A Traitor to Memory

by Elizabeth George

  I ran blindly, but I saw her face. Not as she might have looked in joy or innocence or even in suffering, but in losing consciousness as I drowned her. I saw her head turn side to side, her baby's hair fan out, her mouth gulp fishlike, her eyes roll back and disappear. She fought to stay alive, but she couldn't match the strength of my rage. I held her down and held her down, and when Katja and Raphael burst into the room, she was no longer moving or struggling against me. But still my rage was not satisfied.

  My feet pounded the pavement as I tore along the square. I did not head for Primrose Hill, for Primrose Hill is exposed, and exposure to anything, anyone, any longer, was an unbearable thought to me. So I thundered in another direction, veering round the first corner I came to, charging through the silent neighbourhood till I burst into the upper reaches of Regent's Park Road.

  Moments later, I heard him shouting my name. As I stood panting at the junction where Regent's Park and Gloucester Roads meet, he came round the corner, holding his side against a stitch. He raised his arm. He shouted, “Wait!” I ran again.

  What I thought as I ran was a simple phrase: He's always known. For I remembered more, and I saw what I remembered as a series of images.

  Katja screams and shrieks. Raphael pushes past her to get to me. Shouts and footsteps rise up the stairs and along the corridor. A voice cries out, “God damn it!”

  Dad is in the bathroom. He tries to pull me away from the tub, where my fingers have dug and dug and dug into my sister's fragile shoulders. He shouts my name and slaps my face. He yanks me by the hair, and I finally release her.

  “Get him out of here!” he roars, and for the first time he sounds just like Granddad and I am frightened.

  As Raphael jerks me across the corridor, I hear others on their way. My mother is calling, “Richard? Richard?” as she runs up the stairs. Sarah-Jane Beckett and James the Lodger are talking to each other as they hurry down from above. Somewhere Granddad is bellowing, “Dick! Where's my whisky? Dick!” And Gran is calling out fearfully from below, “Has something happened to Jack?”

  Then Sarah-Jane Beckett is with me, saying, “What's happened? What's going on?” She takes me from Raphael's fierce grip saying, “Raphael, what are you doing to him?” and “What on earth is she going on about?” in reference to Katja Wolff, who is weeping and saying, “I do not leave her. For a minute only,” to which comment Raphael Robson is adding nothing at all.

  After that I am in my room. I hear Dad cry, “Don't come in here, Eugenie. Dial nine-nine-nine.”

  She says, “What's happened? Sosy! What's happened?”

  A door shuts. Katja weeps. Raphael says, “Let me take her below.”

  Sarah-Jane Beckett goes to stand at the door to my room, where she listens, her head bent, and there she remains. I sit against the headboard of the bed, arms wet to the elbows, shaking now, finally aware of the terrible enormity of what I have done. And all along the music has played, that same music, the cursed Archduke that has haunted and pursued me like a relentless demon for the last twenty years.

  That is what I remembered as I ran, and when I crossed the junction, I did not attempt to avoid the traffic. It seemed to me that the only mercy would be if a car or lorry struck me.

  None did. I made it to the other side. But Dad was hard on my heels, still shouting my name.

  I set off again running, running away from him, running into the past. And I saw that past like a kaleidoscope of pictures: that genial ginger-haired policeman who smelled of cigars and spoke in a kindly paternal voice … that night in bed with my mother holding me holding me holding me and my face pressed firmly into her breasts as if she would do to me what I had done to my sister … my father sitting on the edge of my bed, his hands on my shoulders as my hands were on hers … his voice saying, “You're quite safe, Gideon, no one will harm you” … Raphael with flowers, flowers for my mother, flowers of sympathy to assuage her grief … and always hushed voices, in every room, for days on end …

  Finally Sarah-Jane leaves the door where she has stood motionless, waiting and listening. She walks to the tape player, where the violin in the Beethoven trio is executing a passage of doublestops. She punches a button and the music blessedly ceases, leaving behind a silence so hollow that I wish only for the music again.

