A Traitor to Memory

  “Plug it,” Azoff said finally. And to Leach, “Get to the point or we're off.”

  “Not without my motor,” P-Man said.

  Leach fished in his jacket pocket and brought out the release form for the Boxter. He laid it on the table between himself and the two other men. He said, “You were the only one from that house who didn't give evidence against her, Mr. Pytches. I'd think she'd've dropped by to say thank you now that she's out of the coop.”

  “What're you on about?” P-Man cried.

  “Beckett gave character evidence. Talked to us and to everyone else about which wires in Wolff 's circuits were fraying. Bit of temper here. Dash of impatience there. Other things to do when the baby wanted a bit of looking after. Not always on her toes the way a properly trained nanny would be. And then getting herself in the club …”

  “Yes? So? What about it?” P-Man said. “Sarah-Jane saw more than I saw. She talked about that. Am I supposed to be her conscience or something? Twenty-odd years after the fact?”

  Azoff intervened. “We're looking for a point to this confab, DCI Leach. If there isn't one, we'll have that paperwork and be off.” He reached for it.

  Leach pressed his fingers along its edge. “The point is Katja Wolff,” he said. “And our boy's ties to her.”

  “I have no ties to her,” P-Man protested.

  “I'm not sure about that. Someone got her pregnant, and I'm not putting a fiver on the Holy Ghost.”

  “Don't put that down to me. We lived in the same house. That's all. We nodded on the staircase. I might have given her the odd lesson with her English and, yes, I might have admired—Look. She was attractive. She was sure of herself, confident, not the way you'd expect a foreigner who didn't even speak the language to feel or act. That's always nice to see in a woman. And for God's sake. I'm not blind.”

  “Had a bit of a thing with her, then. Tip-toeing round the house at night. Once or twice behind the garden shed, and oops, look what happened.”

  Azoff slapped his hand on the table between them. He said, “Once, twice, eighty-five times. If you're not intending to talk about the case in hand, we're off. You got that?”

  “This is the case in hand, Mr. Azoff, especially if our boy spent the last twenty years brooding about a woman he diddled and then didn't do a thing to help once she'd—A—got herself up the spout thanks to him and—B—got herself charged with murder. He might want to make amends for that. And what better way than to give a hand in a spot of revenge. Which she might think she's owed, by the way. Time passes a bit slow inside, you know. And you'd be dead surprised to see the way that slow time makes a killer decide she's the injured party.”

  “That's … that is utterly … that's preposterous,” P-Man sputtered.

  “Is it?”

  “You know it is. What's supposed to have happened?”

  “Jay—” Azoff counseled.

  “She's supposed to have tracked me down, rung my bell one night, and said, ‘Hello, Jim. Know we haven't seen each other for twenty, but how about helping me rub out a few people? Just for a laugh, this is. Not too busy, are you?’ Is that how you picture it, Inspector?”

  “Shut up, Jay,” Azoff said.

  “No! I've spent half my life scouring down the walls when I'm not the one who's pissed on them, and I'm tired of it. I'm God damn bloody tired. If it's not the police, then it's the papers. If it's not the papers, it's—” He stopped himself.

  “Yes?” Leach leaned forward. “Who is it, then? What's the nasty you've got back there, Mr. P? Something beyond that cot death, I reckon. You're a real man of mystery, you are. And I'll tell you this much: I'm not finished with you.”

  P-Man sank back in his chair, his throat working. Azoff said, “Odd. I don't hear a caution, Inspector. Forgive me if I lapsed into momentary unconsciousness sometime during this meeting, but I don't recall having heard a caution yet. And if I won't be hearing one in the next fifteen seconds, it's my suggestion that we make our farewells to each other now, heartrending though those farewells may be.”

  Leach shoved the Boxter's paperwork at them. He said, “Don't plan any holidays, Mr. P.” And to Azoff, “Keep that fag unlit till you're on the street or I'll have you in for something.”

  “Cor. Blimey. I'm ackshully pissing me pants, guv'nor,” Azoff said.

  Leach started to speak, then stopped himself. Then he said, “Get out,” and saw to it that they did just that.

