A Traitor to Memory

He held out her coat. She slid her arms into it and turned to him. She said, “You are happy, aren't you? About us, the baby?”


“Happy?” He placed one hand on the mountain of her stomach. “If I could climb inside you and reside with our little Cara, I would. That's the only way the three of us could be any closer than we already are.”

“Thank you,” Jill said, and she kissed him, raising her mouth for the familiar joining to his, parting her lips, feeling his tongue, and experiencing the answering heat of desire.

Catherine, she thought. Her name is Catherine. But she kissed him with both longing and hunger, and she felt embarrassed: to be so hugely pregnant and still to want him sexually. But she suddenly possessed such a longing for him that the heat within her turned into an ache.

“Make love to me,” she said against his mouth.

“Here?” he murmured. “In my lumpy bed?”

“No. At home. In Shepherd's Bush. Let's go. Make love to me, darling.”

“Hmm.” His fingers found her nipples. He squeezed them gently. She sighed. He squeezed harder, and she felt her body shoot fire to her genitals in reply.

“Please,” she murmured. “Richard. God.”

He chuckled. “Are you certain that's what you want?”

“I'm dying for you.”

“Well, we can't have that.” He released her, held his hands on her shoulders, and examined her face. “But you do look completely done in.”

Jill felt her spirits plummet. “Richard—”

He cut in. “So you must swear to me that you'll go to sleep and not open an eye for at least ten hours afterwards. Is that a deal?”

Love—or something she took for love—flooded her. She smiled. “Then take me home this instant, and have your way with me. If you don't do both, I won't answer for the consequences to your lumpy bed.”



There were times when you had to operate on instinct. DC Winston Nkata had seen that often enough while working an investigation in the company of one DI or another, and he recognised that inclination in himself.

He'd had that uneasy feeling for the entire afternoon once he'd visited Yasmin Edwards in her shop. It informed him that she wasn't telling him everything. So he stationed himself on Kennington Park Road and settled back with a lamb samosa in one hand and a carton of take-away dal as a dipping sauce in the other. His mum would keep his dinner warm, but it might be hours before he could put his lips round the jerk chicken she'd promised him for that night's meal. In the meantime he needed something to settle the growling in his stomach.

He munched and kept his attention on the steamed-up windows of Crushley's Laundry just across the street and down three doors from where he'd parked. He'd sauntered by and taken a glimpse inside when the door swung open, and he'd seen her big as life in the back, labouring over an ironing board with steam rising round her.

“She in today?” he'd asked her employer earlier over the phone not long after leaving Yasmin's shop. “Just a routine check, this is. No need to tell her I'm on the blower.”

“Yeah,” Betty Crushley had said, sounding like a woman talking round a cigar. “Got her mug where it ought to be for once.”

“Good to hear, that.”

“If good's enough.”

So he was waiting for Katja Wolff to leave her place of employment for the evening. If she walked the short distance to the Doddington Grove Estate, his instinct would require adjustment. If she went somewhere else, he'd know his feeling about her was right.

Nkata was dipping the last bite of his samosa into the dal when the German woman finally came out of the laundry, carrying a jacket over her arm. He crammed the pastry into his mouth, ready for action, but Katja Wolff merely stood on the pavement for a minute, just outside the laundry's front door. It was cold, with a sharp wind blowing the smells of diesel fuel against the pedestrians' cheeks, but the temperature didn't appear to bother her.

She took a moment to don her jacket and pulled from its pocket a blue beret into which she tucked her short blonde hair. Then she turned up the collar of her coat and set off along Kennington Park Road in the direction of home.