Sister: A Novel (11 page)

‘Why did you think Tess had committed suicide?’ I ask.

If she’s surprised by the question she doesn’t show it, not hesitating for a moment in her reply. ‘Because I’d rather feel guilty for the rest of my life than for her to have felt a second’s fear.’

Her tears fall onto the white damask tablecloth but she doesn’t mind the waiter’s stare, not caring any more about ‘form’ and socially correct behaviour. She’s the mother in the rustling dressing gown sitting at the end of our beds smelling of face cream in the dark. The glimpse I had as she first shed her old Mum-ness is now fully exposed.

I never knew so much love could exist for someone until I saw Mum grieving for you. With Leo, I was away at boarding school and didn’t witness it. I find her grief both shocking and beautiful. And it makes me afraid of being a mother, of risking what she feels now - what you must have felt for Xavier.

There’s a short silence, a hangover from a previous time of silences, but then Mum talks into it. ‘You know I don’t mind much about the trial. Not at all if I’m being totally honest.’ She looks at me, checking for a reaction, but I say nothing. I’ve heard her say this before in a myriad of different ways. She doesn’t care about justice or revenge, just you.

‘She’s been in the headlines for days,’ Mum announces with pride. (I think I already told you that she’s proud of all the media attention?) She thinks you deserve to be on everybody’s front page and topping the bill on the news, not because of your story but because everyone should know all about you. They should be told about your kindness, your warmth, your talent, your beauty. For Mum it’s not ‘Stop the clocks’, but ‘Run the presses!’, ‘Turn on the TV!’, ‘Look at my wonderful daughter!’

‘Beatrice?’

My vision is blurring. I can just hear Mum’s voice. ‘Are you all right . . . ? Poppet . . . ?’

The anxiety in her voice jolts me back into full consciousness. I see the worry on her face and hate to be the cause of it, but the waiter is still clearing the next table, so it can’t have been for long.

‘I’m fine. Shouldn’t have had wine, that’s all, it makes me woozy at lunch time.’

Outside the restaurant I promise to come and see her at the weekend and reassure her that I’ll phone her this evening, as I do every evening. In the bright spring sunshine we hug goodbye and I watch her walk away. Amongst the shining hair and brisk walk of office workers returning from lunch breaks, Mum’s non-reflective grey hair stands out for its dullness, her walk uncertain. She seems weighted down by her grief, physically stooping as if not strong enough to bear it. As I watch her amongst the crowd she reminds me of a tiny dingy in an enormous sea, impossibly still afloat.

There’s a limit to how much I can ask her in one wallop. But you want to know if Xavier is buried with you. Of course he is, Tess. Of course he is. In your arms.

7

I arrive back for the afternoon session with Mr Wright, a few minutes late. My head still feels strange, not quite in focus. I ask Mrs Crush Secretary for a strong coffee. I need to tell your story with sharp reflexes, a memory with neurons firing, not half-asleep. I want to say what I have to and go home and phone Mum to make sure she’s OK.

Mr Wright reminds me where we’d got to.

‘Then you went to Hyde Park?’

I left Mum and Todd, walking hurriedly up your icy basement steps, pulling on my coat. I’d thought that my gloves were in my pocket, but only one remained. It was mid-afternoon and the pavements were almost deserted; it was too cold to be out for no reason. I walked hurriedly towards Hyde Park, as if there was a deadline to keep, as if I was late. When I got to the Lancaster Gate entrance I stopped. What was I doing here? Was this just a strop that had needed to find a focus? ‘I’m
not
sulking! I’m going to find my tea set!’ I remember my six-year-old outrage as I ran up the stairs. There was a real purpose this time, even if it had been prompted by wanting to get away from Mum and Todd. I needed to see where your life had ended.

I went through the open wrought-iron gates. The cold and the snow was so like the day you were found that I felt time pulling me back through the previous six days to that afternoon. I started walking towards the derelict toilets building, pushing my gloveless hand deep into the pocket of my coat. I saw young children building a snowman with energetic earnestness, a mother watching and stamping her feet to keep warm. She called to them to finish now. The children and their snowman was the only thing to be different, perhaps that was why I focused on them, or maybe it was their ignorance and innocence of what had happened here that meant I wanted to watch them. I walked on towards the place you were found, my gloveless hand stinging with cold. I could feel the packed snow beneath the thin soles of my shoes. They were not meant for a snowy park but a New York lunch party in a different life.

