A Traitor to Memory

LIBBY NEALE DECIDED to call in sick with the flu. She knew Rock Peters would have a conniption and threaten to withhold her week's pay—not that that actually meant anything, since he was currently three weeks behind paying her anyway—but she didn't care. When she'd parted from Gideon the previous night, she'd hoped he'd come down to her flat after the cop left him, and when he didn't, she slept so badly that she was as good as sick anyway. So calling it the flu wasn't that much of a lie.

She wandered around her flat in sweats for the first three hours after she got up, mostly pounding the heels of her palms together and straining her ears to hear any sound from above to indicate that Gideon was stirring. She didn't get very far in her efforts. Finally, she gave up the attempt at eavesdropping on him—not that it was really eavesdropping when all you were listening for was the sound of movement to indicate that someone was basically all right—and she decided to make sure in person that he was doing okay. He'd been a wreck yesterday before the cop got there. Who the hell knew what condition he'd been in once the cop left?

Should've gone to him then, she told herself. And while she made an earnest attempt not to ponder the reason that she hadn't gone to him once the cop departed, the thought of what she should have done in the first place led inexorably to the why of why she hadn't.

He'd spooked her. He'd been so not there. She'd talked to him in the kite shed and after that in the kitchen and he'd answered her—sort of—but still he'd been so somewhere else in his head that she'd wondered if he maybe needed to be committed or something. Just for a while. And then wondering that had made her feel so disloyal that she couldn't really face him, or at least that was what she told herself when she spent the evening watching old movies on Sky TV and eating two very large bags of cheddar-cheese popcorn which she could have done without thank you very much and finally going to bed alone, where she fought with the sheets and blankets all night when she wasn't having a soon-to-be-major-motion-picture nightmare.

So after spinning her wheels pacing the floor, browsing in the refrigerator for the bag of celery that was supposed to make her feel less guilty about the cheddar-cheese popcorn, and watching Kilroy yacking with women who'd married men young enough to be their sons and—in two cases—their frigging grandsons, she went upstairs to search out Gideon.

She found him on the floor in the music room, sitting beneath the window seat with his back against the wall. He had his legs drawn up to his chest, with his chin resting upon his knees like some kid who's been disciplined by a ticked-off parent. All around him were scattered papers, which turned out to be Xerox copies of newspaper articles, all of them covering the same subject. He'd been back to the Press Association's news library.

He didn't look at her when she came into the room. He was focused on the stories surrounding him, and she wondered if he even heard her. She said his name, but he didn't stir, other than to begin a gentle rocking.

Breakdown, she thought with alarm. Complete crack-up. He looked like someone who'd lost it. He was wearing exactly what he'd had on yesterday, so she figured he hadn't slept all night either.

“Hey,” she said quietly, “what's up, Gideon? You been back down to Victoria? Why'n't you tell me? I'd've gone with you.”

She scanned the papers that fanned around him, overlarge sheets on which newspaper clippings had been photocopied every which way. She saw that the British papers—in keeping with the country's general bent towards xenophobia—had gone after the nanny with a rusty hatchet. If she wasn't “the German” in every article, she was “the former Communist whose family lived particularly well”—not to mention suspiciously well, Libby thought sardonically—“under Russian domination.” One paper had unearthed the news that her grandfather had been a member of the Nazi party, while another had found a picture of her father, who'd evidently been a card-holding, uniform-wearing, Siegheil!–shouting member of the Hitler Youth.

The tireless ability of the press to milk a story for its every frigging ounce of liquid was totally amazing. It looked to Libby like the life of everyone even moderately involved with the death of Sonia Davies and the trial and conviction of her killer had been dissected by the tabloids at one time or another. So Gideon's home teacher had come under the microscope, as had the lodger, as well as Rafe Robson, both of Gideon's parents, and his grandparents, too. And long after the verdict, it seemed that anyone who'd wanted to make a buck had sold his version of the story to the papers.