A Traitor to Memory

Barbara sighed, her shoulders slumping. “Okay. Where's Winston? What's he got to say about Katja Wolff?”


Lynley told her about Nkata's report on the German woman's movements from Kennington to Wandsworth on the previous night. He ended with, “He was confident that both Yasmin Edwards and Katja Wolff are hiding something. When he got the word about Webberly he passed the message back that he wanted to have another chat with them.”

“So he thinks there's a connection between the hit-and-runs as well.”

“Right. And I agree. There is a connection, Havers. We just haven't seen it clearly.” Lynley stood, handed Barbara her notes, and began gathering up material from his desk. He said, “Let's get on to Hampstead. Leach's team must have something we can work with by now.”



Winston Nkata sat in front of the Hampstead police station for a good five minutes before he clambered out of his car. Because of a four-car pileup on the huge roundabout just before the crossing to Vauxhall Bridge, it had taken him more than ninety minutes to make the drive from South London. He was glad of that. Sitting in the car while firemen, paramedics, and traffic police sorted out the tangle of metal and injured bodies had given him the time he needed to come to terms with the balls-up he'd made of his interview with Katja Wolff and Yasmin Edwards.

He'd cocked it up brilliantly. He'd shown his hand. He'd charged like a bull from the pen exactly sixty-seven minutes after opening his eyes that morning, galloping from his parents' flat to Kennington at the earliest hour he'd deemed reasonable. Snorting and pawing the ground, eager to lower his horns and attack, he'd ridden up in that creaking lift with a soaring sense of being about to break the case. And he'd gone to great lengths to assure himself that his mission to Kennington was indeed all about the case. Because if Katja Wolff had a little something on the side going on, and if Yasmin Edwards knew nothing about it, and if he could reveal the little something on the side in such a way as to create a fissure in their relationship, then what was to prevent Yasmin Edwards from admitting what he already knew in his bones to be true: that Katja Wolff had not been home on the night of the murder of Eugenie Davies.

He intended nothing more than that, he'd told himself. He was just a cop carrying out his duties. Her flesh meant nothing: smooth and taut, the colour of newly minted pennies. Her body was of no account either: lithe and firm, with a waist dipping in over welcoming hips. Her eyes were only windows: dark like the shadows and trying to hide what they couldn't hide, which was anger and fear. And that anger and fear were meant to be used, to be used by him to whom she was nothing, just a lezzie lag who'd chopped her husband one night and had taken up with a baby killer.

It wasn't his responsibility to sort out why Yasmin Edwards would bring that baby killer into her home, where her own child lived, and Nkata knew it. But he did tell himself that, aside from providing them the break they needed in the investigation, it would also be for the best if the fissure he was able to produce in the women's relationship led to a break-up that would take Daniel Edwards out of the reach of a convicted killer.

He shut his ears to the thought that the boy's own mother also was a convicted killer. After all, she'd struck out against an adult. There was nothing in her background to indicate she had it in for children.

So he was filled with the righteousness of his cause when he rang the buzzer at Yasmin Edwards' door. And when there was no answer at first, he merely used the lack of response as a spur. It dug into the sides of his reason for being there, and he rang again till he forced a reply.

Nkata was a man who'd encountered prejudice and hatred for most of his life. One couldn't be a member of a minority race in England and not be the recipient of hostility in a hundred subtle forms every day. Even at the Met, where he'd assumed performance counted for more than epidermal hue, he'd learned to watch himself, never allowing others in too close, never completely letting down his guard lest he pay the price of presuming that a familiarity of discourse meant an equality of mind. That was not the case, no matter how things looked to the uninitiated observer. And wise was the black man who remembered that.