A Traitor to Memory

Nkata was about to curse his instincts for wasting his time, when Katja did the unexpected. Instead of turning into Braganza Street, which led to the Doddington Grove Estate, she crossed and continued down Kennington Park Road without so much as a regretful glance in the direction in which she should have been heading. She passed a pub, the take-away where he'd bought his snack, a hairdresser, and a stationery shop, coming to rest at a bus stop where she lit a cigarette and waited among a small crowd of other potential passengers. She rejected the first two buses that stopped, finally climbing onto the third after she tossed her cigarette into the street. As the bus lumbered into the traffic, Nkata set off after it, glad that he wasn't in a panda car and grateful for the dark.

He didn't make himself popular with his fellow drivers as he tailed the bus, pulling to the kerb when it did, keeping an eye peeled at its every stop to make sure he didn't lose Katja Wolff in the growing gloom. More than one driver gave him two fingers as he wove in and out of the traffic, and he nearly hit a cyclist in a gas mask when a request stop loomed up faster than he was prepared for the bus to lurch over to it.

In this fashion, he halted across South London. Katja Wolff had taken a window seat on the street side of the bus, so Nkata could get a glimpse of her blue beret when the street curved ahead of him. He was fairly confident that he'd be able to pick her out when she disembarked, and that proved to be the case when, after suffering through the worst of the rush hour traffic, the bus pulled into Clapham station.

He thought she meant to get a train there, and he wondered how conspicuous he'd be if he had to get on the same carriage as she. Very, he decided. But there was no help for it and no time to consider any other option. He looked desperately for a place to park.

He kept one eye on her as she worked her way through the crowd outside the station. Instead of moving inside as he'd expected her to do, however, she went to a second bus stop, where, after a five-minute wait, she embarked on another ride through South London.

She had no window seat this time, so Nkata was forced to keep an eye peeled each time passengers disembarked. It was anxiety-producing—not to mention maddening to other drivers—but he ignored the rest of the traffic and kept his attention where it belonged.

At Putney Station, he was rewarded. Katja Wolff hopped off and, without a glance right or left, she set off along the Upper Richmond Road.

There was no way Nkata could tail her in a car and not stick out like an ostrich in Alaska or become the victim of a commuter's road rage, so he drove past her and, some fifty yards farther along, he found a section of double yellow just beyond a bus stop across the street. He veered over and parked there. Then he waited, his eyes on the rearview mirror, adjusting it to take in the pavement opposite.

In due course, Katja Wolff came into view. She had her head down and her collar up against the wind, so she didn't notice him. An illegally parked car in London was no anomaly. Even if she glimpsed him, in the fading light he would be just a bloke waiting to fetch someone from the bus stop.

When she'd gained some twenty yards past him, Nkata eased his car door open and took up after her. He shrugged his large frame into his overcoat as he trailed her, tucking a scarf round his neck and thanking his stars that his mum had insisted upon his wearing it that morning. He faded into the shadows created by the trunk of an aged sycamore as up ahead of him Katja Wolff paused, turned her back to the wind, and lit a cigarette. Then she strode to the kerb, waited for a break in the traffic, and dashed across to the opposite side.

At this point, the road opened into a commercial area comprising an assortment of businesses that were fashioned with residences off-set above them. Here were the sort of enterprises local residents would patronise: video shops, newsagents, restaurants, florists, and the like.

Katja Wolff chose to take her custom to Frère Jacques Bar and Brasserie, where both the Union Jack and the French national flag snapped in the wind. It was a cheerful yellow building fronted by multi-paned transom windows, brightly lit from the interior. As she ducked inside, Nkata waited for a chance to cross over. By the time he got there, she'd removed her coat and handed it to a waiter, who was gesturing her beyond the rows of small candlelit tables to a bar that ran along one wall. There were as yet no other patrons in the brasserie, apart from a well-dressed woman in a tailored black suit who sat on a bar stool, nursing a drink.

She looked like money, Nkata thought. It spoke from her haircut, which was fashioned so that her short hair fell round her face like a polished helmet; it spoke from her attire, which was tasteful and timeless as only significant money can buy. Nkata had spent enough time leafing through GQ in the years in which he'd reinvented himself to know how people looked when they did most of their clothes-buying in places like Knightsbridge, where twenty quid might get you a handkerchief but nothing else.