Read Sister: A Novel Online

Authors: Rosamund Lupton

Tags: #Murder, #Investigation, #Mystery & Detective, #Murder - Investigation, #Death, #Fiction, #Mystery Fiction, #Sisters, #Suspense Fiction, #Women Sleuths, #Sisters - Death, #Crime, #Suspense, #General

Sister: A Novel (8 page)

BOOK: Sister: A Novel
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‘It’s not a day job, it’s an evening job.’

There was something brittle behind your humour. You had seen the hidden jibe; my lack of faith in your future as an artist.

Well it’s more than a day or evening job for me, it’s the only job I have. After three weeks of compassionate leave my boss’s sympathy ran out. I had to tell him
one way or the other, Beatrice
what I was going to do, so by staying in London I resigned. That makes it sound like I’m an easy-going person who can respond to situations in a flexible way, trading in senior manager of a corporate identity design company for part-time barmaid with barely a break in my stride. But you know that I am nothing like that. And my New York job with its regular salary and pension scheme and orderly hours was my last foothold on a life that was predictable and safe. Surprisingly, I enjoy working at the Coyote.

The walking helps and after forty minutes my breathing slows; my heartbeat returns to a recognisable rhythm. I finally take notice of you telling me I should at least have phoned Dad. But I thought his new bride would comfort him far better than me. Yes, they’d been married eight years, but I still thought of her as a new bride - fresh and white and sparkling with her youth and fake diamond tiara, untainted by loss. Little wonder Dad chose her over us.

I reach the Coyote and see Bettina has put up the green awning and is laying the old wooden tables outside. She welcomes me by opening her arms, a hug waiting for me to walk into. A few months ago, I would have been repelled. Fortunately, I have become a little less bigot-touchy. We hug tightly and I am grateful for her physicality. I finally stop shivering.

She looks at me with concern. ‘Are you feeling up to working?’

‘I’m fine, really.’

‘We watched it on the news. They said the trial would be in the summer?’

‘Yes.’

‘When do you reckon I’ll get my computer back?’ she asks, smiling. ‘My writing’s illegible, no one can read their menus.’

The police took her computer, knowing that you often used it, to see if there was anything on it that could help with their investigation. She does have a truly beautiful smile and it always overwhelms me. She puts her arm around me to escort me inside and I realise she was deliberately waiting for me.

I do my shift, still feeling nauseous and headachy, but if anyone notices my quietness no one comments. I was always good at mental maths so that side of barmaiding comes easily, but the banter with the customers does not. Fortunately, Bettina can talk for two and I rely on her this evening, as I often used to on you. The customers are all regulars and have the same courtesy towards me as the staff, not asking me questions or commenting on what is happening. Tact is catching.

By the time I get home it’s late and, physically wrung out by the day, I long to sleep. Fortunately, only three stalwart reporters remain. Maybe they’re freelancers in need of cash. No longer part of a pack, they don’t shout out questions or force lenses in my face. Instead it’s more of a cocktail party type of scenario, where they are at least conscious that I may not want to talk to them.

‘Miss Hemming?’

Yesterday it was ‘Beatrice’ and I resented the false intimacy. (Or ‘Arabella’ from those who’d been too sloppy to do their homework.) The woman reporter continues, at a polite distance. ‘Can I ask you some questions?’ It’s the reporter I heard outside the kitchen window on Sunday evening talking on her mobile.

‘Wouldn’t you rather be at home reading bedtime stories?’

She is visibly startled.

‘I was eavesdropping.’

‘My son’s with his aunt tonight. And unfortunately I don’t get paid for reading bedtime stories. Is there anything you’d like people to know about your sister?’

‘She’d bought her baby finger-paints.’

I’m not sure what made me say that. Maybe because for the first time you weren’t just living in the present, but planning for the future. Understandably the reporter wants something else. She waits.

I try to summarise you into a sentence. I think of your qualities but in my head it starts turning into a personal ad: ‘Beautiful, talented, 21-year-old, popular and fun-loving seeks . . .’ I hear you laugh. I left out good sense of humour but in your case that’s entirely true. I think of why people love you. But as I list those reasons I wobble perilously close to an obituary and you’re too young for that. An older male reporter, silent until now, barges in. ‘Is it true she was expelled from school?’

