A Traitor to Memory

“I don't believe you. You've lied to me my whole life. You said nothing. You told me nothing.”





“I'm telling you now.”





Below me, the train passed. I saw the engineer look up at the last moment. Our eyes met, his widened, and he reached for his radio transmitter. The warning was sent to trains that would follow. My opportunity for oblivion was past.

Dad said, “You must believe me. I'm telling you the truth.”





“What about Katja, then?”





“What about Katja?”





“She went to prison. And we sent her there, didn't we? We lied to the police and she went to prison. For twenty years, Dad. We're to blame for that.”





“No. Gideon, she agreed to go.”





“What?”





“Come back to me. Here. I'll explain.”





So I gave him that much: the belief that he'd talked me away from the tracks when in fact I knew that we were moments away from being joined by the transport police. I climbed back onto the footbridge proper, and I approached my father. When I was close enough to him, he grabbed me as if dragging me from the brink of a chasm. He held me to him, and I could feel the hammering of his heart. I didn't believe anything that he'd told me so far, but I was willing to listen, to hear him out, and to try to see past the fa?ade he wore and to ascertain what facts lay beneath it.

He spoke in a rush, never once releasing me as he told me the story. Believing that I—and not my father—had drowned my sister, Katja Wolff had known instantly that she bore a large part of the responsibility because she had left Sonia alone. If she agreed to take the blame—claiming to have left the child for a minute only while she took a phone call—then Dad would see that she was rewarded. He would pay her twenty thousand pounds for this service to his family. And in the event that she should come to trial for negligence, he would add to that amount another twenty thousand for every year she was inconvenienced thereafter.

“We didn't know the police would build a case against her,” he said into my ear. “We didn't know about the healed fractures on your sister's body. We didn't know the tabloids would seize the case with such ferocity. And we didn't know that Bertram Cresswell-White would prosecute her like a man with a chance to convict Myra Hindley all over again. In the normal course of events, she might have been given a suspended sentence for negligence. Or at the most five years. But everything went wrong. And when the judge recommended twenty years because of the abuse … It was too late.”





I pulled away from him. Truth or lie? I wondered as I studied his face. “Who abused Sonia?”





“No one,” he said.

“But the fractures—”





“She was frail, Gideon. Her skeleton was delicate. It was part of her condition. Katja's defence counsel put this to the jury, but Cresswell-White tore their experts to pieces. Everything went badly. Everything went wrong.”





“Then why didn't she give evidence in her own defence? Why didn't she talk to the police? Her own lawyers?”





“That was part of the deal.”





“The deal.”





“Twenty thousand pounds if she remained silent.”





“But you must have known—” What? I thought. What must he have known? That her friend Katie Waddington wouldn't lie under oath, wouldn't testify to having made a phone call that she hadn't made? That Sarah-Jane Beckett would paint her in the worst possible light? That the Crown Prosecutor would try her as a child abuser and limn her as the devil incarnate? That the judge would recommend a draconian sentence? What exactly was my father to have known?

I released myself from the hold he had on me. I began to retrace my route from Chalcot Square. He followed closely on my heels, not speaking. But I could feel his eyes on me. I could feel the burn of their penetration. He's made all of this up, I concluded. He has too many answers, and they're coming too quickly.

I told him on the front steps to my house. I said, “I don't believe you, Dad.”





He countered with, “Why else would she have remained silent? It was hardly in her interests to do so.”





“Oh, I believe that part,” I told him. “I believe the part about the twenty thousand pounds. You would have paid her that much to keep me from harm. And to keep it from Granddad that your freak of a son had deliberately drowned your freak of a daughter.”





“That's not what happened!”





“We both know it is.” I turned to go inside.

He grabbed my arm. “Will you believe your mother?” he asked me.

I turned. He must have seen the question, the disbelief, and the wariness on my face because he went on without my speaking.

“She's been phoning me. Since Wigmore Hall, she's been phoning at least twice a week. She read about what happened, she phoned to ask about you, and she's been phoning ever since. I'll arrange a meeting between you if you like.”