A Traitor to Memory (108 page)

She returned to the shop. When she arrived, the cop was striding up and down in front of it. She saw him check his watch and try to peer round the metal security door that she lowered over the shop front whenever she wasn't there. Then he looked at his watch again and took his beeper from his belt and tapped it.

Yasmin pulled up in the old Fiesta. When she opened her door, the detective was there before she put a foot on the pavement.

“This some kind of joke?” he demanded. “You think messing in a
murder 'vestigation's something you can have fun with, Missus Edwards?”

“You said you didn't know how long—” Yasmin stopped herself. What was
she
making excuses for? She said, “I had a 'pointment. You want to help me unload the car or you want to chew my bum?” She thrust out her chin as she spoke, hearing her final words for their double meaning only after she'd said them. Then she wouldn't give him the pleasure of her embarrassment. She faced him squarely—tall woman, tall man—and waited for
him
to go for the crude.
Hey, baby, I'll chew on more'n your bum, you give me the chance.

But he didn't do that. Wordlessly, he went to the Fiesta's hatchback and waited for her to come round and unlock it.

She did so. She shoved her cardboard box of supplies into his arms and topped it with the case of lotions, make-up, and brushes. Then she smacked the hatch of the Fiesta closed and strode to the shop, where she unlocked the metal door and yanked it upwards, using her shoulder against it, as she usually did when it stuck midway.

He said, “Hang on,” and put his burdens on the ground. Before she could stop it from happening, his hands—broad and flat and black with pale oval nails neatly trimmed to the tips of his fingers—planted themselves on either side of her. He heaved upwards as she pushed, and with a sound like
eeeerrreeek
of metal on metal, the door gave way. He stayed where he was, right behind her, too close by half, and said, “That needs seeing to. 'Fore much longer, you won't be able to slide it at all.”

She said, “I c'n cope,” and she grabbed up the metal box of her make-up because she wanted to be doing something and because she wanted him to know she could manage the supplies, the door, and the shop itself just fine on her own.

But once inside, it was like before. He seemed to fill the place. He seemed to make it his. And that irritated her, especially since he did nothing at all to give the impression that he meant to intimidate or at least to dominate. He merely set the cardboard box onto the counter, saying gravely, “I wasted nearly an hour waiting for you, Missus Edwards. I hope you 'ntend to make it worth my while now you're finally here.”

“You getting
nothing
—” She swung round. She'd been stowing her make-up case as he spoke, and her reaction was reflex, pure as the bell and those Russian dogs.

Now don't go playing Miss Ice Cubes, Ya s. Girl got blessed with a body like yours, she need to use it to her bes' a'vantage.

So
You getting
nothing
off me
was what she'd intended to hurl at the cop. No kiss-and-don't-tell by the airing cupboard, no grope in the lap at the dinner table, no peeling back blouses and easing down trousers and no no no hands separating rigid legs.
Come on, Yas. Don't fight me on this.

She felt her face freeze. He was watching her. She saw his gaze on her mouth, and she watched it travel to her nose. She was marked by what went for love from a man, and he read those marks and she would never be able to forget it.

He said, “Missus Edwards,” and she hated the sound and she wondered why she'd kept Roger's name. She'd told herself she'd done it for Daniel, mother and son tied together by a name when they couldn't be tied by anything else. But now she wondered if she'd really done it to flay herself, not as a constant reminder of the fact that she'd killed her husband but as a way of doing penance for having hooked up with him in the first place.

She'd loved him, yes. But she'd soon learned that there was nothing whatsoever to be gained from loving. Still, the lesson hadn't stuck, had it? For she'd loved again and look where she was now: facing down a cop who would see this time the very same killer but an entirely different sort of corpse.

“You had something to tell me.” DC Winston Nkata reached into the pocket of the jacket that fit him hand-to-a-leather-glove, and he brought out a notebook, the same one he'd been writing in before, with the same propelling pencil clipped to it.

Seeing this, Yasmin thought of the lies he'd already recorded and how bad it was going to go for her if she decided to clean house now. And the image of cleaning house opened her mind to the rest of it: how people could look on a person and because of her face, her speech, and the way she decided to carry herself, how people could reach a conclusion about her and cling to it in the face of all evidence to the contrary, and why? Because people were just so desperate to believe.

Yasmin said, “She wasn't at home. We weren't watching the telly. She wasn't there.”

She saw the detective's chest slowly deflate, as if he'd been holding his breath since the moment he'd arrived, betting against his own respiration that Yasmin Edwards had paged him that morning with the express intention of betraying her lover.

“Where was she?” he asked. “She tell you, Missus Edwards? What time d'she get home?”

“Twelve forty-one.”

He nodded. He wrote steadily and tried to look cool, but Yasmin could see it all happening in his head. He was doing the maths. He was matching the maths to Katja's lies. And underneath that, he was celebrating the fact that his gamble had won him the jackpot he'd bet for.

21

H
ER FINAL WORDS
to him were, “And let's not forget, Eric.
You
wanted the divorce. So if you can't cope with the fact that I've got Jerry now, don't let's pretend it's Esmé’s problem.” And she'd looked so flaming triumphant about it all, so filled with look-at-me-I've-found-someone-who-actually-wants-me-boyo that Leach actually found himself cursing his twelve-year-old daughter—God forgive him—for being capable of manipulating him into talking to her mother in the first place. “I've got a right to see other people,” Bridget had asserted. “You were the one who gave it to me.”

