what was actually worse: years of enduring the iron maiden of imagining or seconds of experiencing the quick death of knowing.

Helen said, “Frances, if Malcolm hadn't loved you—”