A Traitor to Memory

No one spoke. They looked in shock, and they seemed to be grouped to offer each other what support they could. Most of this was being directed at the mother, who was sitting in one corner of the room, a woman in her thirties like Webberly himself, but whey of complexion with large eyes that were haunted and seeing again and again what no mother ever ought to see: her child's limp body in the hands of strangers who fought to save her.

When Webberly introduced himself, one of the two men who were hovering near the mother rose and said he was Richard Davies, the father of the child who'd been taken to hospital. The use of the euphemism was clear when he gave a glance in the direction of the little boy, his son. Wisely, he didn't wish to speak of the other child's death in front of her brother. He said, “We were at the hospital. My wife and I. They told us—”

At this a young woman—seated on a sofa accompanied by a man of her own age with his arm round her shoulders—began to cry. It was a horrible, guttural weeping that grew to the sort of sobs that lead to hysteria. “I do not leave her,” she keened, and even through her lamentation Webberly could hear her heavy German accent. “I swear to God almighty that I do not leave her for even a minute.”

Which begged the question of how she had died, of course.

They all needed to be interviewed, but not simultaneously. Webberly said to the German girl, “You were responsible for the child?”

At which the mother said, “I brought this down upon us.”

“Eugenie!” Richard Davies cried, and the other man who'd been hovering over her, his face shining with a patina of sweat, said, “Don't talk like that, Eugenie.”

The grandfather said, “We all know who's at fault.”

The German girl wailed, “No! No! No! I do not leave her!” while her companion held her and said, “It's okay,” which it patently was not.

Two people said nothing: an elderly woman who kept her eyes glued onto Granddad and a tomato-haired woman in a neat pleated skirt who watched the German girl with undisguised dislike.

Too many people, too much emotion, growing confusion. Webberly told them all to disperse, save the parents. Remain in the house, he directed them. And someone stay with the little boy.

“I'll do that,” Tomato-hair said, obviously the “governess” about whom the young PC had spoken. “Come along, Gideon. Let's have a look at your maths.”

“But I'm to practise,” the boy said, looking earnestly from one adult to another. “Raphael did tell me—”

“Gideon, it's all right. Go with Sarah-Jane.” The sweat-faced man left the mother's side, going to squat before the little boy. “You're not to worry about your music just now. Go with Sarah-Jane, all right?”

“Come along, lad.” Grandfather stood, the little boy in his arms. The rest of the group followed him from the room till only the parents of the dead child remained.

Even now in the garden in Stamford Brook, with Alfie barking at the birds and chasing the squirrels and waiting for his master to call him back to the lead, even now in this park Webberly could see Eugenie Davies as she had been on that long-ago evening.

Dressed simply in grey trousers and a pale blue blouse, she didn't move an inch. She didn't look at him or at her husband. She only said, “Oh my God. What's to become of us?” And even then she spoke to herself, not to the men.

Her husband said, but rather to Webberly and not in answer to her, “We went to the hospital. There was nothing they could do. They didn't tell us that here. At the house. They didn't tell us.”

“No,” Webberly said. “That's not their job. They leave that to the doctors.”

“But they knew. While they were here. They knew then, didn't they?”

“I expect so. I'm sorry.”

Neither of them wept. They would, later, when they realised that the nightmare they were currently experiencing was no nightmare at all but rather an extended reality that would colour what remained of their lives. But at the moment, they were dull with trauma: the initial panic, the crisis of frantic intervention, the invasion of strangers into their home, the agonising wait in a casualty ward, the approach of a doctor whose expression undoubtedly had said it all.

“They talked about releasing her later. The … her body,” Richard Davies said. “He said we couldn't take her, couldn't make any arrangements…. Why?”

Eugenie's head lowered. A tear dropped onto her folded hands.

Webberly drew a chair over so that he was on the same level as Eugenie and he nodded to Richard Davies to sit as well, which he did, next to his wife, whose hand he took. Webberly explained to them as best he could: When an unexpected death occurred, when someone died who was not under the care of a physician who could sign a death certificate, when someone died in an accident—like a drowning—then a post-mortem examination was required by law.

Eugenie looked up. “Are you saying they'll cut her up? Cut her open?”

Webberly skirted the question by saying, “They'll determine the exact cause of her death.”

“But we know the cause,” Richard Davies said. “She … my God, she was in the bath. And then there was shouting, the women screaming. I ran upstairs and James came tearing down from—”

“James?”

“He lodges with us. He was in his room. He came running.”