A Traitor to Memory

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 worktable.

“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.