A Traitor to Memory

Nkata shrugged and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Villains, man. You know how they are. Always like to be the ones pulling the strings.”


That certainly rang an authentic note. If a convict was going to grass on a mate, that convict generally named the time, the place, and the circumstances under which the grassing would occur. It was a power play that acted as a salve to their conscience when they lived the part of no honour among thieves. But lags rarely bore love for cops, and caution suggested that a cop be wise to the fact that a villain liked nothing better than to throw spanners if he could, with the size of the spanners generally matching the proportions of his animosity for the police.

He said, “What's she called again, Winnie?”

“Who?”

“The woman who paged you. Wolff's flat mate.” And when Nkata told him, Lynley asked what crime had sent Yasmin Edwards to prison.

“Knifed her husband,” Nkata said. “Killed him. She was in five years. But I got the 'pression he beat her up a lot. She's got a bad face, 'Spector. Scarred up. She and the German live with her son. Daniel. Ten, eleven years old. Nice kid. Should I …?” Again the anxious nod at the door.

Lynley pondered the wisdom of sending Nkata south of the river again on his own. His very zeal to take on the task gave Lynley pause. On the one hand, Nkata would be eager to make up for his earlier gaffe. On the other hand, he was inexperienced, and the appetite he had for again confronting Yasmin Edwards suggested the potential for a loss of objectivity. As long as the potential was there, Nkata—not to mention the case itself—was in jeopardy. Just as Webberly had been, Lynley realised, all those years ago in another investigation.

They kept coming full circle to that other murder, he thought. There had to be a reason for that.

He said, “Has she got an axe to grind, this Yasmin Edwards?”

“With me, you mean?”

“With cops in general.”

“Could have, yeah.”

“Mind how you go, then.”

Nkata said, “Will do,” and he hastened out of the incident room, car keys already in his palm.

When the constable was gone, Lynley sat at a desk and put on his glasses. The situation they were in was maddening. He'd been involved in cases before in which they'd had mounds of evidence but no one to whom it could be attached. He'd been involved in cases in which they'd had motives leaping out from the wallpaper in the sitting room of every suspect they questioned but no evidence they could apply to the suspects. And he'd been involved in cases in which the means and the opportunity to kill could be applied left, right, and centre and all that was wanting was clarity on the motive. But this …

How was it possible that two people could be hit and abandoned on populated streets without someone seeing something other than a black vehicle? Lynley wondered. And how was it possible that the first victim could actually be dragged from point A to point B in Crediton Hill once the hit took place without someone noticing what was going on?

The moving of the body was an important detail, and Lynley fetched the latest report from forensic to examine what they'd come up with from evidence taken from Eugenie Davies' body. The forensic pathologist would have combed it, probed it, studied it, and analysed it. And if there was a trace of evidence left on it—this despite the rain of the evening—the forensic pathologst would have found it.

Lynley flipped through the paperwork. Nothing under her fingernails, all blood on the body her own, remnants of earth fallen from tyres bearing no telling characteristics like minerals peculiar to one part of the country, granules caught up in her hair similar to those on the street itself, two hairs on her body—one grey and one brown—which, under analysis—

Lynley's interest sharpened. Two hairs, two different colours, an analysis. Surely this amounted to something. He read the report, frowning, wading through descriptions of cuticle, cortex, and medulla and celebrating the initial conclusion offered by SO7: The hairs were mammalian in origin.

But when he continued, fighting his way through the morass of technical terms from the macrofibrillar ultrastructure of the medullary cells to the electrophoretic variants of the structural proteins, he found that the results of the forensic examination of the hairs was inconclusive. How the hell could that possibly be?

He reached for a phone and punched in the number of the forensic lab across the river. After speaking to three technicians and a secretary, he was finally able to pin someone down who explained in layman's terms why a study of hair, made in this century of science so advanced that a microscopic particle of skin—for God's sake—could identify a killer, would offer inconclusive results.

“Actually,” Dr. Claudia Knowles told him, “we have no way of telling if the hairs even came from the killer, Inspector. They could well be from the victim, you know.”