A Traitor to Memory

We started with Bertram Cresswell-White, the barrister who'd prosecuted Katja Wolff for the Crown. Finding him, as Libby had promised, presented no problem. He had a room in chambers in the Temple, at Number Five Paper Buildings, and he agreed to see me once I managed to get him on the phone. He said, “I remember the case perfectly. Yes. I'm happy to speak with you about it, Mr. Davies.”





Libby insisted on going with me. She said, “Two heads are better. What you won't think to ask him, I will.”





So we drove to the river and entered the Temple from Victoria Embankment, where a cobblestone lane ducks beneath an ornate archway, which gives access to the best legal minds in the country. Paper Buildings sits on the east side of a leafy garden within the Temple, and the barristers who have chambers there possess the benefit of views of either the trees or the Thames.

Bertram Cresswell-White had views of both, and when Libby and I were ushered into his office by a young woman delivering him a set of pink-ribboned briefs, we found him in an alcove behind his desk, taking advantage of the sight of a barge sailing sluggishly in the direction of Waterloo Bridge. When he turned from the window, I felt confident that I'd never seen him before, that there was nothing I'd deliberately or unconsciously wiped from my mind involving him. For surely I would remember so imposing a figure had he questioned me inside a courtroom.

He must be six feet three inches tall, Dr. Rose, with the sort of shoulders one gets from rowing. He has the frightening eyebrows of a man over sixty, and when he looked at me, I felt the internal jolt one gets from being pierced by a stare that's used to intimidate witnesses.

He said, “I never expected to meet you. I heard you play some years ago at the Barbican.” He said to the young woman as she placed the briefs on his desk where already a stack of manila folders lay in the centre, “Coffee please, Mandy.” And to Libby and me, “Will you have some?”





I said yes. Libby said, “Sure. Thanks,” and she looked round the room with her lips forming a small O through which she was blowing air. I know her well enough to see what she was thinking in her California fashion: “Some joint you got here.” She wasn't wrong.

Cresswell-White's room in chambers was designed to impress: hung with brass chandeliers, lined with bookshelves holding well-bound legal volumes, and heated by a fireplace in which even now was burning a gas fire with a realistic arrangement of artificial coals. He gestured us to a sitting area of leather armchairs that were gathered round a coffee table on a Persian rug. A framed photograph stood on this table. In it, a youngish man dressed in a barrister's wig and gown posed at Cresswell-White's side, his arms crossed and a grin on his face.

“Is this your kid?” Libby said to Cresswell-White. “There's a big resemblance.”





“That's my son Geoffrey, yes,” the barrister replied, “at the conclusion of his first case.”





“Looks like he won it,” Libby noted.

“He did. He's just your age, by the way.” This last was said to me with a nod as he set the folders on the coffee table. I saw that Crown vs. Wolff was written on each of their tabs. “You were born a week apart at the same hospital, I discovered. I didn't know that at the time of the trial. But later when I was reading about you somewhere—this would have been when you were a teenager, I suppose—the article included the facts of your birth and there it was: the date, place, and time. It's remarkable, really, how connected we all are.”





Mandy returned with the coffee then and placed the tray on the table: three cups and three saucers, milk and sugar, but no pot: a subtle omission that seemed designed to determine the length of our stay. We doctored our drinks as she left us.

I said, “We've come with some specific questions about Katja Wolff 's trial.”





“You've not heard from her, have you?” Cresswell-White's tone was sharp.

“Heard from her? No. Once she left our house—when my sister died—I never saw her again. At least … I don't think I saw her.”





“You don't think …?” Cresswell-White picked up his cup of coffee and held it on his knee. He was wearing a good suit—grey wool and cut exactly to fit him—and the creases in his trousers looked as if they'd been placed there by royal decree.

“I have no recollection of the trial,” I told him. “I have no actual