Where Memories Lie (5 page)

“About my mum, do you know anything at all?” she asked, hesitantly, not sure she was ready for an answer.

“Waiting for blood tests, love,” was all he would say. “It’s just down on the right. You can sit with her as long as you’re quiet.”

The cubicle was dark except for the bluish fluorescent light burning above the bed. Her mum looked oddly small and withered against the starched white sheets, and Gemma noticed for the first time that her mother’s red curls were fading to gray. An IV line snaked from a shunt in her hand to the standing pole at the head of the bed, but otherwise there were no wires or tubes, no indication that Vi Walters’s universe had been turned on its head.

Her eyes were closed, her forehead creased in a slight frown, as if sleeping were an effort. When, Gemma wondered, had she last seen her mother in repose? Her mum was always busy, always doing, the only respite she allowed herself the occasional cup of tea in the small kitchen of the flat above the bakery. Sometimes, after a particularly hard day, she would prop her feet on one of the other chairs and sigh, but if Gemma’s dad came in, she would right herself briskly, as if she didn’t want to be seen slacking.

Gemma pulled the stiffly upright visitor’s chair as close to the bed as she could and took her mother’s hand a little awkwardly, unsure if the touch would wake her, but her mum’s eyelids merely fluttered, then the line on her forehead relaxed, as if she’d found some subconscious comfort.

Dawn found Gemma still there, her cheek now pillowed on the bed beside her mother’s hand, when the consultant making early rounds came in with his diagnosis.

“He was circumcised, if that helps.” Dr. Rainey peered over his half-glasses at Gavin Hoxley, then back down at the body on his mortuary table. “He could very well have been Jewish.”

Hoxley averted his eyes. Circumcised or not, the sight of naked male genitalia, blue tinged and limp, made him feel acutely vulnerable. Nor did he like seeing his unidentified victim stripped of all dignity. The man’s hands and nails had been clean, his hair and face barbered and shaved. He had been someone, this thin man with the salt-and-pepper hair, and now he was nothing but a specimen to be poked and prodded on Dr. Rainey’s table.

The fact that the man might have been a Jew made Hoxley still more uncomfortable. If it was true, it meant that the autopsy itself would be considered a desecration of the remains.

Not that Hoxley put much stock in autopsies himself, or cared
much for pathologists under the best of circumstances. Most of them treated wrongful-death investigations as a nuisance, but Rainey, a small, agile man with a long, mobile face and curly brown hair, had a policeman’s curiosity. Hoxley had requested him specifically, even though it had meant trekking across London Bridge to Guy’s Hospital.

Looking up, he found Rainey regarding him with the same intense gaze he leveled at his corpses. “You look a bit worse for wear yourself,” Rainey commented.

“Thanks, Doc. We try to impress.” With a grimace, Hoxley brushed his hat at the front of his suit, a futile gesture. Arriving home in the early hours of the morning, he had flung jacket, shirt, and trousers across a chair without a thought for wrinkles.

Then, when he climbed into bed, he’d discovered that the small détente he’d established with Linda earlier in the evening had vanished—she’d turned away from him, balancing on her edge of the bed like a tightrope walker, and the inches between them seemed as cold and dangerous as no-man’s-land.

When he’d roused himself from a fitful sleep a few hours later, she hadn’t spoken, even though he’d known from her breathing that she was awake. Not wanting to disturb the children, he’d settled for a quick wash and shave instead of a bath, and it was only when he’d looked in his car’s driving mirror that he’d seen the patches he’d missed on his chin. It was fitting, he thought, that he looked like the walking wounded.

“Late night, early start,” he went on with a shrug, “and I don’t have a thing on the victim. What else can you tell me, Doc?” A fingertip search of the garden started at first light had turned up no trace of a murder weapon or any of the victim’s possessions, nor had nearby neighbors admitted to knowing the man or to seeing anything unusual.

Rainey turned up the victim’s palms. “No defense wounds, so I’d say he knew his killer, or was approached in some way that enabled
the killer to take him completely by surprise.” With a gloved finger, he traced the wound on the left side of the chest, just beneath the breast. “I’d say this was the first blow, and the killing blow. It was an upward thrust to the heart, and more than likely made by someone who knew what he was doing. These others”—his finger skimmed four more dark slashes in the white skin—“might have been done to mask the deliberateness of the first blow, or perhaps rage got the better of our killer.”

“You said ‘someone who knew what he was doing.’ You’re assuming the killer was male?”

