A Traitor to Memory (110 page)

So he studied the pictures on the walls—old black-and-white head shots of women that put him in mind of days when the British Empire stretched round the globe—and when he was done inspecting these, he picked up a copy of
Ms.
from America and engrossed himself in an article about alternatives to hysterectomies that seemed to be written by a woman who was balancing on her shoulder a chip the size of the Blidworth Boulder.

He did not sit, and when Mrs. Eyebrows said to him meaningfully, “It will be a while, Constable, as you've come without an appointment,” he said, “Murder's like that, i'n't it? Never does let you know when it's coming.” And he leaned his shoulder against the pale striped wallpaper and gave it a smack with the palm of his hand, saying, “Very nice, this is. What d'you call the design?”

He could see the receptionist eyeing the spot he'd touched, looking for grease marks. She made no reply. He nodded at her pleasantly, snapped his magazine more fully open, and rested his head against the wall.

“We've a sofa, Constable,” Mrs. Eyebrows said.

“Been sitting all day,” he told her, and added, “Piles,” with a grimace for good measure.

That appeared to do it. She got to her feet, disappeared into the inner office once again, and returned in a minute. She was bearing a
tray with the remains of afternoon tea on it, and she said that the solicitor was ready to see him now.

Nkata smiled to himself. He bet she was.

Harriet Lewis, dressed in black as she had been on the previous evening, was standing behind her desk when he entered. She said, “We've had our conversation already, Constable Nkata. Am I going to have to ring for counsel?”

“You feeling the need?” Nkata asked her. “Woman like you, 'fraid to go it alone?”

“‘Woman like me,’” she mimicked, “no bloody fool. I spend my life telling clients to keep their mouths shut in the presence of the police. I'd be fairly stupid not to heed my own advice, now wouldn't I?”

“You'd be stupider—”

“More stupid,” she said.

“—stupider,” he repeated, “to find yourself dis'tangling your way out of a charge of obstruction in a police enquiry.”

“You've charged no one with anything. You haven't a leg to stand on.”

“Day's not over.”

“Don't threaten me.”

“Make your phone call, then,” Nkata told her. He looked round and saw that a seating area of three chairs and a coffee table had been fashioned at one end of the room. He sauntered over, sat down, and said, “Ah. Whew. Nice to take a load off at the end of the day,” and nodded at her telephone. “Go ahead. I got the time to wait. My mum's a fine cook and she'll keep dinner warm.”

“What's this about, Constable? We've already spoken. I have nothing to add to what I've already told you.”

“Don't have a partner, I notice,” he said, “'less she's hiding under your desk.”

“I don't believe I said there was a partner. You made that assumption.”

“Based on Katja Wolff's lie. Number Fifty-five Galveston Road, Miss Lewis. Care to speculate with me on that topic? Tha's where your partner's s'posed to live, by the way.”

“My relationship with my client is privileged.”

“Right. You got a client there, then?”

“I didn't say that.”

Nkata leaned forward, elbows on knees. He said, “Listen to what I say, then.” He looked at his watch. “Seventy-seven minutes ago
Katja Wolff lost her alibi for the time of a hit-and-run in West Hampstead. You got that straight? And losing that alibi sends her straight to the top of the class. My experience, people don't lie 'bout where they were the night someone goes down 'less they got a good reason. This case, the reason looks like she was involved. Woman who was killed—”

“I know who was killed,” the solicitor snapped.

“Do you? Good. Then you also proba'ly know that your client might've had an axe she wanted to grind with that individual.”

“That idea's laughable. If anything, the complete opposite is the truth.”

“Katja Wolff wanting Eugenie Davies to stay alive? Why's that, Miss Lewis?”

“That's privileged information.”

“Cheers. So add to your privileged information this bit: Last night a second hit happened in Hammersmith. Round midnight this one was. The officer who first put Katja away. He's not dead, but he's hanging on the edge. And you got to know how cops feel 'bout a suspect when one of their own goes down.”

This piece of news seemed to make the first dent in Harriet Lewis's armour of calm. She adjusted her spine microscopically and said, “Katja Wolff is not involved in any of this.”

“So you get paid to say. And paid to believe. So your partner would proba'ly say and proba'ly believe if you had a partner.”

“Stop harping on that. You and I both know that I'm not responsible for a piece of misinformation passed to you by a client when I'm not present.”

“Right. But you are present now. And now that it's clear you got no partner, p'rhaps we need to dwell on why I 'as told that you had.”

“I have no idea.”

“Don't you.” Nkata took out his notebook and his pencil, and he tapped the pencil against the notebook's leather cover for emphasis. “Here's what it's looking like to me: You're Katja Wolff's brief, but you're something else 's well, something tastier and something that's lying just the other side of what's on the up and up in your business. Now—”

“You're incredible.”

“—word of that gets out, you start looking bad, Miss Lewis. You got some code of ethics or other, and solicitor playing love monkeys with her client isn't part of that code. 'Fact, it starts looking like that's
why
you take on lags in the first place: Get 'em when they're at their lowest, you do, and it's plain sailing when you want to pop 'em in bed.”

“That's outrageous.” Harriet Lewis finally came round from behind her desk. She strode across the room, took position behind one of the chairs in the grouping by the coffee table, and gripped onto its back. “Leave this office, Constable.”

“Let's play at this,” he said reasonably, settling back into his chair. “Let's think out loud.”

“Your sort's not even capable of doing that silently.”

Nkata smiled. He gave himself a point. He said, “Stick with me, then, all the same.”

“I've no intention of speaking with you further. Now leave, or I'll see to it you're brought to the attention of the PCA.”

