A Traitor to Memory

“I didn't ask her.”


Lynley and Havers exchanged a look. Havers was the one to ask, “Why not?”

“As I said. She'd been acting peculiar, different from usual, for several days. I assumed there was something on her mind and …” Wiley shifted his eyes to his cap and seemed surprised to find it still in his hands. He stuffed it into his pocket. “See here. I'm not the sort who pries. I decided to wait for her to tell me whatever she wanted to tell me.”

“Had you ever seen this man before?”

Wiley said no, no, he didn't know the man. He hadn't seen him before that moment, he didn't recognise the man at all, but he'd got a good look at him if the detectives wanted a description. When they said that they did, he provided it: the approximate age, the height, the iron-grey hair, the dominant hawk-like nose. “He called her Eugenie,” Wiley concluded. “They knew each other.” This, he said, he'd assumed from what he'd seen in the car park: Eugenie had touched the man's face, but he'd pulled away.

“But you still didn't ask her who he was?” Lynley said. “Why was that, Major Wiley?”

“It seemed … too personal, somehow. I thought she'd tell me when she was ready. If he was important.”

“And she did say she had something she wanted to talk to you about,” Havers noted.

Wiley nodded and let out a slow breath. “She did say that. She talked about confessing her sins.”

“Sins,” Havers said.

Lynley leaned forward, avoiding Havers' meaningful look in his direction. He said, “May we assume from all this that you and Mrs. Davies had a close relationship, Major Wiley? Were you friends? Lovers? Engaged?”

The question seemed to discomfort Wiley. He altered his position on the sofa. “It'd been three years. I wanted to be respectful with her, not like one of these randy modern blokes with nothing more on his mind. I was willing to wait. She finally said that she was ready, but she wanted to have a talk first.”

“Which was what was supposed to happen tonight,” Havers concluded. “That's why you phoned her.”

It was.

Lynley asked the old gentleman to come into the kitchen with them, then. He said that there were other voices on Eugenie Davies' answer machine, and Major Ted Wiley—three years into a relationship with the dead woman, no matter what the relationship was—might be able to identify them.

In the kitchen, Wiley stood by the table and looked at the photographs of the two children. He reached for one of them, but he stopped himself when he finally seemed to take in the fact that Lynley and Havers were wearing gloves for a reason. As Havers readied the answer machine to play its messages again, Lynley said, “Are these Mrs. Davies' children, Major Wiley?”

“Her son and daughter,” Wiley said. “Yes. They're her children. Sonia died a number of years ago. And the boy … They were estranged, Eugenie and the boy. Been estranged for I don't know how long. They had some sort of falling-out ages back. She never spoke of him to me except to say they no longer saw each other.”

“And Sonia? Did Mrs. Davies ever speak to you about Sonia?”

“Just that she died young. But”—Wiley cleared his throat and stepped away from the table as if wishing to distance himself from what he was about to say—“well, look at her. One can't be surprised that she died young. They … they often do.”

Lynley frowned, wondering that Wiley seemed unaware of a case that certainly must have dominated the newspapers at the time. He said, “Were you in the country twenty years ago, Major Wiley?”

No, he'd been … Wiley seemed to do a backward progression in his head, cataloguing the years he'd spent on active duty in the Army. He said he'd been in the Falklands then. But that was long ago and he might have been in Rhodesia at the time … or what was left of Rhodesia. Why?

“Mrs. Davies never told you that Sonia was murdered?”

Dumbly, Wiley returned his gaze to the photographs. He said, “She didn't tell me … She didn't say … No, never once. Good God.” He dug into his back pocket and brought out a handkerchief, but he didn't use it. Instead, he said only, “This lot don't belong here, on the table, you know. Did you move them?” in apparent reference to the pictures.

“This is where we found them,” Lynley told him.