A Traitor to Memory (100 page)

But wait. God. Had Katie
too
wanted James the Lodger? I wondered. Had she orchestrated events somehow in order to make James Pitchford available to
her
?

As if she perceived the subject festering in my mind, Katie continued with the theme she'd begun. “Katja wasn't interested in James. She saw him as someone who could help her with her English, and I suppose she used him if it comes down to it. She saw that he wanted her to spend her free time with him, and she was happy to do it so long as that free time was spent in language tutorials. James went along with that. I suppose he hoped she'd fall in love with him eventually if he was good enough to her.”

“So he could have been the man who made her pregnant.”

“As payment for the language lessons, d'you mean? I doubt it. Sex in exchange for anything wouldn't have been Katja's style. After all, she could have had sex with Hannes Hertel to get him to take her in the hot air balloon. But she chose a different route entirely, and one that could have got her badly hurt.” Katie had ceased petting the blue budgerigar, and she watched the bird as he slowly regained his senses. His tail feathers returned to normal first, then his wings, and finally his eyes, which opened. He blinked as if wondering where he was.

I said, “Then she was in love with someone other than James. You must know who.”

“I don't know that she was in love with anyone.”

“But if she was pregnant—”

“Don't be naïve, Gideon. A woman doesn't need to be in love to become pregnant. She doesn't even need to be willing.” She returned the blue bird to the cage.

“Are you suggesting …” I couldn't even say it, so horrified was I at the thought of what could have happened and at whose hands.

“No, no,” Katie said hastily. “She wasn't raped. She would have told me. I do believe that. What I meant was that …” A marked hesitation during which Katie took the green bird from the cage and began to give it the same massage as she'd given the other. “As I said, she drank a bit. Not a lot and not often. But when she did … well, I'm afraid she forgot things. So there was every chance that she herself didn't know … That's the only explanation I've ever been able to come up with.”

“Explanation for what?”

“For the fact that I didn't know she was pregnant,” Katie said.

“We told each other everything. And the fact that she never told me she was pregnant suggests to me that she didn't know herself. Unless she wanted to keep the identity of the father a secret, I suppose.”

I didn't want to head in that direction, and I didn't want her to do so. I said, “If she drank on her evenings off and one time ended up with someone she didn't even know, she might not have wanted that to come out. It would only have made her look worse, wouldn't it? Especially when she went to trial. Because they talked about her character at the trial, as I understand.” Or at least, I thought, Sarah-Jane Beckett had done.

“As to that,” Katie said, ceasing her stroking of the green bird's head for a moment, “I wanted to be a character witness. Despite her lie about the telephone call, I thought I could do that much for her. But I wasn't allowed. Her barrister wouldn't call me. And when the Crown Prosecutor discovered that I hadn't even known she was pregnant … You can imagine what he made of that when he was questioning me: How could I declare myself Katja Wolff's closest friend and an authority on what she was and wasn't capable of doing if she'd never trusted me enough to reveal she was pregnant?”

“I see how it went.”

“Where it went was murder. I thought I could help her. I
wanted
to help her. But when she asked me to lie about that phone call—”

“She asked you to lie?”

“Yes. She asked me. But I just couldn't do it. Not in court. Not under oath. Not for anyone. That's where I had to draw the line, and it ended our friendship.”

She lowered her gaze to the bird in her palm, its right wing extended now to receive the touch that the other bird had been given. Intelligent little creature, I thought. She'd not yet mesmerised it with her caress, but the bird was already cooperating.

“It's odd, isn't it?” she said to me. “One can earnestly believe one has a particular type of relationship with another person, only to discover it was never what one thought in the first place.”

“Yes,” I said. “It's very odd.”

19

Y
ASMIN
E
DWARDS STOOD
at the corner of Oakhill and Galveston Roads with the number fifty-five burning into her brain. She didn't want any part of what she was doing, but she was doing it anyway, compelled by a force that seemed at once outside herself and integral to her being.

Her heart was saying Go home, girl. Get away from this place. Go back to the shop and go back to pretending.

Her head was saying Nope, time to know the worst.

And the rest of her body was heaving between her head and her heart, leaving her feeling like a thick blonde heroine from a thriller film, the sort who tiptoes through the dark towards that creaking door while the audience shouts at her to stay away.

She'd stopped at the laundry before leaving Kennington. When she'd not been able to cope any longer with what her mind had been shouting for the past several days, she'd shut up the shop and picked up the Fiesta from the car park on the estate with the intention of heading to Wandsworth straight off. But at the top of Braganza Street, where she had to wait for the traffic to clear before she could turn into Kennington Park Road, she'd caught a glimpse of the laundry tucked between the grocery and the electrical shop, and she'd decided to pop round and ask Katja what she wanted for dinner.

