A Traitor to Memory (55 page)

Mandy returned with the coffee then and placed the tray on the table: three cups and three saucers, milk and sugar, but no pot: a subtle omission that seemed designed to determine the length of our stay. We doctored our drinks as she left us.

I said, “We've come with some specific questions about Katja Wolff 's trial.”

“You've not heard from her, have you?” Cresswell-White's tone was sharp.

“Heard from her? No. Once she left our house—when my sister died—I never saw her again. At least … I don't think I saw her.”

“You don't think …?” Cresswell-White picked up his cup of coffee and held it on his knee. He was wearing a good suit—grey wool and cut exactly to fit him—and the creases in his trousers looked as if they'd been placed there by royal decree.

“I have no recollection of the trial,” I told him. “I have no actual

clear
recollection of that whole period of time. Large areas of my childhood are rather misty, and I've been trying to clarify them.” I didn't tell him why I was making this attempt to recapture the past. I didn't use the word
repression
, and I couldn't bring myself to reveal anything more.

“I see.” Cresswell-White gave a brief smile that disappeared as quickly as it flashed on his face. To me, the smile seemed both ironic and self-directed, and his next comment reinforced this assumption. “Gideon, would that we could all drink of the waters of Lethe like you. I, for one, would sleep better at night. May I call you Gideon, by the way? That's how I've always thought of you, although we've never met.”

That was a decisive answer to the main question I'd come with, and the relief I felt at hearing it told me something of how great my fears had been. I said, “So I didn't give evidence, did I? At her trial? I didn't give evidence against her.”

“Good God, no. I wouldn't put an eight-year-old child through that. Why do you ask?”

“Gideon talked to the cops when his sister died,” Libby said frankly. “He couldn't remember much about the trial, but he thought his testimony might have been what put Katja Wolff away.”

“Ah. I do see. And now that she's been released, you're wanting to prepare yourself in case—”

“She's been released?” I broke in.

“You didn't know? Neither of your parents informed you? They were both sent letters. She's been out for—” He glanced at some paperwork in one of the folders. “She's been out for just over a month.”

“No. No. I didn't know.” I felt a sudden pulsing within my skull, and I saw the familiar pattern of bright speckling that always suggests that the pulsing will turn into twenty-four hours of pounding. I thought, Oh no. Please. Not here and not now.

“Perhaps they didn't think it necessary,” Cresswell-White said. “If she's going to approach anyone from that period of time, it's more likely to be one of them, isn't it? Or myself. Or someone who gave damning evidence against her.” He went on to say something more, but I couldn't hear because the pulsing in my head was growing louder and the speckling was turning to an arc of light. My body was like an invading army, and I—who should have been its general—was instead its target.

I felt my feet begin a nervous tapping, as if they wanted to carry me from the room. I drew a breath and with the air came the image of that door once again: that blue blue door at the top of the stairs, those two locks upon it, that ring at its centre. I could see it as if I stood before it, and I wanted to open it but I could not raise my hand.

Libby said my name. I heard that much through the pulsing. I held up a hand, asking for a moment, just a moment please to recover.

From what? you want to know, and you lean towards me, ever ready for a loop in the yarn into which you can insert your needle. Recover from what? Go back, Gideon.

Go back to what?

To that moment in Bertram Cresswell-White's rooms, to the pulsing in your head, to what led to the pulsing.

All the talk about the trial led to the pulsing.

We've had the trial before now. It's more than that. What are you avoiding?

I'm avoiding
nothing
…. But you're not convinced, are you, Dr. Rose? I'm supposed to be writing what I remember, and you've begun to question how trolling through the trial of Katja Wolff is going to take me back to my music. You caution me. You point out that the human mind is strong, that it holds on to its neuroses with a fierce protection, that it possesses the ability to deny and distract, and that this expedition to Paper Buildings might well be a monumental effort on the part of my mind to engage in displacement.

Then that's how it will have to be, Dr. Rose. I do not know how else to go at this thing.

All right, you say. Did your time with Cresswell-White trigger anything else, then? Aside from the episode with your head?

Episode
. You choose that word with deliberation, and I know it. But I will not bite at the bait you cast out. I will tell you about Sarah-Jane instead. For this is what I learn from Bertram Cresswell-White: the part that I did not have in Katja Wolff 's trial, the part that Sarah-Jane Beckett had.

19 October, 9:00 P.M.

“She lived in the house with your family and Wolff, after all,” Bertram Cresswell-White said. He'd taken up the first of the folders with
Crown vs. Wolff
on them, and he'd begun to leaf through the documents inside, reading from time to time when his memory needed to be refreshed. “She was in a good position to observe what went on.”

