A Traitor to Memory (48 page)

“Her?”

“Yes. Her. She may have received mail in the past from an internet Lothario who calls himself TongueMan—”

“Good God.”

“—but there was nothing on the machine from him when we logged on to it in her office.” Lynley went on to tell St. James Eugenie Davies' password, which the other man jotted down on a piece of yellow legal paper that he ripped from a pad on the work-table.

“Am I looking for anything besides TongueMan?”

“You're looking for all activity, Simon. E-mail in, e-mail out. Surfing the net. Whatever she's done once she's logged on, let's say, for the last two months. That's possible, isn't it?”

“Most of the time, yes. But I don't have to tell you how much more quickly an expert from the Yard could manage this for you, not to mention an order from some legal authority should you need to strong-arm the internet provider.”

“Right. I know that.”

“Which leads me to conclude that you suspect there's something here”—he placed his hand on the machine—“that puts someone in a difficult position, someone you'd rather not see get into a difficult position. Is that right?”

Lynley said steadily, “Yes. That's right.”

“It's not you, I hope.”

“Great Scot. No.”

St. James nodded. “I'm glad of that, then.” He looked momentarily uncomfortable and tried to hide the discomfort by lowering his head and rubbing the back of his neck. “So things are well with you and Helen, then,” he settled on saying.

Lynley saw his line of reasoning. A mysterious
her
, a computer in Lynley's possession, an unnamed someone getting into difficulty should his e-mail address show up on Eugenie Davies' computer … It added
up to an illicit something, and St. James's longstanding relationship with Lynley's wife—after all, he'd known Helen since she was eighteen—would make him more protective of her than one would expect of someone's employer.

Lynley hastened to say, “Simon, it's nothing to do with Helen. Nor with me. You have my word on that. So will you do this for me?”

“You're going to owe me, Tommy.”

“In spades. But I'm so far in debt to you at this point that I might as well sign over the land in Cornwall and have done with it.”

“That's a tempting offer.” St. James smiled. “I've always fancied myself a country squire.”

“You'll do it, then?”

“I expect I will. But without the land. God knows we don't want to set your ancestors spinning in their graves.”

DC Winston Nkata knew the woman was Katja Wolff before she opened her mouth, but put to the rack he wouldn't have been able to tell anyone exactly how he knew. She had a key to the flat, true, so there was that to identify her since this flat in the Doddington Grove Estate had been listed as her address when he'd tracked down her parole officer at DI Lynley's request a short time earlier. But it was more than the key unlocking the door that told him whom he was looking at. There was the way she carried herself, like someone wary of every potential encounter, and there was also her expression, a perfect blank, the sort of expression a lag wore inside so as not to draw attention to herself.

She stopped right inside the door, and her glance went from Yasmin Edwards to Nkata and back to Yasmin, where it remained. She said, “Am I interrupting you, Yas?” in a husky voice that bore less of the German accent than Nkata had expected. But she'd been more than twenty years in the country at this point. And she hadn't been surrounded by her fellow Germans.

Yasmin said, “This is the Bill, this is. Detective Constable. He's called Nkata,” and Katja Wolff's body went on the alert: a subtle, tensing awareness that someone not born into the land of gang activity like Winston Nkata might not have noticed.

Katja removed her coat—cherry red—and the close-fitting grey hat with its matching band of the coat's bright colour. Beneath, she
had on a sky-blue pullover, looking like cashmere but worn to a paperlike thinness at the elbows, and pale grey trousers of a slick material threaded through with silver when she moved in the light.

She said to Yasmin, “Where's Dan?”

Yasmin indicated the bathroom with her head. “Doing wigs.”

“And this bloke?” She tilted her chin at Nkata.

He took the reins while he had the chance, saying, “You're Katja Wolff?”

She didn't reply. Instead, she walked over to the bathroom and said hello to Yasmin Edwards' son, who appeared to be up to his elbows in bubbles. The boy looked over his shoulder at her, then into the sitting room, where he managed to lock eyes with Nkata for a moment. But he said nothing. Katja closed the bathroom door on him and strode to the old three-piece suite that constituted the sitting room furniture. She sat on the sofa, opened a packet of Dunhills that lay on the table next to it, and took out a cigarette, which she lit. She picked up the television remote and was about to punch the set on, when Yasmin said her name: not in supplication but in warning, it sounded to Nkata.

At that, Winston found that he wanted to study Yasmin Edwards because he wanted to understand: her, the situation here in Kennington, her son, the relationship between the two women. He'd got beyond the fact that she was beautiful. He was still sorting through her anger, though, as well as through the fears she was doing her best to hide. He wanted to say, “You're all
right
here, girl,” but he recognised the foolishness of doing so.

He said to Katja Wolff, “Laundry up on Kennington High Street says you didn't show to work today.”

She said, “I was ill this morning, all day in fact. I've just been to the chemist. There is no law broken in that, I believe,” and she drew in on the cigarette and examined him.

Nkata saw Yasmin glance between them. She clasped her hands in front of her, just at the level of her sex, as if she wished to hide it. He said to Katja Wolff, “Go to the chemist by motor, then?”

“Yes. What about it?”

“Got your own motor, have you?”

Katja said, “Why? Have you come to request that I drive you somewhere?” Her English was perfect, remarkable really, as impressive as the woman herself.

“Got a car, Miss Wolff?” he repeated patiently.

“No. They don't generally provide parolees with transport when they release them. It's a pity, I think. Especially for those who serve time for armed robbery. How bleak their future must look to them, knowing they'll have to escape from the scenes of their future crimes on foot. While for someone like me …?” She tapped her cigarette against a ceramic ashtray that was shaped, seasonally, like a pumpkin. “A car is quite inessential for working in a laundry. One only needs a high tolerance for both endless boredom and insufferable heat.”

