A Traitor to Memory (99 page)

She took me down a corridor painted in warm, earthy colours and we went to her office, which opened onto a terrace where a profusion of pot plants provided a verdant backdrop for a comfortable room of overstuffed furniture, cushions, and a collection of pottery (“South American,” she informed me) and baskets (“North American … lovely, aren't they? They're my guilty pleasure. I can't afford them, but I buy them anyway. I suppose there are worse vices in life”). We sat and took stock of each other. Katie said in that same warm, personally friendly and professionally reassuring voice, “Now. How can I help you, Gideon?”

I realised that she thought I'd come to solicit her skills, and I hastened to disabuse her of the notion. Nothing in her area of speciality was required, I told her heartily. I'd really come for some information about Katja Wolff, if she didn't mind. I would recompense her for her time, since I'd be using up what would otherwise be someone's appointment. But as to having … shall we say,
difficulties
of the sort she was used to dealing with …? Har, har. Chuckle. Well, at the moment there was no need for
that
sort of intervention.

Katie said, “Brilliant. So glad to hear it,” and she settled more comfortably into her armchair. This was high-backed and upholstered in autumn colours similar to those which decorated the waiting room and the corridor. It was also extremely sturdy, a quality that would be necessary considering Katie's size. For if she'd been given to fat as a twentysomething university student sitting in the kitchen in Kensington Square, now she was downright obese, of a size that would no longer fit into a seat at the cinema or on a plane. But she was still dressed in hues that flattered her colouring, and the jewellery she wore was tasteful and looked expensive. Nonetheless, it was difficult for me to imagine how she managed to get round town. And, admittedly, I couldn't picture anyone telling their innermost libidinous secrets to her. It was obvious others hadn't shared my aversion, however. The clinic looked like a thriving enterprise, and I'd managed to get in to see Katie only because a regular client had canceled minutes before I phoned.

I told her that I was trying to refresh some memories of my childhood, and I'd remembered her. I'd recalled that she'd often been in the kitchen when Katja Wolff was feeding Sonia, and as I had no idea of Katja's whereabouts, it seemed to me that she—Katie—might be able to fill in the gaps where my memories were dim.

Thankfully, she didn't ask why I'd developed this sudden interest in the past. Nor did she, from her place of professional wisdom, comment upon what it might mean that I had gaps in my recollections in the first place. Instead, she said, “People at Immaculate Conception used to call us the two KWs. ‘Where are the KWs?’ they'd ask. ‘Someone fetch the KWs to have a look at this.’”

“So you were close friends.”

“I wasn't the only one who sought her out when she first accepted a room at the convent. But our friendship … I suppose it
took
. So yes, we were close at the time.”

There was a low table next to her chair, and on it stood an elaborate bird cage with two budgerigars inside, one a brilliant blue and the other green. As Katie spoke, she unfastened the door of the cage, and took the blue bird out, grasping him in her large fat fist. He squawked in protest and took a nip at her fingers. She said, “Naughty,
naughty
, Joey,” and picked up a tongue depressor that lay on the table next to the cage. For a grim moment I thought she meant to use it to swat the little bird. But instead she used it to massage his head and neck in a way that calmed him. Indeed, it appeared to hypnotise him, and it did much the same for me, since I watched in fascination as the bird's eyes eased shut. Katie opened her palm, and he sank into it contentedly.

“Therapeutic,” Katie told me as she went on with the massage, using the tips of her fingers once the bird was gentled. “Lowers the blood pressure.”

“I didn't know that birds had high blood pressure.”

She laughed quietly. “Not Joey's. Mine. I've morbid obesity, to state the obvious. Doctor says I'll die before I'm fifty if I don't shed sixteen stone. ‘You weren't born fat,’ he tells me. ‘No, but I've lived it,’ I tell him. It's hell on one's heart, and what it does to one's blood pressure doesn't bear mentioning. But we all have to go some way. I'm just choosing mine.” She ran her fingers along Joey's folded right wing. In response—eyes still closed—he stretched it out. “That's what attracted me to Katja. She was someone who made choices, and I loved that about her. Probably because in my own family, everyone just went into the restaurant business without thinking there might be something else out there to do with their lives. But Katja was someone who grabbed at life. She didn't just accept what was thrust upon her.”

“East Germany,” I acknowledged. “The balloon escape.”

“Yes. That's an excellent example. The balloon escape and how she engineered it.”

“Except she wasn't the one who built the balloon, was she? Not from what I've been told.”

“No, she didn't build it. That's not what I meant by
engineered
. I meant how she convinced Hannes Hertel to take her with him. How she blackmailed him, actually, if what she told me was true, and I expect it was because why would someone lie about something so unflattering? But nasty as her plan might have been, she had real nerve to go to him and to make the threat. He was a big man—six foot three or four to hear her tell it—and he could have done her serious harm had he a mind to do so. He could have killed her, I expect, and gone on his way over the wall and disappeared from there. It was a calculated risk on her part, and she took it. That's how much she wanted life.”

“What sort of risk?”

“The threat, you mean?” Katie had gone on to Joey's other wing, which he'd stretched out as cooperatively as he had done the first. Inside the cage, the second budgerigar had skittered along one of the perches and was watching the massage session with one bright eye. “She threatened to alert the authorities if Hannes didn't take her with him.”

