A Traitor to Memory

She opened the gate into an untidy front garden. The path to the door was flagstones and the door itself was shiny red with a polished brass knocker in the centre. Autumn-bare shrub branches arched over the porch, and a wire milk basket held three empty bottles, one of which had a note sticking out of it.

Yasmin bent to grasp this note, thinking at the last moment that she wouldn't actually have to face … to see … Perhaps the note would tell her. She unrolled it against her palm and read the words: We're switching to two skimmed, one silver top from now on, please. That was all. The handwriting gave away nothing. Age, sex, race, creed. The message could have been penned by anyone.

She played her fingers into her palms, encouraging her hand to lift and do its work. She took a step back and looked at the bay window, in the hope that she might see something there that might save her from what she was about to do. But the curtains were like the others on the street: swathes of material that invited some little light into the room and against which a silhouette could be seen at night. But during the day they protected the room within from outside watchers. So Yasmin was left with the door again.

She thought, Bugger this. She had a right to know. She marched to the door and rapped the knocker forcefully against the wood.

She waited. Nothing. She rang the bell. She heard it sounding right near to the door, one of those fancy bells that played a tune. But the result was the same. Nothing.

Yasmin didn't want to think she'd come all the way from Kennington to learn nothing. She didn't want to think what it would be like, continuing with Katja as if she didn't have any doubts. It was better to know: the good or the bad. Because if she knew, then she'd have a clear sense of what she was meant to do next.

His card weighed in her pocket like a four-by-two-inch sheet of pure lead. She'd first looked at it, turning it over and over in her hands as the hours passed last night without Katja coming home. She'd phoned, of course. She'd said, “Yas, I'll be late,” and she'd said, “It's a bit complicated for the phone. Tell you later, shall I?” when Yasmin had asked what was up. But later hadn't come when Yasmin expected and after several hours, she'd got out of bed, gone to the window, tried to use the darkness to understand something of what was happening, and finally gone to her jacket, where she'd found that card he'd given her in the shop.

She'd stared at the name: Winston Nkata. African, that was. But he sounded West Indies when he wasn't being dead careful to sound plod. A phone number was printed on the bottom, to the left of the name, a Met number that she'd sooner die than ring. A pager number was across from it, in the right corner. “You page me,” he'd said. “Day or night.”

Or had he said that? And in any case, what did it matter, because she wasn't about to grass to a cop. Not in this lifetime. She wasn't that stupid. So she'd shoved the card into her jacket pocket, where she felt it now, a little piece of lead growing hot, growing heavy, weighing her right shoulder down with the pull of it, drawing her like metal to a magnet and the magnet was an action she would not take.

She stepped away from the house. She backed down the flagstone path to the pavement. She felt behind her for the gate, and she backed through it as well. If someone intended to peer through those curtains as she departed, then she damn well intended to see who it was. But that didn't happen. The house was empty.

Yasmin made her decision when a DHL delivery van rumbled into Galveston Road. It puttered along as the driver looked for the correct address, and when he had the right house, he left the van running as he trotted up to the door to make his delivery three houses away from where Yasmin stood. She waited as he rang the bell. Ten seconds and that door was opened. An exchange of pleasantries, a signature on a clipboard, and the delivery man trotted back to his van and went on his way, glancing at Yasmin where she stood on the pavement, giving her a look that registered only female, black, bad face, decent body, good for a shag. Then he and his van were gone. But possibility was not.

Yasmin walked towards the house where he'd made the delivery. She rehearsed her lines. She paused out of sight of the window identical to the window on Number Fifty-five and took a moment to scribble that address—Number Fifty-five Galveston Road, Wandsworth—on the the back of the detective's card. Then she removed her headscarf and refashioned it into a turban. She took her earrings off and shoved the brass and beads of them into her pocket. And although her jacket was buttoned to her neck, she undid it and unclipped her necklace—just for good measure—depositing it into her shoulder bag, redoing her jacket, and flattening its collar to a humble and unfashionable angle.