  J. W Pitchley, AKA TongueMan, AKA James Pitchford, AKA Jimmy Pytches said his goodbye to Lou Azoff in front of the Hampstead Police Station, and he knew that this was a final one. Azoff was cheesed off about the Jimmy Pytches revelation, more cheesed off than he'd been by the James Pitchford revelation, and despite the fact that he'd been declared blameless of the death of both children first as Pytches and then as Pitchford, that wasn't “the issue,” as Azoff put it. He wasn't about to put himself in the position of getting sucker-punched again by something that his client was withholding from him, Azoff said. How'd he think it felt, sitting in there with a sodding copper who'd probably not even passed his bleeding O levels for Christ's sake, and having the rug pulled out without even knowing there was a rug in the room? This effing situation wasn't on, Jay. Or is it James? Or Jimmy? Or someone else, for that matter?

  It wasn't someone else. He wasn't someone else. And even if Azoff hadn't said, “You'll get my final bill by special courier tomorrow,” he himself would have put the full stop to their legal dealings. No matter that he handled the labyrinth that was Azoff 's tricky financial position. He could find someone else in the City equally talented at moving Azoff 's money round faster than the Inland Revenue could track it.

  So he said, “Right, Lou,” and he didn't bother to try to talk the solicitor out of quitting on him. He couldn't blame the poor sod, really. Who could expect someone to want to play defence on a team that wouldn't give directions to the pitch?

  He watched Azoff wind his scarf round his neck and fling its end over his shoulder, like the denouement of a play that had already gone on far too long. The solicitor made his exit, and Pitchley sighed. He could have told Azoff that sacking him had not only already crossed his mind but had also planted itself there half way through the interview with DCI Leach, but he decided to let the solicitor have his moment. The drama of quitting on the streets of Hampstead was meagre compensation for having endured the ignominy of ignorance to which Pitchley's omission of certain facts had recently exposed him. But it was all that Pitchley had to offer at the moment, so he offered it and stood, head bowed, while Azoff railed and till Azoff did his bit with the scarf. “I'll get on to a bloke I know who'll see you right with your money,” he told the solicitor.

  “You do just that,” Azoff said. He made no similar offer on his part: recommending another solicitor willing to take on a client who asked him to work in the dark. But then, Pitchley didn't expect that of him. Indeed, he'd given up expecting anything.

  That hadn't always been the case, although if it couldn't be said that he'd had expectations years ago, it could be said that he'd possessed dreams. She'd told him hers in that breathless, confiding, cheerful whisper, after hours when they had their English lessons and their chats at the top of the house, one ear to the speaker from the baby's room so that if she stirred, if she cried, if she needed her Katja, her Katja would be there, fast as could be. She said, “There are these fashion-for-clothes schools, yes? For design of what to wear. Yes? You see? And you see how I make these fashion drawings, yes? This is where I study when the money is saved. Where I come from, James, clothing … Oh, I cannot say, but your colours, your colours … And see at this scarf I have bought. This is Oxfam, James. Someone gave it away!” And she would bring it out and whirl it like an eastern dancer, a length of worn silk with fringe coming loose but to her a fabric to be turned into a sash, a belt, a drawstring bag, a hat. Two such scarves and she had a blouse. Five and a motley skirt emerged. “This I am meant to do,” she would say, and her eyes were bright and
her cheeks were flushed and the rest of her skin was velvet milk. All London wore black, but never Katja. Katja was a rainbow, a celebration of life.

  And because of all that, he had dreams himself. Not plans as she had, not something spoken, but something held on to like a feather that will soil and be useless for flight if grasped too tightly or for too long.

  He wouldn't move quickly, he'd told himself. They were both young. She had her schooling ahead of her and he wanted to establish himself in the City before taking on the sort of responsibilities that came with marriage. But when the time was right … Yes, she was the one. So completely different, so completely capable of becoming, so eager to learn, so willing—no, so desperate—to escape who she'd been in order to achieve who she believed she could become. She was, in effect, his female counterpart. She didn't know that yet and she never would if he had his way, but in the unlikely event that she discovered that fact, she was a woman who would understand. We all have our hot air balloons, he would tell her.

