With No One As Witness (8 page)

When she’d had enough—or at least as much as she could handle for the day—Barbara had said to Nkata, “I’m out of here, Winnie. You staying or what?”

Nkata had pushed back his chair, rubbed his neck, and said, “I’ll stay for a while.”

She nodded but didn’t leave at once. It seemed to her that they both needed to say something, although she wasn’t sure what. Nkata was the one who took the plunge.

“What d’we do with all this, Barb?” He set his biro on a legal pad. “Question is, how do we be? We can’t ’xactly ignore the situation.”

Barbara sat back down. There was a magnetic paper-clip holder on the desk, and she picked this up and played with it. “I think we just do what needs doing. I expect the rest will sort itself out.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “I don’t sit easy with this. I know why I’m here. I want you to unnerstan that.”

“Got it,” Barbara said. “But don’t be rough on yourself. You deserve—”

“Hillier wouldn’t know sod all ’bout what I deserve,” Nkata cut in. “Not to mention DPA. Not before this, not now, and not later.”

Barbara was silent. She couldn’t dispute what they both knew to be the truth. She finally said, “You know, Winnie, we’re sort of in the same position.”

“How d’you mean? Woman cop, black cop?”

“Not that. It’s more about vision. Hillier doesn’t really see either one of us. Fact is, you can apply that to everyone on this team. He doesn’t see any of us, just how we can either help him or hurt him.”

Nkata considered this. “I s’pose you’re right.”

“So none of what he says and does matters because we have the same job at the end of the day. Question is: Are we up for that? ’Cause it means letting go of how much we loathe him and just getting on with what we do best.”

“I’m on for that,” Nkata said. “But, Barb, you still deserve—”

“Hey,” she interrupted, “so do you.”

Now, she yawned widely and shoved her shoulder against the recalcitrant door of the Mini. She’d found a parking space along Steeles Road, round the corner from Eton Villas. She plodded back to the yellow house, hunched into a cold wind that had come up in the late afternoon, and went along the path to her bungalow.

Inside, she flipped on the lights, tossed her shoulder bag on the table, and dug the desired tin of Heinz from a cupboard. She dumped its contents unceremoniously into a pan. Under other circumstances, she’d have eaten the beans cold. But tonight, she decided she deserved the full treatment. She popped bread into the toaster and from the fridge took a Stella Artois. It wasn’t her night to drink, but she’d had a tough day.

As her meal was preparing itself, she went for the television remote, which, as usual, she couldn’t find. She was searching the wrinkled linens of the unmade daybed when someone rapped at her door. She glanced over her shoulder and saw through the open blinds on the window two shadowy forms on her front step: one quite small, the other taller, both of them slender. Hadiyyah and her father had come calling.

Barbara gave up her search for the remote and opened the door to her neighbours. She said, “Just in time for a Barbara Special. I’ve two pieces of toast, but if you behave yourselves, we can divide them three ways.” She held the door wider to admit them, giving a glance over her shoulder to check that she’d tossed her dirty knickers in the laundry basket sometime during the last forty-eight hours.

Taymullah Azhar smiled with his usual grave courtesy. He said, “We cannot stay, Barbara. This will only take a moment, if you do not mind.”

He sounded so sombre that Barbara glanced warily from him to his daughter. Hadiyyah was hanging her head, her hands clasped behind her back. A few wisps of hair escaped from her plaits, brushing against her cheeks, and her cheeks themselves were flushed. She looked as if she’d been crying.

“What’s wrong? Is something…?” Barbara felt dread from a dozen different sources, none of which she particularly cared to name. “What’s going on, Azhar?”

Azhar said, “Hadiyyah?” His daughter looked up at him imploringly. His face was implacable. “We have come for a reason. You know what it is.”

Hadiyyah gulped so loudly that Barbara could hear it. She brought her hands from round her back and extended them to Barbara. In them, she held the Buddy Holly CD. She said, “Dad says I’m to give this back to you, Barbara.”

Barbara took it from her. She looked at Azhar. She said, “But…Sorry, but is it not allowed, or something?” That seemed unlikely. She knew a little about their customs, and gift giving was one of them.

“And?” Azhar said to his daughter without answering Barbara’s question. “There is more, is there not?”

