Gideon bent forward farther, his face contorted with pain. He said, “God. It feels like a coal's burning right through me.”
“Here, then.” Libby lowered him to bed. He curled on his side, his legs drawn up to his chest. She removed his shoes. His feet were sockless and as pale as milk, and he rubbed them together spasmodically, as if the friction could take his mind from the pain.
Libby lowered herself next to him, spooning her body into his beneath the blanket. She insinuated her hand beneath his arm and laid her palm on his stomach. She could feel his spine curved into her, every knob of it like a marble. He'd become so thin that she wondered how he kept his bones from poking through his papery skin.
She said, “I bet you've had a brain lock on this stuff, huh? Well, forget about it. Not for always. Just for now. Lay here with me and just forget.”
“I can't,” he said, and he gave a bitter laugh. “Remembering everything is my assignment.” His feet rubbed. He curled into himself further still. Libby held him closer. He finally said, “She's out of gaol, Libby. Dad knew, but he didn't tell me. That's why the police want to look at twenty years ago. She's out of gaol.”
“Who is? You mean …?”
“Katja Wolff.”
“Do they think she might have run down your mom?”
“I don't know.”
“Why would she? It makes more sense that your mom would want to run down her.”
“In the normal way of things,” Gideon said. “Except nothing about my life has been normal, so there's no reason why my mother's death should be normal either.”
“Your mom must have testified against her,” Libby said. “And she could have spent her time locked up planning to get everyone who put her there. But if she did, how'd she find your mom, Gideon? I mean, you didn't even know where she was. How could this Wolff chick have tracked her down? And if she did track her down, and if she did kill her, why'd she kill her on this Pitchford guy's street?”
Libby thought about her questions and then answered them herself. “To give Pitchford a message?” “Or to give someone else one.”
A phone call relayed to Barbara Havers what Lynley had learned from Richard Davies, including the name she needed to gain access to the Convent of the Immaculate Conception. There, he told her, she should find someone who could give her the whereabouts of a Sister Cecilia Mahoney.
The convent sat on a piece of land that was probably worth a king's ransom, tucked among a host of listed properties dating from the 1690s. This would have been where the movers and shakers had built their rural retreats during the time that William and Mary had built their own little humble country cottage in Kensington Gardens. Now the movers and shakers in the square were the employees of several business establishments that had shoe-horned themselves into the historic buildings, denizens of a second convent—where the bloody hell did nuns get the lolly to have digs round here? Barbara wondered—and inhabitants of a number of homes that had probably been handed down through families for more than three hundred years. Unlike some of the city squares that had suffered bomb damage or the ravages of greed from consecutive Tory governments with big business, vast profits, and the privatisation of everything in mind, Kensington Square stood largely untouched, with four sides of distinguished buildings overlooking a central garden where the fallen autumn leaves made an umber skirt on the lawn beneath each tree.
Parking was impossible, so Barbara pulled her Mini onto the pavement at the northwest edge of the square, where a strategically placed bollard prevented the traffic from the distant high street from creating a short cut and disturbing the quiet of the neighbourhood. She shoved her police identification onto what went for the Mini's dashboard. She clambered out and in short order found herself in the company of Sister Cecilia Mahoney, who was still a resident of the convent and who was, when Barbara called, at work in the chapel next door.
Barbara's first thought upon encountering the nun was that she didn't look much like one. Nuns were supposed to be women two or three decades past their prime who wore heavy black robes, clanking rosary beads, and veils and wimples from the Middle Ages.
Cecilia Mahoney didn't fit this picture. In fact, when Barbara was directed to the chapel to find her, her first assumption when she saw the figure up on a small step ladder with a can of marble polish in her hand was that she was a tartan-skirted cleaning woman, since cleaning an altar that featured a statue of Jesus pointing to His own exposed, anatomically incorrect, and partially gilded heart was what she was doing. Barbara told this woman that, pardon me but she was looking for Sister Cecilia Mahoney, whereupon the woman turned and said with a smile, “Then it's me you're looking for,” in a brogue that sounded as if she'd just landed from Killarney.
Barbara identified herself, and the nun took some care in climbing down from the steps. She said, “Police, is it? Why, you haven't the look of a policeman at all. Is there some sort of trouble, Constable?”
The chapel was dimly lit, but down from the steps Sister Cecilia put herself into a pool of rose light created by a single votive candle that burned on the altar she was polishing. It did much to flatter her, smoothing away the lines on her middle-aged face and casting highlights into hair that was short but whose curls—as black and as shiny as obsidian—couldn't be disciplined even by the slides she used to manage them. She had violet eyes, darkly lashed, and they looked upon Barbara kindly.
Barbara said, “Is there somewhere we can go to have a word?”
The nun said, “Sad to say, Constable, it's unlikely that we'll be disturbed in here if it's privacy you're wanting. Time was that would have been out of the question. But these days … even the students who live in our dormitory frequent the chapel only when they've got an exam and are hoping for God's intervention in the matter. Come. Let's go up here and you can tell me what it is that you're wanting to know.” She smiled, revealing perfect white teeth, and went on to say, as if in explanation of her smile, “Or is it that you're wanting to join us in the convent, Constable Havers?”
