A Traitor to Memory

In the mirror above the basin, Katja's blue eyes fixed on Yasmin's. “You believe that, Yas? He's a copper and you and I are … You know what we are to him: fluff and dagger from inside, back in the street. I saw how he looked at us if you didn't. So why should a man like that tell us what really is when lies will serve to put us apart from each other?”


Yasmin couldn't deny that there was truth in what Katja was saying. In her experience, police couldn't be trusted with anything. Indeed, no one in the whole legal system could be trusted if it came down to it. In the legal system, plods settled on a story and bent the facts to fit it, presenting those facts to magistrates in such a way that bail was deemed foolhardy and a trial in the Old Bailey followed by a lengthy prison sentence was the only cure for what got called a social ill. Like she had been a disease and Roger Edwards had been what she'd infected instead of what each of them had really been: she nineteen and the longtime plaything of step-fathers, step-brothers, and the friends of both and he a yellow-haired Aussie who'd chased his girlfriend to London where he'd been dumped, with a book of poems tucked under his arm. That was the same book of poems he'd left at the till at Sainsbury's where she rang up his groceries once a week, a book of poems that made her think he was something more than what she was used to.

And he was, Roger Edwards. He was different and more in so many ways. Just not in the ways that counted.

It was never simple: what brought a man and a woman together. Oh, it looked that way on the surface—hard cock and hot cunt—but it never was. There was no way to explain it: her history and Roger's, her fears and his mighty desperation, their mutual needs and their unspoken beliefs about what each partner should be to the other. There was only what happened. And what happened was a tedious series of accusations that were the children born of his addictions and an even more tedious series of denials that were never enough, not without proof which was in itself a spur to more accusations. And these were flung with a building paranoia that was itself fueled by the drugs and the drink until she wanted him out of her life, out of their child's life, and out of her flat no matter that their son would go fatherless like so many boys within their community, fatherless despite the promise she'd made to herself that Daniel would not grow up trapped in a web of women.

Roger wouldn't go, though. He fought against going. He really fought. He fought the way a man fights another man, in silence and with strength and closed fists. But she was the one with the weapon, and she used it.

Five years she'd served. She'd been arrested and charged. Because she was six feet tall, she was more than five inches taller than her husband, so, gentlemen and ladies of the jury, why had this woman felt it was necessary to use a knife to stop him when he allegedly became abusive? He'd been what was called under the influence of a foreign substance so most of his punches had gone wide or been short or merely grazed her instead of connecting with her dusky flesh, instead of bruising or better yet breaking bones. Yet she used a knife on this unfortunate man, and she managed to connect that knife with his body no less than eight times.

More blood would have been useful in the subsequent investigation by the local police. Her blood, that is, instead of Roger's. As it was, all she had was the story itself in which an attractive bloke on the rebound catches the eye of a girl who's in hiding from the world. He coaxes her out from beneath her rock; she promises him a cool draught of forget. And if he used a little and he drank a lot, what worry was there in that? Those were, to her, familiar behaviours. It was the descent into squalor and the demand for money that she could earn at night in doorways, in parked cars, or leaning against a tree on the common with her legs spread wide that she hadn't been prepared to accept from Roger Edwards.

“Get out, get out!” she'd screamed at him. And it was her screaming and those words that she screamed that the neighbours later remembered.

“Just tell us the story, Mrs. Edwards,” the coppers had said to her over her husband's bloodied and very dead body. “All you need to do is to tell us the story and we'll get all this sorted out straightaway.”

Five years in prison had been the consequence of her telling her story to the police. Five years in prison had been their way of getting things sorted out straightaway. She'd lost those years with her son, she'd come out with nothing, and she'd spent the next five years working, planning, begging, and borrowing, making it up to them both. So Katja was right, and Yasmin knew it. Only a fool trusted anything a copper had to say.

But there was more than just the detective's words about Katja's absences—from work, from the flat, from anywhere at all—that she had to contend with. There was also the car. And no matter whether the black man could be trusted, the car itself could not lie to her.

Yasmin said, “Headlamp on the car got itself broke, Katja. He looked that over, the plod, last night. He asked how it broke.”