Sister: A Novel (12 page)

‘Yes, it was getting to be something of a habit.’

And just eight days earlier, flying into London, I’d been someone who always avoided confrontation. But in comparison to the murderous brutality of your death, confrontation with words seemed harmless and a little trivial. Why had I ever been daunted by it before, afraid even? That seemed so cowardly - ludicrous - now.

Todd was going off to buy a toaster. (‘
I can’t believe your sister had to grill her toast.
’) Our toaster in New York had a defrost function and a croissant warming mode that we actually used. At the door he turned to me.

‘You look exhausted.’

Was he being concerned or critical?

‘I told you last night you should take one of Dr Broadbent’s sleeping pills I got for you.’

Critical.

He left to go and get the toaster.

I hadn’t explained to him why I couldn’t take a sleeping pill - that it would have felt cowardly blotting you out, even for a few hours. Nor would I tell him now that I was going to see Simon, because he would have felt duty-bound to stop me being ‘so rash and ridiculous’.

I drove to Simon’s address, which I’d found on a Post-it in your address book, and parked outside a three-storey mansion in Kensington. Simon buzzed me in and I made my way up to the top flat. When he opened the door I barely recognised him. His soft baby face was ridged with tiredness; his designer stubble grown into the beginnings of a sparse beard.

‘I’d like to talk to you about Tess.’

‘Why? I thought you knew her best.’ His voice was snide with jealousy.

‘You were close to her too, weren’t you?’ I asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘So can I come in?’

He left the door open and I followed him into a large opulent drawing room. It must be his father’s London pad when he isn’t in his constituency. On one wall, running along the length of the double drawing room, was a vast painting of a prison. Looking closer, I saw that it was actually a collage; the prison made from thousands of passport-sized photos of babies’ faces. It was engrossing and repelling.

‘The Serpentine Gallery is closed until April, you couldn’t have met Tess there.’

He just shrugged, apparently unconcerned.

‘Why did you lie?’ I asked.

‘I just liked the idea, that’s all,’ he replied. ‘It made our meeting sound like a date. The Serpentine Gallery is the kind of place Tess would choose for a date.’

‘But it wasn’t a date, was it?’

‘Does it really matter now if I rewrite our history a little? Make it something I want it to be? Put a little fantasy in? There’s no harm in that.’

I wanted to yell at him, but nothing would be served but the brief instant gratification of expressed rage.

‘So why did you meet her in the park? It must have been freezing out.’

‘It was Tess who wanted to go to the park. Said she needed to be outside. Told me she was going crazy stuck indoors.’

‘ “Crazy”? She used that word?’

I’ve never heard you say it. Although you talk nineteen to the dozen you choose words carefully, and you’re patriotically English about vocabulary, berating me for my Americanisms.

Simon picked up a velvet bag from a mirrored glass cabinet. ‘Maybe she said she was claustrophobic. I don’t remember.’ That sounded more likely.

‘Did she give a reason for wanting to see you?’ I asked.

He fussed around with Rizla papers not replying.

‘Simon . . . ?’

‘She just wanted to spend time with me. Jesus, is that so hard for you to understand?’

‘How did you find out she was dead?’ I asked. ‘Did a friend tell you? Did they tell you about the slashes to the insides of her arms?’

I wanted to tip him into tears, because I know that tears dissolve into wet saltiness the defences around what we want to keep private.

‘Did they tell you she’d been there for five nights, all alone, in a stinking foul toilets building?’

Tears were welling up in his eyes, his voice quieter than usual. ‘That day you found me outside her flat. I waited, just round the corner, till you left. Then followed you on my bike.’

I dimly remembered the sound of a motorbike revving as I left for Hyde Park. I hadn’t taken any notice of it after that.

‘I waited, for hours, outside the park gates. It was snowing,’ continued Simon. ‘I was already frozen, remember? I saw you come out with that policewoman. I saw a blacked-out van. No one would tell me anything. I wasn’t family.’

His tears were flowing now; he made no effort to stop them. Like his art, I found him repellent.

‘Later that evening it was on the local news,’ he continued. ‘Just a short item, barely two minutes, about a young woman who had been found dead in a Hyde Park toilet. They showed the student picture of her. That’s how I discovered she was dead.’

He had to blow his nose and wipe his eyes and I judged it the right time to confront him.

‘So why did she really want to meet you?’

‘She said she was frightened and wanted me to help her.’

The tears had worked, as I knew they would; since that first night at boarding school when I broke down and admitted to my house mistress that it wasn’t home and Mum I missed, but Dad.

‘Did she tell you why she was frightened?’ I asked.

‘She said she’d been getting weird phone calls.’

‘Did she tell you who it was?’

He shook his head. And I suddenly wondered if his tears were genuine or like the proverbial crocodile’s, ruthless and without remorse.

‘Why do you think she chose you, Simon? Why not one of her other friends?’ I asked.

He had dried his tears now, closing up. ‘We were very close.’

Maybe he saw my scepticism because his tone became angrily wounded. ‘It’s easier for you, you’re her sister, you have a right to mourn her. People expect you to be in pieces. But I can’t even say she was my girlfriend.’

‘She didn’t phone you, did she?’ I asked.

He was silent.

‘She would never have exploited your feelings for her.’

