A Traitor to Memory

The women exchanged a glance, after which Katja rose and went into the kitchen. There, cupboards opened and closed, a kettle clanged onto the cooker, and a burner hissed. For her part, Yasmin waited for a moment as if for a sign from the kitchen of something other than tea being made. When she didn't receive one, she got to her feet and snatched a key from a hook to the right of the flat's front door. She said, “Come on, then,” to Nkata and, coatless despite the weather, she led him outside. Katja Wolff remained behind.

Yasmin took lengthy strides towards the lift, as if she didn't care one way or another if the detective was following her. When she moved, her plaits—so long that they reached her shoulder blades—made a music that was both hypnotic and soothing, and Nkata realised that he couldn't account for the effect that that music had on him. He felt the reaction in his throat first, then behind his eyes, then in his chest. He shook it away and looked down at the car park, then over at what appeared to be allotments across the street, then in the direction of Manor Place, where he could glimpse the first of a row of derelict buildings that expressed what years of government indifference and urban decay had done to the neighbourhood.

In the lift, he said, “'D you grow up round here?”

Yasmin stared him down in silence so he finally moved his gaze to the words eat me till I scream that someone had painted in nail varnish on the lift wall in line with Yasmin's right shoulder. The graffito brought his mother immediately to Nkata's mind: a female vigilante who would no more allow graffiti to foul her landscape than would she permit a profanity uttered within her hearing. Alice Nkata would have been so quickly inside that lift with the varnish remover that the imperative wouldn't have had a chance even to dry before she had obliterated it. Thinking of this and his dignified mother and how she'd managed to maintain her dignity in a society that saw a black woman first and the woman herself only second and if she was lucky that day, Nkata smiled fondly.

Yasmin said, “Like to have women under your thumb, do you, man? That why you joined the Bill, was it?”

He wanted to tell her that she shouldn't sneer, not because the expression distorted her face and stretched the scar on her lip so that it seemed to bloom, but because when she sneered, she looked frightened. And fear was a woman's enemy on the streets.

He said, “Sorry. Thinking of my mum.”

“Your mum.” She rolled her eyes. “You telling me next I remind you 'f her, yeah?”

Nkata laughed outright at the thought of the comparison. He said, “Not at all, girl.” And he chuckled more.

Her eyes narrowed. The lift door creaked open. She stalked outside.

Across a strip of dying lawn, the car park held a small array of cars that spoke of the general economic status of the people in the Doddington Grove Estate. Yasmin Edwards took Nkata to a Fiesta with a rear bumper that clung to the vehicle like an inebriate to a lamppost. The car had once been red but the colour had long ago oxidized so it was mostly rust. Nkata walked round it carefully. The front right headlamp had a jagged crack in it, but aside from the rear bumper, that was the extent of the damage.

He squatted at the front of the Fiesta and peered beneath it, using a pocket torch to shed some light on its undercarriage. He did the same thing at the back of the vehicle, taking his time. Yasmin Edwards stood by in silence, her arms wrapped round her against the chill, her summertime top meagre protection against the wind that was blowing and the rain that had begun to fall.

Nkata straightened, his inspection finished. He said, “When'd that headlamp get smashed?”

“What headlamp?” She went to the front of the car and examined it herself. “I don't know,” she said, and for the first time since learning who and what Nkata was, she did not sound combative as she ran her fingers across the uneven crack in the glass. “Lights still work proper, so I didn't notice.” She was shivering now, but it seemed more likely with the cold than with concern. Nkata removed his overcoat, saying, “Here,” and handing it over. She took it.

Nkata waited till she had slid her arms into his coat, till she had snugly wrapped it round her, till he saw what she looked like with the collar raised and expressing a curve against her dark skin. Then he said, “You both drive this car, Missus Edwards? Right that, isn't it? You and Katja Wolff?”

And the coat was off and thrust back at him instantly, almost before he finished the question. If there had been a moment of anything more than hostility between them, he'd just managed to shatter it. Yasmin looked up to the flat where Katja Wolff was making tea. She returned her glance to Nkata and said evenly, arms encircling her body once more, “That all you want with us, man?”

He said, “No. Where were you last night, Missus Edwards?”

She said, “Here. Where else would I be? I got a boy needs his mum, I expect you noticed.”

“Miss Wolff here as well?”