A Traitor to Memory (81 page)

T
HE RINGING FORCED
Lynley to swim upwards, out of a deep sleep. He opened his eyes into the darkness of the bedroom and flailed out for the alarm clock, cursing when he knocked it to the floor without managing to silence it. Next to him, Helen didn't stir. Even when he switched on the light, she continued to sleep. That had long been her gift, and it remained so, even in pregnancy: She always slept like an effigy in a Gothic cathedral.

He blinked, became semi-conscious, and realised it was the phone sounding off and not the alarm. He saw the time—three-forty in the morning—and knew that the news wasn't good.

Assistant Commissioner Sir David Hillier was on the line. He snapped, “Charing Cross Hospital. Malcolm's been hit by a car.”

Lynley said, “What? Malcolm? What?”

Hillier said, “Wake up, Inspector. Rub ice cubes over your face if necessary. Malcolm's in the operating theatre. Get down here. I want you on this. Now.”

“When? What's happened?”

“God damn bastard didn't even stop,” Hillier said, and his voice—uncharacteristically torn and sounding completely unlike the urbane and measured political tones that the A
C
usually employed at New Scotland Yard—illustrated the level of his concern.

Hit by a car. Bastard didn't stop
. Lynley was instantly fully awake, as
if a mixture of caffeine and adrenaline had been shot into his heart. He said, “Where? When?”

“Charing Cross Hospital. Get down here, Lynley.” And Hillier rang off.

Lynley bolted from the bed and grabbed the first items of clothing that came to hand. He scrawled a note to his wife in lieu of waking her, giving her the bare details. He added the time and left the note on his pillow. Thrusting one arm into his overcoat, he went out into the night.

The earlier wind had died altogether, but the cold was unremitting and it had begun to rain. Lynley turned his coat collar up and jogged round the corner to the mews where he kept the Bentley in a locked garage.

He tried not to think about Hillier's terse message or the tone with which it had been given. He didn't want to make an interpretation of the facts till he had the facts, but he couldn't stop himself from making the leap anyway. One hit-and-run. And now another.

He assumed there would be little traffic on the King's Road at this time of night, so he headed directly for Sloane Square, coursed halfway round the leaf-clogged fountain in its centre, and shot past Peter Jones, where—in a bow to the growing commercialism of their society—Christmas decorations had long since been twinkling from its windows. He flew past the trendy shops of Chelsea, past the silent streets of dignified terraces. He saw a uniformed constable squatting to talk to a blanket-shrouded figure in the doorway of the town hall—the disenfranchised homeless yet another sign of their disparate times—but that was the only life he encountered beyond the few cars he passed on his flight towards Hammersmith.

Just short of King's College, he made a turn to the right, and he began to cut across and upwards to reach Lillie Road, which would take him closest to Charing Cross Hospital. When he zoomed into the car park and set off to Casualty at a sprint, he finally allowed himself a look at his watch. It had been less than twenty minutes since he'd taken Hillier's call.

The AC—as unshaven and disheveled as Lynley himself—was in the waiting area of the casualty ward, speaking tersely to a uniformed constable while three others clustered uneasily nearby. He caught sight of Lynley and flicked a finger at the uniform to dismiss him. As the constable rejoined his colleagues, Hillier strode to meet Lynley in the middle of the room.

Despite the hour, rain made the casualty ward a busy place.
Someone called out, “Another ambulance coming from Earl's Court,” which suggested what the next five minutes were going to be like in the immediate vicinity, and Hillier took Lynley by the arm, leading him beyond Casualty, down several corridors, and up several flights of stairs. He said nothing till they were in a private waiting area that served the families of those undergoing surgery in the operating theatre. No one else was there.

Lynley said, “Where's Frances? She's not—”

“Randie phoned us,” Hillier cut in. “Round one-fifteen.”

“Miranda? What happened?”

“Frances phoned her in Cambridge. Malcolm wasn't home. Frances'd gone to bed and she woke up with the dog barking outside in a frenzy. She found him in the front garden with the lead on his collar, but Malcolm not with him. She panicked, phoned Randie. Randie phoned us. By the time we got to Frances, the hospital had him in Casualty and had rung her. Frances thought he'd had a heart attack while walking the dog. She still doesn't know …” Hillier blew out a breath. “We couldn't get her out of the house. We got her to the door, even had it open, Laura on one arm and myself on the other. But the night air hit her and that was it. She got hysterical. The bloody dog went mad.” Hillier took out a handkerchief and passed it over his face. Lynley realised that this moment constituted the first time he'd seen the assistant commissioner even slightly undone.

He said, “How bad is it?”

“They've gone into his brain to clear out a clot from beneath the skull fracture. There's swelling, so they're dealing with that as well. They're doing something with a monitor … I don't remember what. It's about the pressure. They do something with a monitor to keep note of the pressure. Do they put it in his brain? I don't know.” He shoved his handkerchief away, clearing his throat roughly. “God,” he said, and stared in front of him.

Lynley said, “Sir … can I get you a coffee?” and felt all the awkwardness of the offer as he spoke it. There were gallons of bad blood between himself and the assistant commissioner. Hillier had never made an effort to hide his antipathy for Lynley, and Lynley himself had never seen fit to disguise the disdain he felt for Hillier's rapacious pursuit of promotion. Seeing him like this, however, in an instance of vulnerability as Hillier confronted what had happened to his brother-in-law and friend of more than twenty-five years, painted Hillier in a different shade than previously. But Lynley wasn't sure what to do with the picture.

“They've said they're probably going to have to take out most of his spleen,” Hillier said. “They think they can save the liver, perhaps half of it. But they don't know yet.”