No matter that she knew in her heart this was just an excuse to check up on her lover. She
hadn't
asked Katja about dinner before they'd parted that morning, had she? The unexpected visit from that bloody detective had rattled them away from their regular routine.

So she found a spot to park and she ducked into the shop, where she saw to her relief that Katja was at work: in the back, bending over a steaming iron that she was gliding along someone's lace-edged sheets. The combination of heat, humidity, and a smelly jungle of unwashed laundry made the shop feel like the tropics. Within ten seconds of entering the place, Yasmin was dizzy, with sweat beading on her forehead.

She'd never met Mrs. Crushley, but she recognised the laundry owner from the attitude she projected from her sewing machine when Yasmin approached the counter. She was of the England-fought-the-war-for-the-likes-of-you generation, a woman too young to have done service during any conflict in recent history but just old enough to remember a London that was largely Anglo-Saxon in origin. She said sharply, “Yes? What d' you want?” her glance darting all over Yasmin's person, her face looking like she smelled something bad. Yasmin wasn't carrying laundry, which made her suspect to Mrs. Crushley. Yasmin was black, which went a good distance towards making her dangerous as well. She could have a knife in her kit, after all. She could have a poisoned dart taken from a fellow tribesman tucked away in her hair.

She said politely, “If I could have a word with Katja …?”

“
Katja
?” Mrs. Crushley declared, sounding as if Yasmin had asked if Jesus Christ happened to be working that day. “What you want with her, then?”

“Just a word.”

“Don't see as I need to allow that, do I? 'Nough that I'm employing her, i'n't it, without her taking social calls all day.” Mrs. Crushley lifted the garment she was working on—a man's white shirt—and she used her crooked teeth to bite off a bit of thread from a button she'd been replacing.

At the back of the shop, Katja raised her head. But for some reason, rather than smile a greeting immediately, she looked beyond Yasmin to the door. And
then
she looked back at Yasmin and smiled.

It was the sort of thing anyone might have done, the sort of thing Yasmin once wouldn't have noticed. But now she found that she was acutely attuned to everything about Katja's behaviour. There were
meanings everywhere; there were meanings within meanings. And
that
was down to that filthy detective.

She said to Katja, “Forgot to ask about your tea this morning,” with a wary glance at Mrs. Crushley.

Mrs. Crushley snorted, saying, “Asking her about her
tea
, is it? In my day we ate wha' was put on our plates with no one out there taking requests.”

Katja approached. Yasmin saw that she was soaked through with sweat. Her azure blouse clung to her torso like hunger. Her hair lay limply against her skull. But she'd never looked like this before—used up and bedraggled—at the end of a day since working at the laundry, and seeing her so now when the day was not even half over fired all of Yasmin's suspicions once again. If she
never
came home looking such a mess, Yasmin reasoned, she had to be going somewhere else before returning to the Doddington estate.

She'd come to the laundry just to check up on Katja, to make sure she hadn't bunked off and put herself in a bad place with her parole officer. But like most people who tell themselves they're merely sating their curiosity or doing something for someone else's benefit, Yasmin received more information than she wanted.

She said, “Wha' about it, then?” to Katja, her lips offering a smile that felt like a contortion. “Got any thoughts? I could do us lamb with couscous, if you like. That stew thing, remember?”

Katja nodded. She wiped her forehead on her sleeve and used her cuff against her upper lip. She said, “Yes. This is good. Lamb is good, Yas. Thank you.”

And they stood there after that, perfectly mute. They exchanged a look as Mrs. Crushley watched them both over her half-moon glasses. She said, “Go' the information you 'as wanting, Missie Fancy Hairdo, I believe. Then best take your leave.”

Yasmin pressed her lips together to keep herself from making a choice between saying, “Where?
Who?
” to Katja or “Shit yourself, white cunt” to Mrs. Crushley. Katja spoke instead. She said quietly, “I must get back to work, Yas. See you tonight?”

“Yeah. All right,” Yasmin replied, and she left without asking Katja what time.

What time was the ultimate trap she could have set, the trap that went beyond having a look at Katja's appearance. With Mrs. Crushley sitting there, knowing what hour Katja got off work, it would have been easy to ask exactly when Katja would return from the laundry that evening and to watch for Mrs. Crushley's expression if the time
didn't match up with Katja's hours of employment. But Yasmin didn't want to give the nasty sow the pleasure of drawing an inference of any kind about her relationship with Katja, so she went on her way and drove to Wandsworth.

Now she stood on the street corner in the frigid wind. She examined the neighbourhood, and she set it down next to Doddington Grove Estate, which did not gain from the comparison. The street was clean, like it'd been swept. The pavement was clear of debris and fallen leaves. There were no stains from dog urine on the lampposts and no piles of dog shit in the gutters. The houses were free of graffiti and displayed white curtains in the windows. No laundry hung dispiritedly from balconies, because there were no balconies: just a long row of terraced houses all well taken care of by their inhabitants.