A Traitor to Memory

by Elizabeth George

  He'd spooked her. He'd been so not there. She'd talked to him in the kite shed and after that in the kitchen and he'd answered her—sort of—but still he'd been so somewhere else in his head that she'd wondered if he maybe needed to be committed or something. Just for a while. And then wondering that had made her feel so disloyal that she couldn't really face him, or at least that was what she told herself when she spent the evening watching old movies on Sky TV and eating two very large bags of cheddar-cheese popcorn which she could have done without thank you very much and finally going to bed alone, where she fought with the sheets and blankets all night when she wasn't having a soon-to-be-major-motion-picture nightmare.

  So after spinning her wheels pacing the floor, browsing in the refrigerator for the bag of celery that was supposed to make her feel less guilty about the cheddar-cheese popcorn, and watching Kilroy yacking with women who'd married men young enough to be their sons and—in two cases—their frigging grandsons, she went upstairs to search out Gideon.

  She found him on the floor in the music room, sitting beneath the window seat with his back against the wall. He had his legs drawn up to his chest, with his chin resting upon his knees like some kid who's been disciplined by a ticked-off parent. All around him were scattered papers, which turned out to be Xerox copies of newspaper articles, all of them covering the same subject. He'd been back to the Press Association's news library.

  He didn't look at her when she came into the room. He was focused on the stories surrounding him, and she wondered if he even heard her. She said his name, but he didn't stir, other than to begin a gentle rocking.

  Breakdown, she thought with alarm. Complete crack-up. He looked like someone who'd lost it. He was wearing exactly what he'd had on yesterday, so she figured he hadn't slept all night either.

  “Hey,” she said quietly, “what's up, Gideon? You been back down to Victoria? Why'n't you tell me? I'd've gone with you.”

  She scanned the papers that fanned around him, overlarge sheets on which newspaper clippings had been photocopied every which way. She saw that the British papers—in keeping with the country's general bent towards xenophobia—had gone after the nanny with a rusty hatchet. If she wasn't “the German” in every article, she was “the former Communist whose family lived particularly well”—not to mention suspiciously well, Libby thought sardonically—“under Russian domination.” One paper had unearthed the news that her grandfather had been a member of the Nazi party, while another had found a picture of her father, who'd evidently been a card-holding, uniform-wearing, Siegheil!–shouting member of the Hitler Youth.

  The tireless ability of the press to milk a story for its every frigging ounce of liquid was totally amazing. It looked to Libby like the life of everyone even moderately involved with the death of Sonia Davies and the trial and conviction of her killer had been dissected by the tabloids at one time or another. So Gideon's home teacher had come under the microscope, as had the lodger, as well as Rafe Robson, both of Gideon's parents, and his grandparents, too. And long after the verdict, it seemed that anyone who'd wanted to make a buck had sold his version of the story to the papers.

  Thus, people had crawled out from under rocks to comment on life as a nanny—NEWSREADER: I WAS A NANNY AND IT WAS HELL blared one headline—and those who had no experience as nannies had experience with Germans they wanted to reveal—A RACE APART, FORMER BERLIN GI SAYS, announced another. But what Libby noticed most of all was the number of stories that dealt with Gideon's family having had a nanny for his sister in the first place.

  They went at the topic from several angles: There was the group who chose to dwell on what the German nanny was paid (a pittance, so no wonder she finally offed the poor kid, like in a greedy rage or something) compared to what something called “a well-trained Norland Nanny” was paid (a fortune that prompted Libby to seriously consider a change in career, pronto), crafting their nasty little articles in such a way as to suggest that the Davies family had gotten to the max what they'd paid for with their skinflint pennies. Then there was the group who chose to dwell on speculating what purposes were being served when a mother made the decision to “work outside the home.” And then there was the group who chose to dwell on what it did to parental expectation, responsibility, and devotion when a family was burdened with a disabled child. Battle lines were drawn all over the place on the topic of how to deal with the birth of a Down's Syndrome baby, and all the options taken by parents of such children were given a good airing out: give them up for adoption, put them away at the Government's expense, devote your life to them, learn to cope by asking the aid of outside agencies, join a support group, soldier on with upper lips stiff, treat the child like any other, and on and on.

