A Traitor to Memory (113 page)

“But where does Webberly fit in? In fact, where does he fit in no matter who we go with?”

“He fits in only with Wolff. And that takes us back to the original crime: the murder of Sonia Davies. And that takes us back to the initial group who were involved in the subsequent investigation.”

“P'rhaps someone's just making it look like everything's connected to that period of time, sir. Because isn't it the truth that a more profound connection exists: the romantic one between Webberly and Eugenie Davies? And that takes us to Richard, doesn't it? To Richard or to Frances Webberly.”

Lynley didn't want to think of Frances. He said, “Or to Gideon, blaming Webberly for the end of his parents' marriage.”

“That's weak.”

“But something's going on with him, Havers. If you met him, you'd agree. And he has no alibi other than being home alone.”

“Where was his dad?”

Lynley referred to his notes once again. “With the fiancée. She confirms.”

“But he's got a much better motive than Gideon if the Webberly-Eugenie connection's behind this.”

“Hmm. Yes. I do see that. But to assign him the motive of rubbing out his wife
and
Webberly begs the question of why he would wait all these years to see to the job.”

“He had to wait till now. This is when Katja Wolff was released. He'd know we'd establish a trail to her.”

“That's nursing a grievance for a hell of a long time.”

“So maybe it's a more recent grievance.”

“More recent …? Are you arguing he's fallen in love with her a second time in his life?” Lynley considered his question. “All right. I think it's unlikely, but for the sake of argument, I'll go with it. Let's consider the possibility that he's had his love for his former wife reawakened. We begin with him divorced from her.”

“Destroyed by the fact that she walked out on him,” Havers added.

“Right. Now, Gideon has trouble with the violin. His mother reads about that trouble in the papers or hears it from Robson. She gets back in touch with Davies.”

“They talk often. They begin to reminisce.
He
thinks they're going to make a go of it again, and he's hot to trot—”

“This is, of course, ignoring the entire question of Jill Foster,” Lynley pointed out.

“Hang on, Inspector. Richard and Eugenie talk about Gideon. They talk about old times, their marriage, whatever. Everything he's felt gets fired up again. He becomes a potato all hot for the oven, only to find out that Eugenie's got someone lined up in her knickers already: Wiley.”

“Not Wiley,” Lynley said. “He's too old. Davies wouldn't see him as competition. Besides, Wiley told us she had something she wanted to reveal to him. She'd said as much. But she didn't want to reveal it three nights ago—”

“Because she was headed to London,” Havers said. “To Crediton Hill.”

“To Pitchley-Pitchford-Pytches,” Lynley said. “The end is always the beginning, isn't it?” He found the reference in his notes that supplied a single piece of information that had been there all along, just waiting for the correct interpretation. He said, “Wait. When I brought up the idea of another man, Havers, Davies went straight to him. By name, in fact. Without a doubt in his mind. I've got him naming Pytches right here in my notes.”

“Pytches?” Havers asked. “No. It's not Pytches, Inspector. That can't—”

Lynley's mobile rang. He grabbed it from the table top and held up a finger to stop Havers from continuing. She was itching to do so, however. She'd stubbed out her cigarette impatiently, saying, “What day did you talk to Davies, Inspector?”

Lynley waved her off, clicked on his mobile, said, “Lynley,” and turned away from Havers' smoke.

His caller was DCI Leach. “We've got another victim,” he announced.

Winston Nkata read the sign—
HM Prison Holloway
—and reflected on the fact that had his life taken a slightly different turn, had his mum not fainted dead away at the sight of her son in a casualty ward with thirty-four stitches closing an ugly slash on his face, he might have ended up in such a place. Not in this place, naturally, which imprisoned only women, but in a place just like it. The Scrubs, perhaps, or Dartmoor or the Ville. Doing time inside because what he'd not been able to manage was doing life outside.

But his mum had fainted. She had murmured, “Oh, Jewel,” and had slid to the floor like her legs'd turned to jelly. And the sight of her there with her turban askew—so that he could see what he'd never
noticed before, that her hair was actually going grey—made him finally accept her not as the indomitable force he thought she was but instead as a real woman for once, a woman who loved and relied on him to make her proud that she'd given birth. And that had been that.

But had the moment not occurred, had his dad come to fetch him instead, flinging him into the back seat of the car with a demonstration of the full measure of the disgust he deserved, the outcome might have been quite different. He might have felt the need to prove he didn't care that he'd become the recipient of his father's displeasure, and he might have felt the need to prove it by upping the stakes in the Brixton Warriors' longtime battle with the smaller upstart Longborough Bloods to secure a patch of ground called Windmill Gardens and make it part of their turf. But the moment had happened, and his life course had altered, bringing him to where he was now: staring at the windowless brick bulk of Holloway Prison inside which Katja Wolff had met both Yasmin Edwards and Noreen McKay.

He'd parked across the street from the prison, in front of a pub with boarded-up windows that looked like something straight out of Belfast. He'd eaten an orange, studied the prison entrance, and meditated on what everything meant. Particularly, he meditated on what it meant that the German woman was living with Yasmin Edwards but messing around with someone else, just as he'd suspected when he'd seen those shadows merging on the curtains in the window of Number Fifty-five Galveston Road.

His orange consumed, he ducked across the street when the heavy traffic on Parkhurst Road was halted at the traffic lights. He approached reception and dug out his warrant card, presenting it to the officer behind the desk. She said, “Is Miss McKay expecting you?”

He said, “Official business. She won't be surprised to know I'm here.”

The receptionist said she would phone, if Constable Nkata wanted to have a seat. It was late in the day, and whether Miss McKay would be able to see him …

“Oh, I 'xpect she'll be able to see me,” Nkata said.