“That's not a story that's ever come out, is it?”

“I expect I'm the only person she ever told, and she probably never realised she told me. We'd both been drinking, and when Katja got pissed—which wasn't often, mind you—she'd say or do things that she couldn't even remember twenty-four hours later. I never mentioned the Hannes situation to her after she told me about it, but I admired her for it because it spoke of the lengths she was willing to go to in order to have what she wanted. And as I had to go to my own lengths to get what I wanted”—she indicated the office and the clinic itself, so many steps removed from her family's restaurant business—“it made us sisters, after a fashion.”

“You lived at the convent as well?”

“God no. Katja did. She worked for the sisters—in their kitchen, I think—in exchange for her room while she was learning English. But I lived behind the convent. There were lodgings for students at the bottom of the grounds. Right on the District line, so the noise was ghastly. But the rent was cheap, and the location—near to so many colleges—made it convenient. Several hundred students lived there then, and most of us knew of Katja.” Here she smiled. “Had we not known of her, we would have taken notice of her eventually. What she could do with a jumper, three scarves, and a pair of trousers was quite remarkable. She had an innovative mind when it came to fashion. That's what she wanted to do, by the way. And she would have done had things not turned out so badly for her.”

This was exactly where I wanted the conversation to head: the way things had turned out for Katja Wolff and the why of those things.

“She wasn't really qualified to be my sister's nanny, was she?” I asked.

Katie was stroking the budgerigar's tail feathers now, and he spread them for her as cooperatively as he'd spread his wings, which still remained extended, as if he'd become paralysed by the sheer pleasure of the therapist's touch. “She was devoted to your sister,” Katie said. “She loved her. She was brilliant with her. I never saw her be
anything
other than absolutely tender and gentle towards Sonia. She was a Godsend, Gideon.”

That wasn't what I expected to hear, and I closed my eyes, trying to find a picture in my mind of Katja and Sonia together. I wanted a picture that squared with what I'd said to the ginger-haired policeman, not one that squared with what Katie was claiming.

I said, “You would have seen them together mostly in the kitchen, though, when she was feeding Sonia,” and I kept my eyes closed, trying to conjure that picture at least: the old red-and-black lino squares on the floor, the table scarred with the semi-circles of cups placed down on unprotected wood, the two windows set below the level of the street and the bars that fronted them. Odd that I could remember the sight of feet passing by on the pavement above those kitchen windows, but I could not at that moment envisage a scene in which something might have happened that would confirm what I'd later reported to the police.

Katie said, “I did see them in the kitchen. But I saw them at the convent as well. And in the square. And elsewhere. Part of Katja's job was to stimulate her senses and—” Here she cut herself off, stopped stroking the bird, and said, “But you already know all this, I suppose.”

I murmured vaguely, “As I said, my memory …”

That seemed to be enough, because she went on. “Ah. Yes. Right. Well, all children, disabled or not, benefit from sensory stimulation, and Katja saw to it that Sonia had a variety of experiences. She worked with her in developing motor skills and she saw to it that she was exposed to the environment beyond the home. She was limited by your sister's health, but when Sonia was able to cope with it, Katja would take her out and about. And if I was free, I went as well. So I saw her with Sonia, not every day but several times a week, for the entire time your sister was … well, alive. And Katja was very good to Sonia. So when everything happened as it happened … Well, I still find it a bit difficult to understand.”

So thoroughly different was this account to anything I'd heard or read in the papers that I felt compelled to attempt a frontal assault. I said, “This doesn't square at all with what I've been told.”

“By whom?”

“By Sarah-Jane Beckett for one.”

“That doesn't surprise me,” Katie said. “You can take everything Sarah-Jane says with a pinch of salt. They were oil and water, Katja and she. And there was James to consider. He was wild about Katja, completely over the moon every time she so much as looked his way. Sarah-Jane didn't much like that. It was only too obvious that she'd earmarked James for herself.”

This was down-the-rabbit-hole stuff, Dr. Rose, this bit about James the Lodger. No matter where, how, or to whom I turned, the story seemed to turn as well. And it turned in subtle ways, just a variation here and a little twist there but enough to throw me off my stride and make me wonder whose words I could believe.

Perhaps in no one's, you point out to me. Each person sees things in his own way, Gideon. Each person develops a version of past events that he can live with, and put to the rack, that's the version that he tells. Ultimately, it becomes his truth.

But what is Katie Waddington trying to live with, twenty years after the crime? I can understand what Dad is trying to live with, what Sarah-Jane Beckett is trying to live with. But Katie …? She wasn't a member of the household. She had no interest in anything other than her friendship with Katja Wolff. Right?

Yet it had been Katie Waddington's evidence at the trial that, as much as anything, had sealed Katja Wolff 's fate. I'd read that in the newspaper cutting where the words
Nanny Lied to Police
had formed a mammoth headline. In her only statement to the investigators, Katja had claimed that a phone call from Katie Waddington had taken her from the bathroom for no more than a minute on the night Sonia drowned. But Katie Waddington had, under oath, sworn that she was at an evening class at the same moment that that phone call had ostensibly been made. Her testimony had been supported by the records of the class instructor. And a serious blow had been dealt to Katja's nearly non-existent defence.