I reached the derelict toilets building, totally unprepared for the bouquets. There were hundreds of them. We’re not talking a Princess Diana ocean of floral grief, but masses, nonetheless. Some were half-buried in snow, they must have been there for a few days, others were newer, still pristine in their bouquet cellophane. There were teddy bears too, and for a moment I was perplexed before realising they were for Xavier. There was a police cordon around the small building, making a neat parcel of the scene of your death with a yellow and black plastic ribbon. I thought it odd that the police should make their presence felt here so long after you’d needed their help. The ribbon and flowers were the only colours in the white-out park.

I checked there was no one around, then climbed over the yellow and black ribbon. I didn’t think it strange then that there was no police officer. WPC Vernon has since told me that a police officer always has to be present at a crime scene. They have to stand by that cordon, come what may, in all weathers. She says she gets desperate for the loo. It’s this, she’s told me, that will end her career as a policewoman rather than being too empathetic. Yes, I’m prevaricating.

I went inside. I don’t need to describe to you what it looked like. Whatever state you were in, you’d have noticed your surroundings in detail. Your eyes are an artist’s eyes and I wish that the last place you’d seen hadn’t been stained and vile and ugly. I went into a cubicle and saw bloodstains on the concrete floor and splatters of blood on the peeling walls. I vomited into a basin, before realising it wasn’t attached to any drain. I knew that no one would willingly choose to go into that place. No one would choose to die there.

I tried not to think of you being there for five nights, all alone. I tried to cling on to my Chagall image of you leaving your body, but I couldn’t be sure of the time scale. Did you leave your body, as I so fervently hoped, the moment you died? Or maybe it was later, when you were found, when your body was seen by someone other than your murderer. Or was it in the morgue when the police sergeant pulled back the blanket and I identified you - did grief release you?

I walked out of the foul-smelling, vile building and breathed in the cold till it hurt my lungs, grateful for the white iced air. The bouquets made sense to me now. Decent people were trying to fight evil with flowers; the good fighting under the pennants of bouquets. I remembered the road to Dunblane lined with soft toys. I had never understood before why anyone would think a family whose child had been shot would want a teddy. But now I did; against the sound of gunshots a thousand compassionate soft toys muffled a little their reverberating horror. ‘Mankind isn’t like this,’ the offerings say, ‘we are not like this. The world isn’t only this way.’

I started reading the cards. Some of them were illegible, soaked with snow, the ink melting into the sodden paper. I recognised Kasia’s name, she’d left a teddy with ‘Xavier’ in large childish writing, the dot of the ‘i’ a heart, crosses to show kisses, circles for hugs. The snob in me flinched at her bad taste, but I was also touched and felt guilty for my snobbishness. I resolved to look up her phone number when I got home and thank her for her thoughtfulness.

I gathered up the legible cards to take away with me - no one else would want to read them but Mum and I. As I put them into my pockets I saw a middle-aged man with a Labrador a little distance away, his dog on a tight leash. He was carrying a bunch of chrysanthemums. I remembered him from the afternoon you were found, watching the police activity; the dog was straining to get away then, too. He was hesitating, maybe waiting for me to go before he laid his flowers. I went up to him. He was wearing a tweed hat and Barbour jacket, a country squire who should be out in his estate not a London park.

‘Were you a friend of Tess’s?’ I asked.

‘No. I didn’t even know her name till it was on the television, ’ he replied. ‘We just used to wave, that’s all. When you pass someone quite frequently, you start to form some kind of connection. Just a small one of course, more like recognition.’ He blew his nose. ‘I’ve really no right to be upset, absurd I know. How about you, did you know her?’

‘Yes.’

Whatever DS Finborough said, I knew you. The Country Squire hesitated, unsure of the etiquette of keeping up a conversation by floral tributes. ‘That policeman’s gone then? He said the cordon will be going down soon, now that it’s not a crime scene.’

Of course it wasn’t a crime scene, not when the police had decided you’d committed suicide. The Country Squire seemed to be hoping for a reaction; he prodded a little further.

‘Well you knew her, so you probably know what’s going on better than me.’

Perhaps he was enjoying having a chat about this. The sensation of tears pricking isn’t unpleasant. Terror and tragedy at enough removes is titillating, exciting even, to have a little connection to grief and tragedy that isn’t yours. He could tell people, and no doubt did, that he was involved a little in all this, a bit player in the drama.

‘I am her sister.’