  Into this silence comes the sound of sirens. They grow louder and louder as the vehicles approach. Although it's probably taken them minutes, it seems like an hour since Dad yanked on my hair and forced me to release the grip I had on my sister.

  “Up here, in here,” Dad shouts down the stairs as someone lets the paramedics into the house.

  And then begins the effort to save what cannot be saved, what I know cannot be saved, because I was the one who destroyed her.

  I can't bear the images, the thoughts, the sounds.

  I ran blindly, wildly, without caring where I was going. I crossed the street and came to my senses directly in front of the Pembroke Castle pub. And beyond it I saw the terrace where the drinkers sit in summer, the terrace that was empty now, but bordered by a wall, a low brick wall onto which I leapt, along which I ran, and from which I sprang, sprang without thinking onto the iron archway of the pedestrian footbridge that spans the railway line thirty feet beneath it. I sprang thinking, This is how it will be.

  I heard the train before I saw it. In the hearing, I took my answer. The train wasn't traveling fast, so the engineer would well be able to stop it and I would not die … unless I timed my jump with precision.

  I moved to the edge of the arch. I saw the train. I watched its approach.

  “Gideon!”

  Dad was at the end of the footbridge. “Stay where you are!” he shouted.

  “It's too late.”

  And like a baby, I began to cry, and I waited for the moment, the perfect moment, when I could drop onto the tracks in front of the train and enter oblivion.

  “What are you saying?” he shouted. “Too late for what?”

  “I know what I did,” I cried. “To Sonia. I remember.”

  “You remember what?” He looked from me to the train, both of us watching its steady approach. He took a single step closer to me.

  “You know. What I did. That night. To Sonia. How she died. You know what I did to Sonia.”

  “No! Wait!” This as I moved my feet so that the soles of my shoes overhung the drop. “Don't do this, Gideon. Tell me what you think happened.”

  “I drowned her, Dad! I drowned my sister!”

  He took another step towards me, his hand extended.

  The train drew closer. Twenty seconds and it would be over. Twenty seconds and a debt would be paid.

  “Stay where you are! For the love of God, Gideon!”

  “I drowned her!” I cried, and my breath caught on a sob. “I drowned her and I didn't even remember. Do you know what that means? Do you know how it feels?”

  His glance went to the train, then back to me. He took another step forward. “Don't!” he shouted. “Listen to me. You didn't kill your sister.”

  “You pulled me off her. I remember now. And that's why Mother left. She left us without a word because she knew what I'd done. Isn't that right? Isn't that the truth?”

  “No! No, it's not!”

  “It is. I remember.”

  “Listen to me. Wait.” His words were rapid. “You hurt her, yes. And yes, yes, she was unconscious. But, Gideon, son, hear what I'm saying. You didn't drown Sonia.”

  “Then who—”

  “I did.”

  “I don't believe you.” I looked beneath me to the waiting rail tracks. A single step was all I needed to take, and I would be on the tracks and a moment later it would all be over. A burst of pain then a wiping of the slate.

  “Look at me, Gideon. For God's sake, hear me out. Don't do this before you understand what happened.”

  “You're trying to stall.”

  “If I am, there'll be another train, won't there? So listen to me. You owe it to yourself.”

/>   No one had been present, he told me. Raphael had taken Katja to the kitchen. My mother had gone to ring the emergency number. Gran had gone to Granddad to settle him down. Sarah-Jane had taken me to my room. And James the Lodger had disappeared back upstairs.

  “I could have taken her from the bath just then,” he said. “I could have given her the kiss of life. I could have used CPR on her. But I held her there, Gideon. I held her down beneath the water until I heard your mother finish her call to emergency.”

  “That wouldn't have done it. There wouldn't have been enough time.”

