A Traitor to Memory

Things were moving from bad to worse.

J. W Pitchley AKA TongueMan, AKA James Pitchford, logged off the internet, stared at the blank screen, and cursed it to hell. He'd finally managed to get CreamPants on the net for some cybertalk, but despite a good half hour of reasoning with her, she wasn't going to cooperate. All she had to do was walk into the Hampstead police station and have a five-minute conversation with DCI Leach and she wouldn't do it. She merely needed to confirm that she and a man she knew only as TongueMan had spent the evening together, first in a South Kensington restaurant and then in a claustrophobic little room above Cromwell Road where the ceaseless traffic noise disguised the frantic creaking of bedsprings and the cries of pleasure that he coaxed from her when he performed the services implied by his moniker. But no, she couldn't do that for him. No matter that he'd brought her off six times in under two hours, no matter that he'd held off taking his own satisfaction till she was weak, sodden, and limp with having taken hers, no matter that he'd fulfilled her every seamy fantasy about the rewards of anonymous sex. She wasn't going to step forward and “face the humiliation of having a complete stranger know the sort of woman I can be under certain unusual circumstances.”

I'm a bloody stranger, you filthy bitch! Pitchley had roared, if only in his head. You didn't think twice about letting me know what you like to get up to when you're panting for it.

She'd seemed to know what he was thinking, though, despite the fact that he didn't communicate it on the screen. She'd written They'd want my name, you see. I can't have that, Tongue. Not my name. Not with tabloids being what they are. I'm sorry, but you understand that, don't you?

Which was how he'd come to realise that she wasn't divorced. She wasn't a woman in her declining years who was desperate for a man to prove she still had It. She was a woman in her declining years who was looking for a thrill to balance against the tedium of marriage.

That marriage had to be a longtime covenant, one made not with an Everyman or an Anyman but with a Somebody, an important Somebody, a politician, perhaps, or an entertainer, or a successful and well-known entrepreneur. And if she gave her name to DCI Leach, it would quickly leak through the porous substance that was the hierarchy of power at the police station. Having leaked through that, it would find its way to the ears of an informant from within, a snout who accepted cash from a journalist eager to make his name by outing someone on the front page of his filthy scream sheet.

Bitch, Pitchley thought. Bitch, bitch, bitch. She might have thought of that before she'd met him at the Valley of Kings, Mrs. Butter-Wouldn't-Melt-If-You-Put-It-On-Coals. She might have thought of all the potential consequences before she walked in, dressed to be seen as Mrs. Demure, Mrs. Out-Of-Style, Mrs. I've-Got-No-Experience-With-Men, Mrs. Please-Please-Show-Me-I'm-Still-Desirable-Because-I've-Been-So-Low-On-Myself-For-So-Long. She might have thought it could actually come to having to say Okay, I was there in the Valley of Kings, having drinks and then dinner with an utter stranger whom I met on-line in a chat room where people hide their identities while sharing their fantasies about wild, wet, and lubricious sex. She might have thought she could be asked to admit to hours lying splayed on a thin-mattressed bed above the South Kensington traffic, naked on that bed with a man whose name she didn't know, didn't ask to know, and didn't want to know. She might have thought, the rotten little cow.

Pitchley pushed away from his computer and sank his elbows onto his knees. He took his forehead into his hands and dug into it with his fingertips. She could have helped. She wouldn't have been the complete solution to his problem—there was still that long period between the Comfort Inn and his arrival in Crediton Hill to be accounted for—but she would have been a bloody good start. As it was, he had only his story, his willingness to stick to his story, the unlikely possibility that the evening clerk at the Comfort Inn would confirm his presence two nights ago without confusing that night with the dozens of other nights he'd passed the requisite cash across the counter, and the hope that his face was guileless enough to convince the police to believe his story.