‘Yes. She hated rules, especially ridiculous ones.’

He scribbles and I continue my quest for an encapsulating sentence about you. How many sub-clauses can a single sentence hold?

‘Miss Hemming?’

I meet her eye. ‘She should be here. Now. Alive.’

My six-word summary of you.

I go inside the flat, close the door, and hear you telling me that I was too harsh on Dad earlier. You’re right, but I was still so angry with him then. You were too young to take in what Mum and Leo went through when he left, just three months before Leo died. I knew, rationally, that it was the cystic fibrosis that made him leave; made Leo so ill that he couldn’t bear to look at him; made Mum so tense that her heart knotted into a tight little ball that could barely pump the blood around her body let alone beat for anyone else. So I knew that rationally Dad had his reasons. But he had children and so I thought there were no reasons. (Yes,
had
, because two of his children were dead and the third was no longer a child.)

You believed him when he said he’d be back. I was five years older but no wiser and for years I had a fantasy of a happy-ever-after ending. The first night I spent at university my fantasy ended, because I thought a happy-ever-after was pointless. Because with my father I didn’t want to hope for a happy ending but to have had a happy beginning. I wanted to have been looked after by Daddy in childhood, not finding resolution with my father as an adult. But I’m not so sure of that now.

Outside your window, I see the reporters have all gone. Pudding bends her purring body around my ankles, blackmailing me into giving her more food. When I’ve fed her, I fill a watering can and go out of the kitchen door.

‘This is your backyard?’ I asked on my first visit to your flat, astonished that you hadn’t meant ‘backyard’ in the American sense of a garden, but in the literal one of a few feet of rubble-strewn earth and a couple of wheelie bins. You smiled. ‘It’ll be beautiful, Bee, just wait.’

You must have worked like a Trojan. All the stones cleared, the earth dug through and planted. You’ve always been passionate about gardening, haven’t you? I remember when you were tiny you’d trail Mum around the garden with your child-sized, brightly painted trowel and your special gardening apron. But I never liked it. It wasn’t the long wait between seed and resulting plant that I minded about (you did, hotly impatient), it was that when a plant finally flowered it was over too quickly. Plants were too ephemeral and transient. I preferred collecting china ornaments, solid and dependable inanimate objects that wouldn’t change or die the following day.

But since staying in your flat I have really tried, I promise, to look after this little patch of garden outside the back door. (Fortunately, Amias is in charge of your flowerpot garden of Babylon down the steps to your flat at the front.) I’ve watered the plants out here every day, even adding flower food. No, I’m not absolutely sure why - maybe because I think it matters to you; maybe because I want to nurture your garden because I didn’t nurture you? Well, whatever the motivation, I’m afraid I have failed abysmally. All the plants out here are dead. Their stalks are brown and the few remaining leaves desiccated and crumbling. Nothing is growing out of the bare patches of earth. I empty the last drops from the watering can. Why do I carry on this pointless task of watering dead plants and bare earth?

‘It’ll be beautiful, Bee, just wait.’

I’ll refill the watering can and wait a while longer.

5

Wednesday

I arrive at the Criminal Prosecution Service offices and notice Miss Crush Secretary staring at me. Actually, scrutinising seems more accurate. I sense that she is assessing me as a rival. Mr Wright hurries in, briefcase in one hand, newspaper in the other. He smiles at me openly and warmly; he hasn’t yet made the switch from home life to office. Now I know that Miss Crush Secretary is definitely assessing me as a rival because when Mr Wright smiles at me her look becomes openly hostile. Mr Wright is oblivious. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting. Come through.’ Mentally he’s still knotting his tie. I follow him into his office and he closes the door. I feel his secretary’s eyes the other side, still watching him.

‘Were you all right last night?’ he asks. ‘I know this must be harrowing.’

Before you died the adjectives about my life were second league: ‘stressful’; ‘upsetting’; ‘distressing’; at the worst ‘deeply sad’. Now I have the big gun words - ‘harrowing’, ‘traumatic’, ‘devastating’ - as part of my thesaurus of self.

‘We’d got to you finding someone in Tess’s bedroom?’

