A Traitor to Memory (116 page)

There was something about the way Noreen McKay made the statement—“I can't clear her name”—that gave Nkata pause before lighting the fireworks of celebration. There was a desperation behind the deputy warden's eyes and an incipient panic in the manner in which she downed the rest of her drink in a gulp. He said, “Can't or won't clear her name, Miss McKay?”

She said, “I have two teenage children to consider. They're all I have left as family. I don't want a custody battle with their father.”

“Courts're more liberal these days.”

“I also have a career. It's not the one I wanted, but it's the one I've got. The one I've made for myself. Don't you see? If it comes to light that I ever—” She stopped herself.

Nkata sighed. He couldn't take
ever
to the bank and deposit it, one way or the other. He said, “She was with you, then. Three nights back? Last night as well? Late last night?”

Noreen McKay blinked. She was sitting so straight and tall in her chair that she looked like a cardboard cutout of herself.

“Miss McKay, I got to know whether I c'n cross her name off.”

“And I've got to know whether I can trust you. The fact that you've come here, right to the prison itself… Don't you see what that suggests?”

“Suggests I'm busy. Suggests it doesn't make sense for me to go driving back and forth 'cross London when you're … what … a mile? two miles? from Harriet Lewis's office.”

“It suggests more than that,” Noreen McKay said. “It tells me that you're self-interested, Constable, and if you're self-interested, what's to prevent you from passing on my name to a snout for a nice fifty quid? Or from being the snout yourself, for fifty more? It's a good story to sell to the
Mail.
You've threatened worse already in this conversation.”

“I could do that now, comes down to it. You given me enough already, you have.”

“I've given you what? The fact that a solicitor and her client came to my house one evening? What do you expect the
Mail
to do with that?”

Nkata had to acknowledge that Noreen McKay was making a
good point. There was hardly seed for anyone's planting in what little information he had. There was, however, what he knew already and what he could assume from what he knew and what he ultimately could do with
that
. But the truth of the matter, however reluctantly he admitted it to himself, was that he actually needed from her only confirmation and a period of time to go with that confirmation. As for the rest of it, all the whys and the wherefores … If the truth were told, he
wanted
them, but he did not need them, not professionally.

He said, “The hit-and-run in Hampstead happened round half ten or eleven th' other night. Harriet Lewis says you c'n give Katja Wolff an alibi for the time. She also says you won't, which's what makes me think you and Katja got something between yourselves that's going to make one of you look bad if it gets out.”

“I've said: I'm not going to talk about that.”

“I get that, Miss McKay. Loud and clear. So what about you talking about what you're willing to talk about. What about bare facts with no window-dressing on them?”

“What do you mean?”

“Yeses and nos.”

Noreen McKay glanced over at the bar, where her colleagues were downing pints of Guinness. The pub door opened, and three more employees of the prison walked in, all of them women in uniforms similar to the deputy warden's. Two of them called out to her and looked as if they were considering a saunter over for an introduction to McKay's companion. Noreen turned from them abruptly and said in a low voice, “This is impossible. I shouldn't have … We've got to get out of here.”

“You running out wouldn't look so good,” Nkata murmured. “Especially when I jump up and start shouting your name. But yeses and nos, and I'm gone, Miss McKay. Quiet as a mouse and you c'n tell them I'm anyone. Truant officer come to talk about your kids. Scout for Manchester United interested in the boy. I don't care. Just yeses and nos, and you got your life back, whatever it is.”

“You don't
know
what it is.”

“'Course. Like I said. Whatever it is.”

She stared at him for a moment before saying, “All right. Ask.”

“Was she with you three nights ago?”

“Yes.”

“Between ten and midnight?”

“Yes.”

“What time d'she leave?”

“We said yeses or nos.”

“Right. Yeah. She leave before midnight?”

“No.”

“She arrive before ten?”

“Yes.”

“She come alone?”

“Yes.”

“Missus Edwards know where she was?”

Noreen McKay moved her gaze at this question, but it didn't appear to be because she was about to lie. “No,” she said.

“And last night?”

“What about last night?”

“Katja Wolff with you last night? Say, after her solicitor left?”

Noreen McKay looked back at him. “Yes.”

“She stay? Was she there round half eleven, midnight?”

“Yes. She left…. It was probably half past one when she left.”

“You know Missus Edwards?”

Her gaze moved again. He saw a muscle tighten in her jaw. She said, “Yes. Yes, I know Yasmin Edwards. She served most of her time in Holloway.”

“You know she and Katja—”

“Yes.”

“Then what're you doing mixed up with them?” he asked abruptly, abjuring the previous yeses and nos in a sudden need for weapons, a personal need that he could barely acknowledge let alone begin to understand. “You got some sort of plan, you and Katja? You two using her and her boy for some reason?”

She looked at him but did not reply.

He said, “These're
people
, Miss McKay. They got lives and they got feelings. If you and Katja're planning to put something down to Yasmin, like laying a trail to her door, making her look bad, putting her at risk—”

Noreen snapped forward, saying in a hiss, “Isn't it obvious that just the
opposite
has happened?
I
look bad.
I'm
at risk. And why? Because I love her, Constable. That's my sin. You think this is about quirky sex, don't you? The abuse of power. Coercion leading to perversion, and nauseating scenes of desperate women with dildos strapped to their hips mounting desperate women behind bars. But what you don't think is that this is complicated, that it has to do with loving someone but not being able to love her openly so loving her the only way I can and having to know that on the nights we're
apart—which are far more than we're together, believe me—she's with someone else, loving someone else, or at least playing at it because that's what
I
want. And every argument we
ever
have has
no
solution because both of us are right in the choices we've made. I can't give her what she wants from me, and I can't accept what she wants to give. So she gives it elsewhere and I take scraps from her and she takes scraps from me, and
that's
how it is, no matter what she says about how and when and for whom things will change.” She leaned back in her chair after the speech, her breath coming jerkily as she fumbled her way into her navy coat once more. She got to her feet and headed for the door.

