A Traitor to Memory (101 page)

Someone could be happy here, Yasmin thought. Someone could make a special life here. She began to walk cautiously down the pavement. No one was about, but she still felt watched. She adjusted the button at the top of her jacket and pulled out a scarf to cover her hair. She knew it was a stupid thing to do. She knew it marked her: scared, less than, and worried about. But she did it anyway because she wanted to feel safe, at ease, and confident here, and she was willing to try anything to get that way.

When she reached Number Fifty-five, she hesitated at the gate. She wondered at this final moment if she could really go through with it and she asked herself if she really wanted to know. She cursed the black man who'd brought her to this moment, loathing not only him but herself: him for passing her the information in the first place, herself for making something out of it.

But she had to know. She had too many questions that a simple knock on the door might answer. She couldn't leave until she'd confronted the fears that she'd too long been trying to ignore.

She opened the gate into an untidy front garden. The path to the door was flagstones and the door itself was shiny red with a polished brass knocker in the centre. Autumn-bare shrub branches arched over the porch, and a wire milk basket held three empty bottles, one of which had a note sticking out of it.

Yasmin bent to grasp this note, thinking at the last moment that she wouldn't actually have to face … to see … Perhaps the note would tell her. She unrolled it against her palm and read the words:
We're switching to two skimmed, one silver top from now on, please.
That was all. The handwriting gave away nothing. Age, sex, race, creed. The message could have been penned by anyone.

She played her fingers into her palms, encouraging her hand to lift and do its work. She took a step back and looked at the bay window, in the hope that she might see something there that might save her from what she was about to do. But the curtains were like the others on the street: swathes of material that invited some little light into the room and against which a silhouette could be seen at night. But during the day they protected the room within from outside watchers. So Yasmin was left with the door again.

She thought, Bugger this. She had a
right
to know. She marched to the door and rapped the knocker forcefully against the wood.

She waited. Nothing. She rang the bell. She heard it sounding right near to the door, one of those fancy bells that played a tune. But the result was the same. Nothing.

Yasmin didn't want to think she'd come all the way from Kennington to learn nothing. She didn't want to think what it would be like, continuing with Katja as if she didn't have any doubts. It was better to know: the good or the bad. Because if she knew, then she'd have a clear sense of what she was meant to do next.

His card weighed in her pocket like a four-by-two-inch sheet of pure lead. She'd first looked at it, turning it over and over in her hands as the hours passed last night without Katja coming home. She'd phoned, of course. She'd said, “Yas, I'll be late,” and she'd said, “It's a bit complicated for the phone. Tell you later, shall I?” when Yasmin had asked what was up. But
later
hadn't come when Yasmin expected and after several hours, she'd got out of bed, gone to the window, tried to use the darkness to understand something of what was happening, and finally gone to her jacket, where she'd found that card he'd given her in the shop.

She'd stared at the name: Winston Nkata. African, that was. But he sounded West Indies when he wasn't being dead careful to sound plod. A phone number was printed on the bottom, to the left of the name, a Met number that she'd sooner die than ring. A pager number was across from it, in the right corner. “You page me,” he'd said. “Day or night.”

Or had he said that? And in any case, what did it matter, because she wasn't about to grass to a cop. Not in this lifetime. She wasn't that stupid. So she'd shoved the card into her jacket pocket, where she felt it now, a little piece of lead growing hot, growing heavy, weighing her right shoulder down with the pull of it, drawing her like metal to a magnet and the magnet was an action she would not take.

She stepped away from the house. She backed down the flagstone path to the pavement. She felt behind her for the gate, and she backed through it as well. If someone intended to peer through those curtains as she departed, then she damn well intended to see who it was. But that didn't happen. The house was empty.