  Had he loved her? he wondered. Or had he merely seen in her his best chance for a life where her foreign background would cast a useful shadow in which he could hide? He didn't know. He'd never got a chance to find out. And at a distance of two decades, he still didn't know how it might have worked out between the two of them. But what he did know without a single doubt was that at long last he'd had enough.

  With the Boxter in his possession, he began the drive that he knew was a journey long in coming. It took him across London, first dropping down out of Hampstead and veering in the direction of Regent's Park, then wending his way eastward, ever eastward, to arrive in that Hades of postal codes: E3, where his nightmares had their roots.

  Unlike many areas of London, Tower Hamlets had not become gentrified. Films made here did not feature actors who batted their eyelashes, fell in love, lived arty lives, and lent an air of genteel down-at-heel glamour to the place, thus resulting in its renaissance at the hands of yuppies in Range Rovers yearning to be trendy. For the word renaissance implied that a place had once seen better times to which an infusion of cash would return it. But to Pitchley's eyes, Tower Hamlets had been a dump from the moment its first building had its initial foundation stone set into place.

  He'd spent more than half his life trying to scrub the grime of Tower Hamlets from beneath his fingernails. He'd worked jobs not fit for man or beast since his ninth birthday, squirreling away whatever he could towards a future he wanted but couldn't quite define. He'd endured bullying at a school where learning took a distant seventh place to tormenting teachers, demolishing ancient and nearly useless equipment, graffitiing every available inch, shagging birds on the stairwells, setting fires in the dustbins, and pinching everything from the third-formers' sweets money to the Christmas collection taken each year to give a decent meal to the area's homeless drunks. In that environment, he'd forced himself to learn, a sponge for whatever might get him out of the inferno he'd come to assume was his punishment for a transgression he'd committed in a previous lifetime.

  His family didn't understand his passion to be free of the place. So his mother—unmarried as she always had been and would be to her grave—smoked her fags all day at the window of the council flat, collected the dole like it was owed to her for doing the nation the favour of breathing, raised the six offspring that were got by four fathers, and wondered aloud how she'd managed to produce such a git as Jimmy, all neat and tidy like he actually thought he was something other than a yobbo in disguise.

  “Lookit 'im, will you?” she'd ask his siblings. “Too good for us, our Jim. What's it to be today, laddie?”—as she looked him over—“Riding to the 'ounds, are we?”

  He'd say, “Aw, Mum,” and feel misery climbing from his navel up his chest and into his jaws.

  “Tha's all right, lad,” she'd reply. “Just pinch one of them nice doggies so we'll 'ave a watcher round these ol' digs, okay? Tha'd be nice, now, woul'n't it, kids? 'Ow'd you like our Jimmy to pinch us a dog?”

  “Mum, I'm not going fox hunting,” he'd say.

  And they'd laugh. Laugh and laugh till he wanted to thrash the lot of them for being so useless.

  His mother was the worst because she set the tone. She might have been clever. She might have been energetic. She might have been capable of doing something with her life. But she got herself a baby—Jimmy himself—when she was fifteen and that's when she learned that if she kept having them, she'd be paid. Child Benefit was what they called it. What Jimmy Pytches called it was Chains.

  So he made his life's purpose the demolition of his past, taking every odd job he could get his mitts on as soon as he was able to do so. What the job was didn't matter to him: cleaning windows, scrubbing floors, vacuuming carpets, walking dogs, washing cars, minding children. He didn't care. If he was paid to do it, do it he would. Because although money couldn't buy him better blood, it could get him miles from the blood that threatened to drown him.

  Then came that cot death, that god-awful moment when he went into her bedroom because it was long past the time she generally woke up from her nap. And there she was like a plastic doll, with one hand curled to her mouth like she'd been trying to help herself breathe—for God's sake—and her tiny fingernails were blue were blue were bluest of blue and he knew right then that she was a goner. Crikey, he'd been in the sitting room, hadn't he? He'd been right next door. He'd been watching Arsenal. He'd been thinking, Lucky day, this is, the brat's well away and I won't have to fuss with her during the game. He'd thought that—the brat—but he didn't mean it, never would have said it, actually smiled when he saw her in her push chair at the local grocery with her mum. He never thought “the brat” then. Just, Here's lit'le Sherry and her mum. Hello, Nubkins. Because that's what he called her. He called her a nonsense name. Nubkins.

