A Traitor to Memory

It didn't help matters that he knew the woman who'd died in his street in possession of his address. And it truly didn't help matters one iota that he'd once been involved—no matter how peripherally—with a heinous crime that had taken place when he'd lived under her roof.

He'd heard the shrieking that evening and he'd come running because he'd recognised who was crying out. When he'd got there, everyone else was there as well: the child's father and mother, the grandparents, the brother, Sarah-Jane Beckett, and Katja Wolff. “I do not leave her for more than a minute,” she shrieked, frantically laying this information in front of everyone milling round the closed bathroom door. “I swear. I do not leave her for more than a minute!” And then looming behind her was Robson, the violin master, who grasped her by the shoulders and pulled her away. “You must believe me,” she cried, and continued to cry as he pulled her with him down the stairs and out of sight.

He hadn't known at first what was going on. He hadn't wanted to know and couldn't afford to know. He'd heard the argument between her and the parents, she'd told him she'd been sacked, and the last thing he wanted to consider was whether the argument, the sacking, and the reason for the sacking—which he suspected but could not bear to contemplate—were in any way related to what lay behind that bathroom door.

“James, what's going on?” Sarah-Jane Beckett's hand had slipped into his, clutching at him as she breathed the whisper. “Oh God, something hasn't happened to Sonia, has it?”

He'd looked at her and saw that her eyes were glittering despite her sombre tone. But he hadn't wondered what that glitter meant. He'd only wondered how he could manage to get away from her and go to Katja.

“Take the boy,” Richard Davies had instructed Sarah-Jane. “For God's sake, get Gideon out of here, Sarah.”

She'd done as he commanded, taking the little white-faced boy into his bedroom, where music was playing, issuing blithely forth as if nothing terrible was going on in the house.

He himself went seeking Katja and he found her in the kitchen, where Robson was forcing a glass of brandy on her. She was trying to refuse, crying, “No. No. I cannot drink it,” looking wild-haired, wild-eyed, and completely wrong for the part of loving, protective nanny to a child who was … what? He was afraid to ask, afraid because he already knew but didn't want to face because of what it might mean in his own life if what he thought and dreaded proved to be true.

“Drink this,” Robson was saying. “Katja. For the love of God, pull yourself together. The paramedics will be here in a moment and you can't afford to be seen like this.”

“I did not, I did not!” She swung round in her chair and grabbed onto his shirt, the collar of which she grasped and twisted. “You must say, Raphael! Say to them that I did not leave her.”

“You're getting hysterical. It may be nothing.”

But that did not prove to be the case.

He should have gone to her then, but he hadn't because he'd been afraid. The mere thought that something might have happened to that child, might have happened to any child within a house in which he was a resident, had paralysed him. And then later, when he could have talked to her and when he tried to talk to her, in order to declare himself the friend she needed and clearly did not have, she would not speak to him. It was as if the subtle flaying she was taking in the press in the immediate aftermath of Sonia's death had driven her into a corner and the only way she could survive was to become tiny and silent, like a pebble on a path. Every story about the unfolding drama in Kensington Square began with the reminder that Sonia Davies' nanny was the German whose famed escape from East Germany—previously considered laudable and miraculous—had cost a vital young man his life, and that the luxurious environment in which she found herself in England was a dire and bleak contrast to the situation to which her ostentatious asylum-seeking had condemned the rest of her family. Everything about her that was remotely questionable or potentially interpretable was dug up by the press. And anyone close to her was liable to the same treatment. So he'd kept his distance, till it was too late.

When she was finally charged and brought to trial, the van that had taken her from Holloway to the Old Bailey had been pelted with eggs and rotten fruit, and shouts of “baby killer” greeted her when that same van returned her to the prison at night and she had to make the few yards' walk to the prison's door. Public passion was aroused by the crime she had allegedly committed: because the victim was a child, because the child was handicapped, and because—although no one would say it directly—her putative killer was German.