  “There was. Your mother stayed on the phone with emergency till we heard the paramedics pounding on the front door. She relayed emergency's instructions to me. I pretended to do what they directed. But she couldn't see me, Gideon, so she didn't know that I hadn't taken Sonia out of the bath.”

  “I don't believe you. You've lied to me my whole life. You said nothing. You told me nothing.”

  “I'm telling you now.”

  Below me, the train passed. I saw the engineer look up at the last moment. Our eyes met, his widened, and he reached for his radio transmitter. The warning was sent to trains that would follow. My opportunity for oblivion was past.

  Dad said, “You must believe me. I'm telling you the truth.”

  “What about Katja, then?”

  “What about Katja?”

  “She went to prison. And we sent her there, didn't we? We lied to the police and she went to prison. For twenty years, Dad. We're to blame for that.”

  “No. Gideon, she agreed to go.”

  “What?”

  “Come back to me. Here. I'll explain.”

  So I gave him that much: the belief that he'd talked me away from the tracks when in fact I knew that we were moments away from being joined by the transport police. I climbed back onto the footbridge proper, and I approached my father. When I was close enough to him, he grabbed me as if dragging me from the brink of a chasm. He held me to him, and I could feel the hammering of his heart. I didn't believe anything that he'd told me so far, but I was willing to listen, to hear him out, and to try to see past the façade he wore and to ascertain what facts lay beneath it.

  He spoke in a rush, never once releasing me as he told me the story. Believing that I—and not my father—had drowned my sister, Katja Wolff had known instantly that she bore a large part of the responsibility because she had left Sonia alone. If she agreed to take the blame—claiming to have left the child for a minute only while she took a phone call—then Dad would see that she was rewarded. He would pay her twenty thousand pounds for this service to his family. And in the event that she should come to trial for negligence, he would add to that amount another twenty thousand for every year she was inconvenienced thereafter.

  “We didn't know the police would build a case against her,” he said into my ear. “We didn't know about the healed fractures on your sister's body. We didn't know the tabloids would seize the case with such ferocity. And we didn't know that Bertram Cresswell-White would prosecute her like a man with a chance to convict Myra Hindley all over again. In the normal course of events, she might have been given a suspended sentence for negligence. Or at the most five years. But everything went wrong. And when the judge recommended twenty years because of the abuse … It was too late.”

  I pulled away from him. Truth or lie? I wondered as I studied his face. “Who abused Sonia?”

  “No one,” he said.

  “But the fractures—”

  “She was frail, Gideon. Her skeleton was delicate. It was part of her condition. Katja's defence counsel put this to the jury, but Cresswell-White tore their experts to pieces. Everything went badly. Everything went wrong.”

  “Then why didn't she give evidence in her own defence? Why didn't she talk to the police? Her own lawyers?”

  “That was part of the deal.”

  “The deal.”

  “Twenty thousand pounds if she remained silent.”

  “But you must have known—” What? I thought. What must he have known? That her friend Katie Waddington wouldn't lie under oath, wouldn't testify to having made a phone call that she hadn't made? That Sarah-Jane Beckett would paint her in the worst possible light? That the Crown Prosecutor would try her as a child abuser and limn her as the devil incarnate? That the judge would recommend a draconian sentence? What exactly was my father to have known?

  I released myself from the hold he had on me. I began to retrace my route from Chalcot Square. He followed closely on my heels, not speaking. But I could feel his eyes on me. I could feel the burn of their penetration. He's made all of this up, I concluded. He has too many answers, and they're coming too quickly.

  I told him on the front steps to my house. I said, “I don't believe you, Dad.”

  He countered with, “Why else would she have remained silent? It was hardly in her interests to do so.”

  “Oh, I believe that part,” I told him. “I believe the part about the twenty thousand pounds. You would have paid her that much to keep me from harm. And to keep it from Granddad that your freak of a son had deliberately drowned your freak of a daughter.”

  “That's not what happened!”

  “We both know it is.” I turned to go inside.

  He grabbed my arm. “Will you believe your mother?” he asked me.

