A Traitor to Memory

  Deborah led Lynley into the room, saying, “Do put that thing down somewhere, Tommy. It looks heavy.”

  Lynley chose a coffee table that stood in front of a sofa facing the fireplace. Peach came to investigate the computer before returning to a basket that exposed her to the best warmth of the fire. There, she curled herself into a ball, sighed happily, and watched the proceedings in a dignified head-on-paws position from which she blinked drowsily from time to time.

  “You must be wanting Simon,” Deborah said. “He's just upstairs. Let me fetch him for you.”

  “In a moment.” Lynley said the words without thinking, and so quickly on the heels of her own that Deborah brought herself up short, smiled at him quizzically, and shoved a portion of her heavy hair behind one ear.

  She said, “All right,” and walked to an old drinks trolley by the window. She was a tallish woman, lightly freckled across the bridge of her nose, not thin like a model, not stout, but well-shaped and completely female. She wore black jeans and a sweater that was the colour of green olives and made an attractive contrast with her coppery hair.

  He saw that the room was stacked along the walls and the bookshelves at floor level with dozens of mounted and framed photographs. Some of them were dressed in bubble wrap, which reminded him of Deborah's upcoming show in a gallery on Great Newport Street.

  She said, “Sherry? Whisky? We've got a new bottle of Lagavulin that Simon's telling me is nothing short of potable heaven.”

  “Simon's not given to hyperbole.”

  “Like the fine man of science that he is.”

  “It must be good, then. I'll have the whisky. You're working on the show?”

  “It's nearly ready. I'm at the catalogue stage.” Handing over the whisky, she nodded to her husband's desk and said, “I've been going over the proofs. The pictures they've selected are fine, but they've edited out some of my timeless prose”—she grinned; her nose wrinkled as it always did, making her look much younger than her twenty-six years—“and I'm finding that I don't like that much. Look at me. My fifteen minutes arrive and straightaway I become the great artiste.”

  He smiled. “That's unlikely.”

  “Which part?”

  “The part about fifteen minutes.”

  “You're very quick this evening.”

  “I speak only the truth.”

  She smiled at him fondly, then turned and poured herself a glass of sherry. She took it up, held it out, and said, “Here's to … Hmm … I don't know. What shall we drink to?”

  Which was how Lynley knew that Helen had been as good as her word, not telling Deborah about the coming baby. He was relieved at this. At the same time, he was ill at ease. Deborah would have to know sometime, and he knew that he had to be the person to tell her. He wanted to do so now, but he couldn't think of a place to begin, apart from saying outright, Let's drink to Helen. Let's drink to the baby my wife and I have made. Which was, of course, completely impossible.

  He said instead, “Let's drink to the sale of every one of your pictures next month. On opening night, to members of the royal family who will summarily demonstrate they've a taste for something beyond horses and blood sport.”

  “You never did get over your first fox hunt, did you?”

  “‘The unspeakable in pursuit.’”

  “Such a traitor to your class.”

  “I like to think it's what makes me interesting.”

  Deborah laughed, said, “Cheers, then,” and took a sip of sherry.

  For his part, Lynley took a deep gulp of the Lagavulin and considered everything that was going unsaid between them. What a thing it was to come face-to-face with one's cowardice and indecision, he thought.

  He said, “What will you do after the show is mounted? Have you another project in mind?”

  Deborah looked round at the photographs piled in their serried ranks and considered the question, head cocked and eyes thoughtful. “Bit frightening, that is,” she admitted frankly. “I've been working on this since January. Eleven months now. And I suppose what I'd like to do if the gods allow it …” Her head tilted upwards to indicate not only the heavens but her husband, who'd probably be given his say in the matter. “I'd like to do something foreign, I think. Portraits still, I do love portraits. But foreign faces this time. Not foreign-in-London faces, because obviously I could find hundreds of thousands of those but they've been Britished, haven't they, even if they don't think so themselves. So what I'd like is something quite different. Africa? India? Turkey? Russia? I don't quite know.”

