A Traitor to Memory (109 page)

But he hadn't wanted that.

Why? he asked himself.

Because of what Malcolm Webberly had become to him.

How our pasts define our presents, Leach thought now. We're not even aware that it's happening, but every time we reach a conclusion, make a judgement, or take a decision, the years of our lives are stacked up behind us: all those dominoes of influence that we don't begin to acknowledge as part of defining who we are.

He drove to Hammersmith. He told himself he needed a few minutes to decompress from the scene with Bridget, and he did his decompressing in the car, wending his way south till he was in striking distance of Charing Cross Hospital. So he finished the journey and located intensive care.

He couldn't get in to see him, he was told by the sister in charge when he walked through the swinging doors. Only family were allowed in to see the patients in the Intensive Care. Was he a member of the Webberly family?

Oh yes, he thought. And of long standing, although he'd never truly admitted that to himself and Webberly hadn't ever twigged the idea. But what he said was, “No. Just another officer. The superintendent and I used to work together.”

The nurse nodded. She remarked how good it was that so many members of the Met had stopped by, had phoned, had sent flowers, and had stood by with offers of blood for the patient. “Type B,” she said to him. “Do you happen to be …? Or O, which is universal, but I expect you know that.”

“AB negative.”

“That's very rare. We wouldn't be able to use it in this case, but you ought to be a regular donor, if you don't mind my saying.”

“Is there anything …?” He nodded in the direction of the rooms.

“His daughter's with him. His brother-in-law as well. There's really nothing … But he's holding his own.”

“Still hooked up to the machines?”

She looked regretful. “I'm awfully sorry. I can't exactly give out … I do hope you understand. But if I may ask … Do you pray …?”

“Not regularly.”

“Sometimes it helps.”

But there was something more useful than prayer, Leach thought. Like cracking the whip over the murder team and at least making progress towards finding the bastard who did this to Malcolm. And he could do that.

He was about to nod a goodbye to the nurse, when a young
woman wearing a track suit and untied trainers emerged from one of the rooms. The nurse called her over, saying, “This gentleman's asking after your dad.”

Leach hadn't seen Miranda Webberly since her childhood, but he saw now that she'd grown up to look very much like her father: same stout body, same rust-coloured hair, same ruddy complexion, same smile that crinkled round her eyes and produced a single dimple on her left cheek. She looked like the sort of young woman who didn't bother with fashion magazines and he liked her for that.

She spoke quietly about her father's condition: that he hadn't regained consciousness, that there'd been “a rather serious crisis with his heart” earlier that day but now he had stabilised thank God, that his blood count—“I think it was the white cells? But maybe the other …?”—indicated a point of internal bleeding that they were going to have to locate soon since right now they were transfusing him but that would be a waste of blood if he was losing it from somewhere inside.

“They say he can hear, even in a coma, so I've been reading to him,” Miranda confided. “I hadn't thought to bring anything from Cambridge, so Uncle David went out and bought a book about narrow boating. I think it's the first thing that came to hand. But it's terribly dull and I'm afraid it'll send
me
into a coma before much longer. And I can't think it'll make Dad wake up because he's longing to hear how things turn out. Of course, he's in a coma mostly because they want him in a coma. At least, that's what they're telling me.”

She seemed eager to make Leach feel comfortable, to let him know how much his pathetic effort to be of help was appreciated. She looked exhausted, but she was calm, with no apparent expectation that someone—other than herself—should rescue her from the situation in which she was involved. He liked her more.

He said, “Is there someone who could take over from you here? Give you a chance to get home for a bath? An hour's kip?”

“Oh, yes, of course,” she said, and she fished in her track suit's jacket and brought out a rubber band that she used to discipline her steel-wool hair. “But I want to be here. He's my dad, and … He can hear me, you see. He knows I'm with him. And if that's a help … I mean, it's important that someone going through what he's going through know he's not alone, don't you think?”

Which implied that Webberly's wife wasn't with him. Which suggested a volume or two of what the years had been like since Webberly had made his decision not to leave Frances for Eugenie.

They'd talked about it the single time that Leach himself had brought up the subject. He couldn't remember now
why
he'd felt compelled to venture into such a private area of another man's life, but something had occurred—a veiled remark? a phone conversation with a subtext of hostility on Webberly's part? a departmental party to which Webberly had shown up alone for the dozenth time?—and that something had prompted Leach to say, “I don't see how you can act the lover of one and be the lover of the other. You could leave Frances, Malc. You know that. You've got someplace to go.”

