A Traitor to Memory

Lost? you repeat, ever vigilant for triggers.

Yes. What I've lost: my music, Beth, my mother, a childhood, memories that other people take for granted.

Sonia? you ask. Sonia as well? Would you have her back if you could, Gideon?

Yes, of course, is my reply. But a different Sonia.

And that answer stops me. Because contained within it is a reservoir of remorse for what I'd forgotten about my sister.

3 October, 6:00 P.M.

When I was able to get my raging bowels under control and to breathe normally, Libby and I returned to the news library. There, five bulging manila envelopes awaited us, crammed with newspaper cuttings from over twenty years ago. They were roughly clipped from papers and dog-eared; they were musty smelling and discoloured with age.

While Libby searched out a second chair so that she could join me at the table, I reached for the first envelope and opened it.

KILLER NANNY CONVICTED leapt out at me, with the unspoken reassurance that little had changed with newspaper headlines in the last two decades. The words were accompanied by a picture, and there she was before me, my sister's killer. The photograph looked as if it had been taken very early on in the legal process, since Katja Wolff had been caught by the lens not at the Old Bailey or in prison somewhere but in the Earl's Court Road as she came out of the Kensington police station in the company of a stubby man in an ill-fitting suit. Just behind him, partially obscured by the doorway, was a figure I would not have been able to make out had I not known the shape of him and the size of him and the general look of him from nearly twenty-five years of daily sessions on the violin: Raphael Robson. I registered the presence of these two men—assuming the former to be Katja Wolff 's solicitor—but what I focused on was Katja herself.

Much had changed for her since the day of the sunny picture that had been taken in the back garden. Of course, that photograph had been posed while this one had obviously been snapped in that frantic rush that exists between the time a newsworthy figure leaves a building and the time she enters a vehicle which whisks her away. What was evident in the picture was that public notoriety—at least of this sort—hadn't suited Katja Wolff. She looked thin and ill. And whereas the back-garden shot had depicted her smiling up at the camera openly and happily, this shot had captured her trying to conceal her face. The photographer must have got in quite close, because the picture wasn't grainy as one would expect from a telephoto shot. Indeed, every detail of Katja Wolff 's face seemed harshly highlighted.

Her mouth was pressed shut so her lips were thin. Dark skin formed half-moon bruises beneath her eyes. Her aquiline features had sharpened unappealingly from a loss in weight. Her arms were sticklike, and where her blouse formed a V, her collar bone looked like the edge of a plank.

I read the copy to find that Mr. Justice St. John Wilkes had passed the mandatory life sentence for murder upon Katja Wolff, with an unusual recommendation made to the Home Office that she serve no less than twenty years. According to the correspondent, who evidently had been present in the courtroom, the defendant had leapt to her feet upon hearing the sentence pronounced and demanded to speak. “Let me tell what happened,” she was reported as saying. But her offer to speak now—after having maintained her right to silence not only through the trial but throughout the investigation as well—smacked of panic and deal-making, and it came too late.

“We know what happened,” Bertram Cresswell-White, senior Treasury Counsel, declared later to the press. “We heard it from the police, we heard it from the family, we heard it from the forensic laboratory and from Miss Wolff 's own friends. Placed in circumstances which she found increasingly difficult, seeking to vent her anger in a situation in which she felt she was being unfairly disciplined, and given the opportunity to rid the world of a child who was imperfect anyway, she willfully and with malice towards the Davies family shoved Sonia Davies beneath the water in her own bathtub and held her there—despite the child's pathetic struggles—until she drowned. At which point, Miss Wolff raised the alarm. This is what happened. This is what was proved. And it is for this that Mr. Justice Wilkes handed down the sentence required by law.”