A Traitor to Memory

  “Had she any other passions?”

  “Any other …?” Sarah-Jane looked perplexed.

  “I know she was pregnant, and I've remembered seeing her in the garden with a man. I couldn't see him clearly, but I could tell what they were doing. Raphael says it was James Pitchford, the lodger.”

  “I hardly think that!” Sarah-Jane protested. “James and Katja? Heavens!” Then she laughed. “James Pitchford wasn't involved with Katja. What would make you think that? He helped her with her English, it's true, but apart from that … Well, James always had something of an air of indifference towards women, Gideon. One was forced to wonder about his … if I might say it … his sexual orientation at the end of the day. No, no. Katja wouldn't have been involved with James Pitchford.” She took up another ginger biscuit. She said, “One naturally tends to think that when a group of adults live under one roof and when one of the female adults becomes pregnant, another of the co-inhabitants must be the father. I suppose it's logical, but in this case …? It wasn't James. It couldn't have been your grandfather. And who else is there? Well, Raphael, of course. He could have been the pot calling the kettle when he named James Pitchford.”

  “What about my father?”

  She looked disconcerted. “You can't possibly think your father and Katja—certainly you would have recognised your own father had he been the man you saw with her, Gideon. And even if you hadn't recognised him for some reason, he was utterly devoted to your mother.”

  “But the fact that they separated within two years after Sonia died …”

  “That had to do with the death itself, with your mother's inability to cope afterwards. She went into a very black period after your sister was murdered—well, what mother wouldn't?—and she never pulled herself out of it. No. You mustn't think ill of your father on any account. I won't hear of that.”

  “But when she wouldn't name the father of her child … when she wouldn't talk at all about anything to do with my sister—”

  “Gideon, listen to me.” Sarah-Jane set down her coffee, placing the remainder of her biscuit on the saucer's edge. “Your father might have admired Katja Wolff's physical beauty, as all men did. He might have spent the odd hour now and again alone with her. He might have chuckled fondly at her mistakes in English, and he might have bought her a gift at Christmas and two on her birthday … But none of that means he was her lover. You must drive that idea straight from your mind.”

  “Yet not to talk to anyone … I know Katja never said a word about anything, and that doesn't make sense.”

  “To us, no. It doesn't,” Sarah-Jane agreed. “But you must remember that Katja was headstrong. I've little doubt that she'd got it into her mind that she could say nothing and all would be well. To her way of thinking—and coming from a communist country where criminal science isn't what it is in England, how could she think otherwise?—what evidence had they that couldn't be argued away? She could claim to have been called to the telephone briefly—although why she would claim something that could be so easily disproved is far beyond me—with a tragic accident being the result. How was she to know what else would become public that, taken in conjunction with Sonia's death, would serve to prove her guilt?”

  “What else did become public? Beyond the pregnancy and the lie about the phone call and the row she'd had with my parents. What else?”

  “Aside from the other, healed injuries to your sister? Well, there was her character, for one thing. Her callous disregard for her own family in East Germany. What happened to them as a result of her escape. Someone did some digging round in Germany after her arrest. It was in the papers. Don't you recall?” She took up her cup again and poured herself more coffee. She didn't notice that I had not yet touched mine. “But no. You wouldn't have done, would you? Every effort was made never to talk about the case in front of you, and I doubt you saw the papers, so how would you remember—or even know in the first place—that her family had been tracked down—God knows how although the East Germans were probably happy to offer the information as a caveat for anyone who might think of escaping …”

  “What happened to them?” I pressed.

  “Her parents lost their jobs, and her siblings in university lost their places. And had Katja shed a single tear about any of her family while she was in Kensington Square? Had she tried to contact them or help them? No. She never even mentioned them. They might not have existed for her.”

  “Did she have friends, then?”

  “Hmmm. There was that fat girl who always had her mind in the gutter. I remember her last name—Waddington—because it reminded me of waddle, which is how she walked.”

