A Traitor to Memory (72 page)

“She in today?” he'd asked her employer earlier over the phone not long after leaving Yasmin's shop. “Just a routine check, this is. No need to tell her I'm on the blower.”

“Yeah,” Betty Crushley had said, sounding like a woman talking round a cigar. “Got her mug where it ought to be for once.”

“Good to hear, that.”

“If good's enough.”

So he was waiting for Katja Wolff to leave her place of employment for the evening. If she walked the short distance to the Doddington Grove Estate, his instinct would require adjustment. If she went somewhere else, he'd know his feeling about her was right.

Nkata was dipping the last bite of his samosa into the dal when the German woman finally came out of the laundry, carrying a jacket over her arm. He crammed the pastry into his mouth, ready for action, but Katja Wolff merely stood on the pavement for a minute, just outside the laundry's front door. It was cold, with a sharp wind blowing the smells of diesel fuel against the pedestrians' cheeks, but the temperature didn't appear to bother her.

She took a moment to don her jacket and pulled from its pocket a blue beret into which she tucked her short blonde hair. Then she turned up the collar of her coat and set off along Kennington Park Road in the direction of home.

Nkata was about to curse his instincts for wasting his time, when Katja did the unexpected. Instead of turning into Braganza Street, which led to the Doddington Grove Estate, she crossed and continued
down Kennington Park Road without so much as a regretful glance in the direction in which she should have been heading. She passed a pub, the take-away where he'd bought his snack, a hairdresser, and a stationery shop, coming to rest at a bus stop where she lit a cigarette and waited among a small crowd of other potential passengers. She rejected the first two buses that stopped, finally climbing onto the third after she tossed her cigarette into the street. As the bus lumbered into the traffic, Nkata set off after it, glad that he wasn't in a panda car and grateful for the dark.

He didn't make himself popular with his fellow drivers as he tailed the bus, pulling to the kerb when it did, keeping an eye peeled at its every stop to make sure he didn't lose Katja Wolff in the growing gloom. More than one driver gave him two fingers as he wove in and out of the traffic, and he nearly hit a cyclist in a gas mask when a request stop loomed up faster than he was prepared for the bus to lurch over to it.

In this fashion, he halted across South London. Katja Wolff had taken a window seat on the street side of the bus, so Nkata could get a glimpse of her blue beret when the street curved ahead of him. He was fairly confident that he'd be able to pick her out when she disembarked, and that proved to be the case when, after suffering through the worst of the rush hour traffic, the bus pulled into Clapham station.

He thought she meant to get a train there, and he wondered how conspicuous he'd be if he had to get on the same carriage as she. Very, he decided. But there was no help for it and no time to consider any other option. He looked desperately for a place to park.

He kept one eye on her as she worked her way through the crowd outside the station. Instead of moving inside as he'd expected her to do, however, she went to a second bus stop, where, after a five-minute wait, she embarked on another ride through South London.

She had no window seat this time, so Nkata was forced to keep an eye peeled each time passengers disembarked. It was anxiety-producing—not to mention maddening to other drivers—but he ignored the rest of the traffic and kept his attention where it belonged.

At Putney Station, he was rewarded. Katja Wolff hopped off and, without a glance right or left, she set off along the Upper Richmond Road.

There was no way Nkata could tail her in a car and not stick out like an ostrich in Alaska or become the victim of a commuter's road rage, so he drove past her and, some fifty yards farther along, he found
a section of double yellow just beyond a bus stop across the street. He veered over and parked there. Then he waited, his eyes on the rearview mirror, adjusting it to take in the pavement opposite.

In due course, Katja Wolff came into view. She had her head down and her collar up against the wind, so she didn't notice him. An illegally parked car in London was no anomaly. Even if she glimpsed him, in the fading light he would be just a bloke waiting to fetch someone from the bus stop.

When she'd gained some twenty yards past him, Nkata eased his car door open and took up after her. He shrugged his large frame into his overcoat as he trailed her, tucking a scarf round his neck and thanking his stars that his mum had insisted upon his wearing it that morning. He faded into the shadows created by the trunk of an aged sycamore as up ahead of him Katja Wolff paused, turned her back to the wind, and lit a cigarette. Then she strode to the kerb, waited for a break in the traffic, and dashed across to the opposite side.

At this point, the road opened into a commercial area comprising an assortment of businesses that were fashioned with residences off-set above them. Here were the sort of enterprises local residents would patronise: video shops, newsagents, restaurants, florists, and the like.

Katja Wolff chose to take her custom to Frère Jacques Bar and Brasserie, where both the Union Jack and the French national flag snapped in the wind. It was a cheerful yellow building fronted by multi-paned transom windows, brightly lit from the interior. As she ducked inside, Nkata waited for a chance to cross over. By the time he got there, she'd removed her coat and handed it to a waiter, who was gesturing her beyond the rows of small candlelit tables to a bar that ran along one wall. There were as yet no other patrons in the brasserie, apart from a well-dressed woman in a tailored black suit who sat on a bar stool, nursing a drink.

She looked like money, Nkata thought. It spoke from her haircut, which was fashioned so that her short hair fell round her face like a polished helmet; it spoke from her attire, which was tasteful and timeless as only significant money can buy. Nkata had spent enough time leafing through
GQ
in the years in which he'd reinvented himself to know how people looked when they did most of their clothes-buying in places like Knightsbridge, where twenty quid might get you a handkerchief but nothing else.

Katja Wolff approached this woman, who slid off her bar stool with a smile and came to greet her. They reached for each other's
hands and pressed their cheeks together, air-kissing in the batty way Europeans had of greeting each other. The woman gestured Katja Wolff to join her.

