A Traitor to Memory

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 Cecilia 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.”