A Traitor to Memory

clear recollection of that whole period of time. Large areas of my childhood are rather misty, and I've been trying to clarify them.” I didn't tell him why I was making this attempt to recapture the past. I didn't use the word repression, and I couldn't bring myself to reveal anything more.

“I see.” Cresswell-White gave a brief smile that disappeared as quickly as it flashed on his face. To me, the smile seemed both ironic and self-directed, and his next comment reinforced this assumption. “Gideon, would that we could all drink of the waters of Lethe like you. I, for one, would sleep better at night. May I call you Gideon, by the way? That's how I've always thought of you, although we've never met.”





That was a decisive answer to the main question I'd come with, and the relief I felt at hearing it told me something of how great my fears had been. I said, “So I didn't give evidence, did I? At her trial? I didn't give evidence against her.”





“Good God, no. I wouldn't put an eight-year-old child through that. Why do you ask?”





“Gideon talked to the cops when his sister died,” Libby said frankly. “He couldn't remember much about the trial, but he thought his testimony might have been what put Katja Wolff away.”





“Ah. I do see. And now that she's been released, you're wanting to prepare yourself in case—”





“She's been released?” I broke in.

“You didn't know? Neither of your parents informed you? They were both sent letters. She's been out for—” He glanced at some paperwork in one of the folders. “She's been out for just over a month.”





“No. No. I didn't know.” I felt a sudden pulsing within my skull, and I saw the familiar pattern of bright speckling that always suggests that the pulsing will turn into twenty-four hours of pounding. I thought, Oh no. Please. Not here and not now.

“Perhaps they didn't think it necessary,” Cresswell-White said. “If she's going to approach anyone from that period of time, it's more likely to be one of them, isn't it? Or myself. Or someone who gave damning evidence against her.” He went on to say something more, but I couldn't hear because the pulsing in my head was growing louder and the speckling was turning to an arc of light. My body was like an invading army, and I—who should have been its general—was instead its target.

I felt my feet begin a nervous tapping, as if they wanted to carry me from the room. I drew a breath and with the air came the image of that door once again: that blue blue door at the top of the stairs, those two locks upon it, that ring at its centre. I could see it as if I stood before it, and I wanted to open it but I could not raise my hand.

Libby said my name. I heard that much through the pulsing. I held up a hand, asking for a moment, just a moment please to recover.

From what? you want to know, and you lean towards me, ever ready for a loop in the yarn into which you can insert your needle. Recover from what? Go back, Gideon.

Go back to what?

To that moment in Bertram Cresswell-White's rooms, to the pulsing in your head, to what led to the pulsing.

All the talk about the trial led to the pulsing.

We've had the trial before now. It's more than that. What are you avoiding?

I'm avoiding nothing…. But you're not convinced, are you, Dr. Rose? I'm supposed to be writing what I remember, and you've begun to question how trolling through the trial of Katja Wolff is going to take me back to my music. You caution me. You point out that the human mind is strong, that it holds on to its neuroses with a fierce protection, that it possesses the ability to deny and distract, and that this expedition to Paper Buildings might well be a monumental effort on the part of my mind to engage in displacement.

Then that's how it will have to be, Dr. Rose. I do not know how else to go at this thing.

All right, you say. Did your time with Cresswell-White trigger anything else, then? Aside from the episode with your head?

Episode. You choose that word with deliberation, and I know it. But I will not bite at the bait you cast out. I will tell you about Sarah-Jane instead. For this is what I learn from Bertram Cresswell-White: the part that I did not have in Katja Wolff 's trial, the part that Sarah-Jane Beckett had.

19 October, 9:00 P.M.

“She lived in the house with your family and Wolff, after all,” Bertram Cresswell-White said. He'd taken up the first of the folders with Crown vs. Wolff on them, and he'd begun to leaf through the documents inside, reading from time to time when his memory needed to be refreshed. “She was in a good position to observe what went on.”





“So did she see something?” Libby asked. She'd moved her chair closer to mine, and she'd placed her hand on the back of my neck as if she knew without my telling her what state my head was in. She kneaded my neck gently, and I wanted to be grateful. But I could sense the displeasure that the barrister felt at this open display of her affection for me, and I tensed because of this displeasure as I always tense when an older man looks on me with a critical eye.

“She saw Wolff being sick in the mornings, every morning for a month before the child was killed,” he said. “You know she was pregnant, don't you?”