A Traitor to Memory

They could have married at once, of course, once she'd become pregnant. She wouldn't have minded. It was, after all, marriage and children that she'd placed on her list as having to accomplish by her thirty-fifth birthday. She'd never written the word wedding, and she had seen a wedding only as one of the means she could use to achieve her end. Indeed, had she not been so blissful there in bed after their lovemaking, she probably would have said, “Bother the wedding, Richard. Let's marry now,” and he would have agreed.

Wouldn't he? she wondered. Just as he'd agreed to the name she'd chosen for the baby? Just as he'd agreed to her mother's delivering the baby? Just as he'd agreed to selling her flat first instead of his? To buying that house she'd found in Harrow? To simply going with the estate agent to at least take a look at that house?

What did it mean that Richard was thwarting her at every turn, thwarting her in the most reasonable of fashions, making it seem as if every decision they reached was reached mutually and not a case of her giving in because she was … what? Afraid? And if so, of what?

And the answer was there even though the woman was dead, even though she could not come back to harm them, to stand in the way, to prevent what was meant to be …

The phone rang. Jill started. She looked round, dazed at first. So deep into her thoughts had she been that she wasn't aware for a moment that she was still in the kitchen and the cordless phone was somewhere in the sitting room. She lumbered to get it.

“Is this Miss Foster?” a woman's voice said. It was a professional voice, a competent voice, a voice such as Jill's voice once had been.

Jill said, “Yes.”

“Miss Jill Foster?”

“Yes. Yes. Who is this please?”

And the answer fractured Jill's world into pieces.



There was something about the way Noreen McKay made the statement—“I can't clear her name”—that gave Nkata pause before lighting the fireworks of celebration. There was a desperation behind the deputy warden's eyes and an incipient panic in the manner in which she downed the rest of her drink in a gulp. He said, “Can't or won't clear her name, Miss McKay?”

She said, “I have two teenage children to consider. They're all I have left as family. I don't want a custody battle with their father.”

“Courts're more liberal these days.”

“I also have a career. It's not the one I wanted, but it's the one I've got. The one I've made for myself. Don't you see? If it comes to light that I ever—” She stopped herself.

Nkata sighed. He couldn't take ever to the bank and deposit it, one way or the other. He said, “She was with you, then. Three nights back? Last night as well? Late last night?”

Noreen McKay blinked. She was sitting so straight and tall in her chair that she looked like a cardboard cutout of herself.

“Miss McKay, I got to know whether I c'n cross her name off.”

“And I've got to know whether I can trust you. The fact that you've come here, right to the prison itself… Don't you see what that suggests?”

“Suggests I'm busy. Suggests it doesn't make sense for me to go driving back and forth 'cross London when you're … what … a mile? two miles? from Harriet Lewis's office.”

“It suggests more than that,” Noreen McKay said. “It tells me that you're self-interested, Constable, and if you're self-interested, what's to prevent you from passing on my name to a snout for a nice fifty quid? Or from being the snout yourself, for fifty more? It's a good story to sell to the Mail. You've threatened worse already in this conversation.”

“I could do that now, comes down to it. You given me enough already, you have.”

“I've given you what? The fact that a solicitor and her client came to my house one evening? What do you expect the Mail to do with that?”

Nkata had to acknowledge that Noreen McKay was making a good point. There was hardly seed for anyone's planting in what little information he had. There was, however, what he knew already and what he could assume from what he knew and what he ultimately could do with that. But the truth of the matter, however reluctantly he admitted it to himself, was that he actually needed from her only confirmation and a period of time to go with that confirmation. As for the rest of it, all the whys and the wherefores … If the truth were told, he wanted them, but he did not need them, not professionally.

He said, “The hit-and-run in Hampstead happened round half ten or eleven th' other night. Harriet Lewis says you c'n give Katja Wolff an alibi for the time. She also says you won't, which's what makes me think you and Katja got something between yourselves that's going to make one of you look bad if it gets out.”

“I've said: I'm not going to talk about that.”

“I get that, Miss McKay. Loud and clear. So what about you talking about what you're willing to talk about. What about bare facts with no window-dressing on them?”

“What do you mean?”

“Yeses and nos.”