  Libby found that she couldn't begin to imagine what it had been like for all of them when little Sonia Davies had died. Her birth would have been tough to deal with, but to love her—because they must have loved her, right?—and then to lose her and then to have every detail of what went into her existence and the existence of her family displayed for public entertainment and consumption … Whew, Libby thought. How did anyone deal with that?

  Not well, if Gideon was anything to go by. He'd changed his position so his forehead was balanced on his knees. He continued to rock.

  “Gideon,” she asked him, “you all right?”

  “I don't want to remember now that I remember,” he replied numbly. “I don't want to think. And I can't stop either. Remembering. Thinking. I want to rip my brain from my head.”

  “I can buy that,” Libby assured him. “So why don't we dump all this stuff in the trash? You been reading it all night?” She bent to the papers and began to gather them. “No wonder you can't get your mind off it, Gid.”

  He grabbed her wrist, crying out, “Don't!”

  “But if you don't want to think—”

  “No! I've been reading and reading and I want to know how anyone could continue to exist, could even want to exist … Look at it all, Libby. Look. Just look.”

  Libby looked again at the papers and she saw them the way Gideon must have seen them, coming upon them twenty years after the fact of being protected from the knowledge of what that time had been like for his family. Particularly, she saw the thinly veiled attacks on his parents in the light he would be seeing them. And she made the leap that he no doubt had already made from what the papers had printed: His mother had left them because of this; she had disappeared for nearly twenty years because she had no doubt begun to believe herself as ill-suited for parenthood as the newspapers had made her out to be. It seemed that Gideon was finally understanding his past. Little wonder that he was inches away from flipping out.

  She was about to say all of this when he got to his feet. He took two steps, then swayed. She leapt up and grabbed him by the arm.

  He said, “I've got to see Cresswell-White.”

  “Who? That attorney?”

  He headed out of the room, fumbling in his pocket and bringing out his keys. The thought of him driving alone across London spurred Libby to follow. At the front door, she snatched his leather jacket from the coat rack, and she trailed him along the sidewalk to his GPS. As he attempted to insert the key in the lock with a hand that trembled like an octogenarian's, she threw the jacket over his shoulders and said, “You're not driving. You'd get in a wreck before you got to Regent's Park.”

  “I've got to get to Cresswell-White.”

  “Fine. Cool. Whatever. I'll drive.”

  During the drive, Gideon said not a word. He merely stared straight ahead, his knees knocking together spasmodically.

  He got out the moment she turned off the ignition in the area of the Temple. He set off down the street. Libby locked the car and trotted to catch up, reaching him as he crossed over at the end and entered that holy of legal holies.

  Gideon led her to the place she'd accompanied him previously: to a building that was part brick and part stone, sitting on the edge of a little park. He went in through
the same narrow doorway, where black wooden slats on the wall were painted in white with the names of the lawyers who had offices inside.

  They had to cool their heels in reception before Cresswell-White had a break in his schedule. They sat in silence on the black leather sofas, both of them staring alternately at the Persian carpet and the brass chandelier. Around them, telephones rang constantly and quietly as a group working in an office directly opposite the sofas fielded calls.

  After forty minutes of pondering the crucial issue of whether the oak chest in reception had been built to store chamber pots, Libby heard someone say, “Gideon,” and roused herself to see that Bertram Cresswell-White had himself come out to take them back to his corner office. Unlike their previous visit—which had been scheduled in advance—no coffee was on offer this time, although the fireplace was lit and it was doing at least something to cut the chill that pervaded the room.

  The lawyer had been working hard at some task or another, for a computer's monitor was still glowing with a page of typescript and half a dozen books were open on his desk along with what looked like pretty ancient files. Among these, a black-and-white photograph of a woman lay. She was blonde with close-cropped hair, a bad complexion, and an expression saying “Don't mess with me.”

