A Traitor to Memory

Directly inside, a staircase covered in thinning red carpet led up to two doors which faced each other on a landing. One of the doors was open, revealing an empty room with another adjoining it and a wide-planked wooden floor frosted with dust. The other door was closed, and a business card was tacked to the panels with a drawing pin. Nkata scrutinised this card and found it identical to the one Katja Wolff had given to him. He lifted it with the edge of his fingernail and looked beneath it. There was no other card. Nkata smiled. He had the opening he wanted.

He entered without knocking and found himself in a reception room as unlike the neighbourhood, the immediate environment, and the suite across the landing as he could have imagined. A Persian rug covered most of the polished floor, and on it sat a reception desk, sofa, chairs, and tables of a severely modern design. They were all sharp edges, wood, and leather, and they should have argued with not only the rug but also the wainscoting and the wallpaper, but instead, they suggested just the right degree of daring one would hope for when one hired a solicitor.

“May I help you?” The question came from a middle-aged woman who sat at the desk in front of a keyboard and monitor, wearing tiny earphones from which she appeared to have been taking dictation. She was done up in professional navy-and-cream, her hair short and neat and just beginning to grey in a streak that wove back from above her left temple. She had the darkest eyebrows Nkata had ever seen, and in a world in which he was used to being looked at with suspicion by white women, he'd never encountered a more hostile stare.

He produced his identification and asked to speak to the solicitor. He didn't have an appointment, he told Mrs. Eyebrows before she could ask, but he expected Miss Lewis—

“Ms. Lewis,” the receptionist said, removing her earphones and setting them aside.

—would see him once she was told he was calling about Katja Wolff. He laid his card on the desk and added, “Pass that to her if you like. Tell her we talked on the phone this morning. I 'xpect she'll remember.”

Mrs. Eyebrows made a point of not touching the card till Nkata's fingers had left it. Then she picked it up, saying, “Wait here, please,” and went through to the inner office. She came out perhaps two minutes later and repositioned the earphones on her head. She resumed her typing without a glance in his direction, which might have caused his blood to start heating had he not learned early in life to take white women's behaviour for what it usually was: obvious and ignorant as hell.

So he studied the pictures on the walls—old black-and-white head shots of women that put him in mind of days when the British Empire stretched round the globe—and when he was done inspecting these, he picked up a copy of Ms. from America and engrossed himself in an article about alternatives to hysterectomies that seemed to be written by a woman who was balancing on her shoulder a chip the size of the Blidworth Boulder.

He did not sit, and when Mrs. Eyebrows said to him meaningfully, “It will be a while, Constable, as you've come without an appointment,” he said, “Murder's like that, i'n't it? Never does let you know when it's coming.” And he leaned his shoulder against the pale striped wallpaper and gave it a smack with the palm of his hand, saying, “Very nice, this is. What d'you call the design?”

He could see the receptionist eyeing the spot he'd touched, looking for grease marks. She made no reply. He nodded at her pleasantly, snapped his magazine more fully open, and rested his head against the wall.

“We've a sofa, Constable,” Mrs. Eyebrows said.

“Been sitting all day,” he told her, and added, “Piles,” with a grimace for good measure.

That appeared to do it. She got to her feet, disappeared into the inner office once again, and returned in a minute. She was bearing a tray with the remains of afternoon tea on it, and she said that the solicitor was ready to see him now.

Nkata smiled to himself. He bet she was.

Harriet Lewis, dressed in black as she had been on the previous evening, was standing behind her desk when he entered. She said, “We've had our conversation already, Constable Nkata. Am I going to have to ring for counsel?”

“You feeling the need?” Nkata asked her. “Woman like you, 'fraid to go it alone?”

“‘Woman like me,’” she mimicked, “no bloody fool. I spend my life telling clients to keep their mouths shut in the presence of the police. I'd be fairly stupid not to heed my own advice, now wouldn't I?”

“You'd be stupider—”

“More stupid,” she said.

“—stupider,” he repeated, “to find yourself dis'tangling your way out of a charge of obstruction in a police enquiry.”

“You've charged no one with anything. You haven't a leg to stand on.”

“Day's not over.”

“Don't threaten me.”

“Make your phone call, then,” Nkata told her. He looked round and saw that a seating area of three chairs and a coffee table had been fashioned at one end of the room. He sauntered over, sat down, and said, “Ah. Whew. Nice to take a load off at the end of the day,” and nodded at her telephone. “Go ahead. I got the time to wait. My mum's a fine cook and she'll keep dinner warm.”

“What's this about, Constable? We've already spoken. I have nothing to add to what I've already told you.”