A Traitor to Memory

Other than that, he had nothing to say. He would stand by his original story, given to Lynley during earlier interviews. He knew his rights, and the police had nothing on which to build a case against the father of Gideon Davies.

What they had, however, was the Humber, and Lynley went back to Cornwall Gardens with the official team to oversee the acquisition of that vehicle. As Winston Nkata had predicted, what damage the car had sustained in striking two—and probably three—individuals was centred round its front chrome bumper, which was fairly mangled. But this was something that any adroit defence lawyer would be able to argue away, and consequently Lynley was not depending upon it to build a case against Richard Davies. What he was depending upon and what that same adroit barrister would find difficult to discount was trace evidence both beneath the bumper and upon the undercarriage of the Humber. For it was hardly possible that Davies could strike Kathleen Waddington and Malcolm Webberly and run over his former wife three times and leave not a deposit of blood, a fragment of skin, or the kind of hair they desperately needed—hair with human scalp attached to it—on the underside of the car. To get rid of that sort of evidence, Davies would have had to think of that possibility. And Lynley was betting that he hadn't done so. No killer, he knew from long experience, ever thought of everything.

He phoned the news to DCI Leach and asked him to pass the message along to AC Hillier. He would wait in Cornwall Gardens to see the Humber safely off the street, he said, after which he'd fetch Eugenie Davies' computer, as had been his original destination. Did DCI Leach still wish him to fetch that computer?

He did, Leach told him. Despite the arrest, Lynley was still out of order for having taken it and it needed to be logged among the belongings of the victim. “Anything else you lifted, while we're at it?” Leach asked shrewdly.

Lynley replied there was nothing else belonging to Eugenie Davies that he had taken, nothing at all. And he was content with the truth of this answer. For he had come to understand for better or worse that the words born of passion which a man puts on paper and sends to a woman—indeed, even those words that he speaks—are on loan to her only, for whatever length of time serves their purpose. The words themselves always belong to the man.



“He didn't push me,” was what Jill Foster said to Barbara Havers in the ambulance. “You mustn't think that he pushed me.” Her voice was faint, a weak murmur only, and her lower body was soiled from the pool of urine, water, and blood that had been spreading out beneath her when Barbara knelt by her side at the foot of the stairs. But that was all she was able to say, because pain was taking her, or at least that was how it seemed to Barbara as she heard Jill cry out and she watched the paramedic monitor the woman's vital signs and listened to him say to the driver, “Hit the sirens, Cliff,” which was explanation enough of Jill Foster's condition.

“The baby?” Barbara asked the medic in a low voice.

He cast her a look, said nothing, and moved his gaze to the IV bag he'd fixed to a pole above his patient.

Even with the siren, the ride to the nearest hospital with a casualty ward seemed endless to Barbara. But once they arrived, the response was immediate and gratifying. The paramedics trundled their charge inside the building at a run. There, she was met by a swarm of personnel, who whisked her away, calling out for equipment, for phone calls to be made to Obstetrics, for obscure drugs and arcane procedures with names that camouflaged their purposes.

“Is she going to make it?” Barbara asked anyone who would listen. “She's in labour, right? She's okay? The baby?”

“This is not how babies are intended to get born,” was the only reply she was able to obtain.

She remained in Casualty, pacing the waiting area, till Jill Foster was taken in a rush to an operating theatre. “She's been through enough trauma,” was the explanation she was given and “Are you family?” was the reason that nothing else was revealed. Barbara couldn't have said why she felt it was important for her to know that the woman was going to be all right. She put it down to an unusual sisterhood she found herself feeling for Jill Foster. It had not, after all, been so many months since Barbara herself had been whisked away by an ambulance after her own encounter with a killer.

She didn't believe that Richard Davies had not pushed Jill Foster down the stairs. But that was something to be sorted out later, once a recovery period gave the other woman time to learn what else her fiancé had been up to. And she would recover, Barbara learned within the hour. She'd been delivered of a daughter: healthy despite her precipitate entry into the world.