“So it's not your car, then?”

Yasmin crossed the room as Nkata completed the question. She joined Katja on the sofa and neatly rearranged a few magazines and tabloids on the iron-legged coffee table in front of it. Having done this, she placed a hand on Katja's knee. She looked at Nkata across the line she'd drawn as clearly as if she'd wielded chalk on the carpet squares.

She said, “What'd you want with us, man? Time to spit it out or time to leave.”

“Got a car yourself?” Nkata asked her.

“'F I do?”

“Like to see it, I would.”

Katja said, “Why? Who is it you've come to speak to, Constable?”

“We'll get to that soon enough, I expect,” Nkata said. “Where's the car?”

The two women were motionless for a moment, during which a resuming of water roaring into the bathtub told everyone that Daniel was taking his mother's wigs through a manual rinse cycle. Katja was the one to break the silence, and she did it with the confidence of a woman who'd spent two decades educating herself as to her rights with regard to the police. “Have you a warrant? For anything, by the way?”

“Didn't think I'd need one, conversation being what's on my mind.”

“Conversation about Yasmin's car?”

“Missus Edwards' car. Ah. Right. Where is it?” Nkata tried not to look smug. The German woman flushed anyway, perhaps realising that her own dislike and distrust of Nkata had caused her to trip.

“What's this
about
, man?” Yasmin snapped, but her voice was higher now and anxiety was tightening her hold on Katja's knee. “You're wanting a warrant if you mean to go through my car, hear me?”

Nkata said, “I don't need to go through it, do I, Missus Edwards. But I'll have a look at it all the same.”

The women exchanged a glance, after which Katja rose and went into the kitchen. There, cupboards opened and closed, a kettle
clanged onto the cooker, and a burner hissed. For her part, Yasmin waited for a moment as if for a sign from the kitchen of something other than tea being made. When she didn't receive one, she got to her feet and snatched a key from a hook to the right of the flat's front door. She said, “Come on, then,” to Nkata and, coatless despite the weather, she led him outside. Katja Wolff remained behind.

Yasmin took lengthy strides towards the lift, as if she didn't care one way or another if the detective was following her. When she moved, her plaits—so long that they reached her shoulder blades—made a music that was both hypnotic and soothing, and Nkata realised that he couldn't account for the effect that that music had on him. He felt the reaction in his throat first, then behind his eyes, then in his chest. He shook it away and looked down at the car park, then over at what appeared to be allotments across the street, then in the direction of Manor Place, where he could glimpse the first of a row of derelict buildings that expressed what years of government indifference and urban decay had done to the neighbourhood.

In the lift, he said, “'D you grow up round here?”

Yasmin stared him down in silence so he finally moved his gaze to the words
eat me till I scream
that someone had painted in nail varnish on the lift wall in line with Yasmin's right shoulder. The graffito brought his mother immediately to Nkata's mind: a female vigilante who would no more allow graffiti to foul her landscape than would she permit a profanity uttered within her hearing. Alice Nkata would have been so quickly inside that lift with the varnish remover that the imperative wouldn't have had a chance even to dry before she had obliterated it. Thinking of this and his dignified mother and how she'd managed to maintain her dignity in a society that saw a black woman first and the woman herself only second and if she was lucky that day, Nkata smiled fondly.

Yasmin said, “Like to have women under your thumb, do you, man? That why you joined the Bill, was it?”

He wanted to tell her that she shouldn't sneer, not because the expression distorted her face and stretched the scar on her lip so that it seemed to bloom, but because when she sneered, she looked frightened. And fear was a woman's enemy on the streets.

He said, “Sorry. Thinking of my mum.”

“Your mum.” She rolled her eyes. “You telling me next I remind you 'f her, yeah?”

Nkata laughed outright at the thought of the comparison. He said, “Not at all, girl.” And he chuckled more.

Her eyes narrowed. The lift door creaked open. She stalked outside.

Across a strip of dying lawn, the car park held a small array of cars that spoke of the general economic status of the people in the Doddington Grove Estate. Yasmin Edwards took Nkata to a Fiesta with a rear bumper that clung to the vehicle like an inebriate to a lamppost. The car had once been red but the colour had long ago oxidized so it was mostly rust. Nkata walked round it carefully. The front right headlamp had a jagged crack in it, but aside from the rear bumper, that was the extent of the damage.

He squatted at the front of the Fiesta and peered beneath it, using a pocket torch to shed some light on its undercarriage. He did the same thing at the back of the vehicle, taking his time. Yasmin Edwards stood by in silence, her arms wrapped round her against the chill, her summertime top meagre protection against the wind that was blowing and the rain that had begun to fall.

Nkata straightened, his inspection finished. He said, “When'd that headlamp get smashed?”

“What headlamp?” She went to the front of the car and examined it herself. “I don't know,” she said, and for the first time since learning who and what Nkata was, she did not sound combative as she ran her fingers across the uneven crack in the glass. “Lights still work proper, so I didn't notice.” She was shivering now, but it seemed more likely with the cold than with concern. Nkata removed his overcoat, saying, “Here,” and handing it over. She took it.

Nkata waited till she had slid her arms into his coat, till she had snugly wrapped it round her, till he saw what she looked like with the collar raised and expressing a curve against her dark skin. Then he said, “You both drive this car, Missus Edwards? Right that, isn't it? You and Katja Wolff?”

And the coat was off and thrust back at him instantly, almost before he finished the question. If there had been a moment of anything more than hostility between them, he'd just managed to shatter it. Yasmin looked up to the flat where Katja Wolff was making tea. She returned her glance to Nkata and said evenly, arms encircling her body once more, “That all you want with us, man?”