A Traitor to Memory

“The threat, you mean?” Katie had gone on to Joey's other wing, which he'd stretched out as cooperatively as he had done the first. Inside the cage, the second budgerigar had skittered along one of the perches and was watching the massage session with one bright eye. “She threatened to alert the authorities if Hannes didn't take her with him.”





“That's not a story that's ever come out, is it?”





“I expect I'm the only person she ever told, and she probably never realised she told me. We'd both been drinking, and when Katja got pissed—which wasn't often, mind you—she'd say or do things that she couldn't even remember twenty-four hours later. I never mentioned the Hannes situation to her after she told me about it, but I admired her for it because it spoke of the lengths she was willing to go to in order to have what she wanted. And as I had to go to my own lengths to get what I wanted”—she indicated the office and the clinic itself, so many steps removed from her family's restaurant business—“it made us sisters, after a fashion.”





“You lived at the convent as well?”





“God no. Katja did. She worked for the sisters—in their kitchen, I think—in exchange for her room while she was learning English. But I lived behind the convent. There were lodgings for students at the bottom of the grounds. Right on the District line, so the noise was ghastly. But the rent was cheap, and the location—near to so many colleges—made it convenient. Several hundred students lived there then, and most of us knew of Katja.” Here she smiled. “Had we not known of her, we would have taken notice of her eventually. What she could do with a jumper, three scarves, and a pair of trousers was quite remarkable. She had an innovative mind when it came to fashion. That's what she wanted to do, by the way. And she would have done had things not turned out so badly for her.”





This was exactly where I wanted the conversation to head: the way things had turned out for Katja Wolff and the why of those things.

“She wasn't really qualified to be my sister's nanny, was she?” I asked.

Katie was stroking the budgerigar's tail feathers now, and he spread them for her as cooperatively as he'd spread his wings, which still remained extended, as if he'd become paralysed by the sheer pleasure of the therapist's touch. “She was devoted to your sister,” Katie said. “She loved her. She was brilliant with her. I never saw her be anything other than absolutely tender and gentle towards Sonia. She was a Godsend, Gideon.”





That wasn't what I expected to hear, and I closed my eyes, trying to find a picture in my mind of Katja and Sonia together. I wanted a picture that squared with what I'd said to the ginger-haired policeman, not one that squared with what Katie was claiming.

I said, “You would have seen them together mostly in the kitchen, though, when she was feeding Sonia,” and I kept my eyes closed, trying to conjure that picture at least: the old red-and-black lino squares on the floor, the table scarred with the semi-circles of cups placed down on unprotected wood, the two windows set below the level of the street and the bars that fronted them. Odd that I could remember the sight of feet passing by on the pavement above those kitchen windows, but I could not at that moment envisage a scene in which something might have happened that would confirm what I'd later reported to the police.

Katie said, “I did see them in the kitchen. But I saw them at the convent as well. And in the square. And elsewhere. Part of Katja's job was to stimulate her senses and—” Here she cut herself off, stopped stroking the bird, and said, “But you already know all this, I suppose.”





I murmured vaguely, “As I said, my memory …”





That seemed to be enough, because she went on. “Ah. Yes. Right. Well, all children, disabled or not, benefit from sensory stimulation, and Katja saw to it that Sonia had a variety of experiences. She worked with her in developing motor skills and she saw to it that she was exposed to the environment beyond the home. She was limited by your sister's health, but when Sonia was able to cope with it, Katja would take her out and about. And if I was free, I went as well. So I saw her with Sonia, not every day but several times a week, for the entire time your sister was … well, alive. And Katja was very good to Sonia. So when everything happened as it happened … Well, I still find it a bit difficult to understand.”





So thoroughly different was this account to anything I'd heard or read in the papers that I felt compelled to attempt a frontal assault. I said, “This doesn't square at all with what I've been told.”





“By whom?”





“By Sarah-Jane Beckett for one.”