He tried to light his joint but his fingers were trembling and he couldn’t get his lighter to work.

‘What really happened?’

‘I’d called her loads of times, but the answerphone was always on, or the line was engaged. But this time she answered it. She said she needed to get out of the flat. I suggested the park and she agreed. I didn’t know that the Serpentine Gallery was shut. I’d hoped we could go there. When we met up in the park she asked me if she could stay at my flat. Said she needed to be with someone twenty-four/seven.’ He paused, angry. ‘She said I’m the only person at the college who doesn’t have a part-time job.’

‘ “Twenty-four/seven?” ’

‘Round the clock. I can’t remember her exact expression. Jesus, does it matter?’ It did matter because it authenticated what he was telling me. ‘She was frightened and she asked for my help, because I was convenient for her.’

‘So why did you leave her?’

He seemed jolted by the question. ‘What?’

‘You said she wanted to stay with you, so why didn’t you let her?’

He finally managed to light the joint and took a drag. ‘OK, I told her what I felt for her. How much I loved her. Everything.’

‘You came on to her?’

‘It wasn’t like that.’

‘And she rejected you?’

‘Straight out. No wrapping the bullet. She said this time she didn’t think she could offer “with credibility” to be friends.’

His monstrous ego had sucked any pity for you, for your grief, into turning himself into the victim. But my anger was bigger than his ego.

‘She turned to you and you tried exploit her need for protection.’

‘She wanted to exploit me, it was that way round.’

‘So she still wanted to stay with you?’

He didn’t answer, but I could guess the next bit. ‘But with no strings attached?’

Still he was silent.

‘But you wouldn’t allow that, would you?’ I asked.

‘And be emasculated?’

For a moment I think I just stared at him, too astonished by his gross selfishness to respond. He thought I didn’t understand.

‘The only reason she wanted to be with me was because she was terrified witless. How do you think that made me feel?’

‘Terrified witless?’

‘I exaggerated, I meant—’

‘You said “frightened” before, now it’s
“terrified witless”
?’

‘OK. She said she thought a man had followed her into the park.’

I forced my voice into neutral. ‘Did she tell you who the man was?’

‘No. I searched for him. Even went scrapping around in the bushes, getting covered in snow and frozen dog turds. No one.’

‘You have to go to the police. Talk to an officer called DS Finborough. He’s at the Notting Hill police station, I’ll give you the number.’

‘There’s no point. She committed suicide. It was on the local news.’

‘But you were there. You know more than the TV, don’t you?’ I was talking as I would to a child, trying to coax, trying to hide my desperation. ‘She told you about the man following her. You
know
she was frightened.’

‘He was probably just a paranoid delusion. They said post-natal psychosis makes women go completely crazy.’

‘Who said that?’

‘Must have been the TV.’

He heard how lame that sounded. He met my eye, casually unconcerned. ‘OK. Dad found out for me. I hardly ever ask anything of him, so when I do . . .’

He trailed off, as if he couldn’t be bothered to complete the sentence. He took a step closer towards me and I smelled his aftershave, pungent in the overly warm flat. It brought into sharp sensory focus the first sight I’d had of him, sitting in the snow outside your flat, holding a bouquet, smelling of the same aftershave despite the cold air. I hadn’t taken it in then, but why the flowers and the aftershave when you’d only ever offered him the consolation prize of friendship? And now, when I knew you’d turned him down outright?

‘You had a bouquet when I found you waiting for her. You smelled of aftershave.’

‘So?’

‘You thought you’d try it again, didn’t you? Maybe she’d be desperate enough by then to accept your conditions.’

He shrugged, not finding fault with himself. Spoilt since the time he was born; spoiling him so that he’d turned into this man rather than the person he may once have had the potential to become.

I turned away from him, to see his enormous collage of babies’ faces making up a picture of a prison.

I flinched from it and went to the door.

As I opened it, I felt tears on my face before realising I was crying.

‘How could you have just left her there?’

‘It wasn’t my fault she killed herself.’

‘Is anything ever your fault?’

I am back with Mr Wright, the smell of Simon and his flat still pungent in my memory. I am grateful for the open window, the faint scent of newly mown grass reaching us from the park.

‘Did you tell the police what Simon had told you?’ Mr Wright asks.

‘Yes, a junior of DS Finborough’s. He was polite but I knew it would do no good. The man following her was her murderer but he could also have been a product of her supposed paranoia. The facts which pointed to murder also backed up the diagnosis of psychosis.’

Mr Wright looks at his watch, five fifteen. ‘Shall we call it a day?’

I nod. Somewhere at the back of my nose and throat linger the remembered particles of dope and aftershave and I am grateful that I can go outside and breathe the fresh air first hand.

I walk across St James’s Park then get a bus to the Coyote. I know you’re curious about how I’ve come to be working there. Initially I went to question the people you worked with, hoping someone could give me a clue about your death. But no one could help, they hadn’t seen you since the Sunday before you’d had Xavier and they didn’t know much about your life outside the Coyote. Meanwhile, my boss in the States had,
with great reluctance, Beatrice
, ‘let me go’ and I had no idea when I’d get another job. I knew my share of the mortgage for the New York apartment would soon eat up all my savings. I needed to earn something to live on, so I went back to ask Bettina for a job.