A Traitor to Memory

So he manufactured tales for her because telling tales had long ago become his stock in trade. He was flattered by the attention that she—an educated girl from the Home Counties—was willing to show him. He had held his own counsel and kept his head down for so many years that Sarah-Jane Beckett's interest in him stirred an appetite for companionship that he'd kept suppressed for most of his life.

She wasn't the companion he was seeking, however. And while he couldn't have said exactly who that companion would be in his evenings with Sarah-Jane, he felt no heaving of the earth when her leg touched his and no pleasurable longing for the pressure of something more than her palm against his own when she took his hand.

Then Katja Wolff arrived, and with Katja the situation was different. But then, Katja Wolff had been as different from Sarah-Jane Beckett as was humanly possible to be.

7





“SHE MIGHT HAVE been meeting with the ex,” DCI Leach said in reference to the man Ted Wiley had seen in the car park of the Sixty Plus Club. “Divorce doesn't mean goodbye forever, take it from me. He's called Richard Davies. Track him down.”

“He could be the third male voice on her answer machine as well,” Lynley acknowledged.

“What did that voice say again?”

Barbara Havers read the message from her notes. “Sounded angry,” she added, and tapped her biro meditatively against the paper. “You know, I wonder if our Eugenie played men off against each other.”

“You're thinking of this other bloke … Wiley?” Leach said.

“Could be something there,” Havers noted. “We've got three separate men on her answer machine. We've got her—this is according to Wiley—arguing with a bloke in the car park. We've got her wanting to talk to Wiley, having something to tell him, something he apparently feels was important …” Havers hesitated and glanced at Lynley.

He knew what she was thinking and what she wanted to say: We've also got love letters from a married man and a computer with access to the internet. She was clearly waiting for him to give her the go-ahead to say this, but he held his tongue, so she finished lamely with, “We've got reason to look closely at every bloke who knew her, 'f you ask me.”

Leach nodded. “Have at Richard Davies, then. Get what you can.”

They were in the incident room, where detective constables were reporting in on the activities to which they'd been assigned. Following Lynley's phone call to the DCI on the way back into town, Leach had allocated further manpower to the PNC in order to trace all navy and black Audis with number plates ending in ADY. He'd put a constable on to BT for a list of the incoming and outgoing phone calls from Doll Cottage in Henley, and another constable was getting on to Cellnet to track down the mobile phone whose owner had left a message on Eugenie Davies' answer machine.

Of the activities reported as being completed so far that day, only the DC with the responsibility for gathering information from forensic had offered a useful detail: A number of minute paint particles had been found on the dead woman's clothing when it was examined. Further particles had also been found on her body, specifically upon her mangled legs.

“They're putting the paint under analysis,” Leach said. “Broken down, it might well give us the make of the car that hit her. But that'll take time. You know the dance.”

“Have you got a colour on the paint?” Lynley asked.

“Black.”

“What colour is the Boxter you're holding?”

“As to that …” Leach told his team to get on with their work and he led the way back to his office, saying, “Car's silver. And it's clean. Not that I'd expect some bloke—no matter how much he's rolling in bunce—to run down a woman in a motor that cost more than my mum's house. We're still holding the car, though. It's proving useful.”