A Traitor to Memory

This card was from someone called Lynn, with an envelope that bore a London postmark but no sender's address. Its message was simple:

Thank you so much for the floral tribute, dearest Eugenie, and for your presence which meant so much to me. Life will go on. I know that. But, of course, it will never be the same.



Fondly,



Lynn



Barbara examined the date: a week ago. She agreed with Lynley. Thematically, it sounded like the same woman who'd left the message on the answer machine.

“Damn.” This was Lynley's reaction to the letter Barbara had handed to him. He gestured to the other letters that lay across Eugenie Davies' bed. “What about those?”

“All from him, Inspector, if the writing on the envelopes is anything to go by.”

Barbara watched the play of reactions as they crossed Lynley's face. She knew that her superior officer and she had to be thinking along the same lines: Had Webberly known these letters—so embarrassing and potentially damaging to him—would be in Eugenie Davies' possession? Had he merely suspected or feared that they might be? And in either case, had he arranged to have Lynley—and by extension Havers as well—work the case in order to run interference no matter which circumstance arose?

“D'you think Leach knows about them?” Barbara asked.

“He phoned Webberly when he had a potential i.d. on the body. At one in the morning, Havers. What does that suggest to you?”

“And guess who he asked to go to Henley this morning.” Barbara took the letter that Lynley handed back to her. “What's to do, then, sir?”

Lynley walked to the window. She watched as he gazed down at the street. She expected the regulation reply from him. Asking the question in the first place had been merely rote.

“We'll take them with us,” he said.

She got to her feet. “Right. You've got evidence bags in the boot, haven't you? I'll fetch—”

“Not like that,” Lynley said.

Barbara said, “What? But you just said take—”

“Yes. We'll take them with us.” He turned back to her from the window.

Barbara stared at him. She didn't want to think what he was implying. We'll take them with us. Not, We'll bag them and log them as evidence, Havers. Not, Have a care with them, Barbara. Not, We'll have forensic check them for fingerprints, for the prints of someone other than the recipient who might have found them, might have read them, might have become consumed with jealousy because of them and despite their age, someone who might have looked for vengeance because of them….

She said, “Hang on, Inspector. You can't mean—”

But she wasn't able to complete her protest.

Below them, someone knocked on the door.



Lynley answered it to find an elderly gentleman in a waxed jacket and peaked cap standing on the pavement, his hands sunk into his pockets. His ruddy face was mapped with the markings of broken capillaries, and his nose was just that shade of rose that would deepen and grow purple over time. But it was his eyes that Lynley took note of most closely. They were blue, intense, and wary.

He introduced himself as Major Ted Wiley, Army, retired. “Someone from the police … You must be one of them. I had a call …?”

Lynley asked the man to step inside. He introduced himself and then introduced Havers, who descended the stairs as Wiley moved tentatively into the room. The old gentleman looked round him, glanced at the stairs, then lifted his eyes to the ceiling as if he were trying to determine what Barbara Havers had been looking for or had found on the floor above.

“What's happened?” Wiley removed neither his hat nor his jacket.

“You're a friend of Mrs. Davies?” Lynley asked him.

The man didn't respond at once. It was as if he were trying to decide what the word friend actually meant in reference to his relationship with Eugenie Davies. He finally said, looking from Lynley to Havers and back again to Lynley, “Something's happened to her. You wouldn't be here otherwise.”

“That was you on the phone, that last message on her machine? A man talking about plans for tonight?” Havers asked this. She remained by the stairs.

“We were …” Wiley seemed to hear the past tense and made the adjustment. “We're supposed to have dinner. Tonight. She said … You're from the Met and she went to London last night. So something's happened to her. Please tell me what.”

“Sit down, Major Wiley,” Lynley said. The old man didn't seem frail, but there was no telling the condition of his heart or his blood pressure from just one look at him, and Lynley didn't like to take risks with someone when he had bad news to pass on.

“It was raining hard last night,” Wiley said, more to himself than to either Lynley or Havers. “I talked to her about driving in the rain. And the dark. Dark's bad enough but rain makes it worse.”

Havers crossed the few feet to Wiley and took him by the arm. “Have a seat, Major,” she said.

“It's bad,” he responded.