“Look, Bridg,” he'd said. “It's not that I'm jealous. It's that Esmé’s in a twist because she thinks you'll remarry.”

“I intend to remarry. I
want
to remarry.”

“All right. Fine. But she thinks you've already chosen this bloke and—”

“What if I have? What if I've decided it feels good to be wanted? To be with a man who doesn't have a thing about breasts that droop a bit and lines of character on my face. That's what he calls them, by the way, lines of character, Eric.”

“This is on the rebound,” Leach tried to tell her.

“Do
not
inform me what this is. Or we'll get into what your behaviour is: midlife idiocy, extended immaturity, adolescent stupidity. Shall I go on? No? Right. I didn't think so.” And she turned on her
heel and left him. She returned to her classroom in the primary school, where ten minutes before Leach had motioned to her from the doorway, having dutifully stopped to speak to the head teacher first, asking if he could have a word, please, with Mrs. Leach. The head teacher had remarked how irregular it was that a parent should come calling on one of the teachers in the midst of the school day, but when Leach had introduced himself to her, she'd become simultaneously cooperative and compassionate, which told Leach that the word was out not only about the pending divorce but also about Bridget's new love interest. He felt like saying, “Hey. I don't give a flying one that she's got a new bloke,” but he wasn't so sure that was the case. Nonetheless, the fact of the new bloke at least allowed him to feel less guilty about being the one who'd wanted to separate and, as his wife stalked off, he tried to keep his mind fixed on that.

He said, “Bridg, listen. I'm sorry,” to her retreating back, but he didn't say it very loudly, he knew she couldn't hear him, and he wasn't sure what he was apologising about anyway.

Still, as he watched her retreat, he did feel the blow to his pride. So he tried to obliterate his regrets about how they'd parted, and he told himself he'd done the right thing. Considering how quickly she'd managed to replace him, there wasn't much doubt their marriage had been dead long before he'd first mentioned the fact.

Yet he couldn't help thinking that some couples managed to stay the course no matter what happened to their feelings for each other. Indeed, some couples swore that they were “absolutely desperate to grow together,” when all the time the only real glue that kept them adhered to each other was a bank account, a piece of property, shared offspring, and an unwillingness to divide up the furniture and the Christmas decorations. Leach knew men on the force who were married to women they'd loathed forever. But the very thought of putting their children, their possessions—not to mention their pensions—at risk had kept them polishing their wedding rings for years.

Which thought led Leach ineluctably to Malcolm Webberly.

Leach had known that something was up from the phone calls, from the notes scribbled, shoved into envelopes, and posted, from the oft distracted manner in which Webberly engaged in a conversation. He'd had his suspicions. But he'd been able to discount them because he hadn't known for certain till he saw them together, seven years after the case itself, when quite by chance he and Bridget had taken the kids to the Regatta because Curtis'd had a project at school—The Culture and Traditions of Our Country … Jesus … Leach even remembered
the bloody name of it!—and there they were, the two of them, standing on that bridge that crossed the Thames into Henley, his arm round her waist and the sunlight on them both. He didn't know who she was at first, didn't remember her, saw only that she was good-looking and that they comprised that unit which calls itself In Love.

How odd, Leach thought now, to recall what he'd felt at the sight of Webberly and his Lady Friend. He realised that he'd never considered his superior officer a real breathing man before that moment. He realised that he'd seen Webberly in rather the same manner as a child sees a much older adult. And the sudden knowledge that Webberly had a secret life felt like the blow an eight-year-old would take should he walk in on his dad going at it with a lady from the neighbourhood.

And she'd looked like that, the woman on the bridge, familiar like a lady from the neighbourhood. In fact, she looked so familiar to Leach that for a time he expected to see her at work—perhaps a secretary he'd not yet met?—or maybe emerging from an office on the Earl's Court Road. He'd reckoned that she was just someone Webberly had happened to meet, happened to strike up a conversation with, happened to discover an attraction to, happened to say to himself “Oh, why not, Malc? No need to be such a bloody Puritan,” about.

Leach couldn't remember when or how he'd sussed out that Webberly's lover was Eugenie Davies. But when he had done, he hadn't been able to keep mum any longer. He'd used his outrage as an excuse for speaking, no little boy fearful that Dad would leave home again but a full-grown adult who knew right from wrong. My God, he'd thought, that an officer from the murder squad—that his own partner—should cross the line like that, should take the opportunity to gratify himself with someone who'd been traumatised, victimised, and brutalised both by tragic events and the aftermath of those events…. It was inconceivable.

Webberly had been, if not deaf to the subject, at least willing to hear him out. He hadn't made a comment at all till Leach had recited every stanza of the ode to Webberly's unprofessional conduct that he'd been composing. Then he'd said, “What the hell do you think of me, Eric? It wasn't like that. This didn't start during the case. I hadn't seen her for years when we began to … Not till … It was at Paddington Station. Completely by chance. We spoke there for ten minutes or less, between trains. Then later … Hell. Why am I explaining this? If you think I'm out of order, put yourself up for transfer.”