‘Yes.’

His mental tie is knotted now, and we resume business. He reads me back my own words, ‘“What the fuck are you doing?”’

The man turned. Despite the freezing flat, his forehead had a film of sweat. There was a moment before he spoke. His Italian accent was, intentionally or not, flirtatious. ‘My name is Emilio Codi. I’m sorry if I startled you.’ But I’d known immediately who he was. Did I sense threat because of the circumstances, because I suspected him of killing you - or would I have found him threatening even if that wasn’t the case? Because unlike you, I find Latinate sexuality - that brash masculinity of hard jawline and swarthy physique - menacing rather than attractive.

‘Do you know that she’s dead?’ I asked, and the words sounded ridiculous; an over-the-top stagy piece of dialogue that I didn’t know how to deliver. Then I remembered your colourless face.

‘Yes. I saw it on the local news. A terrible, terrible tragedy.’ His default voice mode was charm, however inappropriate, and I thought that to charm can also mean to entrap. ‘I just came to get my things. I know it seems like indecent haste—’

I interrupted him, ‘Do you know who I am?’

‘A friend, I presume.’

‘Her sister.’

‘I’m sorry. I’m intruding.’

He couldn’t hide the adrenaline in his voice. He started to walk towards the door but I blocked his path.

‘Did you kill her?’

I know, pretty blunt, but then this wasn’t a carefully crafted Agatha Christie moment.

‘You’re obviously very upset—’ he replied, but I cut him off.

‘You tried to make her have an abortion. Did you want her out of the way too?’

He put down what he was carrying and I saw they were canvasses. ‘You’re not being rational, and that’s understandable, but—’

‘Get out! Get the fuck out!’

I yelled my ugly grief at him, yelling over and over, still yelling when he’d gone. Amias came hurrying in through the open front door, bleary from sleep. ‘I heard shouting.’ In the silence he looked at my face. He knew without me saying anything. His body caved and then he turned away, not wanting me to witness his grief.

The phone rang and I let the answerphone get it. ‘Hi, it’s Tess.’

For a moment the rules of reality had been broken, you were alive. I grabbed the receiver.

‘Darling? Are you there?’ asked Todd. What I had heard earlier was, of course, just your answerphone greeting. ‘Beatrice? Have you picked up?’

‘She was found in a public lavatory. She’d been there for five days. All alone.’

There was a pause; the information not squaring with his predicted scenario. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

Todd was my safety rope. That was why I’d chosen him. Whatever happened I’d have him to hold on to.

I looked at the pile of canvasses Emilio had left behind. They were all nudes of you. You’ve never had my shyness that way. He must have painted them. In each of the paintings your face was turned away.

‘The next morning you went to DS Finborough with your concerns?’ Mr Wright asks.

‘Yes. He said that Emilio collecting his paintings was extremely insensitive, but not necessarily anything more than that. He told me the coroner would be asking for a post-mortem and we should wait for the results before making any accusations or reaching any conclusions.’

His language was so measured, so controlled. It infuriated me. Maybe in my volatile state I was jealous of his balance.

‘I thought that DS Finborough would at least ask Emilio what he was doing the day she was killed. He told me that until the results of the post-mortem they wouldn’t know when Tess had died.’

Miss Crush Secretary comes in with mineral water and I am glad of the interruption. Oddly dehydrated, I gulp down the water and notice first her pearly pink nail varnish and then a wedding ring on her finger. Why was it that I only checked Mr Wright’s left hand yesterday? I feel sad for Mr Crush Secretary who, while not in any danger of imminent sexual betrayal, is emotionally cuckolded 9.00 to 5.30 on a daily basis. Mr Wright smiles at her. ‘Thanks, Stephanie.’ His smile is innocent of any overtone, but its very openness is alluring and can be misinterpreted. I wait for her to leave.

‘So I went to see Emilio Codi myself.’

I go back into that precipitous past; my grip a little firmer because of nail varnish and wedding rings.

I left the police station, anger sparking through exhaustion. DS Finborough had said that they didn’t yet know when you had died, but I knew. It was Thursday. You left Simon by the lido in Hyde Park on that day as he’d said, but you never got out of the park. Nothing else made any sense.