“What're you going to complain 'bout? And how's it likely to look when the story gets out that you couldn't cope with one lone copper come to talk to you about a killer? And not jus' any killer, Miss Lewis. A baby killer, twenty years put away.”

The solicitor made no reply to this.

Nkata pressed on, nodding in the direction of Harriet Lewis's desk. “So you phone up Police Complaints right now, and you shout harassment and you file whatever you want to file. And when the story finds its way to the papers, you watch and see who gets the smear.”

“You're blackmailing me.”

“I'm telling you the facts. You c'n do with them what you want. What
I
want is the truth about Galveston Road. Give me that and I'm gone.”

“Go there yourself.”

“Been there once. Not going again without ammunition.”

“Galveston Road has
nothing
to do with—”

“Miss Lewis? Don't play me like a fool.” Nkata nodded at her telephone. “You making that call to the PCA? You ready to file your complaint 'gainst me?”

Harriet Lewis appeared to consider her options as she let out a breath. She came round the chair. She sat. She said, “Katja Wolff 's alibi lives in that house, Constable Nkata. She's a woman called Noreen McKay, and she's unwilling to step forward and clear Katja from suspicion. We went there last night to talk to her about it. We weren't successful. And I very much doubt you'll be.”

“Why's that?” Nkata asked.

Harriet Lewis smoothed down her skirt. She fingered a minute length of thread that she found at the edge of a button on her jacket. “I suppose you'd call it a code of ethics,” she finally said.

“She's a solicitor?”

Harriet Lewis stood. “I'm going to have to phone Katja and request her permission to answer that question,” she said.

Libby Neale went straight to the refrigerator when she got home from South Kensington. She was having a major white jones, and she considered herself deserving of having the attack taken care of. She kept a pint of vanilla Häagen-Dazs in the freezer for just such emergencies. She dug this out, ferreted a spoon from the utensil drawer, and prised open the lid. She'd gobbled up approximately one dozen spoonfuls before she was even able to think.

When she finally did think, what she thought was
more white
, so she rustled through the trash under the kitchen sink and found part of the bag of cheddar popcorn that she'd thrown away in a moment of disgust on the previous day. She sat on the floor and proceeded to cram into her mouth the two handfuls of popcorn that were left in the bag. From there, she went to a package of flour tortillas, which she'd long kept as a challenge to herself to stay away from anything white. These, she found, weren't exactly white any longer, as spots of mould were growing on them like ink stains on linen. But mould was easy enough to remove, and if she ingested some by mistake, it couldn't hurt, could it? Consider penicillin.

She rustled a cube of Wensleydale from its wrapper and sliced enough for a quesadilla. She plopped the cheese slices onto the tortilla, topped that with another, and slapped the whole mess into a frying pan. When the Wensleydale was melted and the tortilla was browned, she took the treat from the fire, rolled it into a tube, and settled herself on the kitchen floor. She proceeded to shove the food into her mouth, eating like a victim of famine.

When she'd polished off the quesadilla, she remained on the floor, her head against one of the cupboard doors. She'd needed that, she told herself. Things were getting too weird, and when things got too weird, you had to keep your blood sugar high. There was no telling when you'd need to take action.

Gideon hadn't walked her from his father's flat to his car. He'd just shown her to the door and shut it behind her. She'd said, “You going to be okay, Gid?” as they'd made their way from the study. “I mean,
this can't be the nicest place for you to wait. Look. Why'n't you come home with me? We can leave a note for your dad, and when he gets back, he can call you and we can drive back over.”

“I'll wait here,” he'd said. And he'd opened the door and shut it without ever once looking at her.

What did it
mean
that he wanted to wait for his dad? she wondered. Was this going to be the Big Showdown between them? She certainly hoped so. The Big Showdown had been a long time coming between Davies father and son.

She tried to picture it, a confrontation provoked, for some reason, by Gideon's discovery of a second sister he hadn't even known he'd had. He'd take that card written to Richard by Virginia's mother and he'd wave it in front of his father's nose. He'd say, “
Tell
me about her, you bastard. Tell me why I wasn't allowed to know
her
either.”

Because that seemed to be the crux of what had set Gideon off when he'd read the card: His dad had denied him another sibling when Virginia had been there all along.

And why? Libby thought. Why had Richard made this move to isolate Gid from his surviving sister? It had to be the same reason that Richard did everything else: to keep Gid focused on the violin.

No, no, no. Can't have friends, Gideon. Can't go to parties. Can't play at sports. Can't go to a
real
school. Must practise, play, perform, and provide. And you can't do that if you've got any interests away from your instrument. Like a sister, for example.

God, Libby thought. He was such a shit. He was
so
totally screwing up Gideon's life.

What, she wondered, would that life have been like had he not spent it playing his music? He would have gone to school like a regular kid. He would have played sports, like soccer or something. He would have ridden a bike, fallen out of trees, and maybe broken a bone or two. He would have met his buddies for beer in the evening and gone out on dates and screwed around in girls' pants and been normal. He would be so
not
who he was right now.

Gideon deserved what other people had and took for granted, Libby told herself. He deserved friends. He deserved love. He deserved a family. He deserved a life. But he wasn't going to get any of that as long as Richard kept him under his thumb and as long as no one was willing to take positive action to alter the relationship Gideon had with his frigging father.

Libby stirred at that and realised her scalp was tingling. She rolled her head against the cupboard door so that she could look at the
kitchen table. She'd left Gideon's car keys there when she'd dashed into the kitchen to admit defeat to her attack of the whites, and it seemed to her now that her possession of those keys was meant to be, like a sign from God that she'd been sent into Gideon's life to be the one who took a stand.

Libby got to her feet. She approached the keys in a state of pure resolution. She snatched them up from the table before she could talk herself out of it. She left the flat.