A Traitor to Memory

“In the bath. Upstairs. But don't you want to talk to …? The family're in the drawing room.”


Webberly didn't need a young PC to tell him his business, but the boy was rattled, so there was no point sorting him out right then. He looked at Leach instead. “Tell them we'll be with them shortly. Then …” He jerked his head towards the stairs. He said to the constable, “Show me,” and he followed him up a staircase that curved round an ornate oak plant stand from which an enormous fern drooped fronds towards the floor.

The nursery bathroom was on the second floor of the house along with the nursery, a loo, and another bedroom that was occupied by the other child in the family. The parents and grandparents had rooms just below on the first floor. The top floor was occupied by the nanny, a lodger, and a woman who … well, the constable supposed she'd be called a governess although the family didn't call her that.

“She teaches the children,” the constable said. “Well, perhaps just the older one, I expect.”

Webberly raised his eyebrows at the oddity of a governess in this day and age, and he went into the bathroom where the tragedy had occurred. Leach joined him there, his duty done in the drawing room below. The constable returned to his post by the front door.

The two detectives surveyed the bathroom somberly. It was a mundane location for sudden death to make its mark. And yet it happened so often that Webberly wondered when people would finally learn not to leave a child unattended for even a second when it came to so much as an inch of water anywhere.

There was more than an inch of water in the tub, however. At least ten inches remained inside, cool now and with a plastic boat and five yellow ducklings floating motionless on its surface. A bar of soap rested on the bottom near the drain, and a stainless steel bath tray with worn rubber ends bridged the width of the tub and held a limp flannel, a comb, and a sponge. All of it looked perfectly normal. But there was also an indication that both panic and tragedy had been recent visitors to the room.

To one side, a towel rack lay overturned on the floor. A soaked bath mat was crumpled beneath a wash basin. A rattan wastepaper basket had been caved in. And across the white tiles were the footprints of the paramedics whose last concern would have been to keep the room neat and tidy as they attempted to revive a child.

Webberly could picture the scene as if he'd been there because he had been there before while on uniformed patrol: no panic among the 'medics but rather intense and what seemed like inhumanly impersonal calm; checks for pulse and respiration, for reaction from the pupils; the immediate initiation of CPR. They would know she was dead within moments but they would not say those words to anyone because their job was life, life at any cost, life at every cost, and they would work upon the child and whisk her from the house and continue to work upon her all the way to the hospital because there was always the chance that life could be wrung from the limp tatter that remained when the spirit left the body.

Webberly squatted by the wastepaper basket and used a pen to right it, having a look inside. Six crumpled tissues, perhaps half a yard of dental floss, a flattened tube of toothpaste. He said to Leach, “Check the medicine cabinet, Eric,” while he himself went back to the tub and looked long and hard round its sides, round its taps and its spigot, along the grout that edged it, and into its water. Nothing.

Leach said, “Baby aspirin in here, cough syrup, some prescriptions. Five of them, sir.”

“For who?”

“Made out for Sonia Davies.”

“Note them all, then. Seal off the room. I'll speak to the family.”

But it was more than the family he met in the drawing room because more than the family lived in the house, and more than only the house's inhabitants had been present when the tragedy supervened in their evening rituals. Indeed, the drawing room seemed to be bursting with people although there were but nine individuals present: eight adults and a small boy with an appealing fall of white-blond hair across his forehead. Chalky-faced, he stood in the protective circle of the arm of an old man who was, presumably, his grandfather and whose necktie—a souvenir of some college or club by the look of it—the boy grasped and twisted in his fingers.