A Traitor to Memory (85 page)

“It was large,” Lynley said. “According to the witness, it could have been a taxi. He thought it was painted in two tones, black with a grey roof. Hillier claims the grey would be the street lights' reflection on black.”

“Bugger Hillier for a lark,” Barbara scoffed. “Taxis are painted all sorts of ways these days. Two tones, three tones, red and yellow, or covered tyres-to-top with advertisements. I say we should listen to
what the witness says. And as we're talking about a black car once again, I expect we've got a connection, don't you?”

“With Eugenie Davies?” Lynley didn't wait for a reply. “Yes. I'd say we've got a connection.” He gestured with a notebook he'd taken up from his desk and he put on his spectacles as he walked round to sit, nodding for Barbara to do likewise. “But we've still got virtually nothing to go on, Havers. I've been reading through my notes trying to find
something
, and I'm not getting far. All I can come up with is a conflict among what Richard Davies, his son, and Ian Staines are saying about Eugenie's seeing Gideon. Staines claims she intended to ask Gideon for money to get him out of debt before he loses his house and everything in it, but he also says that she told him—after having made the promise to see her son—that something had come up and because of it, she wouldn't ask Gideon for the money. In the meantime, Richard Davies claims she hadn't asked to see Gideon at all, but just the opposite. He says he wanted her to try to help Gideon with a problem he's having with stage fright and that's why they were going to meet: at
his
suggestion. Gideon supports this claim, more or less. He says his mother never asked to see him, at least not that he was told. All he knows is that his father wanted them to meet so she could help him out with his playing.”

“She played the violin?” Barbara said. “There wasn't one at the cottage in Henley.”

“Gideon didn't mean that she was going to tutor him. He said there was actually nothing she could do to help him with his problem other than to ‘agree’ with his father.”

“What's that supposed to mean when it's dancing the polka?”

“I don't know. But I'll tell you this: He doesn't have stage fright. There's something seriously wrong with the man.”

“Like a guilty conscience? Where was he three nights ago?”

“Home. Alone. So he says.” Lynley tossed his notebook on his desk and removed his glasses. “And that doesn't even begin to address Eugenie Davies' e-mail, Barbara.” He brought her into the picture on that front, saying in conclusion, “
Jete
was the name tagged onto the message. Does that mean anything to you?”

“An acronym?” She considered the possible words that the four letters could begin, with
just
and
eat
coming to mind at once. She followed that thought along the family tree to its cousin, saying, “Could be Pitchley branching out from his TongueMan handle?”

“What did you get from St. Catherine's on him?” Lynley asked her.

“Gold,” she replied. “St. Catherine's confirms Pitchley's claim that he was James Pitchford twenty years ago.”

“How is that gold?”

“Because of what follows,” Barbara replied. “Before he was Pitchford, he was someone else: He was Jimmy Pytches, sir, little Jimmy Pytches from Tower Hamlets. He changed his name to Pitchford six years before the murder in Kensington Square.”

“Unusual,” Lynley agreed, “but hardly damning.”

“By itself, right. But when you put two name changes in one lifetime into the same basket as having two blokes jumping out of his kitchen window when the rozzers come to call, you've got something that smells like cod in the sun. So I rang the station over there and asked if anyone remembered a Jimmy Pytches.”

“And?” Lynley asked.

“And listen to this. The whole family're in and out of trouble all the time. Were back then. Still are now. And when Pitchley was Jimmy Pytches all those years ago, a baby died while he was minding her. He was a teenager at the time, and the investigation couldn't pin anything on him. The inquest finally called it cot death, but not before our Jimmy spent forty-eight hours being held and questioned as suspect number one. Here. Check my notes if you want to.”

Lynley did so, putting his reading glasses back on.

Barbara said, “A second kid dying while he was in the same house,” as Lynley looked over the information. “Doesn't feel very nice, does it, sir?”

“If he did indeed murder Sonia Davies and if Katja Wolff carried the can for him,” Lynley began, and Barbara interrupted with, “Perhaps this is why she never said a word once she was arrested, sir. Say she and Pitchford had a thing—she was pregnant, right?—and when Sonia was drowned, they both knew that the cops would look hard at Pitchford because of the other death, once they found out who he really was. If they could play it out as an accident, as negligence—”

“Why would he have drowned the Davies girl?”

“Jealousy over what the family had and he hadn't got. Anger over how they were treating his beloved. He wants to rescue her from her situation, or he wants to get back at people he sees as having what he'll never put his mitts on, so he goes after the kid. Katja takes the fall for him, knowing about his past and thinking she'll get a year or two for negligence while he'd probably get life for premeditated murder.
And she never once considers how a jury's going to react to her keeping silent about the death of a disabled toddler. And just think of what was probably going through their heads: shades of Mengele and all that, Inspector, and
she
won't even say what happened. So the judge throws the book at her, she gets twenty years, and Pitchford disappears from her life, leaving her to rot in prison while he becomes Pitchley and makes a killing in the City.”

“And then what?” Lynley said. “She gets out of prison and then what, Havers?”

“She tells Eugenie what really happened, who really did it. Eugenie tracks down Pitchley the way I tracked down Pytches. She goes to confront him, but she never makes it.”

“Because?”

“Because she gets it on the street.”

“I realise that. But from whom, Barbara?”

“I think Leach might be onto it, sir.”

“Pitchley? Why?”

“Katja Wolff wants justice. So does Eugenie. The only way to get it is to put Pitchley away, which I doubt he'd go for.”

Lynley shook his head. “How do you explain Webberly, then?”

“I think you already know the answer to that.”

“Those letters?”

“It's time to hand them over. You've got to see they're important, Inspector.”

“Havers, they're more than ten years old. They're not an issue.”