“Merely being grammatical,” Rainey answered, shaking his head. “A woman could have wielded that knife, if she had knowledge and upper-body strength. That might account for the element of surprise. Still…” Rainey studied the wounds. “I’d put my money on a man, probably ex-service. That would account for the knowledge, and the knife.”

Hoxley waited, eyebrow raised, knowing Rainey liked the drama of his revelations.

“I assume you’ll want to know what sort of weapon was used?”

“So tell me about the knife,” said Hoxley, giving in.

Rainey smiled, showing even white teeth. “A wide, double-edged blade, with a definitive hilt. If you look carefully, you can see the faint indentation it left on the skin.”

Following the pathologist’s pointing finger, Hoxley saw nothing, and decided Rainey’s eyes must be better than his. He nodded agreement, however, not wanting to stop the flow of information.

“My guess would be a hunting knife, or more likely, considering the location of the crime, a combat knife.”

“Ah. Near the Royal Hospital. That’s why you think the killer might have been ex-service.” Hoxley frowned. “Very neat, but then, I don’t trust neat.”

“A wager?”

“I’ll buy you a pint if you’re right,” replied Hoxley. “That’s about
all my salary will cover. Anything else you can tell me from the external exam?” He wouldn’t stay for the dissection—Rainey could send him a report on the state of his victim’s internal organs.

“The hands are soft, but he has a callus on the side of his right index finger, probably from holding a pen. And his teeth. The dental work’s not English. Maybe Eastern European.”

“So I have a middle-aged, moderately well-nourished, literate, possibly European, possibly Jewish, white male. Thanks, Doc.”

“Do I detect a note of sarcasm, Inspector?” Rainey looked hurt. “What did you expect, the poor man’s name tattooed on his privates?”

“More to the point,” said Hoxley, “there’s no tattoo on his forearm. This man was never in the camps.”

The morning dawned clear and fine, but brought Erika no peace. She had slept fitfully—shivering beneath the duvet and an extra woolen blanket, even though the night was mild—and had slipped in and out of vague dreams that left her with only an ache under her breastbone.

She lay in bed, thinking, until the sun coming in the garden window crept across the counterpane, then she rose and forced herself to bathe and dress as if it were any ordinary Sunday. Sweeping up the white hair she still wore long and fastening it with pins, she gazed at her shadowed eyes in the dressing table mirror. Already she regretted speaking to Gemma. The confidence had left her feeling violated, and she had a sudden desire to undo it, to forget the whole matter, push it back into the recesses of her life like a wayward jack-in-the-box.

After a meager breakfast, she made coffee—the real thing, to combat her weariness, doctor’s orders be damned—and took it out into the garden. Setting the newspaper carefully on the white iron table, she sat, but when she raised the delicate china cup to her lips, her hand trembled. She set the cup down and pulled her cardigan more
closely about her shoulders, but not even the brilliant sun seemed able to warm her.

Closing her eyes, she tried to recapture the anticipation of her morning’s idyll, but to one side the neighbor’s children were as raucous as jackdaws, drowning out the birdsong with their shrieks, and on the other the middle-aged husband was industriously spreading organic fertilizer and whistling through his teeth.

It was a good thing, she knew, the communal garden healthy and well tended, the children happy and well fed, but she found herself remembering the shabby comradeship of the war years, when she had been a mere tenant in the garden flat and the neighbors had come down in the raids, sharing mattresses spread on the floor and endless cups of weak tea. Back then they had been bonded by more than self-interest and the desire to discuss their property values.

She and David had ended up in Notting Hill by a combination of necessity and happenstance, and assessing the future value of their property had been the farthest thing from their minds. All Jewish refugees had been placed by the Jewish relief organizations—a guarantee to the government by established English Jews that the incomers would not be a burden on the state. David had been found a job as secretary to an organization official, while she had been taken on that first year at Whiteleys in Bayswater, in the millinery department. Lodging had been found for them near David’s employer.

Those connections had made their transition easier, although her German accent had caused neighbors and coworkers to regard her with suspicion at first. And even then, she’d had to learn to keep quiet when her English friends gloated over the RAF’s retaliation bombings in Germany. She took no pleasure in an eye for an eye, seeing only suffering piled upon suffering, but her efforts to explain that the average German family had no more control over circumstances than the English were met with glassy-eyed hostility.

Later, after the war, when Erika had secured a university teach
ing position, she bought the garden flat and then the entire house, putting tenants in the upper three floors, never dreaming that she’d end up with a gold mine—a gold mine that meant nothing, as there was no one to benefit when she was gone.