Nkata followed her. Outside, the wind was blowing ferociously, and Noreen McKay was standing in it. She was breathing like a runner in the light from a streetlamp, one hand curled round the pole. She was looking at Holloway Prison across the street.

She appeared to feel rather than to see Nkata come up next to her. She didn't look at him when she spoke. “At first, I was just curious about her. They put her in the medical unit after her trial, which is where I was assigned back then. She was on suicide watch. But I could tell that she had no intention of harming herself. There was this
resolve
about her, this knowing completely who she was. And I found that attractive, compelling really, because while I knew who I was as well, I'd never been able to admit it to myself. Then she went to the pregnancy unit and she could have gone to the mother-and-baby unit after the child was born, but she didn't want that, she didn't want him, and I found that I needed to know what she wanted and what she was made of that she could exist so sure and so alone.”

Nkata said nothing. He blocked some of the wind with his back as he positioned himself before the deputy warden.

“So I just watched her. She was in jeopardy, of course, once she was off the medical unit. There's a form of honour among them, and the worst in their eyes is the killer of babies, so she wasn't safe unless she was with other Schedule One offenders. But she didn't care that she wasn't safe, and that fascinated me. I thought at first it was because she saw her life as over, and I wanted to talk to her about that. I called it my duty, and since I was in charge of the Samaritans at that point—”

“Samaritans?” Nkata asked.

“We have a programme of visits for them here at the prison. If a prisoner wishes to participate, she tells the staff member in charge.”

“Katja wanted to participate?”

“No. Never. But I used that as an excuse to talk to her.” She examined Nkata's face and seemed to read something into his expression, because she went on with, “I am
good
at my job. We've got twelve-step programmes now. We've got an increase in visits. We've got better rehabilitation and easier means for families to see mothers who're doing time. I
am
good at my job.” She looked away from him, into the street, where the evening traffic was pouring out towards the northern suburbs. She said, “She didn't want any of it, and I couldn't understand why. She'd fought deportation to Germany, and I couldn't understand why. She talked to no one unless spoken to first. But all the time she watched. And so she eventually saw me watching her. When I was assigned to her wing—this is later—we started talking. She went first, which surprised me. She said, ‘Why do you watch me?’ I remember that. And what followed. I remember that also.”

“She's holding all the cards, Miss McKay,” Nkata noted.

“This isn't about blackmail, Constable. Katja could destroy me, but I know she won't.”

“Why?”

“There are things you just know.”

“We're talking 'bout a lag.”

“We're talking about Katja.” The deputy warden pushed away from the streetlamp and approached the traffic lights that would allow her to cross the road and return to the prison. Nkata walked beside her. She said, “I knew what I was from an early age. I expect my parents knew as well when I played dressing up and dressed like a soldier, a pirate, a fireman. But never like a princess or a nurse or a mum. And that's not normal, is it, and when at last you're fifteen, all you want is what's normal. So I tried it: short skirts, high heels, low necklines, the whole bit. I went after men and I shagged every boy I could get my hands on. Then one day in the paper I saw an ad for women looking for women and I phoned a number. For a joke, I told myself. Just for a lark. We met at a health club and had a swim and went out for coffee and then went to her place. She was twenty-four. I was nineteen. We were together five years, till I went into the prison service. And then … I couldn't live that life. It felt like too much of a risk. And then my sister got Hodgkin's and I got her children and for a long time that was enough.”

“Till Katja.”

“I've had scores of bed mates in the form of men, but only two lovers, both of them women. Katja's one of them.”

“For how long?”

“Seventeen years. Off and on.”

“You mean to go at it like this forever?”

“With Yasmin in the middle, d'you mean?” She glanced at Nkata, seeming to try to read an answer in his silence. “If it can be said that we choose where we love, then I chose Katja for two reasons. She never spoke about what put her in prison, so I knew she could hold her tongue about me. And she had an enormous secret she was keeping, which I thought at the time was a lover outside prison. I'll be safe getting involved, I thought. When she leaves, she'll go to her or to him, and I'll have had the chance to get this out of my system so I can live the rest of my life celibate but still knowing I once had
something…
.” The traffic lights on Parkhurst Road changed, and the walking figure altered along with it from red to green. Noreen stepped off the pavement, but looked back over her shoulder as she made a final comment. “It's been seventeen years, Constable. She's the only prisoner I ever touched … that way. She's the only woman I've ever loved … this way.”

“Why?” he asked as she began to cross the street.

“Because she's safe,” Noreen McKay said in parting. “And because she's strong. No one can break Katja Wolff.”

“Bloody hell. This is just brilliant,” Barbara Havers muttered. She was beginning to feel the peril of her own situation: Two months demoted for insubordination and assault on a superior officer, she couldn't afford yet another pot hole on the ill-paved road of her career. “If Leach tells Hillier about that computer, we're done for, Inspector. You know that, don't you?”

“We're only done for if there's something useful to the investigation on the computer,” Lynley pointed out as he nosed the Bentley into the heavy evening traffic of Rosslyn Hill. “And there isn't, Havers.”