A Traitor to Memory

Life wasn't a continuum of events, although it wore the guise of exactly that. Instead, it was actually a carousel. In infancy, one mounted a galloping pony and started out on a journey during which one assumed that circumstances would change as the expedition continued. But the truth of life was that it was an endless repetition of what one had already experienced … round and round and up and down on that pony. And unless one dealt with whatever challenges one was meant to deal with along the route, those challenges appeared again and again in one form or another till the end of one's days. If he hadn't subscribed to that notion before, J. W Pitchley was a believer now.

He stood on the steps of the Hampstead police station with his solicitor and listened to the peroration of Jake Azoff's harangue. This consisted of a soliloquy on the topic of trust-and-veracity between a client and his lawyer. He was ending with, “Do you think I would have bloody well walked in there if I'd bloody well known what you were bloody well hiding, you twit? You made me look like a fool and what the hell do you think that does for my credibility with the cops?”

Pitchley wanted to say that the current situation wasn't about Azoff, but he didn't bother. He didn't say anything, which encouraged the solicitor to demand, “So what would you like me to call you, sir?” The sir was no indication of anything other than contempt, which coloured it appreciably. “Is it to be Pitchley or Pitchford for what remains of our legal relationship?”

“Pitchley's perfectly legal,” J. W. Pitchley replied. “There's nothing dodgy in how I changed my name, Jake.”

“In that, perhaps,” Azoff retorted. “But I want the whys, the wherefores, and the hows in writing on my desk, by fax, messenger, e-mail, or carrier pigeon before six o'clock. And then we'll look at what happens next in our professional relationship.”

J. W. Pitchley, AKA James Pitchford, AKA TongueMan to his cyberacquaintances, nodded cooperatively even though he knew Jake Azoff was blowing smoke in the air. Azoff 's track record of managing his money was so appalling that he wouldn't be able to exist for a month without someone at the helm of his investments, and Pitchley-Pitchford-TongueMan had been handling them for so many years and with such a degree of expertise in the financial legerdemain department that to give control over to a lesser fiscal guru would be to put Azoff within striking distance of the Inland Revenue, which the solicitor was understandably loath to have happen. But he needed to let off steam, did Azoff, and J. W. Pitchley—formerly James Pitchford and currently AKA TongueMan—couldn't really blame him. So he said, “Will do, Jake. Sorry about the surprise,” and he watched as Azoff huffed, raised the collar of his overcoat against a chill wind, and set off down the street.

For his part, Pitchley, with no access to his car and no invitation from Azoff to drive him back to Crediton Hill, set off disconsolately for the railway station near Hampstead Heath and prepared to submit himself to its insalubrious embrace. At least it wasn't the underground, he told himself. And there hadn't been a smash-up between competing railway lines vying for the Excellence in Ineptitude Award in at least a week.

He walked up Downshire Hill and veered right into Keats' Grove, where at the eponymous poet's house and library, a middle-aged woman was just leaving the waterlogged grounds, a large satchel in her right hand that was painfully sloping her shoulder with its weight. Pitchley-Pitchford slowed his footsteps when she turned right and headed in the same direction as the one he was taking. In another time, he would have hurried forward to assist her with her burden. It was, after all, the gentlemanly thing to do.