A Traitor to Memory

“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?”