“It might give me the fashion make-over I need,” Barbara admitted.
Sister Cecilia laughed. “Come this way. It'll be a bit warmer by the main altar. I've an electric fire there for the Monsignor when he says Mass in the morning. He's become a bit arthritic, poor man.”
Taking her cleaning supplies in hand, she led Barbara up the single centre aisle in the chapel, beneath a deep blue ceiling punctuated by gilded stars. Barbara saw that it was a church of women: Apart from the statue of Jesus and a stained glass window dedicated to St. Michael, all other windows and statues were female: St. Theresa of Lisieux, St. Clare, St. Catherine, St. Margaret. And atop the ornamental pillars on either side of each of the windows were carvings of even more women.
“Here we are.” Sister Cecilia went to one side of the altar and switched on a large electric fire. As it began to heat, the nun explained that she'd continue her work right here in the sanctuary if the constable didn't mind. There was this altar to be seen to as well: the candlesticks and the marble to be polished, a reredos to be dusted, and altar cloths to be replaced. “But you might wish to sit by the fire, my dear. The cold seeps in.”
As Sister Cecilia set to her cleaning, Barbara told her that she'd brought what might be bad news for the nun. Her name had been found inside several books on the lives of saints—
“Not a surprise, I hope, considering my calling,” Sister Cecilia murmured as she removed the brass candlesticks from the altar and set them carefully on the floor next to Barbara. She went on to the altar cloths, folding and placing them over an ornate altar rail. She then fished in her bucket and brought out a jar and some rags, which she took with her to work upon the altar.
Barbara told her that the books in question had been among a collection kept by a woman who'd died on the previous evening. There had been a note penned to that woman as well, a note written by Sister Cecilia herself. “She was called Eugenie Davies,” Barbara said.
Sister Cec
ilia hesitated. She'd just scooped up a palmful of marble polish and she held it motionless as she said, “Eugenie? Oh, I'm sorry to hear about that, I am. It's been years since I last saw the poor woman. Was it sudden, her passing?”
“She was murdered,” Barbara said. “In West Hampstead. On her way to see a bloke called J. W. Pitchley, who was once James Pitchford.”
Sister Cecilia moved to the altar slowly, like an underwater diver in a strong, cold current. She smoothed some polish onto the marble, using small round strokes, as her lips worked their way round a thought or a prayer.
“We've learned,” Barbara said, “that the killer of the daughter—a woman called Katja Wolff—has recently got out of prison as well.”
The nun turned from the altar at this, saying, “You can't be thinking poor Katja had anything to do with this.”
Poor Katja. Barbara said, “Did you know the girl?”
“Of course I knew her. She lodged here at the convent before she went to work for the Davies family. They lived at that time just along the square.”
Katja had been a refugee from the former East Germany, Sister Cecilia explained, and she went on to relate the facts of the girl's immigration to England.
Katja Wolff had dreamed as all girls dream, even girls from countries where freedom is so limited as to make the very act of dreaming imprudent. She had been born in Dresden of parents who believed in the system of economy and government under which they had lived. A teenager during the Second World War, her father had seen the worst that could happen when nations engage in conflict, and he embraced the lifestyle of equality for the masses, believing that only communism and socialism held out the promise that global destruction would not occur. As good Party workers with no members of the intelligentsia in their past for whose sins they would have had to pay, the family prospered under this system. From Dresden they moved to East Berlin.
“But Katja wasn't like the rest of them,” Sister Cecilia said. “Indeed, Constable, God love the girl, but wasn't Katja Wolff living proof that children are born with their personalities intact.”
Unlike her parents and her four siblings, Katja hated the atmosphere of socialism and the omnipresence of the State. She hated the fact that their lives were “described, prescribed, and circumscribed” from birth. And in East Berlin—so close to the West by the presence of that other half of the city just a few hundred yards across No Man's Land—she got her first taste of what could be if she only could escape the land of her birth. For from East Berlin for the first time she could see western television and from westerners who traveled to the East on business, she could learn what life was like in what the girl came to call The World of Bright Colours.
“She was expected to go to university, to study in one field of science or another, to marry, and to have babies who would be looked after by the State,” Sister Cecilia explained. “This is what her sisters were doing and this is what her parents intended her to do as well. But she wanted to be a fashion designer.” Sister Cecilia turned from the altar with a smile. “And can you not imagine, Constable Havers, how that idea was greeted by members of the Party?”
So she escaped, and in escaping as she'd escaped, she gained a degree of celebrity that had brought her to the attention of the convent, where there existed a programme for political refugees: one year at the convent to have shelter and food, to learn the language, and to assimilate into the culture if they could. “She came to us with not a word of English and only the clothes on her back, Constable. She was with us that full year before she went to the Davies family to help out with the new baby.”
“Is that when you got to know them?”
Sister Cecilia shook her head. “It was years and years that I'd known Eugenie. She attended Mass here, so she was familiar to all of us, she was. We spoke now and again and I lent her a book or two—which is what you must have seen amongst her collection—but it was only after Sonia's birth that I came to know her better.”
