A Traitor to Memory

“Someone with an old motor?” Barbara Havers asked.

“Bet on it. I've got a PC going through the significant others right now,” with a jerk of his head towards a female constable sitting at one of the terminals in the room. “She's picking up every name mentioned in every action report and running each through the system. We'll get our mitts on the prison records as well and run through everyone Wolff had contact with while she was inside. We can do that while we've got her in for questioning. D'you want to page your man and give him the message? Or shall I?” Leach rubbed his hands together briskly.

The constable at the computer terminal rose from her seat at that moment with a paper in her hand. She said, “I think I've got it, sir,” and Leach bounded to her with a happy, “Brilliant. Good work, Vanessa. What've we got?”

“A Humber,” she said.

The vehicle in question was a post-war saloon manufactured in the days when the relationship between petrol consumed and kilometers covered was not the first thing on a driver's mind. It was smaller than a Rolls-Royce, a Bentley, or a Daimler—not to mention less costly—but it was larger than the average car on the street today. And whereas the modern car was manufactured from aluminium and alloy to keep its weight low and its mileage high, the Humber was fashioned from steel and chrome with a front end comprising a toothy sneer of heavy grillwork suitable for scooping from the air everything from winged insects to small birds.

“Excellent,” Leach said.

“Whose is it?” Lynley asked.

“Belongs to a woman,” Vanessa told them. “She's called Jill Foster.”

“Richard Davies' fiancée?” Havers looked at Lynley. Her face broke into a smile. She said, “That's it. That's bloody it, Inspector. When you—”

But Lynley interrupted her. “Jill Foster? I can't see that, Havers. I've met the woman. She's enormously pregnant. She's not capable of this. And even if she were, why would she go after Waddington?”

Havers said, “Sir—”

Leach cut in, “There's got to be another car, then. Another old one.”

“How likely is that?” the PC said doubtfully.

“Page Nkata,” Leach told Lynley. And to Vanessa, “Get Wolff's prison records. We need to go through them. There's got to be a car—”

“Hang on!” Havers said explosively. “There's another way to look at this, you lot. Listen. He said Pytches. Richard Davies said Pytches. Not Pitchley or Pitchford, but Pytches.” She grasped Lynley's arm for emphasis. “You said he said Pytches when we were having coffee. You said you had Pytches in your notes. When you interviewed Richard Davies? Yes?”

Lynley said, “Pytches? What's Jimmy Pytches have to do with this, Havers?”

“It was a slip of the tongue, don't you see?”

“Constable,” Leach said irritably, “what the hell are you on about?”

Havers went on, directing her comments to Lynley. “Richard Davies wouldn't have made that kind of verbal mistake when he'd just been told his former wife was murdered. He couldn't have known J. W. Pitchley was Jimmy Pytches right at that moment. He might have known James Pitchford was Jimmy Pytches, yes, all right, but he didn't think of him as Pytches, he'd never known him as Pytches, so why the hell would he call him that in front of you, since you yourself didn't know who Pytches even was at that point? Why would he ever call him that, in fact? He wouldn't unless it was on his mind because he'd had to go through what I'd gone through: the records in St. Catherine's. And why? In order to locate James Pitchford himself.”

“What is this?” Leach demanded.

Lynley held up a hand, saying, “Hang on a moment, sir. She's got something. Havers, go on.”

“Too right I've got something,” Havers asserted. “He'd been speaking to Eugenie for months. You've got that in your notes. He said it and the BT records corroborate.”

“They do,” Lynley said.

“And Gideon told you they were supposed to meet, he and his mother. Right?”

“Yes.”

“Eugenie was supposed to be able to help him get over his stage fright. That's what he said. That's also in your notes. Only they didn't meet, did they? They weren't able to meet because she was killed first. So what if she was killed to prevent them from meeting? She didn't know where Gideon lived, did she? The only way she could have found out was from Richard.”

Lynley said thoughtfully, “Davies wants to kill her, and he sees a way. Give her what she thinks is Gideon's address, arrange a time when they're supposed to meet, lie in wait for her—”

“—and when she goes wandering down the street with the address in her hand or wherever it was, blam. He runs her down,” Havers concluded. “Then he drives over her to finish her off. But he makes it look like it's related to the older crime by taking Waddington out first and Webberly afterwards.”