A Traitor to Memory

“Still hooked up to the machines?”


She looked regretful. “I'm awfully sorry. I can't exactly give out … I do hope you understand. But if I may ask … Do you pray …?”

“Not regularly.”

“Sometimes it helps.”

But there was something more useful than prayer, Leach thought. Like cracking the whip over the murder team and at least making progress towards finding the bastard who did this to Malcolm. And he could do that.

He was about to nod a goodbye to the nurse, when a young woman wearing a track suit and untied trainers emerged from one of the rooms. The nurse called her over, saying, “This gentleman's asking after your dad.”

Leach hadn't seen Miranda Webberly since her childhood, but he saw now that she'd grown up to look very much like her father: same stout body, same rust-coloured hair, same ruddy complexion, same smile that crinkled round her eyes and produced a single dimple on her left cheek. She looked like the sort of young woman who didn't bother with fashion magazines and he liked her for that.

She spoke quietly about her father's condition: that he hadn't regained consciousness, that there'd been “a rather serious crisis with his heart” earlier that day but now he had stabilised thank God, that his blood count—“I think it was the white cells? But maybe the other …?”—indicated a point of internal bleeding that they were going to have to locate soon since right now they were transfusing him but that would be a waste of blood if he was losing it from somewhere inside.

“They say he can hear, even in a coma, so I've been reading to him,” Miranda confided. “I hadn't thought to bring anything from Cambridge, so Uncle David went out and bought a book about narrow boating. I think it's the first thing that came to hand. But it's terribly dull and I'm afraid it'll send me into a coma before much longer. And I can't think it'll make Dad wake up because he's longing to hear how things turn out. Of course, he's in a coma mostly because they want him in a coma. At least, that's what they're telling me.”

She seemed eager to make Leach feel comfortable, to let him know how much his pathetic effort to be of help was appreciated. She looked exhausted, but she was calm, with no apparent expectation that someone—other than herself—should rescue her from the situation in which she was involved. He liked her more.

He said, “Is there someone who could take over from you here? Give you a chance to get home for a bath? An hour's kip?”

“Oh, yes, of course,” she said, and she fished in her track suit's jacket and brought out a rubber band that she used to discipline her steel-wool hair. “But I want to be here. He's my dad, and … He can hear me, you see. He knows I'm with him. And if that's a help … I mean, it's important that someone going through what he's going through know he's not alone, don't you think?”

Which implied that Webberly's wife wasn't with him. Which suggested a volume or two of what the years had been like since Webberly had made his decision not to leave Frances for Eugenie.

They'd talked about it the single time that Leach himself had brought up the subject. He couldn't remember now why he'd felt compelled to venture into such a private area of another man's life, but something had occurred—a veiled remark? a phone conversation with a subtext of hostility on Webberly's part? a departmental party to which Webberly had shown up alone for the dozenth time?—and that something had prompted Leach to say, “I don't see how you can act the lover of one and be the lover of the other. You could leave Frances, Malc. You know that. You've got someplace to go.”

Webberly hadn't responded at first. Indeed, he hadn't responded for days. Leach thought he might never respond at all till two weeks later, when Webberly's car was in for repair and Leach had dropped him off at his home because it was not so far out of his way. Half past eight in the evening, and she was in her pyjamas when she came to the door and flung it open, crowing, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” and dashing down the path to be caught up in her father's arms. Webberly had buried his face in her crinkly hair, had blown noisy kisses against her neck, had elicited more crows of joy from her.

“This is my Randie,” he'd said to Leach. “This is why.”

Leach said to Miranda now, “Your mum's not here, then? Gone home for a rest, has she?”

She said, “I'll tell her you were here, Inspector. She'll be so glad to know. Everyone's been so … so decent. Really.” And she shook his hand and said that she would get back to her dad.

“If there's something I can do …?”

“You've done it,” she assured him.