  “But portraits all the same?”

  “People don't hide from the camera when the picture's not for their own use. That's what I like about it: the openness, the candour with which they gaze at the lens. It's rather addictive, looking at all those faces being real for once.” She took another swallow of sherry and said, “But you can't have come to talk about my pictures.”

  He took the opportunity for escape even as he loathed himself for doing so. He said, “Is Simon in the lab?”

  “Shall I fetch him for you?”

  “I'll just go up if that's all right.”

  She said that it was, of course it was, he knew the way. And she crossed back to the desk where she'd been working, set down her glass, and came back to him. He finished his whisky, thinking she meant to have his own glass back, but she squeezed his arm and kissed him on the cheek. “Lovely to see you. D'you need help with that computer?”

  “I can manage,” he said. And he did just that, not feeling particularly proud of himself for accepting the escape route she offered, but telling himself that there was work to be done and work came first, which was certainly a fact that Deborah St. James understood.

  Her husband was on the fourth floor of the house, where he had a work room that had long been called his laboratory, and Deborah had a darkroom adjacent to it. Lynley climbed to this floor, pausing at the top of the stairs to say, “Simon? Are you in the middle of something?” before he walked across the landing to the open door.

  Simon St. James was at his own computer, where he appeared to be studying a complicated structure that resembled a three-dimensional graph. When he tapped a few keys, the graphic altered. When he tapped a few more, it revolved on its side. He murmured, “That's damn curious,” and then turned to the door. “Tommy. I thought I heard someone come in a few minutes ago.”

  “Deb offered me a glass of your Lagavulin. She was seeking confirmation as to its quality.”

  “And?”

  “Pretty damn good. May I …?” He nodded down at the computer.

  St. James said, “Sorry. Here. Let me move…. Well, something can be moved, I think.”

  He rolled his chair back from his computer table and hit the side of his leg brace at the knee with a metal ruler when it didn't adjust properly as he rose. He said, “I've been having the most blasted trouble with this thing. It's worse than arthritis. As soon as the rain starts, the knee hinge doesn't want to work properly. It's time for an overhaul. That or a visit to Oz.” He spoke with an utter lack of concern that Lynley knew he felt but could not feel himself. Whenever St. James had taken a step in Lynley's line of vision in the last thirteen years, it had required every ounce of control he had not to avert his eyes in abject shame for having wreaked such physical devastation on his friend.

  St. James cleared a space on the worktable nearest to the door by stacking up papers and manila folders and moving several scientific journals to one side. He said casually, “Is Helen all right? She was looking rather ill when she left this afternoon. All day, in fact, now that I think of it.”

  “She was fine this morning,” Lynley said, and he told himself that the statement comprised the approximate if not the literal truth. She was fine. Morning sickness did not constitute illness in the usual sense. “Bit tired, I expect. We were out late at Web—” But that wasn't, he recalled, the story his wife had told Deborah and Simon earlier, was it? Blast Helen, he thought, for being so creative when it ca
me to spinning tales. “No. Sorry. That was the other night, wasn't it. Christ. I can't keep anything straight. Anyway, she's fine. I expect it was a late night catching up with her.”

  “Right. Well. Yes,” St. James said, but his examination of Lynley was rather too lengthy for Lynley's comfort. In the small silence that ensued, rain began to fall outside. It hit the window like timpani in miniature, and it was accompanied by a sudden gust of wind that rattled the casement like an unspoken accusation. St. James said, “What've you brought me?” with a nod at the computer.

  “Some detective work.”

  “That's your bailiwick, isn't it?”

  “This requires a more delicate touch.”

  St. James hadn't known Lynley for more than twenty years to find himself suddenly incapable of reading between the lines. He said, “Are we on thin ice, Tommy?”

