A Traitor to Memory

But on the way back to the Hampstead station, Leach didn't feel that way. And once inside, he began pacing round the incident room as he reviewed one report after another, most of which he'd already read. He said to the WPC on the computer, “So what's Swansea given us?”


She shook her head. “Every car owned by every principal's a late model, sir. There's nothing earlier than ten years old.”

“Who owns that one?”

She referred to a clipboard, ran her finger down the page. “Robson,” she said. “Raphael. He's got a Renault. Colour is … let me see … silver.”

“Blast. There's got to be something.” Leach considered another way to approach the problem. He said, “Significant others. Go there.”

She said, “Sir?”

“Go through the reports. Get all the names. Wives, husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends, teenagers who drive, anyone and everyone connected to this who has a driving licence. Run their names through the DVLA and see if any of them have a car that fits our profile.”

“All of them, sir?” the constable said.

“I believe we speak the same language, Vanessa.”

She sighed, said, “Yes, sir,” and returned to work as one of the newer constables came barreling into the room. He was called Solberg, a wet-behind-the-ears DC who'd been eager to prove himself from day one on the murder squad. He was trailing a sheaf of paperwork behind him, and his face was so red, he looked like a runner at the end of a marathon.

He cried out, “Guv! Check this out. Ten days ago, and it's hot. It's hot.”

Leach said, “What're you on about, Solberg?”

“A bit of a complication,” the constable replied.



Nkata decided to turn to Katja Wolff's solicitor after his conversation with Yasmin Edwards. She'd said, “You got what you want, now get out, Constable,” once she'd watched him write 12:41 in his notebook, and she'd refused to speculate on where her lover had been on the night Eugenie Davies had died. He'd thought about pushing her—You lied once, madam, so what's to say you aren't lying again and do you know what happens to lags who get ticks by their names as accessories to murder?—but he hadn't done so. He hadn't had the heart because he'd seen the emotions running across her face while he was questioning her, and he had an idea of how much it had cost her to tell him the little she'd already told. Still, he'd not been able to stop himself from considering what would happen if he asked her why: Why was she betraying her lover and, more important, what did it mean that she was betraying her? But that wasn't his business, was it? It couldn't be his business because he was a copper and she was a lag. And that's the way it was.

So he'd closed his notebook. He'd intended to turn on his heel and get out of her shop with a simple yet pointed “Cheers, Missus Edwards. You did the right thing.” But he didn't say that. Instead, what he'd said was, “You all right, Missus Edwards?” and found himself taken aback at the gentleness he felt. It was wrong as hell to feel gentle towards such a woman in such a situation, and when she said, “Just get out,” he took the course of wisdom and did just that.

In his car, he'd slipped from his wallet the card that Katja Wolff had handed him early that morning. He'd removed the A to Z from his glove box and looked up the street on which Harriet Lewis had her office. As luck would have it, the solicitor's office was in Kentish Town, which meant the other side of the river and yet another drive through London. But wending his way there gave him time to plan an approach likely to dislodge information from the lawyer. And he knew he needed a decent approach, because the proximity of her office to HM Prison Holloway suggested that Harriet Lewis had more than one villain as a client, which suggested in turn that she wasn't likely to be easily finessed into revealing anything.

When at last he pulled to the kerb, Nkata discovered that Harriet Lewis had set herself up in humble offices between a newsagent and a grocery displaying limp broccoli and bruised cauliflower out on the pavement. A door was set at an oblique angle to the street, abutting the door to the newsagent's, and on its upper half of translucent glass was printed Solicitors and nothing more.