“I saw a picture of the little girl.”
“Ah, yes.” Sister Cecilia rubbed polish along the front of the altar, tucking her cloth into its ornate carving. “Eugenie was devastated when that baby was born. And I suppose any mother would feel the same. A period of adjustment is necessary—isn't it—when a child is born who isn't what we expect her to be. And indeed, it must have been worse for Eugenie and her husband than it might have been for other parents, because their first child was so gifted, you see.”
“The violin player. Right. We know about him.”
“Yes. Little Gideon. An astonishing lad.” Sister Cecilia lowered herself to her knees and saw to the elaborate barley sugar column at the end of the altar. She said, “Eugenie didn't talk about little Sonia at first. All of us knew she was pregnant, of course, and we knew when she'd delivered the child. But the first we knew anything was wrong was when she returned to Mass one or two weeks later.”
“She told you, then?”
“Ah no. Poor thing. She just wept. Wept her eyes out every morning for three or four days, there at the back of the chapel with that poor frightened little boy at her side, stroking her arm and watching her with those big eyes of his. As for us at the Immaculate Conception, we none had actually seen the infant, you understand. I'd gone to the house. But Eugenie was never ‘available for visitors.’” Sister Cecilia clucked and went back to her bucket of cleaning items, from which she took another rag and set about buffing. “When I finally spoke to Eugenie and learned the truth from her, I understood her sorrow. But not the depth of it, Constable. That, I must tell you, I never understood. Now, perhaps it's because I'm not a mother and have no idea what it's like to give birth to a child who isn't perfect as the world deems perfection. But it seemed to me then—and it seems to me now—that God gives us what we're meant to have. We may not understand His reason for giving us what He gives us at the moment we're given it, but there is a plan for us which time allows us to comprehend.” She rested on her heels and looked over her shoulder at Barbara, softening what she seemed to feel might be harsh words by adding, “But then, that's an easy thing for one such as myself to say, isn't it, Constable? Here I am”—she extended her arms—“surrounded by God's love manifesting itself in a thousand different ways every day. Who am I to judge another's ability—or lack of such—to accept the will of God, when I myself have been blessed with so much? Will you see to the candlesticks for me, dear? There's a tin of polish in the bucket there.”
Barbara said, “Oh. Right. Sorry.” She rooted through the bucket for the appropriate tin and a rag whose black spots suggested it was the correct one to use on the candlesticks. Housewifely chores were not exactly in her line, but she reckoned she could do a job on the brass without destroying it permanently. “When was the last time you talked to Mrs. Davies?”
“That would have been soon after Sonia's death. There was a service for the child.” Sister Cecilia looked down at her polishing rag. “Eugenie wouldn't hear of a Catholic funeral because she'd stopped attending Mass herself. Her faith was gone: that God would have given her such an afflicted child in the first place, that God would have taken the child in such a way … Eugenie and I never spoke again. I tried to see her. I wrote to her as well. But she would have none of me, none of my faith, none of the Church. In the end I had to leave her to God, and I only pray the dear woman found peace at last.”
Barbara frowned, candlestick in one hand and polish tin in the other. There was a vital part of the story that was missing, and it was named Katja Wolff. She said, “How exactly did the German girl end up working in the Davies household?”
“That was my doing.” Sister Cecilia got to her feet with a little grunt. She genuflected in front of the tabernacle at the centre of the altar and then began to attack its marble sides. “Katja needed employment at the end of her year here at the convent. A position with the Davies family, which included her room and board, would have allowed her to save for design college. It seemed a solution created by God because Eugenie
so needed someone to help her.”
“And then the baby was killed.”
Sister Cecilia looked over at her, one hand on the tabernacle. She said nothing but her face, muscles loosening so that expression was drained from it entirely, spoke the inference that she herself did not make.
Barbara said, “Have you stayed in contact with anyone else from that time, Sister Cecilia?”
“It's Katja you're asking about, is it, Constable?”
Barbara prised the lid from the brass polish and said, “If you like.”
“I went once a month for two years to see her. First while she was on remand in Holloway, then when she was imprisoned. She spoke to me only once, in the beginning, when she was arrested. Then not again.”
“What did she say?”
“That she did not kill Sonia.”
“Did you believe her?”
“I did.”
But then, she would have had to do so, Barbara thought, because believing that Katja Wolff had murdered a child would have been a monstrous burden to carry through the rest of life, especially for the woman—devoted or not to an omnipotent and sagacious God—who had facilitated the German girl's placement in that family. She said, “Have you heard from Katja Wolff since she got out of prison, Sister Cecilia?”
“Indeed, I have not.”
“Would there be any reason, aside from a need to declare her innocence, that she might have contacted Eugenie Davies once she was released?”
“None at all,” Sister Cecilia said firmly.
“You're certain of that?”
“I am. If Katja were to contact anyone at all from that terrible time, it would be no one from the Davies family. It would be myself. But I've not heard from her.”
A Traitor to Memory Page 29