A Traitor to Memory

I didn't want to head in that direction, and I didn't want her to do so. I said, “If she drank on her evenings off and one time ended up with someone she didn't even know, she might not have wanted that to come out. It would only have made her look worse, wouldn't it? Especially when she went to trial. Because they talked about her character at the trial, as I understand.” Or at least, I thought, Sarah-Jane Beckett had done.

“As to that,” Katie said, ceasing her stroking of the green bird's head for a moment, “I wanted to be a character witness. Despite her lie about the telephone call, I thought I could do that much for her. But I wasn't allowed. Her barrister wouldn't call me. And when the Crown Prosecutor discovered that I hadn't even known she was pregnant … You can imagine what he made of that when he was questioning me: How could I declare myself Katja Wolff's closest friend and an authority on what she was and wasn't capable of doing if she'd never trusted me enough to reveal she was pregnant?”





“I see how it went.”





“Where it went was murder. I thought I could help her. I wanted to help her. But when she asked me to lie about that phone call—”





“She asked you to lie?”





“Yes. She asked me. But I just couldn't do it. Not in court. Not under oath. Not for anyone. That's where I had to draw the line, and it ended our friendship.”





She lowered her gaze to the bird in her palm, its right wing extended now to receive the touch that the other bird had been given. Intelligent little creature, I thought. She'd not yet mesmerised it with her caress, but the bird was already cooperating.

“It's odd, isn't it?” she said to me. “One can earnestly believe one has a particular type of relationship with another person, only to discover it was never what one thought in the first place.”





“Yes,” I said. “It's very odd.”





19





YASMIN EDWARDS STOOD at the corner of Oakhill and Galveston Roads with the number fifty-five burning into her brain. She didn't want any part of what she was doing, but she was doing it anyway, compelled by a force that seemed at once outside herself and integral to her being.

Her heart was saying Go home, girl. Get away from this place. Go back to the shop and go back to pretending.

Her head was saying Nope, time to know the worst.

And the rest of her body was heaving between her head and her heart, leaving her feeling like a thick blonde heroine from a thriller film, the sort who tiptoes through the dark towards that creaking door while the audience shouts at her to stay away.

She'd stopped at the laundry before leaving Kennington. When she'd not been able to cope any longer with what her mind had been shouting for the past several days, she'd shut up the shop and picked up the Fiesta from the car park on the estate with the intention of heading to Wandsworth straight off. But at the top of Braganza Street, where she had to wait for the traffic to clear before she could turn into Kennington Park Road, she'd caught a glimpse of the laundry tucked between the grocery and the electrical shop, and she'd decided to pop round and ask Katja what she wanted for dinner.

No matter that she knew in her heart this was just an excuse to check up on her lover. She hadn't asked Katja about dinner before they'd parted that morning, had she? The unexpected visit from that bloody detective had rattled them away from their regular routine.

So she found a spot to park and she ducked into the shop, where she saw to her relief that Katja was at work: in the back, bending over a steaming iron that she was gliding along someone's lace-edged sheets. The combination of heat, humidity, and a smelly jungle of unwashed laundry made the shop feel like the tropics. Within ten seconds of entering the place, Yasmin was dizzy, with sweat beading on her forehead.

She'd never met Mrs. Crushley, but she recognised the laundry owner from the attitude she projected from her sewing machine when Yasmin approached the counter. She was of the England-fought-the-war-for-the-likes-of-you generation, a woman too young to have done service during any conflict in recent history but just old enough to remember a London that was largely Anglo-Saxon in origin. She said sharply, “Yes? What d' you want?” her glance darting all over Yasmin's person, her face looking like she smelled something bad. Yasmin wasn't carrying laundry, which made her suspect to Mrs. Crushley. Yasmin was black, which went a good distance towards making her dangerous as well. She could have a knife in her kit, after all. She could have a poisoned dart taken from a fellow tribesman tucked away in her hair.

She said politely, “If I could have a word with Katja …?”

“Katja?” Mrs. Crushley declared, sounding as if Yasmin had asked if Jesus Christ happened to be working that day. “What you want with her, then?”

“Just a word.”

“Don't see as I need to allow that, do I? 'Nough that I'm employing her, i'n't it, without her taking social calls all day.” Mrs. Crushley lifted the garment she was working on—a man's white shirt—and she used her crooked teeth to bite off a bit of thread from a button she'd been replacing.