A Traitor to Memory

He said, “Mind 'f I look round?”


“Why? I'm not holding nothing. You got a warrant? And I checked in like I always check in with Sharon Todd last week. If she's told you different—if that bitch's told prison service anything different …” Yasmin could feel the scare creeping up her arms as she realised yet again the amount of power her parole officer had over what went for her freedom. She said, “She'd gone to see her GP. Least, that's what I was told, wasn't I? Had some sort of attack in the office, she did, and they told her to have it checked out straightaway. So when I got there …” She drew a breath to slow herself down. And she was angry—angry—at the fear that she felt and the fact that this man with his razor-scarred face had brought fear with him into her house. This copper held every card in the deck, and both of them knew it. She said with a shrug, “Look round, then. Whatever you want, you'll not find it here.”

He engaged her eyes for a long clear time, and she refused to look away because to look away would tell him he'd squashed her beneath his thumb like a flea. So she stood where she was by the kitchen door while the water roared in the bathroom and Daniel saw to the wigs that wanted washing.

The cop said, “Cheers,” with a nod that she was meant to believe was shy and polite. He went first to her bedroom and flipped on the light. She could see him move to the paint-chipped clothes cupboard, and he opened it, but he didn't empty the pockets of any of the garments inside, although he fingered several pairs of trousers. He didn't pull out the drawers in the chest, either. But he studied the top of it—particularly one hairbrush and the blond hairs caught up in its bristles, particularly the dish of beads that she used when she wanted a change on the ends of her plaits. He took the most time with the picture of Roger, twin to the picture that she had in the sitting room, triplet to the picture that stood in the other bedroom on the table next to Daniel's small bed, quadruplet to the picture that hung on the kitchen wall above the table. Roger Edwards, aged twenty-seven when the snap had been taken, one month arrived from New South Wales, and two days fresh from Yasmin's bed.

The cop came out of her bedroom, nodded at her politely, and went into Daniel's, where the music was the same: clothes cupboard, top of the chest, picture of Roger. He went from there to the bathroom, where Daniel started chatting to him straightaway, saying, “This is my reg'lar job, these wigs. Mum pr'vides them for ladies what have cancer, see? When they take their med'cine, their hair falls out mostly. Mum gives them hair. She does their faces as well.”

“Gives them beards, does she?” the cop asked.

Daniel laughed. “Not with hair, man! She does them with make-up. Dead good she is at it, Mum is. I c'n show you a—”

“Dan!” Yasmin barked. “Mind you've a job to do.” She saw her son duck back to the tub.

The cop came out of the bathroom, gave her another nod, and went into the kitchen. There a door led onto a tiny balcony where she dried their clothes, and he opened this door, peered outside, then closed it carefully and ran his hand—large like the rest of him—along the jamb like someone looking for splinters. He opened no cupboards or drawers. He did nothing else, in fact, except stand at the table and look at that same picture that he'd been looking at in every room.

He said, “Who's this bloke, then?”

“Dan's dad. My husband. He's dead.”

“Sorry.”

“No need to be sorry,” she said. “I killed him. But I 'spect you know that already. I 'spect that's why you're here, right? Some Aussie with a habit for henry got found dead with a knife in his neck and you lot ran the specifics through your computers and Yasmin Edwards' name popped up like toast.”

“I didn't know that,” Winston Nkata said. “Sorry all the same.”

He sounded … what? She couldn't put a name to it, just as she couldn't put the name she wanted to put to the expression in his eyes. And she felt the bubbling of rage grow in her, which was something that she couldn't think through and she could never explain. It was the rage she'd learned to feel young and always—always—at the hands of a man: blokes she met and thought well of for a day or a week or a month till who they were showed through what they pretended to be.

She snapped, “What you want, then? Why're you messing with me? Why're you outside chatting to my son like you were in'erested in something he got to tell you? 'F you think I done something, then you speak proper and you speak now or you get your bum out 'f here. Hear me? Because if you don't—”

He said, “Katja Wolff,” and that stopped her. What the hell did he want with Katja? He said, “Probation service list this as her address. That right?”