  “Was that a girl called Katie?”

  “Yes. Yes, that was it. Katie Waddington. Katja knew her from the convent, and when she moved in with your parents, this Waddington—Katie—hung about quite regularly. Usually eating something—well, just consider her size—and always going on about Freud. And sex. She was obsessed with sex. With Freud and sex. With sex and Freud. The significance of orgasm, the resolution of the Oedipal drama, the gratification of childhood's unfulfilled and forbidden wishes, the rôle of sex as a catalyst for change, the sexual enslavement of women by men and men by women …” Sarah-Jane leaned forward and took up the coffee pot, smiling at me and saying, “Another? Oh, but you haven't touched a drop yet, have you? Here, then. Let me pour you a fresh one.”

  And before I could reply, she snatched up my coffee cup and disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me with my thoughts: about celebrity and the abrupt loss of it, about the destruction of immediate family, about the possession of dreams and the crucial ability to delay the immediate fulfilment of those dreams, about physical beauty and the lack thereof, about lying out of malice and telling the truth for the very same reason.

  When Sarah-Jane came into the room, I had my question ready. “What happened the night my sister died? I remember this: I remember the emergency people arriving, the paramedics or whoever they were. I remember us—you and me—in my bedroom while they were working on Sonia. I remember people crying. I think I remember Katja's voice. But that's all. What actually happened?”

  “Surely your father can give you a far better answer to that than I. You've asked him, I take it?”

  “It's rough for him to talk about that time.”

  “Naturally, it would be … But as for me …” She fingered her pearls. “Sugar? Milk? You must try my coffee.” And when I obliged her by raising the bitter brew to my mouth, she said, “I can't add much, I'm afraid. I was in my room when it happened. I'd been preparing your lessons for the following day and I'd just popped into James's room to ask him to help me devise a scheme that would get you interested in weights and measures. Since he was a man—well, is a man, assuming he's still alive, and there's certainly no reason to assume otherwise, is there?—I thought he'd be able to suggest some activity that would intrigue a little boy who was”—and here she winked at me—“not always cooperative when it came to learning something he thought was unrelated to his music. So James and I were going over some ideas, when we heard the commotion downstairs: shouting and pounding feet and doors slamming. We went running down and saw everyone in the corridor—”

  “Everyone?”

  “Yes. Everyone. Your mother, your father, Katja, Raphael Robson, your grandmother …”

  “What about Granddad?”

  “I don't … Well, he must have been there. Unless, of course, he was … well, out in the country for one of his rests? No, no, he must have been there, Gideon. Because there was such shouting going on, and I remember your grandfather as something of a shouter. At any rate, I was told to take you into your bedroom and stay with you there, so that's what I did. When the emergency services arrived, they told everyone else to get out of their way. Only your parents stayed. And we could still hear them from your room, you and I.”

  “I don't remember any of it,” I said. “Just the part in my room.”

  “That's just as well, Gide
on. You were a little boy. Seven? Eight?”

  “Eight.”

  “Well, how many of us have explicit, full memories even of good times from when we were children? And this was a terrible, shocking time. I dare say, forgetting it was a blessing, dear.”

  “You said you wouldn't leave. I remember that.”

  “Of course I wouldn't have left you alone in the middle of what was going on!”

  “No. I mean, you said that you wouldn't be leaving as my teacher. Dad told me he'd sacked you.”

  She coloured at that, a deep crimson that was the child of her red hair, hair that was dyed to its original hue now that she was approaching fifty. “There was a shortage of money, Gideon.” Her voice was fainter than it had been.

  “Right. Sorry. I know. I didn't mean to imply … Obviously, he wouldn't have kept you on till I was sixteen if you'd been anything less than extraordinary as my teacher.”