Webberly hadn't responded at first. Indeed, he hadn't responded for days. Leach thought he might never respond at all till two weeks later, when Webberly's car was in for repair and Leach had dropped him off at his home because it was not so far out of his way. Half past eight in the evening, and she was in her pyjamas when she came to the door and flung it open, crowing, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” and dashing down the path to be caught up in her father's arms. Webberly had buried his face in her crinkly hair, had blown noisy kisses against her neck, had elicited more crows of joy from her.

“This is my Randie,” he'd said to Leach. “This is why.”

Leach said to Miranda now, “Your mum's not here, then? Gone home for a rest, has she?”

She said, “I'll tell her you were here, Inspector. She'll be so glad to know. Everyone's been so … so
decent
. Really.” And she shook his hand and said that she would get back to her dad.

“If there's something I can do …?”

“You've done it,” she assured him.

But on the way back to the Hampstead station, Leach didn't feel that way. And once inside, he began pacing round the incident room as he reviewed one report after another, most of which he'd already read. He said to the WPC on the computer, “So what's Swansea given us?”

She shook her head. “Every car owned by every principal's a late model, sir. There's nothing earlier than ten years old.”

“Who owns that one?”

She referred to a clipboard, ran her finger down the page. “Robson,” she said. “Raphael. He's got a Renault. Colour is … let me see … silver.”

“Blast. There's got to be something.” Leach considered another way to approach the problem. He said, “Significant others. Go there.”

She said, “Sir?”

“Go through the reports. Get all the names. Wives, husbands,
boyfriends, girlfriends, teenagers who drive, anyone and everyone connected to this who has a driving licence. Run their names through the DVLA and see if any of them have a car that fits our profile.”

“All of them, sir?” the constable said.

“I believe we speak the same language, Vanessa.”

She sighed, said, “Yes, sir,” and returned to work as one of the newer constables came barreling into the room. He was called Solberg, a wet-behind-the-ears DC who'd been eager to prove himself from day one on the murder squad. He was trailing a sheaf of paperwork behind him, and his face was so red, he looked like a runner at the end of a marathon.

He cried out, “Guv! Check this out. Ten days ago, and it's hot. It's
hot
.”

Leach said, “What're you on about, Solberg?”

“A bit of a complication,” the constable replied.

Nkata decided to turn to Katja Wolff's solicitor after his conversation with Yasmin Edwards. She'd said, “You got what you want, now get out, Constable,” once she'd watched him write
12:41
in his notebook, and she'd refused to speculate on where her lover had been on the night Eugenie Davies had died. He'd thought about pushing her—
You lied once, madam, so what's to say you aren't lying again and do you know what happens to lags who get ticks by their names as accessories to murder?
—but he hadn't done so. He hadn't had the heart because he'd seen the emotions running across her face while he was questioning her, and he had an idea of how much it had cost her to tell him the little she'd already told. Still, he'd not been able to stop himself from considering what would happen if he asked her why: Why was she betraying her lover and, more important, what did it mean that she was betraying her? But that wasn't his business, was it? It couldn't be his business because he was a copper and she was a lag. And that's the way it was.

So he'd closed his notebook. He'd intended to turn on his heel and get out of her shop with a simple yet pointed “Cheers, Missus Edwards. You did the right thing.” But he didn't say that. Instead, what he'd said was, “You all right, Missus Edwards?” and found himself taken aback at the gentleness he felt. It was wrong as hell to feel gentle towards such a woman in such a situation, and when she said, “Just get out,” he took the course of wisdom and did just that.

In his car, he'd slipped from his wallet the card that Katja Wolff
had handed him early that morning. He'd removed the
A to Z
from his glove box and looked up the street on which Harriet Lewis had her office. As luck would have it, the solicitor's office was in Kentish Town, which meant the other side of the river and yet another drive through London. But wending his way there gave him time to plan an approach likely to dislodge information from the lawyer. And he knew he needed a decent approach, because the proximity of her office to HM Prison Holloway suggested that Harriet Lewis had more than one villain as a client, which suggested in turn that she wasn't likely to be easily finessed into revealing anything.

When at last he pulled to the kerb, Nkata discovered that Harriet Lewis had set herself up in humble offices between a newsagent and a grocery displaying limp broccoli and bruised cauliflower out on the pavement. A door was set at an oblique angle to the street, abutting the door to the newsagent's, and on its upper half of translucent glass was printed
Solicitors
and nothing more.

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.