I phoned your art college and a secretary with a German accent tartly told me Emilio was sorting out coursework at home. But when I told her I was your sister, she sweetened and gave me his address.

As I drove there I remembered our conversation about where Emilio lives.

‘I’ve no idea. We only ever meet at the college or at my flat.’

‘So what’s he trying to hide?’

‘It just doesn’t crop up, that’s all.’

‘I expect he lives somewhere like Hoxton. Trendily middle class, but with the chic edge of poor people around.’

‘You really loathe him, don’t you?’

‘With just enough graffiti to keep the urban jungle look. I reckon people like him go out at night with spray paints just so that the area stays trendily tagged and doesn’t degenerate into middle-class middle-income nappy valley.’

‘What’s he done to deserve this?’

‘Oh I don’t know. Perhaps having sex with my little sister, getting her pregnant and then abnegating all responsibility.’

‘You make me sound like I’m completely incompetent at running my own life.’

I let your words hang in the wire between our two phones. I could hear the chuckle in your voice. ‘You left out him being my tutor and abusing his position of authority.’

You never could take my seriousness seriously.

Well I found out where he lives, and it isn’t Hoxton or Brixton or any of those places where the trendy middle classes arrive once there’s a café with skinny lattes. It’s Richmond; beautiful, sensible Richmond. And his house is not a Richard Rogers type of building but a Queen Anne gem whose large front garden alone must be worth a street or two in Peckham. I walked through his impressively long front garden and knocked on his original period doorknocker.

You can’t believe I went through with it, can you? My actions seem extreme, but new raw grief strips away logic and moderation. Emilio opened the door and I thought the adjectives which apply to him are stock phrases in romantic fiction: he is devilishly handsome; he has animal magnetism; adjectives that have threat embedded in them.

‘Did you kill her?’ I asked. ‘You didn’t answer my question last time.’

He tried to close the door on me, but I held it open. I had never used physical force against a man before and I was surprisingly strong. All those meticulously kept meetings with a personal trainer had had a purpose after all.

‘She told her landlord she was getting frightening phone calls. Was that you?’ I asked.

Then I heard a woman’s voice in the hallway behind him, ‘Emilio?’ His wife joined him at the doorway. I still have our emails about her.

From: [email protected]
To: Beatrice Hemming’s iPhone
Hi Bee, I asked him about her, before any of this started, and he told me that they married in haste and are at leisure together but not repenting. They enjoy each other’s company but the physical relationship between them stopped years ago. Neither of them is jealous of the other. Happy now?
T XXXX
From: Beatrice Hemming’s iPhone
To: [email protected]
Dearest T,
How convenient for him. I imagine she’s also forty-something and as nature’s far more cruel to women than men what other choice is she left with? Not happy. lol
Bee
PS Why are you using ‘Coreyshand’ as a typeface for emails? It’s not easy to read.
From: [email protected]
To: Beatrice Hemming’s iPhone
Dearest Bee, You walk down your straight and narrow moral tightrope, not even teetering, while I fall off at the first small wobble. But I do believe him. There’s no reason why anyone should get hurt.
T XXXX
PS I thought it was a friendly kind of typeface. PPS Did you know lol means laughing out loud?
From: Beatrice Hemming’s iPhone
To: [email protected]
Dear Tess
You’re surely not that naïve? Wise up.
Lol
Bee
(From me it means lots of love)
From: [email protected]
To: Beatrice Hemming’s iPhone
‘Wise up’? You’ll be telling me next to seek closure. You need to leave the states and come home. Have a nice day hon, T. X

I had imagined a forty-something woman whose looks had unfairly faded while her husband’s had not. I had imagined parity at twenty-five, but a marriage of unequals fifteen years later. But the woman in the hall was no more than thirty. She has unnervingly pale-blue eyes.

‘Emilio? What’s going on?’

Her voice was cut-lead-glass aristocratic; the house must be hers. I didn’t look at her, directing my question at Emilio. ‘Where were you last Thursday, the twenty-third of January, the day my sister was murdered?’

Emilio turned to his wife. ‘One of my students, Tess Hemming. She was on the local news last night, remember?’

BOOK: Sister: A Novel
2.36Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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