“Is he still—”

“Uncle David!” Miranda Webberly's arrival broke into Lynley's question. She flew through the door to the waiting area, wearing a baggy track suit with her curly hair pulled back and held in place with a knotted scarf. She was bare of foot and white in the face. She had a set of car keys clutched in her hand. She made a beeline for her uncle's arms.

“You got someone to drive you?” he asked her.

“I borrowed a car from one of the girls. I drove myself.”

“Randie, I told you—”

“Uncle David.” And to Lynley, “Have you seen him, Inspector?” And then back to her uncle without waiting for an answer, “How is he? Where's Mum? She's not …? Oh, God. She wouldn't come, would she?” Miranda's eyes were bright liquid as she went on bitterly, saying, “Of course not, of
course
not,” in a broken voice.

“Your aunt Laura's with her,” Hillier said. “Come over here, Randie. Sit down. Where're your shoes?”

Miranda looked down at her feet blankly. “God, I've come without them, Uncle David. How
is
he?”

Hillier told her what he'd told Lynley, everything except the fact that the accident was a hit-and-run. He was just reaching the part about attempting to save the superintendent's liver, when a doctor in surgical garb pushed through the doorway, saying “Webberly?” He surveyed all three of them with the bloodshot eyes of a man who wasn't bearing good news.

Hillier identified himself, introduced Randie and Lynley, put his arm round his niece, and said, “What's happened?”

The surgeon said Webberly was in recovery and he'd go from there straight to intensive care where he would be kept in a chemically induced coma to rest the brain. Steroids would be used to ease the swelling there, barbiturates to render him unconscious. He'd be paralysed with muscle anaesthetics to keep him immobile until his brain recovered.

Randie seized upon the final word. “So he'll be all right? Dad'll be all right?”

They didn't know, the surgeon told her. His condition was critical. With cerebral oedema, it was always touch-and-go. One had to be vigilant with the swelling, to keep the brain from pushing down on its stem.

“What about the liver and the spleen?” Hillier asked.

“We've saved what we could. There're several fractures as well, but those are secondary in comparison to the rest.”

“May I see him?” Randie asked.

“You're …?”

“His daughter. He's my dad. May I see him?”

“No other next of kin?” This the doctor asked Hillier.

“She's ill,” Hillier said.

“Rotten luck,” was the reply. The surgeon nodded at Randie, saying, “We'll let you know when he's out of recovery. It won't be for several hours, though. You'd be wise to get some rest.”

When he left, Randie turned to her uncle and Lynley, saying anxiously, “He won't die. That means he won't die. That's what it means.”

“He's alive right now, and that's what counts,” her uncle told her, but he didn't say what Lynley knew he was thinking: Webberly might not die, but he also might not recover, at least not to a degree that made him fit for something more than life as an invalid.

Without wanting it to happen, Lynley found himself thrust back in time to another head injury, and another bout of pressure on the brain. That had left his own friend Simon St. James much in the state he was in today, and the years that had passed since the man's long convalescence had not returned to him what Lynley's negligence had taken.

Hillier settled Randie on a PVC sofa, where a discarded hospital blanket marked another anxious relative's vigil. He said, “I'm going to fetch you some tea,” and he indicated to Lynley that he was to follow. Out in the corridor, Hillier paused. He said, “You're acting superintendent till further notice. Put together a team to scour the town for the bastard that hit him.”

“I've been working on a case that—”

“Is there something wrong with your hearing?” Hillier cut in. “Drop that case. I want you on this one. Use whatever resources you need. Report to me every morning. Clear? The uniforms below will put you in the picture of what we've got so far, which is sod bloody all in a basket. A driver going the opposite direction got a glimpse of the car, but it didn't register beyond something large like a limo or a taxicab. He thought the roof might be grey, but you can discount that. The reflection of street lights would have made it look grey, and when was the last time you saw a two-tone car?”

“Limo or taxi. Black vehicle, then,” Lynley said.

“I'm glad to see you haven't lost your remarkable powers of deduction.”

The gibe gave credence to how little Hillier actually wanted him involved in the case at hand. Hearing it, Lynley felt the old quick heat, felt his fingers draw inward to form a fist. But when he said, “Why me?” he did his best to make the question sound polite.

“Because Malcolm would choose you if he were able to speak,” Hillier told him. “And I intend to honour his wishes.”

“Then you think he won't make it.”

“I don't think anything.” But the tremor in Hillier's voice gave the lie to his words. “So just get onto it. Drop what you're doing and get onto it now. Find this son of a bitch. Drag him in. There're houses along the road where he was hit. Someone out there has got to have seen something.”

“This may be related to what I'm working on already,” Lynley said.

“How the hell—”

“Hear me out, if you will.”

Hillier listened as Lynley sketched in the details of the hit-and-run two nights earlier. It was another black car, he explained, and there was a connection between Detective Superintendent Malcolm Webberly and the victim. Lynley didn't spell out the exact nature of their connection. He merely let it suffice that an investigation from two decades in the past might well be what lay beneath the two hit-and-runs.

Hillier hadn't reached his level of command without his fair share of brains, however. He said incredulously, “The mother of the child and the chief investigating officer? If this is connected, who the
hell
would wait two decades to go after them?”

“Someone who didn't know where they were till recently, I expect.”

“And you've someone likely among the group you're interviewing?”

“Yes,” Lynley said after a moment's reflection. “I believe we may have.”

Yasmin Edwards sat on the edge of her son's bed and curved her hand round his small, perfect shoulder. “Cme on, Danny. Time to get up.” She gave him a shake. “Dan, di'n't you hear your alarm?”

Daniel scowled and burrowed further beneath the covers so that
his bottom made an appealing hillock in the bed that caught at Yasmin's heart. He said, “Jus' a more minute, Mum. Please. C'me on. Jus' a more minute.”

“No more minutes. They're adding up too fast. You'll be late for school. Or have to go without breakfast.”