A Traitor to Memory (120 page)

I moved to the edge of the arch. I saw the train. I watched its approach.

“Gideon!”

Dad was at the end of the footbridge. “Stay where you are!” he shouted.

“It's too late.”

And like a baby, I began to cry, and I waited for the moment, the perfect moment, when I could drop onto the tracks in front of the train and enter oblivion.

“What are you saying?” he shouted. “Too late for what?”

“I know what I did,” I cried. “To Sonia. I remember.”

“You remember what?” He looked from me to the train, both of us watching its steady approach. He took a single step closer to me.

“You know. What I did. That night. To Sonia. How she died. You know what I did to Sonia.”

“No! Wait!” This as I moved my feet so that the soles of my shoes overhung the drop. “Don't do this, Gideon. Tell me what you think happened.”

“I drowned her, Dad! I drowned my sister!”

He took another step towards me, his hand extended.

The train drew closer. Twenty seconds and it would be over. Twenty seconds and a debt would be paid.

“Stay where you are! For the love of God, Gideon!”

“I drowned her!” I cried, and my breath caught on a sob. “I drowned her and I didn't even
remember
. Do you know what that means? Do you know how it feels?”

His glance went to the train, then back to me. He took another step forward. “Don't!” he shouted. “Listen to me. You didn't kill your sister.”

“You pulled me off her. I
remember
now. And that's why Mother left. She left us without a word because she knew what I'd done. Isn't that right? Isn't that the truth?”

“No! No, it's not!”

“It is. I remember.”

“Listen to me. Wait.” His words were rapid. “You hurt her, yes. And yes, yes, she was unconscious. But, Gideon, son, hear what I'm saying. You didn't drown Sonia.”

“Then who—”

“I did.”

“I don't believe you.” I looked beneath me to the waiting rail tracks. A single step was all I needed to take, and I would be on the tracks and a moment later it would all be over. A burst of pain then a wiping of the slate.

“
Look
at me, Gideon. For God's sake, hear me out. Don't do this before you understand what happened.”

“You're trying to stall.”

“If I am, there'll be another train, won't there? So listen to me. You owe it to yourself.”

No one had been present, he told me. Raphael had taken Katja to the kitchen. My mother had gone to ring the emergency number. Gran had gone to Granddad to settle him down. Sarah-Jane had taken me to my room. And James the Lodger had disappeared back upstairs.

“I could have taken her from the bath just then,” he said. “I could have given her the kiss of life. I could have used CPR on her. But I held her there, Gideon. I held her down beneath the water until I heard your mother finish her call to emergency.”

“That wouldn't have done it. There wouldn't have been enough time.”

“There was. Your mother stayed on the phone with emergency till we heard the paramedics pounding on the front door. She relayed emergency's instructions to me. I pretended to do what they directed. But she couldn't
see
me, Gideon, so she didn't know that I hadn't taken Sonia out of the bath.”

“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 façade 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.”

“What good would that do? You said she didn't see—”

“Gideon, for God's sake. Why do you think she left me? Why do you suppose she took every picture of your sister with her?”

I stared at him. I tried to read him. And more than that, I tried to find the answer to a single question that I didn't give voice to: Even if I saw her, would she tell me the truth?

But Dad appeared to see this question in my eyes, because quickly he said, “Your mother has no reason to lie to you, son. And surely the manner of her disappearance from our lives tells you she couldn't bear the guilt of living the pretence that I'd forced her into living.”

“It also might mean that she couldn't bear to live in the same house with a son who'd murdered his sister.”

“Then let her tell you that.”

We were eye to eye, and I waited for a sign that he was the least apprehensive. But no sign came.

“You can trust me,” he told me.

And I wanted more than anything to believe that promise.

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