  Gideon saw the picture and said, “Are you trying to get her out?”

  Cresswell-White closed the file, gestured them to the leather chairs near the fireplace, and said, “She would have been hanged if I'd had my way and the law were different. She's a monster. And I've made the study of monsters my avocation.”

  “What'd she do?” Libby asked.

  “Killed children and buried their bodies on the moors. She liked to make audiotapes as she tortured them, she and her boyfriend.” Libby swallowed. Cresswell-White glanced at his watch with some meaning but tempered this action with, “I heard about your mother, Gideon. On Radio Four News, I'm terribly sorry. I expect that's something to do with why you've come. How can I help you?”

  “With her address.” Gideon spoke as if he'd thought of nothing else since first getting into his car in Chalcot Square.

  “Whose?”

  “You have to know where she is. You were the one who put her away, so you would've been told when they let her out. That's why I've come. I need her address.”

  Libby thought, Hold on here, Gid.

  Cresswell-White gave his version of that same reaction. He knotted his eyebrows, saying, “Are you asking me for Katja Wolff 's address?”

  “You have it, don't you? You have to have it. I don't expect they'd let her out without telling you where she went.”

  “Why do you want it? I'm not saying I do have it, by the way.”

  “She's owed.”

  Libby thought, This is really the limit. She said quietly but with what she hoped was gentle urgency, “Gideon. Gosh. The police're handling this, aren't they?”

  “She's out now,” Gideon said to Cresswell-White as if Libby hadn't spoken. “She's out and she's owed. Where is she?”

  “I can't tell you that.” Cresswell-White leaned forward, his body if not his hands reaching for Gideon. “I know you've had a very bad shock. Your life has probably been one long effort to recover from what she put you through. God knows the time that she spent in prison doesn't mitigate your suffering one iota.”

  “I've got to find her,” Gideon said. “It's the only way.”

  “No. Listen to me. It's the wrong way. Oh, it feels right and I know that feeling: You'd climb back into the past if you could and you'd tear her limb from limb before the fact, just to prevent her from doing the harm she eventually did your family. But you'd gain as little as I gain, Gideon, when I hear the jury's verdict and I know that I've won but all the time I've lost because nothing can bring a dead child back to life. A woman who takes the life of a child is the worst kind of demon because she can give life if she chooses. And to take a life when you can give life is a crime that's compounded and one for which no sentence will ever be long enough and no punishment—even death—ever good enough.”

  “There's got to be reparation,” Gideon said. He didn't sound so much stubborn as desperate. “My mother's dead, don't you see? There's got to be reparation, and this is the only way. I don't have a choice.”

  “You do,” Cresswell-White said. “You can choose not to meet her at the level she operates on. You can choose to believe what I'm telling you because what I'm telling you comes from decades of experience. There is no vengeance for this sort of thing. Even death was no vengeance when death was both legal and possible, Gideon.”

  “You don't understand.” Gideon closed his eyes, and for a moment, Libby thought he'd start crying. She wanted to do something to prevent him breaking down and humiliating himself further in the eyes of this man who did not really know him and could not therefore know what he'd been going through for more than three months. But she also wanted to do something to smooth things over, on the off-chance that something bad might accidentally happen to the German chick in the next few days, in which case Gideon would be the first person they'd be talking to after this little conversation in the Temple. Not that she really thought Gideon'd do anything to anyone. He was just talking; he was just looking for something to make him feel like his world wasn't falling apart.