  I turned. He must have seen the question, the disbelief, and the wariness on my face because he went on without my speaking.

  “She's been phoning me. Since Wigmore Hall, she's been phoning at least twice a week. She read about what happened, she phoned to ask about you, and she's been phoning ever since. I'll arrange a meeting between you if you like.”

  “What good would that do? You said she didn't see—”

  “Gideon, for God's sake. Why do you think she left me? Why do you suppose she took every picture of your sister with her?”

  I stared at him. I tried to read him. And more than that, I tried to find the answer to a single question that I didn't give voice to: Even if I saw her, would she tell me the truth?

  But Dad appeared to see this question in my eyes, because quickly he said, “Your mother has no reason to lie to you, son. And surely the manner of her disappearance from our lives tells you she couldn't bear the guilt of living the pretence that I'd forced her into living.”

  “It also might mean that she couldn't bear to live in the same house with a son who'd murdered his sister.”

  “Then let her tell you that.”

  We were eye to eye, and I waited for a sign that he was the least apprehensive. But no sign came.

  “You can trust me,” he told me.

  And I wanted more than anything to believe that promise.

  25

  HAVERS SAID, “I wish the situation would stop changing direction every twenty-five minutes. If it would, we might actually be able to get a handle on this case.”

  Lynley made a turn into Belsize Avenue and did a quick recce of the A to Z in his brain to plot out a decent route to Portman Street. Next to him, Havers was continuing to grouse.

  “So if Davies is down, who're we on to? Leach must be right. It's got to be back to Wolff with another antique car in possession of someone she knows that we haven't sussed out yet. That someone loans the car to her—probably not knowing what she wants it for—and she goes gunning for the principals who put her into the nick. Or maybe the two of them go gunning together. We haven't considered that possibility yet.”

  “That scenario argues an innocent woman going to prison for twenty years,” Lynley pointed out.

  “It's been known to happen,” Havers said.

  “But not with the innocent person saying nothing about being innocent in the first place.”

  “She's from East Germany, former totalitarian state. She'd been in England … what? Two years? Three? When Sonia Davies drowned? She finds herself questioned by the local rozzers and she gets paranoid and won't talk to them. That makes sense to me. I don't expect she had the wa
rm fuzzies for the police where she came from, do you?”

  Lynley said, “I agree that she might have been rattled by police. But she would have told someone she was innocent, Havers. She would have spoken to her lawyers, surely. But she didn't. What does that suggest to you?”

  “Someone got to her.”

  “How?”

  “Hell, I don't know.” Havers pulled at her hair in frustration, as if this action would dislodge another possibility in her brain, which it did not.

  Lynley thought about what Havers had suggested, however. He said, “Page Winston. He may have something for us.”

  Havers used Lynley's mobile to do so. They worked their way down to Finchley Road. The wind, which had been brisk all day, had picked up in force during the late afternoon, and now it was hurtling autumn leaves and rubbish along the street. It was also carrying a storm in from the northeast, and as they made the turn into Baker Street, drops began to splatter the Bentley's windscreen. November's early darkness had fallen on London, and the lights from passing vehicles coned forward, creating a playing area for the first sheet of rain.

  Lynley cursed. “This'll make a fine mess of the crime scene.”

  Havers agreed. Lynley's mobile rang. Havers handed it over.

  Winston Nkata reported that unless Katja Wolff's longtime lover was lying, the German woman was in the clear. Both for the murder of Eugenie Davies and for the hit-and-run of Malcolm Webberly. They were together both nights, he said.

  Lynley said, “That's nothing new, Winston. You've told us that Yasmin Edwards confirms that she and Katja—”

  This lover wasn't Yasmin Edwards, Nkata informed him. This lover was the deputy warden at Holloway, one Noreen McKay, who'd been involved with Katja Wolff for years. McKay hadn't wanted to come forward for obvious reasons, but put on the rack, she'd admitted to being with the German woman on both nights in question.