A Traitor to Memory

Katja Wolff approached this woman, who slid off her bar stool with a smile and came to greet her. They reached for each other's hands and pressed their cheeks together, air-kissing in the batty way Europeans had of greeting each other. The woman gestured Katja Wolff to join her.

For his part, Nkata hunkered down into his overcoat and watched them from a place he made for himself in the shadows just beyond the bank of the brasserie windows and at the side of an Oddbins. Should they turn his way, he could give his attention to the sale announcements painted in front of him on the window—Spanish wine was going for a real treat, he noted. And in the meantime he could watch them and attempt to suss out what they were to each other, although he already had developed a fair set of suspicions in that direction. He'd seen the familiarity in their greeting, after all. And the woman in black had money, which Katja Wolff would probably like just fine. So the pieces were starting to fall into place, aligning themselves with the German's lie about where she'd been on the night Eugenie Davies had died.

Nkata wished there were a way he could have overheard their conversation, however. The manner in which they hovered over their drinks shoulder to shoulder suggested a confidential chat that he would have given much to hear. And when Wolff raised a hand to her eyes and the other put her arm round her shoulders and said something into her ear, he even considered sauntering in and introducing himself, just to see how Katja Wolff reacted to being caught out.

Yes. There was something definitely going on here, he thought. This was probably what Yasmin Edwards knew but did not want to speak of. Because one could always tell when one's lover started stepping outside for more than a breath of air or a packet of fags in the evening. And the toughest bit about coping with that knowledge was coming to accept it in the first place. People walked miles to avoid having to look at, talk about, or actually confront something that might cause them pain. Short-sighted as it was to wear blinkers in relationships, it was still amazing to see how many people did exactly that.

Nkata stamped his feet in the cold and buried his hands in his coat pockets. He watched for another quarter of an hour and was considering his options, when the two women began to gather up their belongings.

He ducked into Oddbins as they came out of the brasserie door. Half-hidden behind a display of Chianti Classico, he picked up a bottle as if to study its label while the shop assistant eyed him the way all shop assistants eyed a black man who wasn't quick enough to buy what he was touching. Nkata ignored him, his head bent but his gaze fastened on the shop's front windows. When he saw Wolff and her companion pass by, he set the bottle back onto the display, stifled what he wanted to say to the young man behind the till—when would he outgrow the need to shout “I'm a copper, all right?” as he grabbed them by the necks of their shirts?—and slipped out of Oddbins in the women's wake.

Katja's companion had her by the arm, and she was continuing to talk to her as they strolled along. Over her right shoulder dangled a leather bag the size of a briefcase, and she held this firmly tucked under her arm like a woman who was wise to what life on the streets could offer the unaware. In this fashion, the two of them walked not to the station but along the Upper Richmond Road in the direction of Wandsworth.

Perhaps a quarter of a mile along, they turned left. This would take them into a heavily populated neighbourhood of terraced and semi-detached houses. If they went into a residence there, Nkata knew he would need more than luck to find them. He increased his pace and broke into a jog.

He was still in luck, he saw, as he turned the corner. Although several streets turned off this road and bored into the crowded neighbourhood, the two women hadn't taken any of them yet. Rather, they were continuing ahead of him, still in conversation but with the German woman talking this time, gesturing with her hands while the other listened.

They chose Galveston Road to turn into, a short thoroughfare of terraced houses, some converted into flats and some still standing as single homes. It was a middle-class neighbourhood of lace curtains, fresh paint, tended gardens, and window boxes where pansies were planted in anticipation of the coming winter. Wolff and her companion walked along to the midway point, where they turned in through a wrought iron gate and approached a red door. The brass number fifty-five was posted on it, between two narrow translucent windows.