  Lynley said honestly, “A singular pronoun is all that's required. You're clean. If you'll help me, that is.”

  “That's remarkably reassuring,” St. James said dryly. “Why do I picture myself in an unpleasant future scenario, sitting in the dock or standing in the witness box, but in either case sweating like a fat man in Miami?”

  “That's your natural sense of fair play among men, a quality I deeply admire in you, by the way, if I've not mentioned the fact before. It's also, however, one of the first things that gets tossed out of the window after a few years dealing with the criminal element.”

  “This is from a case, then?” St. James said.

  “You didn't hear that from me.”

  St. James fingered his upper lip thoughtfully as he gazed at the computer. He would know what Lynley ought to be doing with the piece of machinery. But as to why he wasn't doing it … That was something he'd be better off not asking. He finally drew a breath and let it out, giving a shake of his head that indicated it was against his better judgement to say, “What do you need?”

  “All internet activity. Her use of e-mail particularly.”

  “Her?”

  “Yes. Her. She may have received mail in the past from an internet Lothario who calls himself TongueMan—”

  “Good God.”

  “—but there was nothing on the machine from him when we logged on to it in her office.” Lynley went on to tell St. James Eugenie Davies' password, which the other man jotted down on a piece of yellow legal paper that he ripped from a pad on the work-table.

  “Am I looking for anything besides TongueMan?”

  “You're looking for all activity, Simon. E-mail in, e-mail out. Surfing the net. Whatever she's done once she's logged on, let's say, for the last two months. That's possible, isn't it?”

  “Most of the time, yes. But I don't have to tell you how much more quickly an expert from the Yard could manage this for you, not to mention an order from some legal authority should you need to strong-arm the internet provider.”

  “Right. I know that.”

  “Which leads me to conclude that you suspect there's something here”—he placed his hand on the machine—“that puts someone in a difficult position, someone you'd rather not see get into a difficult position. Is that right?”

  Lynley said steadily, “Yes. That's right.”

  “It's not you, I hope.”

  “Great Scot. No.”

  St. James nodded. “I'm glad of that, then.” He looked momentarily uncomfortable and tried to hide the discomfort by lowering his head and rubbing the back of his neck. “So things are well with you and Helen, then,” he settled on saying.

  Lynley saw his line of reasoning. A mysterious her, a computer in Lynley's possession, an unnamed someone getting into difficulty should his e-mail address show up on Eugenie Davies' computer … It added up to an illicit something, and St. James's longstanding relationship with Lynley's wife—after all, he'd known Helen since she was eighteen—would make him more protective of her than one would expect of someone's employer.

  Lynley hastened to say, “Simon, it's nothing to do with Helen. Nor with me. You have my word on that. So will you do this for me?”

  “You're going to owe me, Tommy.”

  “In spades. But I'm so far in debt to you at this point that I might as well sign over the land in Cornwall and have done with it.”

  “That's a tempting offer.” St. James smiled. “I've always fancied myself a country squire.”

  “You'll do it, then?”

  “I expect I will. But without the land. God knows we don't want to set your ancestors spinning in their graves.”

  DC Winston Nkata knew the woman was Katja Wolff before she opened her mouth, but put to the rack he wouldn't have been able to tell anyone exactly how he knew. She had a key to the flat, true, so there was that to identify her since this flat in the Doddington Grove Estate had been listed as her address when he'd tracked down her parole officer at DI Lynley's request a short time earlier. But it was more than the key unlocking the door that told him whom he was looking at. There was the way she carried herself, like someone wary of every potential encounter, and there was also her expression, a perfect blank, the sort of expression a lag wore inside so as not to draw attention to herself.

  She stopped right inside the door, and her glance went from Yasmin Edwards to Nkata and back to Yasmin, where it remained. She said, “Am I interrupting you, Yas?” in a husky voice that bore less of the German accent than Nkata had expected. But she'd been more than twenty years in the country at this point. And she hadn't been surrounded by her fellow Germans.