Yes, I used the present tense. You being dead didn’t stop me being your sister, our relationship didn’t go into the past, otherwise I wouldn’t be grieving now, present tense. The squire looked appalled. I think he hoped I was at a decent emotional remove too.

I walked away.

The snow, which had been falling randomly in soft flakes, became denser and angrier. I saw that the children’s snowman was disappearing, engorged by new snow. I decided to go out of a different park exit, the memory of how I felt leaving the previous time too raw to be walked over again.

As I neared the Serpentine Gallery it started blizzarding fiercely, suffocating trees and grass with white. Soon, your flowers and Xavier’s bears would be covered, turned invisible. My feet were numb, my gloveless hand aching with cold. The vomiting had left me with a foul taste in my mouth. I thought I’d go into the Serpentine Gallery and see if they had a café with water. But as I approached the building I saw it was in darkness, the doors chained. A notice on the window said the gallery was not opening again until April. Simon could not have met you there. He was the last person to see you alive and he’d lied. His lie played over in my head, like tinnitus, the only sound not muffled by the falling snow.

I walked along Chepstow Road back to your flat, holding on my mobile for DS Finborough, my pockets stuffed with the cards from teddies and bouquets. From a distance, I saw Todd outside, pacing in short anxious strides. Mum had already taken the train home. He followed me into the flat, relief mutating his anxiety into annoyance. ‘I tried to phone you, but you’ve been engaged.’

‘Simon lied about meeting Tess at the Serpentine Gallery. I have to tell DS Finborough.’

Todd’s reaction, or rather lack of it, should have prepared me for DS Finborough’s. But just then DS Finborough came onto the line. I told him about Simon.

He sounded patient, gentle even. ‘Maybe Simon was just trying to look good.’

‘By lying?’

‘By saying they met at a gallery.’ I could hardly believe DS Finborough was making excuses for him. ‘We did talk to Simon, when we knew he’d been with her that day,’ he continued. ‘And there’s no reason to think that he had any involvement in her death.’

‘But he lied about where they were.’

‘Beatrice, I think you should try to—’

I flipped through the clichés I imagined he was about to use; I should try to ‘move on’, ‘put it behind me’, even with a little flourish of clauses ‘accept the truth and get on with my life’. I interrupted before any of these clichés took verbal form.

‘You’ve seen the place where she died, haven’t you?’

‘Yes I have.’

‘Do you think anyone would choose to die there?’

‘I don’t think it was a matter of choice.’

For a moment I thought he had started to believe me, then realised he was blaming mental illness for your murder. Like an obsessive compulsive who has no choice but to repeat the same task a hundred times, a woman with post-natal psychosis gets swept along by her mental tide of madness to inevitable self-destruction. A young woman with friends, family, talent and beauty who is found dead arouses suspicion. Even if her baby has died there’s still a question mark about the end of her life. But throw psychosis into the list of life-affirming adjectives and you take away the question mark; you give a mental alibi to the killer, framing the victim for her own murder.

‘Somebody forced her into that terrible place and killed her there.’

DS Finborough was still patient with me. ‘But there was no reason any one would want to kill her. It wasn’t a sexual crime, thank God, and there was no theft involved. And when we were investigating her disappearance, we couldn’t find anyone who wished her harm, in fact quite the reverse.’

‘Will you at least talk to Simon again?’

‘I really don’t believe there’s anything to be gained by that.’

‘Is it because Simon is the son of a cabinet minister?’

I threw that at him in an attempt to make him change his mind, to shame him into it.

‘My decision not to talk to Simon Greenly again is because there is no purpose to be served by it.’

Now I know him better I know that he uses formal language when he feels emotionally pressurised.

‘But you’re aware that Simon’s father is Richard Greenly MP?’

‘I don’t think this phone call is getting us very far. Perhaps—’

‘Tess isn’t worth the risk to you, is she?’

Mr Wright has poured me a glass of water. Describing the toilets building made me retch. I have told him about Simon’s lie and my phone call to DS Finborough. But I have left out that as I spoke to DS Finborough Todd hung up my coat; that he took the cards out of the pockets and neatly laid each one out to dry; and that instead of feeling that he was being considerate, each damp card smoothed out felt a criticism; that I knew he was taking DS Finborough’s side, even though he could only hear mine.

‘So after DS Finborough said he wouldn’t interview Simon you decided to do it yourself?’ asks Mr Wright. I think I detect a hint of amusement in his voice; it wouldn’t be surprising.