A Traitor to Memory

“Or else? What?”


He could feel her deflate. “Yes. That's just it, isn't it? I know you'd never leave her. Well, of course, how could you and live with yourself? But there's got to be something you—we—haven't thought of yet.” And then apparently to spare him from having to answer, she noted that Alfie was eyeing a cat up ahead of them with too much interest. She took the lead from her father and said, “Don't even think of it, Alfred,” with a little jerk.

At the corner, they crossed and there they parted fondly, Miranda heading to the left, which would ultimately take her in the direction of Stamford Brook Underground station and Webberly striding onward along the green iron railings that formed the east boundary of Prebend Gardens.

Inside the wrought iron gate, Webberly took the dog off his lead and wrested the tennis ball from his jaws. He flung it as far as he could down the length of the green and watched as Alfie raced after it. Once the ball was in the dog's possession, Alfie did his usual: He loped to the far end of the lawn and began to race round the perimeter of the green. Webberly watched his progress from bench to bush to tree to path, but he himself remained where they'd entered, moving only to the paint-chipped black bench a short distance from the notice board on which announcements of coming events in the community were posted.

These he read without actually assimilating them: Christmas fêtes, antiques fairs, car boot sales. He noted with approval that the phone number of the local police station was prominently displayed and that a committee hoping to organise a Neighbourhood Watch programme was going to assemble in the basement of one of the churches. He saw all this but he couldn't have testified to any of it later. Because although he perceived those six or seven pieces of paper pinned behind the glass of the notice board, and although he went through the motions of reading each one of them, what he actually observed was Frances standing at the kitchen window while his daughter said kindly and with absolute faith in him, Of course you'd never leave her … how could you? That last especially seemed to reverberate round his skull like an echo with a killing sense of irony.

Leaving Frances had been the last thing on his mind that night he'd got the call to go to Kensington Square. The call had come via the Earl's Court Road station, where he was a recently promoted detective inspector with a newly assigned sergeant—Eric Leach—as his partner. Leach did the driving down Kensington High Street, which in those days was moderately less jammed than it tended to be now. Leach was new to the borough, so they overshot the mark and ended up winding through Thackery Street, with its small-village feel so at odds with a huge city, and coming into the square from its southeast end. This put them directly in front of the house they were seeking: a red brick Victorian affair with a white medallion at the gable's peak giving the date of construction: 1879, relatively new in an area where the oldest building had been raised nearly two hundred years earlier.

A panda car, a tandem arrival at the scene along with the paramedics when the emergency call had first come through, still sat at the kerb although its lights were no longer flashing. The paramedics themselves were long since gone, as were the neighbours, who had doubtless assembled as neighbours will do when sirens scream into a residential area.

Webberly shoved open his door and walked to the house, where a low brick wall surmounted by black wrought iron fenced in a flagstone area with a central planter. An ornamental cherry tree grew there, and at that time of year it created a roseate blossom pool on the ground.

The front door was closed, but someone inside must have been waiting for them, because no sooner had Webberly put his foot on the bottom step than the door swung open and the uniformed constable who'd placed the call to the station admitted them into the house. He looked shaken. This was his first call to a child's death, he told them. He'd arrived in the wake of the ambulance.

“Two years old,” he informed them in a hollow voice. “Dad'd been giving her kiss of life and the 'medics tried everything they could.” He shook his head, looking stricken. “No chance. She was gone. Sorry, sir. I've a baby at home. Makes you think …”

“Right,” Webberly said. “It's okay, son. I've a little one myself.” He needed no reminding how fleeting life was, how vigilant a parent needed to be against anything that might snuff that life out. His own Miranda had just turned two.

“Where'd it happen?” Webberly asked.