Hadiyyah lowered her head again. Barbara could see that her lips were trembling.

Her father said, “Hadiyyah. I shall not ask you—”

“I fibbed,” the little girl blurted out. “I fibbed to my dad and he found out and I’m meant to give this back to you in consee…con…consequence.” She raised her head. She’d begun to cry. “But thank you, because I thought it was lovely. I liked ‘Peggy Sue’ especially.” Then she spun on her heel and fled, back towards the front of the house. Barbara heard her sob.

She looked to her neighbour. She said, “Listen, Azhar. This is actually my fault. I had no idea Hadiyyah wasn’t supposed to go to Camden High Street. And she didn’t know where we were going when we set off. It was something of a joke anyway. She was listening to some pop group and I was giving her aggro about them and she was saying how great they are and I decided to show her some real rock ’n’ rock and I took her down to the Virgin Megastore but I didn’t know it was forbidden and she didn’t know where we were going.” Barbara was out of breath. She felt like an adolescent getting caught for being out after curfew. She didn’t much like it. She calmed herself and said, “If I’d known you’d forbidden her to go to Camden High Street, I never would have taken her there. I’m dead sorry, Azhar. She didn’t mention it straightaway.”

“Which is the source of my irritation with Hadiyyah,” Azhar said. “She should have done so.”

“But, like I said, she didn’t know where we were going till we got there.”

“Once you arrived, was she wearing a blindfold?”

“Of course not. But then it was too late. I didn’t exactly give her a chance to say something.”

“Hadiyyah should not need an invitation to be truthful.”

“Okay. Agreed. It happened, and it won’t happen again. At least let her keep the CD.”

Azhar glanced away. His dark fingers—so slender, they looked like a girl’s—moved beneath his trim jacket to the pocket of his pristine white shirt. He felt there and brought forth a packet of cigarettes. He shook one out, appeared to think about what to do next, and then offered the packet to Barbara. She took this as a positive sign. Their fingers brushed as she took a cigarette from him, and he lit a match that he shared with her.

“She wants you to stop smoking,” Barbara told him.

“She wants many things. As do we all.”

“You’re angry. Come in. Let’s talk about this.”

He remained where he was.

“Azhar, listen. I know what you’re worried about, Camden High Street and all that. But you can’t protect her from everything. It’s impossible.”

He shook his head. “I don’t seek to protect her from everything. I merely seek to do what’s right. But I find that I don’t always know what that is.”

“Being exposed to Camden High Street isn’t going to pollute her. And Buddy Holly”—here Barbara gestured with the CD—“isn’t going to pollute her either.”

“It’s not Camden High Street or Buddy Holly that comprises my concern,” Azhar said. “It is the lie, Barbara.”

“Okay. I can see that. But it was only a lie of omission. She just didn’t tell me when she could have told me. Or should have told me. Or whatever.”

“That is not it at all.”

“What is it, then?”

“She lied to me, Barbara.”

“To you? About—”

“And this is something I will not accept.”

“But when? When did she lie to you?”

“When I asked her about the CD. She said you had given it to her—”

“Azhar, that was true.”

“—but she failed to include the information about where it had come from. That in itself slipped out when she was chatting about CDs in general. About how many there were to choose from at the Virgin Megastore.”

“Bloody hell, Azhar, that’s not a lie, is it?”

“No. But the outright denial of having been in the Virgin Megastore is. And this is something that I will not accept. Hadiyyah is not to start that with me. She will not begin lying. She will not. Not to me.” His voice was so controlled and his features so rigid that Barbara realised far more was being discussed than his daughter’s initial venture into prevarication.

She said, “Okay. I get it. But she feels wretched. Whatever your point is, I think you made it.”

“I hope so. She must learn that there are consequences to the decisions she makes, and she must learn this as a child.”

“I don’t disagree. But…” Barbara drew in on her cigarette before she dropped it to the front step and ground it out. “It seems like making her admit her wrongdoing to me—sort of like in public?—is punishment enough. I think you should let her keep the CD.”

“I’ve decided the consequences.”

“You can bend, though, can’t you?”

“Too far,” he said, “and you break on the wheel of your own inconsistencies.”

