A Traitor to Memory

“Heading to fetch the computer, sir.” Leach, she mouthed to Lynley, in another twist.

“Bugger the computer,” Leach said. “Get over to Portman Street. Between Oxford Street and Portman Square. You'll see the action when you get there.”

“Portman Street?” Barbara said. “But, sir, don't you want—”

“Is your hearing as bad as your judgement?”

“I—”

“We've got another hit-and-run,” Leach snapped.

“What?” Barbara said. “Another? Who is it?”

“Richard Davies. But there're witnesses this time. And I want you and Lynley over there shaking the lot of them through a sieve before they disappear.”





GIDEON





10 November





Confrontation is the only answer. He has lied to me. For nearly three quarters of my life, my father has lied. He's lied not with what he said but with what he's allowed me to believe by saying nothing for twenty years: that we—he and I—were the injured parties when my mother left us. But all the time the truth was that she left us because she'd realised why Katja had murdered my sister and why she kept silent about having done so.

11 November





So this is how it happened, Dr. Rose. No memories now, if you will forgive me, no traveling back through time. Just this:

I phoned him. I said, “I know why Sonia died. I know why Katja refused to talk. You bastard, Dad.”





He said nothing.

I said, “I know why my mother left us. I know what happened. Do you understand me? Say something, Dad. It's time for the truth. I know what happened.”





I could hear Jill's voice in the background. I could hear her question, and both the tone and the manner of her question—“Richard? Darling, who on earth is it?”—told me something of Dad's reaction to what I was saying. So I was not surprised when he said harshly, “I'm coming over there. Don't leave the house.”





How he got to me so quickly, I don't know. All I can say is that when he entered the house and came up the stairs at a decisive pace, it seemed that mere minutes had passed since I had rung off from our conversation.

But I'd seen the two of them in those minutes: Katja Wolff, who grabbed at life, who used a deadly threat to get out of East Germany, and who would have used death itself if necessary to achieve the end that she had in mind; and my father, who had impregnated her, perhaps in the hope of producing a perfect specimen to carry on a family line that began with himself. He, after all, discarded women when they failed to produce something healthy. He'd done that to his first wife, and he'd been more than likely setting up to do the same to my mother. But he hadn't been moving fast enough for Katja. Katja Katja, who grabbed at life and who did not wait for what life provided her.

They argued about it.

When will you tell her about us, Richard?

When the time is right.

But we have no time! You know we have no time.

Katja, don't act like an hysterical fool.

And then, when the moment came when he could have taken a stand, he wouldn't speak up to defend her, excuse her, or commit himself as my mother confronted the German girl with the fact of her pregnancy and with the fact of her failure to perform her duties towards my sister because of her pregnancy. So Katja had finally taken matters into her own hands. Exhausted with arguing and with attempting to defend herself, ill from her pregnancy, and feeling deeply betrayed on all sides, she had snapped. She had drowned Sonia.

What did she hope to gain?

Perhaps she hoped to free my father from a burden she believed was keeping them apart. Perhaps she saw drowning Sonia as her way of making a statement that needed to be made. Perhaps she wished to punish my mother for having a hold on my father that seemed unbreakable. But kill Sonia she did, and then she refused, by means of a stoic silence, to acknowledge her crime, my sister's brief life, or what sins of her own had led to the taking of that life.

Why, though? Because she was protecting the man she loved? Or because she was punishing him?

All this I saw, and all this I thought of as I waited for my father's arrival.

“What is this cock, Gideon?”





Those were his first words to me as he strode into the music room, where I was sitting in the window seat, fighting off the first tentative stabs in my gut that proclaimed me frightened, childish, and cowardly as the time for our final engagement approached. I gestured to the notebook I'd been writing in all these weeks, and I hated the fact that my voice was strained. I hated what that strain revealed: about myself, about him, about what I feared.

“I know what happened,” I said. “I've remembered what happened.”





“Have you picked up your instrument?”





“You thought I wouldn't work it out, didn't you?”





“Have you picked up the Guarnerius, Gideon?”





“You thought you could pretend for the rest of your life.”





“Damn it. Have you played? Have you tried to play? Have you even looked at your violin?”