  “Thank you.” Her reply was formal in the extreme. Either she had been wounded by my words or she wanted me to think so. And believe me, Dr. Rose, I could see how my believing I'd wounded her could serve to direct the course of the conversation. But I chose to eschew that direction, saying, “What were you doing before you asked James for his advice on the weights-and-measures activity?”

  “That evening? As I said, I was planning your lessons for the following day.”

  She didn't add the rest, but her face told me she knew I'd appended the information myself: She had been alone in her room before she asked James to help her.

  15

  THE RINGING FORCED Lynley to swim upwards, out of a deep sleep. He opened his eyes into the darkness of the bedroom and flailed out for the alarm clock, cursing when he knocked it to the floor without managing to silence it. Next to him, Helen didn't stir. Even when he switched on the light, she continued to sleep. That had long been her gift, and it remained so, even in pregnancy: She always slept like an effigy in a Gothic cathedral.

  He blinked, became semi-conscious, and realised it was the phone sounding off and not the alarm. He saw the time—three-forty in the morning—and knew that the news wasn't good.

  Assistant Commissioner Sir David Hillier was on the line. He snapped, “Charing Cross Hospital. Malcolm's been hit by a car.”

  Lynley said, “What? Malcolm? What?”

  Hillier said, “Wake up, Inspector. Rub ice cubes over your face if necessary. Malcolm's in the operating theatre. Get down here. I want you on this. Now.”

  “When? What's happened?”

  “God damn bastard didn't even stop,” Hillier said, and his voice—uncharacteristically torn and sounding completely unlike the urbane and measured political tones that the AC usually employed at New Scotland Yard—illustrated the level of his concern.

  Hit by a car. Bastard didn't stop. Lynley was instantly fully awake, as if a mixture of caffeine and adrenaline had been shot into his heart. He said, “Where? When?”

  “Charing Cross Hospital. Get down here, Lynley.” And Hillier rang off.

  Lynley bolted from the bed and grabbed the first items of clothing that came to hand. He scrawled a note to his wife in lieu of waking her, giving her the bare details. He added the time and left the note on his pillow. Thrusting one arm into his overcoat, he went out into the night.

  The earlier wind had died altogether, but the cold was unremitting and it had begun to rain. Lynley turned his coat collar up and jogged round the corner to the mews where he kept the Bentley in a locked garage.

  He tried not to think about Hillier's terse message or the tone with which it had been given. He didn't want to make an interpretation of the facts till he had the facts, but he couldn't stop himself from making the leap anyway. One hit-and-run. And now another.

  He assumed there would be little traffic on the King's Road at this time of night, so he headed directly for Sloane Square, coursed halfway round the leaf-clogged fountain in its centre, and shot past Peter Jones, where—in a bow to the growing commercialism of their society—Christmas decorations had long since been twinkling from its windows. He flew past the trendy shops of Chelsea, past the silent streets of dignified terraces. He saw a uniformed constable squatting to talk to a blanket-shrouded figure in the doorway of the town hall—the disenfranchised homeless yet another sign of their disparate times—but that was the only life he encountered beyond the few cars he passed on his flight towards Hammersmith.

  Just short of King's College, he made a turn to the right, and he began to cut across and upwards to reach Lillie Road, which would take him closest to Charing Cross Hospital. When he zoomed into the car park and set off to Casualty at a sprint, he finally allowed himself a look at his watch. It had been less than twenty minutes since he'd taken Hillier's call.

  The AC—as unshaven and disheveled as Lynley himself—was in the waiting area of the casualty ward, speaking tersely to a uniformed constable while three others clustered uneasily nearby. He caught sight of Lynley and flicked a finger at the uniform to dismiss him. As the constable rejoined his colleagues, Hillier strode to meet Lynley in the middle of the room.

  Despite the hour, rain made the casualty ward a busy place. Someone called out, “Another ambulance coming from Earl's Court,” which suggested what the next five minutes were going to be like in the immediate vicinity, and Hillier took Lynley by the arm, leading him beyond Casualty, down several corridors, and up several flights of stairs. He said nothing till they were in a private waiting area that served the families of those undergoing surgery in the operating theatre. No one else was there.