Suddenly the breeze shifted and the earthy farmyard smell of her neighbor’s fertilizer hit her in a wave, bringing an unexpected rush of memory that made the bile rise in her throat. Pushing away from the table, she left her coffee untouched and hurried back into the house, swallowing and wiping at her stinging eyes.

When she reached the sitting room she stopped, panting, and clutched a chair back for support. How had her father’s brooch got from a German barn to an auction house in South Kensington? And why did it matter so much, after all this time? That had been another life, and she had been a different person, a phantom of a girl held to her now by the most tenuous of threads.

Erika looked round the sitting room, at the beautiful cocoon she had made for herself, and saw it for a hollow shell, a facade created to hold the past at bay.

But yesterday her life had cracked open and there could be no putting it back. She owed the truth to that long-ago girl, and that meant she would have to accept the help she had enlisted, no matter how difficult either of them found it.

“Drink up.” Kincaid set a cup of hot tea on the kitchen table. Gemma seemed to hesitate for a moment, then sank into a chair and wrapped her hands round the mug. Bringing his own mug to the table, Kincaid sat down opposite and studied her.

She still wore her clothes from the night before, a filmy spring skirt in a soft green print, with a matching green-and-cream beaded cardigan over a lacy camisole. But her makeup had long since rubbed off, the smattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks standing out starkly against skin translucently pale, while the combination of
exhaustion and last night’s mascara had left dark smudges beneath her eyes.

Absently, she reached up to pull her thick copper hair, recently cut, into the plait she could no longer make. Frowning, she settled for tucking disheveled strands behind one ear and returned her hands to her cup.

Geordie settled himself against her feet with a gusty, doggy sigh, and her face relaxed a bit. “Are the boys up?” she asked, sipping her tea.

“No, but they will be soon. So talk.” It was unlike her not to have rung him from hospital, and when he’d tried her mobile it had been switched off. He’d finally drifted off to sleep at the presage of dawn, awaking to find it full light and Gemma still gone, still not answering her mobile.

He’d showered and dressed and was pacing the kitchen by the time she came in. She’d given him a quick hug, her face turned away, murmuring, “Sorry, sorry. I should have rung. But it was hospital regs, and then when I left, I wasn’t sure you’d be up.” It was a fragile excuse, merely confirming that she hadn’t wanted to talk on the phone, and that meant the news was bad.

Reaching across to free one of her hands from the cup, Kincaid squeezed it encouragingly. “Gemma, what’s happened? Your mum—”

“Leukemia.” She met his eyes for the first time. “The consultant says they think she has leukemia.”

He sat back, his grip loosening. “What? But—how could she—”

“She’d been complaining about being tired. For my mum, that meant exhausted. All the symptoms were there, the bruising, the breathlessness, if anyone had noticed.” Her voice was bitter.

“Surely you’re not blaming yourself, Gem? There’s no way you could have known.”

“If I’d seen her more often, I might have—And Dad, he should have seen—If he’d told me—” Her eyes glazed with unshed tears.

“You’d have been a bit worried, maybe. You’d have tried to con
vince her to see a doctor. She’d have refused. So don’t go there. The important thing is what happens now.”

After a moment, she nodded. “They’re moving her this morning to St. Barts, to the cancer specialty ward. The consultant said they would do more tests. And then…He said they’d see.”

“He doesn’t know your mum,” Kincaid said briskly, covering his own dismay. In his experience, doctors were usually encouraging past all reasonable hope. He grasped Gemma’s hand again. “What will we tell the boys?”

“I hate to worry Kit, but he’ll have to know the truth. And Toby…for now, let’s just say Gran’s not feeling well. I don’t think they’ll be able to see her. Her immune system is vulnerable.” She looked at him, stricken. “That means…She could…Anything could—”

“You need to get some sleep,” Kincaid interrupted gently. “Things won’t seem so insurmountable when you’ve had some rest. I’ll talk to the boys, if you want—”

“No.” She was already shaking her head. “I should do it. And this afternoon, when she’s settled, I’ll go to St. Barts—”

“What about Cynthia?”

“Oh, Cyn will be there, with bells on.” One corner of Gemma’s mouth quirked into a reluctant smile. “If she can rope Gerry into minding the kids.” She made no secret of the fact that she thought her sister’s husband was a lout.

“And your dad?”

Gemma’s face went still. “I don’t know. I tried to ring him this morning, but he didn’t answer. Cyn said she’d talk to him. Better her than me, anyway.”

Kincaid thought back to her father’s abrupt visit the night before. “I never realized your dad disliked me quite so much.”

“Oh, it’s not you, specifically. It’s everything. This”—her gesture encompassed the house—“my job. He thinks I’ve got above my station.”