“So did she see something?” Libby asked. She'd moved her chair closer to mine, and she'd placed her hand on the back of my neck as if she knew without my telling her what state my head was in. She kneaded my neck gently, and I wanted to be grateful. But I could sense the displeasure that the barrister felt at this open display of her affection for me, and I tensed because of this displeasure as I always tense when an older man looks on me with a critical eye.

“She saw Wolff being sick in the mornings, every morning for a month before the child was killed,” he said. “You know she was pregnant, don't you?”

“My father told me as much,” I said.

“Yes. Well. Beckett saw the German girl's patience growing thin. The child—your sister—got her up three or four times each night, so she was short of sleep as well and that, in conjunction with the difficulties of morning sickness, wore her down. She began to leave Sonia too much alone, which was something that Miss Beckett came to realise since she gave you your lessons on the same floor of the house as your sister's nursery. Ultimately, she felt it her duty to report to your parents that Wolff was derelict in her duties. This precipitated a confrontation, which resulted in Wolff being sacked.”

“On the spot?” Libby asked.

Cresswell-White consulted a file for the answer to this, saying, “No. She was given a month's notice. Your parents were quite generous considering the situation, Gideon.”

“But she never said in court that she saw Katja Wolff abuse my sister?” I asked.

The barrister closed the folder, saying, “Beckett testified that they'd rowed—the German girl and your parents. She testified that Sonia, over a period of days, was left to cry for as long as an hour in her cot. She said that on the evening in question, she heard the German girl giving Sonia her bath. But she couldn't name the time or the place where she'd witnessed any direct physical abuse.”

“Who did?” Libby asked.

“No one,” the barrister replied.

“God,” I murmured.

Cresswell-White seemed to know what I was thinking, because he set the folder back on the coffee table along with his cup and he spoke to me urgently. “A case in court is like a mosaic, Gideon. If there's no eyewitness to the crime itself—as there wasn't in this situation—then each piece of the case that the Crown presents must ultimately form a pattern from which an entire picture can be seen. The entire picture is what convinces the jury of the defendant's guilt. And that's what happened in Katja Wolff's case.”

“Because there was other testimony against her?” Libby asked.

“Yes, indeed.”

“Whose?” My voice was weak—I could
hear
the weakness as well as I could hate it and as fully as I could not remove it from my tone.

“The police who took her first and only statement, the forensic pathologist who did the post-mortem, the friend with whom Wolff had initially claimed to be on the phone for one minute during which she left your sister alone, your mother, your father, your grandparents. It's less a case of encouraging anyone to say something directly against a defendant than of unfolding for the jury the situation as it existed and allowing them to draw their own conclusions about that situation. So everyone contributed to the overall mosaic. What we ended up with was a twenty-one-year-old German girl who had reveled in the publicity she got when she escaped from her country, who was able to emigrate to England because of the good will of a group of nuns, whose celebrity—which had fed her ego—quickly faded upon her arrival here, who was given a job that included room and board, who got herself pregnant, fell consequently ill, failed to cope, lost her job, and snapped.”

“Sounds like manslaughter, not murder,” Libby said.

“And would probably have gone down as such had she been willing to testify. But she wasn't. It was amazingly arrogant but quite in keeping with her background if it comes down to it, I suppose. She wouldn't testify. And she made matters worse for herself by refusing to speak to the police more than that single time, as well as by refusing to speak to her solicitor, or even her barrister.”

“Why'd she clam up?” Libby asked.

“I couldn't say. But the post-mortem showed there were previously healed fractures on your sister's body that no doctor could account for and no one else was able to explain, Gideon, and the fact that the German girl would say
nothing
to anyone concerning Sonia didn't make it look as if she was in the dark about those older injuries. And while the jury was instructed—as they were in those days—that Wolff's silence could not be held against her, juries are only human, aren't they? That silence is going to influence their thinking.”

“So what I said to the police—”

Cresswell-White waved my words away, saying, “I read your statement. Naturally, it was part of the brief. I re-read it, in fact, when you phoned me. And while I would have taken it into account twenty years ago, believe me, I wouldn't have prosecuted Katja Wolff on the strength of it alone.” He smiled. “After all, you were eight years old, Gideon. I had a son the very same age, so I was well aware of what boys are like. I had to consider the fact that Katja Wolff might have sorted you out about something in the days preceding your sister's death. And if that had been the case, you might have used your imagination for a bit of revenge on her, without knowing where your statement to the police could lead.”

“There you go, Gideon,” Libby said.

“So set your mind at rest if you're feeling guilty about Katja Wolff,” Cresswell-White said, and his words were warm. “She did herself far more harm than you ever did her.”

20 October

So was it revenge or was it memory, Dr. Rose? And if it was revenge, what was it for? I can't think of a time that anyone save Raphael sought to discipline me, and the only times he did so were when he made me listen to a piece of music that I wasn't performing to his liking, and that was hardly punishment at all.