A Traitor to Memory

“Why?” Leach asked.

“That's the question,” Lynley acknowledged. He said to Havers, “It works, Barbara. I do see that it works. But if Eugenie Davies could help her son regain his music, why would Richard Davies want to stop her? From talking to the man—not to mention from seeing his flat, which is a virtual shrine to Gideon's accomplishments—the only reasonable conclusion is that Richard Davies was determined to get his son playing again.”

“So what if we've been looking at it wrong?” Havers asked.

“In what way?”

“I accept that Richard Davies wants Gideon to play again. If he had an issue with his playing—like jealousy or something, like his kid being more of a success than he is and how can he handle that—then he probably would have done something a long time ago to stop him. But from what we know, the kid's been playing since he was just out of nappies. So what if Eugenie Davies was going to meet Gideon in order to stop him ever playing again?”

“Why would she do that?”

“What about quid pro quo to Richard? If their marriage ended because of something he'd done—”

“Like putting the nanny in the club?” Leach suggested.

“Or devoting his every waking moment to Gideon and forgetting he had a wife at all, a woman in mourning, a woman with needs … Eugenie loses a child and instead of having someone to lean on, she has Richard, and all he cares about is getting Gideon through the trauma so he doesn't freak out and stop playing his music and stop being the son who's admired so much and on the edge of being famous and gratifying his daddy's every dream and what about her through all this? What about his mum? She's been forgotten, left to cope on her own, and she never forgets what it was like, so when she has the chance to put the screws on Richard, she knows just how to do it: when he needs her just like she needed him.” Havers drew a deep breath at the end of all this, looking from the DCI to Lynley for their reaction.

Leach was the one to give it. “How?”

“How what?”

“How's she supposed to be able to stop her son playing? What's she going to do, Constable: break his fingers? Run him down?”

Havers drew a second breath, but she let it out on a sigh. “I don't know,” she said, her shoulders sagging.

“Right,” Leach snorted. “Well, when you do—”

“No,” Lynley cut in. “There's some sense to this, sir.”

“You're joking,” Leach said.

“There's something in it. Following Havers' line of thinking, we've got an explanation of why Eugenie Davies was carrying Pitchley's address that night, and nothing else we've come up with so far gets anywhere near explaining that.”

“Bollocks,” Leach said.

“What other explanation can we come up with? Nothing ties her to Pitchley. No letter, no phone call, no e-mail.”

“She had e-mail?” Leach demanded.

Havers said, “Right. And her computer—” But she stopped herself abruptly, swallowing the rest of her sentence with a wince.

“Computer?” Leach echoed. “Where the hell's her computer? There's no computer mentioned in your reports.”

Lynley felt Havers look at him, then drop her glance to her shoulder bag, where she rooted industriously for something that she probably didn't need. He wondered what would serve them better, truth or lie at this point. He opted for “I checked the computer. There was nothing on it. She had e-mail, yes. But there was nothing from Pitchley. So I saw no need—”

“To put it in your report?” Leach demanded. “What the hell kind of police work is that?”

“It seemed unnecessary.”

“What? Good Christ. I want that computer in here, Lynley. I want our people on it like ants over ice cream. You're no computer expert. You might have missed … God damn it. Have you gone out of your mind? What the hell were you thinking?”

What could he say? That he was thinking of saving time? saving trouble? saving a reputation? saving a marriage? He said carefully, “Getting into her e-mail wasn't a problem, sir. Once we managed that, we could see there was virtually nothing—”

“Virtually?”

“Just a message from Robson, and we've spoken to him. He's holding something back, I think. But it's not the fact that he had anything to do with Mrs. Davies' death.”

“You know that, do you?”

“It's a gut feeling, yes.”

“The same one that prompted you to hold back—or is it remove?—a piece of evidence?”

“It was a judgement call, sir.”

“You've no place making judgement calls. I want that computer. In here. Now.”

“As to the Humber?” Havers ventured delicately.

“Bugger the Humber. And bugger Davies. Vanessa, get those sodding prison records of Wolff's. For all we know, she's got ten people on a string, all with vehicles as old as Methuselah, all of them somehow related to this case.”