Free With No One As Witness by Elizabeth George Page A

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