A Traitor to Memory

Richard said nothing in reply to this. He merely swirled the brandy round in his glass and observed the thin patina it left on the sides. There was something more here, Jill concluded. She said, “Richard? What is it? There's something you're not telling me, isn't there?” And she felt once again a basic shutting down when confronted with the idea that a man with whom she was so intimately involved might not be as forthcoming as she required of him. Odd, she thought, how one humiliating and disastrous relationship had the potential to affect every involvement that followed it. “Richard? Tell me. Is there something more?”


“Gideon,” Richard said. “I didn't tell him that she'd been phoning me about him. I didn't know what to tell him, Jill. It's not as if she was asking to see him, because she wasn't asking to see him at all. So what would have been the point, telling him? But now she's dead and he's got to be told about that and I'm terrified that hearing it is going to make him take a turn for the worse.”

“Yes. I can see how it could.”

“‘Is he well?’ she wanted to know, Jill. ‘Why isn't he playing, Richard?’ she asked. ‘How many concert engagements has he actually broken? And why? Why?’”

“What was she after?”

“She must have phoned me a dozen times in the last two weeks alone,” Richard said. “There she was, this voice from the past which I thought I'd bloody well recovered from and—” He stopped himself.

Jill felt the chill. It started from her ankles and swept up quickly to close round her heart. She said carefully, “Thought you'd recovered?” and tried to stop herself from thinking what she couldn't bear to think, but the words ricocheted round her head anyway: He still loves her. She walked out on him. She disappeared from his life. But he continued to love her. He climbed into my bed. He joined his body to mine. But all the time he was loving Eugenie.

No wonder he'd never remarried. The only question was: Why was he remarrying now?

The damn man read her mind. Or perhaps her face. Or maybe he felt the chill as well, since he said, “Because it took me that much time to find you, Jill. Because I love you. Because at my age, I never expected to love again. And every morning when I awake, even on that miserable sofa of yours, I thank God for the miracle that you love me. Eugenie is a distant part of my past. Let's not make her part of our future.”

And the truth of it was, as Jill knew well, that they both had pasts. They were not adolescents, so neither of them could expect the other to come into their new life unburdened. The future was what was important, at the end of the day. Their future and the future of the baby. Catherine Ann.



Henley-on-Thames was easily accessible from London, especially when the morning commute along the M40 created tailbacks that extended in the opposite direction only. So DI Thomas Lynley and DC Barbara Havers were rolling south in the direction of Henley from Marlow just under an hour after having left Eric Leach's incident room in Hampstead.

DCI Leach, fighting off either a head cold or flu, had introduced them to a squad of detectives who, while slightly leery of the presence of New Scotland Yard among them, also seemed willing to accept their participation in a work load that currently included a series of rapes on Hampstead Heath and an arson in the Grade II-listed cottage of an ageing actress of both title and considerable reputation.

Leach detailed the preliminary findings from the post-mortem examination first, pending blood, tissue, and organ analysis, and they amounted to a multitude of injuries on a body that had ultimately been identified through dental records as belonging to one Eugenie Davies, aged sixty-two. First came the fractures she had sustained: the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae, the left femur, ulna, and radius, the right clavicle, and the fifth and sixth ribs. Then came the internal ruptures: liver, spleen, and kidneys. The cause of death had been determined as massive internal haemorrhaging and shock, and the time had been set between ten o'clock and midnight. An evaluation of trace evidence on the body would be forthcoming.

“She was thrown about fifty feet,” Leach told the detectives assembled in the incident room as they stood among the computers, the china boards, the filing cabinets, the copy machines, and the photographs. “According to forensic she was then driven over at least twice, possibly three times, as indicated by contusions on the body and markings left on her mac.”

A general murmur greeted this remark. Someone said, “Nice neighbourhood, that” with heavy irony.