A Traitor to Memory

“Yes. Well. I don't know who that someone might be.”


Barbara watched the nun place half of the biscuit onto the saucer. She watched as Sister Cecilia went to the kettle and switched it on for a second cup of tea. She weighed her preconceived notions about nuns with what information she'd gathered from this one and the air with which Sister Cecilia had parted with it. She concluded that the nun was telling her everything she knew. In their earlier interview, Sister Cecilia had said that Eugenie stopped attending church when Sonia died. So she—Sister Cecilia—would no longer have had the opportunity she'd once had for heart-to-heart chats of the sort that passed along crucial information.

She said, “What happened to the other baby?”

“The other …? Oh. Are you speaking of Katja's child?”

“My DCI wants me to track him down.”

“He's in Australia, Constable. He's been there since he was twelve years old. And as I told you when we first spoke, if Katja wished to find him, she'd have come to me at once upon her release. You must believe me. The terms of the adoption asked the parents to provide annual updates about the child, so I've always known where he was and I'd have provided Katja with that information any time she asked for it.”

“But she didn't?”

“She did not.” Sister Cecilia headed for the door. “If you'll excuse me for a moment, I'll fetch something you might want to see.”

The nun left the room just as the electric kettle brought the water to a boil and clicked off. Barbara rose and brewed a second cup of Earl Grey for Sister Cecilia, scoring another packet of the biscuits for herself. She'd crammed these down her throat and added the three cubes of sugar to Sister Cecilia's tea when the nun returned, a manila envelope in her hand.

She sat, knees and ankles together, and spread the contents of the envelope on her lap. Barbara saw they consisted of letters and photographs, both snapshots and studio portraits.

“He's called Jeremy, Katja's son,” Sister Cecilia told her. “He'll be twenty in February. He was adopted by a family called Watts, along with three other children. They're in Adelaide now, all of them. He favours his mother, I think.”

Barbara took the photos that Sister Cecilia offered her. In them she saw that the nun had maintained a pictorial record of the child's life. Jeremy was fair and blue-eyed, although the blond hair of his childhood had darkened to pine in his adolescence. He'd gone through a gawky period round the time his family had taken him and his siblings to Australia, but once he'd passed through that, he was handsome enough. Straight nose, square jaw, ears flat against his skull, he would do for an Aryan, Barbara thought.

She said, “Katja Wolff doesn't know that you have these?”

Sister Cecilia said, “As I told you, she wouldn't ever see me. Even when it came time to arrange for Jeremy's adoption, she wouldn't speak with me. The prison acted as our go-between: The warden told me Katja wanted an adoption and the warden told me when the time had arrived. Sure, I don't know if Katja ever saw the baby. All I know is that she wanted him placed with a family at once, and she wanted me to see to it as soon as was possible after the birth.”

Barbara handed the pictures back, saying, “She didn't want him to go to the father?”

“Adoption was what she wanted.”

“Who was the dad?”

“We didn't speak—”

“Got that. I know. But you knew her. You knew all of them. So you must have had an idea or two. There were three men in the house that we know of: the Granddad, Richard Davies, and the lodger, who was a bloke called James Pitchford. There were four if you count Raphael Robson, the violin teacher. Five if you want to count Gideon and think Katja might have liked to have at them young. He was precocious in one way. Why not in another?”

The nun looked affronted. “Katja was not a child molester.”

“She might not have seen it as molestation. Women don't, do they, when they're initiating a male. Hell, there are tribes where it's customary for older women to take young boys in hand.”

“Be that as it may, this was not a tribe. And Gideon was certainly not the father of that baby. I doubt”—and here the nun blushed hotly—“I doubt that he would have been capable of the act.”

“Then whoever it was, he must have had reason to keep his part in it under wraps. Else why not come forward and lay claim to the kid once Katja got her twenty-year sentence? Unless, of course, he didn't want to be known as the man who put a killer in the club.”

“Why does it have to be someone from the house at all?” Sister Cecilia asked. “And why is it important to know?”

“I'm not sure it is important,” Barbara admitted. “But if the father of her baby is somehow involved with everything else that happened to Katja Wolff, then he might be in danger right now. If she's behind two hit-and-runs.”

“Two … ?”