Free A Traitor to Memory by Elizabeth George

friend's name?”
    “I say, am I being accused of something?” Pitchley sounded flustered rather than concerned. “Because if phoning the emergency services when one finds a body is grounds for suspicion, I'd like a solicitor with me when I—Hello, there. Do keep your distance from my car, would you please?” This last was directed towards a swarthy constable who was part of a fingertip search ongoing in the street.
    More constables combed the area surrounding Pitchley and Leach, and it was from this group that a female PC presently emerged, a woman's handbag in her latex-gloved grip. She trotted towards Leach, and he donned his own gloves, stepping away from Pitchley with instructions to the man to give his address and phone number to one of the policemen guarding his car. He met the female constable in the middle of the street and took the handbag from her.
    “Where was it?”
    “Ten yards back. Beneath a Montego. Keys and wallet are in it. There's an ID as well. Driving licence.”
    “Is she local?”
    “Henley-on-Thames,” the constable replied.
    Leach unfastened the handbag's clasp, fished out the keys, and handed them over to the constable. “See if they fit any of the cars in the area,” he told her and as she set off to do so, he took out the wallet and opened it to locate the ID.
    He first read the name without making a connection. Later he would wonder how he'd failed to twig her identity instantly. But he was feeling so much like trampled horse turds that it wasn't until he'd read not only her organ donor card but also the name imprinted on her cheques that he realised who the woman actually was.
    Then he looked from the handbag he was holding to the crumpledform of its owner lying like so much discarded rubbish in the street. And as his body shuddered, what he said was, “God. Eugenie. Jesus Christ. Eugenie”.

    Far across town, Detective Constable Barbara Havers sang along with the rest of the party-goers and wondered how many more choruses of jolly-good-fellowing she was going to have to live through before she could make her escape. It wasn't the hour of the night that bothered her. True, one in the morning meant that she was already cutting critically into her beauty rest, but since even doing a Sleeping-Beauty wouldn't make an inroad into her general appearance, she knew that she could live with the knowledge that if she managed to get four hours' kip at the end of the night, she was going to be one lucky bird. Rather, she was bothered by the reason for the party, exactly why , along with her colleagues from New Scotland Yard, she'd been crammed into an overheated house in Stamford Brook for the last five hours.
    She knew that twenty-five years of marriage was something worth celebrating. She could count on the digits of her right hand the couples she knew who'd attained that hallmark of connubial longevity, and she wouldn't even have to use her thumb. But there was something about this particular couple that didn't strike her as right, and try as she had done from the moment she'd first stepped into the sitting room where yellow crepe paper and green balloons made a brave attempt to camouflage a shabbiness that had more to do with indifference than with poverty, she'd not been able to shake the feeling that the guests of honour and the company assembled were all taking part in a domestic drama for which she—Barbara Havers—had not been given a script.
    At first she told herself that her disconnected feeling came from partying with her superior officers, one of whom had saved her neck from the professional noose nearly three months earlier and one of whom had attempted to knot the rope himself. Then she decided her discomfort came from arriving at the party in her usual state—dateless—while everyone else had a companion in tow, including her fellow and favourite detective constable, Winston Nkata, who'd brought along his mother, an imposing woman six feet tall and dressed in the Caribbean