  Then she was dead and the police were there. Questions and answers and tears all round. And what kind of monster was he who watched Arsenal while a baby was dying and who even to this day remembered the score?

  There were whispers, of course. There were rumours. Both fueled his passion to be gone forever. And forever was what he thought he'd achieved, a kind of eternal paradise defined by a Dutch-fronted house in Kensington, the kind of house so grand it had a medallion carved 1879 on its gable. And this house was peopled as grandly as it was situated, much to his delight. A war hero, a child prodigy, a for-God's-sake governess for that child, a foreign nanny … Nothing could have been more different to where he'd come from: Tower Hamlets via a bed-sit in Hammersmith and a fortune spent on learning everything from how to say haricots verts and knowing what it meant to how to use cutlery instead of one's fingers for moving bits of food round one's plate. So when he'd finally reached Kensington Square, no one knew. Least of all Katja, who would never have known, having not had a lifetime of instruction on what it meant to say lounge at an inopportune time.

  And then she'd got pregnant, the worst sort of getting pregnant. Unlike his mum, who'd carried on during her pregnancies as if growing a child inside her body were nothing more than a minor inconvenience causing her to switch to a different set of clothes for a few months, Katja'd had no easy time of it, which made her condition impossible to hide. And from that pregnancy had risen everything else, including his own past, threatening to seep from the splitting pipes of their life in Kensington Square like the sewage it was.

  Even after all that, he'd thought he could escape it again. James Pitchford, whose past had hung over him like Damocles' sword, just waiting to be smeared across the tabloids as Lodger Once Investigated in Cot Death, just waiting to be revealed as Jimmy Pytches: all aitches dropped and tee-aitches said as effs, Jimmy Pytches the subject of laughter for trying to be better than he was. So he changed again, morphed himself into J. W. Pitchley, ace investor and financial wizard, but running, always running, and always to run.

  Which brought him to Tower Hamlets now: a man who'd come to accept the fact that to escape what he could not bear to face, he could kill himself, he
could change his identity yet another time, or he could flee forever, not only the teeming city of London but everything that London—and England—represented.

  He parked the Boxter near the tower block that had been his childhood home. He looked round and saw that little had changed, including the presence of local skinheads, three of them this time, who smoked in the doorway of a nearby shop, watching him and his car with studied attention. He called out to them, “Want to make ten quid?”

  One of them spat a gob of yellowish sputum into the street. “Each?” he said.

  “All right. Each.”

  “What's to do, then?”

  “Keep an eye on the motor for me. See that no one touches it. Okay?”

  They shrugged. Pitchley took this for assent. He nodded at them, saying, “Ten now, twenty later.”

  “Give,” said their leader, and he slouched over for the cash.

  As he handed the ten-pound note over to the thug, Pitchley realised the bloke might well be his youngest half brother, Paul. It had been more than twenty years since he'd seen little Paulie. What an irony it would be if he were handing over what went for extorted dosh to his own brother without either of them knowing who the other was. But that was the case for most of his siblings now. For all he knew, there might even be more of them than the five there were when he did his runner.

  He entered the tower block estate: a patch of dead lawn, chalk hopscotch squares drawn drunkenly on the uneven tarmac, a deflated football with a knife gouge in it, two shopping trolleys overturned and rendered wheel-less. Three little girls were attempting to inline skate on one of the concrete paths, but its condition was as bad as the tarmac's, so they'd get about two and a half yards of even ground to glide on before they had to clomp over or around a spot where the concrete looked as if the bomb squad might want to come to have a look for a UXB.

  Pitchley made his way to the tower block's lift and found that it was out of service. A block-lettered sign informed him of this, hanging on old chrome doors long ago decorated by the resident spray-paint artists.