  Yasmin said, “This is the Bill, this is. Detective Constable. He's called Nkata,” and Katja Wolff's body went on the alert: a subtle, tensing awareness that someone not born into the land of gang activity like Winston Nkata might not have noticed.

  Katja removed her coat—cherry red—and the close-fitting grey hat with its matching band of the coat's bright colour. Beneath, she had on a sky-blue pullover, looking like cashmere but worn to a paperlike thinness at the elbows, and pale grey trousers of a slick material threaded through with silver when she moved in the light.

  She said to Yasmin, “Where's Dan?”

  Yasmin indicated the bathroom with her head. “Doing wigs.”

  “And this bloke?” She tilted her chin at Nkata.

  He took the reins while he had the chance, saying, “You're Katja Wolff?”

  She didn't reply. Instead, she walked over to the bathroom and said hello to Yasmin Edwards' son, who appeared to be up to his elbows in bubbles. The boy looked over his shoulder at her, then into the sitting room, where he managed to lock eyes with Nkata for a moment. But he said nothing. Katja closed the bathroom door on him and strode to the old three-piece suite that constituted the sitting room furniture. She sat on the sofa, opened a packet of Dunhills that lay on the table next to it, and took out a cigarette, which she lit. She picked up the television remote and was about to punch the set on, when Yasmin said her name: not in supplication but in warning, it sounded to Nkata.

  At that, Winston found that he wanted to study Yasmin Edwards because he wanted to understand: her, the situation here in Kennington, her son, the relationship between the two women. He'd got beyond the fact that she was beautiful. He was still sorting through her anger, though, as well as through the fears she was doing her best to hide. He wanted to say, “You're all right here, girl,” but he recognised the foolishness of doing so.

  He said to Katja Wolff, “Laundry up on Kennington High Street says you didn't show to work today.”

  She said, “I was ill this morning, all day in fact. I've just been to the chemist. There is no law broken in that, I believe,” and she drew in on the cigarette and examined him.

  Nkata saw Yasmin glance between them. She clasped her hands in front of her, just at the level of her sex, as if she wished to hide it. He said to Katja Wolff, “Go to the chemist by motor, then?”

  “Yes. What about it?”

  “Got your own motor, have you?”

  Katja said, “Why? Have you come to request that I drive
you somewhere?” Her English was perfect, remarkable really, as impressive as the woman herself.

  “Got a car, Miss Wolff?” he repeated patiently.

  “No. They don't generally provide parolees with transport when they release them. It's a pity, I think. Especially for those who serve time for armed robbery. How bleak their future must look to them, knowing they'll have to escape from the scenes of their future crimes on foot. While for someone like me …?” She tapped her cigarette against a ceramic ashtray that was shaped, seasonally, like a pumpkin. “A car is quite inessential for working in a laundry. One only needs a high tolerance for both endless boredom and insufferable heat.”

  “So it's not your car, then?”

  Yasmin crossed the room as Nkata completed the question. She joined Katja on the sofa and neatly rearranged a few magazines and tabloids on the iron-legged coffee table in front of it. Having done this, she placed a hand on Katja's knee. She looked at Nkata across the line she'd drawn as clearly as if she'd wielded chalk on the carpet squares.

  She said, “What'd you want with us, man? Time to spit it out or time to leave.”

  “Got a car yourself?” Nkata asked her.

  “'F I do?”

  “Like to see it, I would.”

  Katja said, “Why? Who is it you've come to speak to, Constable?”

  “We'll get to that soon enough, I expect,” Nkata said. “Where's the car?”

  The two women were motionless for a moment, during which a resuming of water roaring into the bathtub told everyone that Daniel was taking his mother's wigs through a manual rinse cycle. Katja was the one to break the silence, and she did it with the confidence of a woman who'd spent two decades educating herself as to her rights with regard to the police. “Have you a warrant? For anything, by the way?”