  Libby said to the lawyer in a low voice, “He's been up all night. And he's been having nightmares on the nights he can sleep. He saw her, see, and—”

  Cresswell-White sat up and took notice of this, saying, “Katja Wolff? Has she contacted you, Gideon? The terms of her parole prevent her from contacting any member of the family, and if she violates those terms, we can see to it—”

  “No, no. His mom,” Libby interrupted. “He saw his mom. But he didn't know who she was because he hadn't seen her since he was a little kid. And that's been eating at him since he heard she was … you know, killed.” She glanced cautiously at Gideon. His eyes were still closed, and his head was shaking as if he wanted to negate everything that had happened to bring him to this position of begging a lawyer he didn't even know to violate whatever it was he would have to violate in order to give out the information that Gideon wanted. That wasn't going to happen, and Libby knew it. Cresswell-White sure as hell wasn't going to hand the German nanny over to Gideon on a platter and risk his own reputation and career for having done so. Which was just as well and damn lucky to boot. All Gideon needed to really mess up his life at this point was access to the woman who'd killed his sister and maybe killed his mom as well.

  But Libby knew how he felt, or at least she thought she knew. He felt like he'd blown his chance for some kind of redemption for some kind of sin, the punishment for which was not being able to play his violin. And that's what it all boiled down to after all: that frigging violin.

  Cresswell-White said, “Gideon, Katja Wolff's not worth the time it would take to locate her. This is a woman who showed no remorse, who was so certain of her exoneration that she offered no defence of her actions. Her silence said, ‘Let them prove they have a case,’ and only when the facts piled up—those bruises, those fractures left to heal untreated on your sister's body—and she heard the verdict and the sentence did she decide a defence might be in order. Imagine that. Imagine what kind of person lies behind that simple refusal to cooperate—to answer the most basic of questions—when a child in her care has died. She didn't even weep once she made her initial statement. And she won't weep now. You can't expect that from her. She is not like us. Abusers of children are never like us.”

  Libby watched anxiously as Cresswell-White spoke, looking for a sign that what the lawyer was saying was somehow making an impression on Gideon. But she was left with a growing sense of despair when Gideon opened his eyes, got to his feet, and spoke.

  He said, as if Cresswell-White's words meant nothing to him, “This is what it is: I didn't understand, but now I do. And I've got to find her.” He walked towards the door of the office, raising his hands to his forehead as if he wanted to d
o what he'd said earlier: rip the brain from his head.

  Cresswell-White said to Libby, “He's not well.”

  To which she responded, “Well, duh,” as she went after Gideon.

  Raphael Robson's home in Gospel Oak was set off one of the busier roads in the district. It turned out to be an enormous ramshackle Edwardian building in need of renovation, the front garden of which was hidden behind a yew hedge and graveled over to make it into a parking space. When Lynley and Nkata arrived, three vehicles were standing in front of the house: a dirty white van, a black Vauxhall, and a silver Renault. Lynley took quick note of the fact that the Vauxhall wasn't old enough to qualify as their hit-and-run vehicle.

  A man came round the side of the house as they approached the front steps. He headed towards the Renault without noticing them. When Lynley called out, he stopped in his tracks, car keys extended to unlock his vehicle. Was he Raphael Robson? Lynley asked him, and produced his identification.

  The man was an unappealing sort with a serious comb-over of dun-coloured hair that began just above his left ear and made his skull look as if someone were water-colouring a lattice across it. He was patchy-skinned from far too many holidays in the Mediterranean in August, and his shoulders bore a liberal sprinkling of dandruff. He gave a glance at Lynley's warrant card and said yes, he was Raphael Robson.

  Lynley introduced Nkata and asked Robson if there was somewhere they could have a word with him, out of the noise of cars whooshing by just beyond the hedge. Robson said yes, yes, of course. If they'd follow him …?

  “The front door's warped,” he said. “We haven't replaced it yet. We'll need to go in through the back.”

  Through the back took them along a brick path that led into a good-sized garden. This was overgrown with weeds and grass, edged by herbaceous borders long gone to ruin and dotted with trees that hadn't been pruned in years. Beneath them, wet fallen leaves were rotting to join their brothers from seasons past in the soil. In the midst of all the chaos and decay, however, a newish building stood. Robson saw both Lynley and Nkata giving this a look-over, and he said, “That was our first project. We do furniture in there.”