Yasmin made her decision when a DHL delivery van rumbled into Galveston Road. It puttered along as the driver looked for the correct address, and when he had the right house, he left the van running as he trotted up to the door to make his delivery three houses away from where Yasmin stood. She waited as he rang the bell. Ten seconds and that door was opened. An exchange of pleasantries, a signature on a clipboard, and the delivery man trotted back to his van and went on his way, glancing at Yasmin where she stood on the pavement, giving her a look that registered only
female, black, bad face, decent body, good for a shag.
Then he and his van were gone. But possibility was not.

Yasmin walked towards the house where he'd made the delivery. She rehearsed her lines. She paused out of sight of the window identical to the window on Number Fifty-five and took a moment to scribble that address—Number Fifty-five Galveston Road, Wandsworth—on the the back of the detective's card. Then she removed her headscarf and refashioned it into a turban. She took her earrings off and shoved the brass and beads of them into her pocket. And although her jacket was buttoned to her neck, she undid it and unclipped her necklace—just for good measure—depositing it into her shoulder bag, redoing her jacket, and flattening its collar to a humble and unfashionable angle.

Garbed as well as she could be for the part, she entered the garden of the DHL house and rapped hesitantly on its front door. There was a spy hole in it, so she lowered her head, took her bag from her shoulder, and held it awkwardly like a handbag in front of her. She arranged her features as best she could to portray humility, fear, worry, and a desperate eagerness to please. In a moment, she heard the voice.

“Yes? What can I do for you?” It came from behind the closed door, but the
fact
of it told Yasmin she'd cleared the first hurdle.

She looked up. “Please, can you help me?” she asked. “I have come to clean your neighbour's house, but she is not at home. Number Fifty-five?”

“She works during the day,” the voice called back.

“But I do not understand …” Yasmin held up the detective's card. She said, “If you see … Her husband wrote it all down …?”

“Husband?” The locks on the door were released and the door itself was opened. A middle-aged woman stood there, a pair of scissors in her hand. Seeing Yasmin's gaze go to the scissors and her expression alter, the woman said, “Oh. Sorry. I was opening a parcel. Here. Let me have a look at that.”

Yasmin willingly handed over the card. The woman read the address.

“Yes. I see. It certainly does say … But you said her husband?” And when Yasmin nodded, the woman turned the card over and read the front of it, just exactly what Yasmin herself had read and read again on the previous night:
Winston Nkata, Detective Constable, Metropolitan Police
. A phone number and a pager number. Everything on the complete up and up.

“Well, of course, the fact that he's a policeman …” the woman said thoughtfully. But then, “No. There's a mistake, I'm sure. No one named Nkata lives there.” She handed the card back.

“You are sure?” Yasmin asked, drawing her eyebrows together, attempting to look her most pathetic. “He said I should clean …”

“Yes, yes, my dear girl. I'm sure that he did. But he's given you the wrong address for some reason. No one named Nkata lives in that house or ever has done. It's been lived in for years by a family called McKay.”

“McKay?” Yasmin asked. And her heart felt lighter. Because if there was a partner to Harriet Lewis the solicitor as Katja had claimed, then her fears were groundless if this was her home.

“Yes, yes, McKay,” the woman said. “Noreen McKay. And her niece and nephew. Very nice woman, she is, very pleasant, but she isn't married. Never has been as far as I know. And certainly not to someone called Nkata, if you know what I mean, and no offence intended.”

“I … yes. Yes. I see,” Yasmin whispered, because that was all she could force from herself upon learning the full name of the occupant of Number Fifty-five. “I do thank you, madam. Thank you very much indeed.” She backed away.

The woman came forward. “See here, are you all right, Miss?” she asked.

“Oh yes. Yes. Just … When one expects work and is disappointed …”

“I'm awfully sorry. If I hadn't had my own woman here yesterday, I'd not mind letting you have a go with my house. You seem decent enough. May I have your name and number on the chance my
woman doesn't work out? She's one of those Filipinos, and they can't always be relied on, if you know what I mean.”