  Lynley said, “Where's Frances? She's not—”

  “Randie phoned us,” Hillier cut in. “Round one-fifteen.”

  “Miranda? What happened?”

  “Frances phoned her in Cambridge. Malcolm wasn't home. Frances'd gone to bed and she woke up with the dog barking outside in a frenzy. She found him in the front garden with the lead on his collar, but Malcolm not with him. She panicked, phoned Randie. Randie phoned us. By the time we got to Frances, the hospital had him in Casualty and had rung her. Frances thought he'd had a heart attack while walking the dog. She still doesn't know …” Hillier blew out a breath. “We couldn't get her out of the house. We got her to the door, even had it open, Laura on one arm and myself on the other. But the night air hit her and that was it. She got hysterical. The bloody dog went mad.” Hillier took out a handkerchief and passed it over his face. Lynley realised that this moment constituted the first time he'd seen the assistant commissioner even slightly undone.

  He said, “How bad is it?”

  “They've gone into his brain to clear out a clot from beneath the skull fracture. There's swelling, so they're dealing with that as well. They're doing something with a monitor … I don't remember what. It's about the pressure. They do something with a monitor to keep note of the pressure. Do they put it in his brain? I don't know.” He shoved his handkerchief away, clearing his throat roughly. “God,” he said, and stared in front of him.

  Lynley said, “Sir … can I get you a coffee?” and felt all the awkwardness of the offer as he spoke it. There were gallons of bad blood between himself and the assistant commissioner. Hillier had never made an effort to hide his antipathy for Lynley, and Lynley himself had never seen fit to disguise the disdain he felt for Hillier's rapacious pursuit of promotion. Seeing him like this, however, in an instance of vulnerability as Hillier confronted what had happened to his brother-in-law and friend of more than twenty-five years, painted Hillier in a different shade than previously. But Lynley wasn't sure what to do with the picture.

  “They've said they're probably going to have to take out most of his spleen,” Hillier said. “They think they can save the liver, perhaps half of it. But they don't know yet.”

  “Is he still—”

  “Uncle David!” Miranda Webberly's arrival broke into Lynley's question. She flew through the door to the waiting area, wearing a baggy track suit with her curly hair pulled back and held in place with a knotted s
carf. She was bare of foot and white in the face. She had a set of car keys clutched in her hand. She made a beeline for her uncle's arms.

  “You got someone to drive you?” he asked her.

  “I borrowed a car from one of the girls. I drove myself.”

  “Randie, I told you—”

  “Uncle David.” And to Lynley, “Have you seen him, Inspector?” And then back to her uncle without waiting for an answer, “How is he? Where's Mum? She's not …? Oh, God. She wouldn't come, would she?” Miranda's eyes were bright liquid as she went on bitterly, saying, “Of course not, of course not,” in a broken voice.

  “Your aunt Laura's with her,” Hillier said. “Come over here, Randie. Sit down. Where're your shoes?”

  Miranda looked down at her feet blankly. “God, I've come without them, Uncle David. How is he?”

  Hillier told her what he'd told Lynley, everything except the fact that the accident was a hit-and-run. He was just reaching the part about attempting to save the superintendent's liver, when a doctor in surgical garb pushed through the doorway, saying “Webberly?” He surveyed all three of them with the bloodshot eyes of a man who wasn't bearing good news.

  Hillier identified himself, introduced Randie and Lynley, put his arm round his niece, and said, “What's happened?”

  The surgeon said Webberly was in recovery and he'd go from there straight to intensive care where he would be kept in a chemically induced coma to rest the brain. Steroids would be used to ease the swelling there, barbiturates to render him unconscious. He'd be paralysed with muscle anaesthetics to keep him immobile until his brain recovered.