“What happens then?” Barbara asked him. When he didn’t reply, she went on quietly with, “Hadiyyah and lying…This isn’t really what it’s all about. Is it, Azhar.”

He replied, “I will not have her start,” and he stepped back, preparatory to leaving. He added politely, “I have kept you from your toast long enough,” before he returned to the front of the property.

NO MATTER HIS conversation with Barbara Havers and her reassurance on the subject, Winston Nkata didn’t rest easily beneath the mantle of detective sergeant. He’d thought he would—that was the hell of it—but it wasn’t happening, and the comfort he wanted in his employment hadn’t materialised for most of his career.

He hadn’t started out in police work feeling uneasy about his job. But it hadn’t been long before the reality of being a black cop in a world dominated by white men had begun to sink in. He’d noticed it first in the canteen, in the way that glances sidled over to him and then slid onto someone else; then he felt it in the conversations, how they became ever so slightly more guarded when he joined his colleagues. After that it was in the manner that he was greeted: with just a shade more welcome than was given the white cops when he sat with a group at table. He hated that deliberate effort people made to appear tolerant when he was near. The very act of diligently treating him like one of the lads made him feel like the last thing he’d ever become was one of the lads.

At first he’d told himself he didn’t want that anyway. It was rough enough round Loughborough Estate hearing himself called a fucking coconut. It would be that much worse if he actually ended up becoming part of the white establishment. Still, he hated being marked as phony by his own people. While he kept in mind his mother’s admonition that “it doesn’t make you a chair ’f some ignoramus calls you a chair,” he found it increasingly difficult just to keep himself moving in the direction he wanted to go. On the estate, that meant to and from his parents’ flat and nowhere else. Otherwise, it meant upward in his career.

“Jewel, luv,” his mother had said when he phoned her with the news of his promotion. “Doesn’t matter one bit why they promoted you. What matters is they did, and now the opening’s there. You walk through it. And you don’t look back.”

But he couldn’t do that. Instead, he continued to feel weighed down by AC Hillier’s sudden notice of him when before he’d been nothing more to the man than a passing face to which the assistant commissioner could not have put a name if his continued existence had depended upon it.

Yet, there was still so much truth to what his mother had said. Just walk through the opening. He had to learn how to do it. And the entire subject of openings applied to more than one area of his life, which was what he was left thinking about once Barb Havers departed for the day.

He took a final look at the pictures of the dead boys before he too left the Yard. He did it to remind himself that they were young—terribly young—and as a consequence of their racial background, he had obligations that went beyond merely bringing their killer to justice.

Below, in the underground carpark, he sat for a moment in his Escort and thought about those obligations and what they called for: action in the face of fear. He wanted to slap himself stupid for even having that fear. He was twenty-nine years old, for God’s sake. He was an officer of the police.

That alone should have counted for something, and it would have done in other instances. But it counted for nothing in this situation, when being a cop was the single profession in life least designed to impress. Yet…It couldn’t be helped that he was a cop. He was also a man, and a man’s presence was called for.

Nkata finally set off with a deep breath. He followed a route across the river to South London. But instead of heading home, he took a detour round the curved brick shell of the Oval and drove down Kennington Road in the direction of Kennington Station.

The tube itself marked his destination, and he found a place to park nearby. He bought an Evening Standard from a vendor on the pavement, using the activity to build up his courage for walking the length of Braganza Street.

At its bottom, Arnold House—part of Doddington Grove Estate—rose out of a lumpy carpark. Across from this building, a horticultural centre grew behind a chain-link fence, and it was against this fence that Nkata chose to lean, with his newspaper folded beneath his arm and his gaze on the third-floor covered walk that led to the fifth flat from the left.

It wouldn’t take much effort to cross over the street and weave his way through the carpark. Once there, he was fairly certain the lift would be available since, more often than not, the security panel giving access to it was broken. How much trouble would it be, then, to cross, to weave, to punch the button, and then to make his way to that flat? He had a reason to do so. There were boys being murdered across London—mixed-race boys—and inside that flat lived Daniel Edwards, whose white father was dead but whose black mother was very much alive. But then that was the problem, wasn’t it. She was the problem. Yasmin Edwards.