He didn't sit but rather walked to the window, where he looked out on more of the vast brick walls. As he watched the traffic passing by on the street, a guard gate raised to accommodate a prison van, no doubt returning an inmate at the end of a day's trial at the Old Bailey. This would have been how Katja Wolff had come and gone during those long-ago days of her own trial. She'd have been accompanied
daily by a prison officer, who would remain in court with her, right inside the dock. That officer would have ferried her to and from her cell beneath the courtroom, made her tea, escorted her to lunch, and seen her back to Holloway for the night. An officer and an inmate alone, during the most difficult period of that inmate's life.

“Constable Nkata?”

Nkata swung round to see the receptionist holding a telephone receiver out to him. He took it from her, said his name, and heard a woman say in response, “There's a pub across the street. On the corner of Hillmarton Road. I can't see you in here, but if you wait in the pub, I'll join you in quarter of an hour.”

He said, “Make it five minutes and I'm on my way without hanging about chatting to anyone.”

She exhaled loudly, said, “Five minutes, then,” and slammed down the phone at her end.

Nkata went back to the pub, which turned out to be a nearly empty room as cold as a barn where the air was redolent mostly of dust. He ordered himself a cider, and he took his drink to a table that faced the door.

She didn't make it in five, but she arrived under ten, coming through the door with a gust of wind. She looked round the pub, and when her eyes fell upon Nkata, she nodded once and came over to him, taking the long sure strides of a woman with power and confidence. She was quite tall, not as tall as Yasmin Edwards but taller than Katja Wolff, perhaps five foot ten.

She said, “Constable Nkata?”

He said, “Miss McKay?”

She pulled out a chair, unbuttoned her coat, shrugged out of it, and sat, elbows on the table and hands fingering back her hair. This was blonde and cut short, leaving her ears bare. She wore small pearl studs in their lobes. For a moment, she kept her head bent, but when she drew in a breath and looked up, her blue eyes fixed on Nkata with plain dislike.

“What do you want from me? I don't like interruptions while I'm at work.”

“Could've caught up with you at home,” Nkata said. “But here was closer than Galveston Road from Harriet Lewis's office.”

At the mention of the solicitor, her face became guarded. “You know where I live,” she said cautiously.

“Followed a bird called Katja Wolff there last night. From Kennington to Wandsworth by bus, this was. It was in'ersting to note
that she went the whole route and didn't stop once to ask directions. Seems like she knew where she was going good enough.”

Noreen McKay sighed. She was middle-aged—probably near fifty, Nkata thought—but the fact that she wore little make-up served her well. She heightened what she had without looking painted, so her colour seemed authentic. She was neatly dressed in the uniform of the prison. Her white blouse was crisp, the navy epaulets bore their brass ornamentation brightly, and her trousers had creases that would have done a military man proud. She had keys on her belt, a radio as well, and some sort of pouch. She looked impressive.

She said, “I don't know what this is about, but I've nothing to say to you, Constable.”

“Not even 'bout Katja Wolff?” he asked her. “'Bout what she was doing calling on you with her solicitor in tow? They filing a law suit 'gainst you, or something?”

“As I just said, I've nothing to say, and there's no room for compromise in my position. I've a future and two adolescents to consider.”

“Not a husband, though?”

She brushed one hand through her hair again. It seemed to be a characteristic gesture. “I've never been married, Constable. I've had my sister's children since they were four and six years old. Their father didn't want them when Susie died—too busy playing the footloose bachelor—but he's started coming round now he's realising he won't be twenty years old forever. Frankly, I don't want to give him a reason to take them.”

“There's a reason, then? What would that be?”

Noreen McKay shoved away from the table and went to the bar instead of replying. There, she placed an order and waited while her gin was poured over two ice cubes and a bottle of tonic set next to it.

Nkata watched her, trying to fill in the blanks with a simple scrutiny of her person. He wondered which part of prison work had first attracted Noreen McKay: the power it provided over other people, the sense of superiority it offered, or the chance it represented to cast a fishing line in waters where the trout had no psychological protection.

She returned to the table, her drink in hand. She said, “You saw Katja Wolff and her solicitor come to my home. That's the extent of what you saw.”

“Saw her let herself in 's well. She didn't knock.”

“Constable, she's a German.”

Nkata cocked his head. “I got no recollection of Germans not knowing they're s'posed to knock on strangers' doors before walking in on them, Miss McKay. Mostly, I think they know the rules. Especially the ones telling them they don't have to knock where they already've got themselves well established.”

Noreen McKay lifted her gin and tonic. She drank but made no reply.

Nkata said, “What I'm wondering 'bout the whole situation is this: Is Katja the first lag you had some rabbit with or was she just one in a line of nellies?”

The woman flushed. “You don't know what you're talking about.”

“What I'm talking about's your position at Holloway and how you might've used and abused it over the years, and what action the guv'nors might think of taking if word got out you've been doing the nasty where you ought to be just locking the doors. You got how many years in the job? You got a pension? In line for promotion to warden? What?”

She smiled without humour, saying, “You know, I wanted to be a policeman, Constable, but I've dyslexia and I couldn't pass the exams. So I turned to prison work because I like the idea of citizens upholding the law, and I believe in punishing those who cross the line.”

“Which you yourself did. With Katja. She 'as doing twenty years—”

“She didn't do all her time at Holloway. Virtually no one does. But I've been here for twenty-four years. So I expect your assumption—whatever it is—has a number of holes in it.”

“She was here on remand, she was here for the trial, she did some time here. And when she went off—to Durham, was it?—she'd be able to list her visitors, wouldn't she? And whose name d'you think I'd find in her records as the one to admit—proba'ly the
only
one to admit aside from her brief—for her visits? And she'd be back in Holloway to do some of her time, I expect. Yeah. I expect that could've been fixed up easy enough from within. What's your job, Miss McKay?”