“Wrong, wrong,
wrong
.” Barbara pulled on her sandy fringe in sheer frustration. “Look. Say Pitchley and Eugenie had something going. Say
that's
the reason she was in his street the other night. Say he's been to Henley to see her on the sly and during a tryst he's come across those letters. He's gone round the bend with jealousy, so he gives her the chop and then takes down the superintendent.”

Lynley shook his head. “Barbara, you can't have it all ways. You're twisting the facts to fit a conclusion. But they don't fit it, and it doesn't fit the case.”

“Why not?”

“Because it leaves too much unaccounted for.” Lynley ticked off the items. “How could Pitchley have maintained an affair with Eugenie Davies without Ted Wiley's knowledge since Wiley appears to have kept close tabs on the comings and goings at Doll Cottage? What did Eugenie have to confess to Wiley, and why did she die the night before the scheduled confession? Who is
Jete
? Who was she
meeting at those pubs and hotels? And what do we do about the coincidence of Katja Wolff's release from prison and two hit-and-runs in which the victims are significant people in the case that put her away?”

Barbara sighed, her shoulders slumping. “Okay. Where's Winston? What's he got to say about Katja Wolff?”

Lynley told her about Nkata's report on the German woman's movements from Kennington to Wandsworth on the previous night. He ended with, “He was confident that both Yasmin Edwards and Katja Wolff are hiding something. When he got the word about Webberly he passed the message back that he wanted to have another chat with them.”

“So he thinks there's a connection between the hit-and-runs as well.”

“Right. And I agree. There
is
a connection, Havers. We just haven't seen it clearly.” Lynley stood, handed Barbara her notes, and began gathering up material from his desk. He said, “Let's get on to Hampstead. Leach's team must have something we can work with by now.”

Winston Nkata sat in front of the Hampstead police station for a good five minutes before he clambered out of his car. Because of a four-car pileup on the huge roundabout just before the crossing to Vauxhall Bridge, it had taken him more than ninety minutes to make the drive from South London. He was glad of that. Sitting in the car while firemen, paramedics, and traffic police sorted out the tangle of metal and injured bodies had given him the time he needed to come to terms with the balls-up he'd made of his interview with Katja Wolff and Yasmin Edwards.

He'd cocked it up brilliantly. He'd shown his hand. He'd charged like a bull from the pen exactly sixty-seven minutes after opening his eyes that morning, galloping from his parents' flat to Kennington at the earliest hour he'd deemed reasonable. Snorting and pawing the ground, eager to lower his horns and attack, he'd ridden up in that creaking lift with a soaring sense of being about to break the case. And he'd gone to great lengths to assure himself that his mission to Kennington was indeed all about the case. Because if Katja Wolff had a little something on the side going on, and if Yasmin Edwards knew nothing about it, and if he could reveal the little something on the side in such a way as to create a fissure in their relationship, then what
was to prevent Yasmin Edwards from admitting what he already knew in his bones to be true: that Katja Wolff had not been home on the night of the murder of Eugenie Davies.

He intended nothing more than that, he'd told himself. He was just a cop carrying out his duties. Her flesh meant nothing: smooth and taut, the colour of newly minted pennies. Her body was of no account either: lithe and firm, with a waist dipping in over welcoming hips. Her eyes were only windows: dark like the shadows and trying to hide what they couldn't hide, which was anger and fear. And that anger and fear were meant to be used, to be used by him to whom she was nothing, just a lezzie lag who'd chopped her husband one night and had taken up with a baby killer.

It wasn't his responsibility to sort out why Yasmin Edwards would bring that baby killer into her home, where her own child lived, and Nkata knew it. But he did tell himself that, aside from providing them the break they needed in the investigation, it would also be for the best if the fissure he was able to produce in the women's relationship led to a break-up that would take Daniel Edwards out of the reach of a convicted killer.

He shut his ears to the thought that the boy's own mother also was a convicted killer. After all, she'd struck out against an adult. There was nothing in her background to indicate she had it in for children.

So he was filled with the righteousness of his cause when he rang the buzzer at Yasmin Edwards' door. And when there was no answer at first, he merely used the lack of response as a spur. It dug into the sides of his reason for being there, and he rang again till he forced a reply.

Nkata was a man who'd encountered prejudice and hatred for most of his life. One couldn't be a member of a minority race in England and not be the recipient of hostility in a hundred subtle forms every day. Even at the Met, where he'd assumed performance counted for more than epidermal hue, he'd learned to watch himself, never allowing others in too close, never completely letting down his guard lest he pay the price of presuming that a familiarity of discourse meant an equality of mind. That was not the case, no matter how things looked to the uninitiated observer. And wise was the black man who remembered that.

Because of all this, Nkata had long thought himself incapable of the sort of judgement he'd learned to experience at the hands of others. But after his morning interview in the Doddington Grove Estate, he'd learned that his vision was just as narrow and just as fully capable
of leading him to ill-founded conclusions as was the vision of the most illiterate, badly dressed, and ill-spoken member of the National Front.

He'd seen them together. He'd seen the way they greeted each other, the way they talked together, the way they walked like a couple to Galveston Road. He'd known the German was a woman whose life partner was another woman. So when they'd gone into that house and shut the door, he'd allowed an embrace silhouetted against the window to provoke his imagination into running from its pen like an untamed pony. A lesbian meeting another woman and trotting off with her for seclusion together meant only one thing. So he had believed. So he had let his belief colour his second interview in Yasmin Edwards' flat.

Had he not known how thoroughly he'd cocked things up right then, he would have been informed soon enough when he phoned the number on the business card that Katja had handed him. Harriet Lewis herself confirmed the story: Yes, she was Katja Wolff's solicitor. Yes, she had been with her on the previous evening. Yes, they had gone to Galveston Road together.