A Traitor to Memory

“That doesn't surprise me,” Katie said. “You can take everything Sarah-Jane says with a pinch of salt. They were oil and water, Katja and she. And there was James to consider. He was wild about Katja, completely over the moon every time she so much as looked his way. Sarah-Jane didn't much like that. It was only too obvious that she'd earmarked James for herself.”





This was down-the-rabbit-hole stuff, Dr. Rose, this bit about James the Lodger. No matter where, how, or to whom I turned, the story seemed to turn as well. And it turned in subtle ways, just a variation here and a little twist there but enough to throw me off my stride and make me wonder whose words I could believe.

Perhaps in no one's, you point out to me. Each person sees things in his own way, Gideon. Each person develops a version of past events that he can live with, and put to the rack, that's the version that he tells. Ultimately, it becomes his truth.

But what is Katie Waddington trying to live with, twenty years after the crime? I can understand what Dad is trying to live with, what Sarah-Jane Beckett is trying to live with. But Katie …? She wasn't a member of the household. She had no interest in anything other than her friendship with Katja Wolff. Right?

Yet it had been Katie Waddington's evidence at the trial that, as much as anything, had sealed Katja Wolff 's fate. I'd read that in the newspaper cutting where the words Nanny Lied to Police had formed a mammoth headline. In her only statement to the investigators, Katja had claimed that a phone call from Katie Waddington had taken her from the bathroom for no more than a minute on the night Sonia drowned. But Katie Waddington had, under oath, sworn that she was at an evening class at the same moment that that phone call had ostensibly been made. Her testimony had been supported by the records of the class instructor. And a serious blow had been dealt to Katja's nearly non-existent defence.

But wait. God. Had Katie too wanted James the Lodger? I wondered. Had she orchestrated events somehow in order to make James Pitchford available to her?

As if she perceived the subject festering in my mind, Katie continued with the theme she'd begun. “Katja wasn't interested in James. She saw him as someone who could help her with her English, and I suppose she used him if it comes down to it. She saw that he wanted her to spend her free time with him, and she was happy to do it so long as that free time was spent in language tutorials. James went along with that. I suppose he hoped she'd fall in love with him eventually if he was good enough to her.”





“So he could have been the man who made her pregnant.”





“As payment for the language lessons, d'you mean? I doubt it. Sex in exchange for anything wouldn't have been Katja's style. After all, she could have had sex with Hannes Hertel to get him to take her in the hot air balloon. But she chose a different route entirely, and one that could have got her badly hurt.” Katie had ceased petting the blue budgerigar, and she watched the bird as he slowly regained his senses. His tail feathers returned to normal first, then his wings, and finally his eyes, which opened. He blinked as if wondering where he was.

I said, “Then she was in love with someone other than James. You must know who.”





“I don't know that she was in love with anyone.”





“But if she was pregnant—”





“Don't be na?ve, Gideon. A woman doesn't need to be in love to become pregnant. She doesn't even need to be willing.” She returned the blue bird to the cage.

“Are you suggesting …” I couldn't even say it, so horrified was I at the thought of what could have happened and at whose hands.

“No, no,” Katie said hastily. “She wasn't raped. She would have told me. I do believe that. What I meant was that …” A marked hesitation during which Katie took the green bird from the cage and began to give it the same massage as she'd given the other. “As I said, she drank a bit. Not a lot and not often. But when she did … well, I'm afraid she forgot things. So there was every chance that she herself didn't know … That's the only explanation I've ever been able to come up with.”





“Explanation for what?”





“For the fact that I didn't know she was pregnant,” Katie said.

“We told each other everything. And the fact that she never told me she was pregnant suggests to me that she didn't know herself. Unless she wanted to keep the identity of the father a secret, I suppose.”