For his part, Nkata hunkered down into his overcoat and watched them from a place he made for himself in the shadows just beyond the bank of the brasserie windows and at the side of an Oddbins. Should they turn his way, he could give his attention to the sale announcements painted in front of him on the window—Spanish wine was going for a real treat, he noted. And in the meantime he could watch them and attempt to suss out what they were to each other, although he already had developed a fair set of suspicions in that direction. He'd seen the familiarity in their greeting, after all. And the woman in black had money, which Katja Wolff would probably like just fine. So the pieces were starting to fall into place, aligning themselves with the German's lie about where she'd been on the night Eugenie Davies had died.

Nkata wished there were a way he could have overheard their conversation, however. The manner in which they hovered over their drinks shoulder to shoulder suggested a confidential chat that he would have given much to hear. And when Wolff raised a hand to her eyes and the other put her arm round her shoulders and said something into her ear, he even considered sauntering in and introducing himself, just to see how Katja Wolff reacted to being caught out.

Yes. There was something definitely going on here, he thought. This was probably what Yasmin Edwards knew but did not want to speak of. Because one could always tell when one's lover started stepping outside for more than a breath of air or a packet of fags in the evening. And the toughest bit about coping with that knowledge was coming to accept it in the first place. People walked miles to avoid having to look at, talk about, or actually confront something that might cause them pain. Short-sighted as it was to wear blinkers in relationships, it was still amazing to see how many people did exactly that.

Nkata stamped his feet in the cold and buried his hands in his coat pockets. He watched for another quarter of an hour and was considering his options, when the two women began to gather up their belongings.

He ducked into Oddbins as they came out of the brasserie door. Half-hidden behind a display of Chianti Classico, he picked up a bottle as if to study its label while the shop assistant eyed him the way all shop assistants eyed a black man who wasn't quick enough to buy what he was touching. Nkata ignored him, his head bent but his gaze
fastened on the shop's front windows. When he saw Wolff and her companion pass by, he set the bottle back onto the display, stifled what he wanted to say to the young man behind the till—when would he outgrow the need to shout “I'm a copper, all right?” as he grabbed them by the necks of their shirts?—and slipped out of Oddbins in the women's wake.

Katja's companion had her by the arm, and she was continuing to talk to her as they strolled along. Over her right shoulder dangled a leather bag the size of a briefcase, and she held this firmly tucked under her arm like a woman who was wise to what life on the streets could offer the unaware. In this fashion, the two of them walked not to the station but along the Upper Richmond Road in the direction of Wandsworth.

Perhaps a quarter of a mile along, they turned left. This would take them into a heavily populated neighbourhood of terraced and semi-detached houses. If they went into a residence there, Nkata knew he would need more than luck to find them. He increased his pace and broke into a jog.

He was still in luck, he saw, as he turned the corner. Although several streets turned off this road and bored into the crowded neighbourhood, the two women hadn't taken any of them yet. Rather, they were continuing ahead of him, still in conversation but with the German woman talking this time, gesturing with her hands while the other listened.

They chose Galveston Road to turn into, a short thoroughfare of terraced houses, some converted into flats and some still standing as single homes. It was a middle-class neighbourhood of lace curtains, fresh paint, tended gardens, and window boxes where pansies were planted in anticipation of the coming winter. Wolff and her companion walked along to the midway point, where they turned in through a wrought iron gate and approached a red door. The brass number fifty-five was posted on it, between two narrow translucent windows.

The garden here was overgrown, unlike the other small gardens on the street. On either side of the front door, shrubbery had been allowed to flourish, and tentacles from a star jasmine bush at one side and a Spanish broom on the other hungered outward towards the front door as if for an anchoring spot. From across the street, Nkata watched as Katja sidled through the shrubbery and mounted the two steps onto the front porch. She didn't ring the bell. Rather, she opened the door and let herself in. Her companion followed.

The door shut behind them and a light went on right inside the
entry. This was followed some five seconds later by a dimmer light, which began to glow behind the curtains at the front bay window. The curtains were such that only silhouettes were visible. But nothing more than silhouettes was necessary to understand what was going on when the two women melded into one figure and into each other's arms.

“Right,” Nkata breathed. So at last he saw what he had come to see: a concrete illustration of Katja Wolff's infidelity.

Laying this information in front of the unsuspecting Yasmin Edwards should suffice to get her to start telling what was what with regard to her companion. And if he left this instant and jogged back to his car, he'd be able to make the drive to the Doddington Grove Estate far in advance of Katja herself, who thus wouldn't be able to prepare Yasmin to hear something which Katja could later label a lie.

But as the two figures in the Galveston Road sitting room moved apart to set about doing whatever it was that they intended to do for each other's pleasure, Nkata found himself hesitating. He found himself wondering how he could broach the subject of Katja's infidelity in such a way as to avoid making Yasmin Edwards want to kill the messenger instead of absorbing the message.

Then he wondered why he was wondering that at all. The woman was a charlie. She was also a lag. She'd knifed her own husband and done five years and no doubt learned a few more tricks of the trade while she was inside. She was dangerous and he—Winston Nkata, who himself had escaped a life that could have sent him along a path similar to hers—would do well to remember that.

There was no need to rush over to the Doddington Grove Estate, he decided. From the looks of things here in Galveston Road, Katja Wolff wasn't going anywhere soon.

Lynley was surprised to find his wife still at the St. James house when he arrived. It was nearly time for dinner, long past the hour at which she usually departed. But when Joseph Cotter—St. James's father-in-law and the man who had held the Cheyne Row household together for more than a decade—admitted Lynley into the house, the first thing he said was, “They're up in the lab, the whole flamin' lot of 'em. No surprise, that. His nibs's got them marching today. Deb's up there 's well, though I don't s'pose she's cooperating like Lady Helen's been doing. Even went without lunch. ‘Can't stop now,’ 'e said. ‘We're almost done.’”