A Traitor to Memory

“She had a right to silence, Gideon.” He placed his tea cake on his plate and took up his cup, which he held in both hands as if warming them.

“In court, right. With the police, right. She didn't have to talk. But with her solicitor? With her barrister? Why not talk to them?”





“She wasn't fluent in English. Someone might have explained her right to silence and she could have misunderstood.”





“And that brings up something else I don't understand,” I told him. “If she was foreign, why did she serve her time in England? Why wasn't she sent back to Germany?”





“She fought repatriation through the courts, and she won.”





“How do you know?”





“How could I help knowing? It was in all the newspapers at the time. She was like Myra Hindley: Every legal move she made from behind bars was scrutinised by the media. It was a nasty case, Gideon. It was a brutal case. It destroyed your parents, it killed both your grandparents within three years, and it damn well might have ruined you had not every effort in the world been made to keep you out of it. So to dig it all up now … all these years afterwards …” He set down his cup and added more tea to it. He said, “You aren't touching your food.”





“I'm not hungry.”





“When did you last have a meal? You look like hell. Eat the tea cake. Or at least drink the tea.”





“Raphael, what if Katja Wolff didn't drown Sonia?”





He put the tea pot back on the table. He took the sugar and added a packet to his cup, following this with the milk. It came to me then that he did it all in reverse of the usual order.

He said once the pouring and sugaring was done, “It hardly makes sense that she'd keep quiet if she hadn't killed Sonia, Gideon.”





“Perhaps she suspected that the police would twist her words. Or the Crown Prosecutors, should she have stood in the witness box.”





“They might have done, all of them, yes. Indeed. But her solicitor and her barrister would have been unlikely to twist her words should she have seen fit to give them any.”





“Did my father make her pregnant?”





He'd lifted his cup, but he set it back on its saucer. He looked out of the window, where the couple with the push chair had now unloaded it of a bag, two baby bottles, and a pack of disposable nappies. They'd turned the chair on its side and the man was attacking the wheel with the heel of his shoe. Raphael said quietly, “That has nothing to do with the problem,” and I knew he was not speaking about the blanket that continued to make the push chair impossible to roll forward.

“How can you say that? How can you know? Did he make her pregnant? And is that what destroyed my parents' marriage?”





“Only the people within a marriage can say what destroyed it.”





“All right. Accepted. And as to the rest? Did he make Katja pregnant?”





“What does he say? Have you asked him?”





“He says no. But he would do, wouldn't he?”





“So you've had your answer.”





“Then who?”





“Perhaps the lodger. James Pitchford was in love with her. The day she walked into your parents' house, James fell hard and he never recovered.”





“But I thought James and Sarah-Jane … I remember them together, James the Lodger and Sarah-Jane. From the window, I saw them heading out in the evening. And whispering together in the kitchen, like intimates.”





“That would have been before Katja, I expect.”





“Why?”





“Because after Katja arrived, James spent most of his free hours with her.”





“So Katja displaced Sarah-Jane in more than one way.”





“You could say that, yes, and I see where you're heading. But she was with James Pitchford when Sonia drowned. And James confirmed that. He had no reason to lie for her. If he was going to lie for anyone back then, he would have lied for the woman he loved. In fact, had Sarah-Jane not been with James when Sonia was murdered, I expect James would have gladly given Katja an alibi that would have made her seem merely derelict in her duties and consequently responsible for a tragic death but not a malevolent one.”





“And as it was, it was murder,” I said reflectively.

“When all the facts were presented, yes.”





GIDEON





25 October





When all the facts were presented, Raphael Robson said. And that's what I'm looking for, isn't it, an accurate presentation of the facts.

You don't reply. Instead, you keep your face expressionless as you no doubt were instructed to do as a psychiatric intern or whatever it was that you were as a student, and you wait for me to offer an explanation for why I have veered so decidedly into this area. Seeing this, I flounder for words. In floundering, I begin to question myself. I examine my motivation for what might prompt me to engage in displacement—as you would call it—and I admit to every one of my fears.

What are they? you ask.