Yasmin raised her head. What she wanted to say battled with what she needed to say, given the situation. Need won. There were other considerations beyond insult right now. She said, “You are very kind, madam,” and she called herself Nora and recited eight digits at random, all of which the woman eagerly wrote onto a pad that she took from a table by the door.

“Well,” she said as she wrote the last number with a flourish. “Our little encounter might turn out all for the best.” She offered a smile. “You never know, do you?”

How true, Yasmin thought. She nodded, went back to the street, and returned to Number Fifty-five for a final look at it. She felt numb, and for a moment she encouraged herself to believe that the numbness was a sign of not caring about what she'd just learned. But she knew the reality was that she was in shock.

And between the time of the shock's wearing off and the rage's setting in, she hoped she'd have five minutes to decide what to do.

Winston Nkata's pager went off while Lynley was reading the action reports that DCI Leach's team had been sending in to the incident room for compilation during the morning. In the absence of both eyewitnesses and evidence at the crime scene beyond the paint chips, the vehicle used in the first hit-and-run was what was left as the murder squad's focus. But according to the activities reports, the town's body shops were proving to be fallow ground so far, as were the parts shops, where something like a chrome bumper might possibly be purchased to replace one damaged in an accident.

Lynley looked up from one of the reports to see Nkata scrutinising his pager and contemplatively fingering his facial scar. He took off his reading glasses and said, “What is it, Winnie?” and the constable replied, “Don't know, man.” But he said it slowly, as if he had his thoughts on the subject, after which he went to a phone on a nearby desk, where a WPC was entering data into the computer.

“I think our next step is Swansea, sir,” Lynley had said to DCI Leach by mobile once they'd completed their interview with Raphael Robson. “It seems to me that we've got all the principals in hand at this point. Let's run their names through the DVLA and see if one of them has an older car registered, in addition to what they're driving
round town. Start with Raphael Robson and see what he has. It could be in a lockup somewhere.”

Leach had agreed. And this is what the WPC at the computer was doing at the moment: contacting the vehicle department, plugging in names, and looking for ownership of a classic—or simply an old car.

“We can't discount the possibility that one of our suspects just has access to cars—old or otherwise,” Leach had pointed out. “Could be the friend of a collector, for instance. Friend of a car salesman. Friend of someone who works as a mechanic.”

“And we also can't discount the possibility that the car was stolen, recently purchased from a private party but not registered, or brought over from Europe to do the job and already returned with no one the wiser,” Lynley said. “In which case the DVLA will be a dead end. But in the absence of anything else …”

“Right,” Leach said. “What've we got to lose?”

Both of them knew that what they had to lose was Webberly, whose condition had altered perilously in Charing Cross Hospital.

“Heart attack,” Hillier had said tersely from intensive care. “Just three hours ago. Blood pressure went down, heart started acting dodgy, then … bam. It was massive.”

“Jesus Christ,” Lynley said.

“Used those things on him … what're they … electrical shocks …”

“Those paddles?”

“Ten times. Eleven. Randie was there. They got her out of the room but not before the alarms and the shouting and … It's a
bloody
mess, this.”

“What are they telling you, sir?”

“He's monitored every which way to Sunday. IVs, tubes, machines, wires. Ventricular fibrillation, this was. It could happen again. Anything could.”

“How's Randie?”

“Coping.” Hillier didn't give Lynley a chance to enquire about anything else. Instead, he went on gruffly, as if wishing to dismiss a topic that was too frightening to entertain, “Who've you brought in for questioning?” He wasn't happy when he learned that Leach's best efforts had failed to gain anything substantial from Pitchley-Pitchford-Pytches upon his third interview. He was also not pleased to learn that the equally best efforts of the teams who were working the sites of the
two hit-and-runs had uncovered nothing more useful than what they had already known about the car. He
was
moderately satisfied with the news from forensic about the paint chips and the age of the vehicle. But information was one thing; an arrest was another. And he God damn wanted a bloody arrest.