Sister: A Novel (9 page)

Where was I when the news was on? Still in the morgue with you? Putting Mum to bed? Emilio put his arm around his wife, his voice measured. ‘This is Tess’s older sister. She’s going through a terribly traumatic time and is . . . lashing out.’ He was explaining me away. Explaining you away.

‘For God’s sake, Tess was your lover. And you know me because I interrupted you getting your paintings out of her flat last night.’

His wife stared at him, her face suddenly looked fragile. He tightened his arm around her.

‘Tess had a crush on me. That’s all. It was just a fantasy. The fantasy got out of control. I wanted to make sure there was nothing in her flat that she’d fabricated about me.’

I knew what you wanted me to say. ‘Was the baby a fantasy too?’

His arm was still around his wife who was still and mute. ‘There is no baby.’

I’m sorry. And I’m sorry for this next bit too.

‘Mummy?’

A little girl was coming down the stairs. His wife took the child’s hand. ‘Bedtime, sweetie.’

I asked you once if he had children and you sounded astonished I’d even asked the question. ‘
Of course he doesn’t, Bee
.’ It was an ‘
Of course he doesn’t because if he did I wouldn’t be having sex with him, what do you take me for?
’ Your moral tightrope might be a lot wider than mine, but that’s your boundary and you wouldn’t have crossed it. Not after Dad. So that was what he’d been trying to hide at home.

Emilio slammed the door shut in my face, this time my strength was no match for his. I heard him pulling the chain across. ‘Leave me and my family alone.’ I was left on the doorstep shouting through the door. Somehow I’d become the obsessed madwoman on the doorstep, while he was part of a persecuted little family besieged in their beautiful period home. I know, the previous day I had used lines from a TV cop show, now I was going Hollywood. But real life, at least my real life, hadn’t given me any kind of model for what was happening.

I waited in their front garden. It grew dark and icily cold. In this stranger’s snowy garden, with nothing familiar around me, I had Christmas carols playing silently in my head. You always liked the jolly ones, ‘Ding Dong Merrily on High’; ‘We Three Kings from Orient Far
’
; ‘God Rest ye Merry Gentlemen’; singing about parties and presents and having a good time. I’ve always gone for the quiet reflective ones, ‘Silent Night’; ‘It Came Upon a Midnight Clear’. This time it was ‘In the deep midwinter/Frosty wind made moan/ Earth stood hard as iron/ Water like a stone.’ I’d never realised that it was a song of the bereaved.

Emilio’s wife came out of the house, interrupting my silent solo. A security light switched on illuminating her path towards me. I imagined she was coming to appease the madwoman in the garden before I started boiling up the bunnies.

‘We weren’t introduced earlier. I’m Cynthia.’

Maybe sang-froid is in the genes of the aristocracy. I found myself responding to this strange formal politeness, holding out my hand to take hers. ‘Beatrice Hemming.’

She squeezed my hand, rather than shake it. Her politeness was something warmer. ‘I’m so sorry about your sister. I have a younger sister too.’ Her sympathy seemed genuine. ‘Last night,’ she continued, ‘just after the news, he said he’d left his laptop at the college. It’s an expensive one, important for his work, and he’s a convincing liar. But I’d seen it in his study before dinner. I thought he was going off for sex.’ She was talking quickly, as if she needed to get this over and done with. ‘I’d known about it, you see, just hadn’t confronted him with it. And I’d thought it had stopped. Months ago. But it serves me right. I know that. I did the same to his first wife. I’d never properly realised before what she must have gone through.’

I didn’t reply, but found myself warming to her in this most unlikely of situations. The security light from the house flipped off, and we were in almost darkness together. It felt strangely intimate.

‘What happened to their baby?’ she asked. I’d never thought of him as anything other than your baby before. ‘He died,’ I said and in the darkness I thought her eyes had tears in them. I wondered if they were for your baby or for her failed marriage.

‘How old was he?’ she asked.

‘He died while he was being born so I don’t think he gets an age.’

It adds to the stillness in stillborn. I saw her hand move unconsciously to her tummy. I hadn’t noticed before that it was a little distended, maybe five months pregnant. She brusquely wiped her tears away. ‘This probably isn’t what you want to hear, but Emilio was working from home last Thursday, he usually does that one day a week. I was with him all day and then we went to a drinks party. Emilio’s weak, with no moral fibre to speak of, but he wouldn’t hurt anyone. Physically, at least.’

She turned to go, but I had a bomb to drop on her life first.

‘Tess’s baby had cystic fibrosis. It means Emilio must be a carrier.’

I might as well have punched her. ‘But our little girl, she’s fine.’

You and I have grown up with genetics, as other children grow up knowing about their dad’s football team. This wasn’t a great time for a crash course, but I tried.

‘The CF gene is recessive. That means that even if you and Emilio both carry it, you both also carry a healthy gene. So your baby would have a fifty-per-cent chance of having CF.’

‘And if I’m not a carrier of the CF gene?’

‘Then there’s no way your baby can have it.
Both
parents have to carry it.’

She nodded, still reeling.

‘It’s probably best to get checked out.’

‘Yes.’

I wanted to steady the shakiness in her voice. ‘Even in the worst case scenario, there’s a new therapy now.’

I felt her warmth in the snowy garden. ‘You’re very generous to be concerned.’

Emilio came out onto the doorstep and called her name. She didn’t move or acknowledge him in any way, looking intently at me. ‘I hope they find the person who killed your sister.’

She turned and walked slowly back to the house, triggering the security light. In its glare I could see Emilio putting an arm around her, but she shrugged him off, hugging her arms tightly around herself. He caught sight of me watching then turned away.

I waited in the wintry darkness till the lights in the house were switched off.

6

As I drove back to your flat along precariously icy roads, Todd phoned to say he was getting a flight to Heathrow, landing in the morning and the thought of him made the road feel a little more secure somehow.

The next morning, standing at the arrivals barrier, I didn’t recognise him when he walked through, my eyes still scanning for someone else - an idealised Todd? You? When I did see him he seemed slighter than I remembered him, a little smaller. The first thing I asked was if a letter from you had arrived, but there was nothing.

He had brought a case of clothes for me with everything he thought I’d need, including an appropriate outfit for your funeral and a prescription of sleeping pills from my US doctor. That first morning, and from then on, he made sure I ate properly. The description of him, of us, feels a little disconnected I know, but that’s how it felt.

He was my safety rope. But he wasn’t - yet - breaking my fall.

I have left out Todd’s arrival but told Mr Wright about my confrontation on Emilio’s doorstep and my time in the garden with his wife.

‘I knew Emilio had a motive for killing Tess - losing his job and possibly his marriage. Now I also knew that he was capable of living with a lie. And of twisting the truth into the shape he wanted. Even in front of me, her sister, he had claimed Xavier was no more than the fantasy of an obsessed student.’

‘And Mrs Codi, did you believe her alibi for him?’

‘At the time I did. I liked her. But later, I thought she might have chosen to lie for him to protect her little girl and unborn baby. I thought that her children came first with her and for their sake she wouldn’t want him in prison; and that her little girl was the reason she hadn’t left Emilio when she’d discovered he’d been unfaithful.’

Mr Wright looks down at a file in front of him. ‘You didn’t tell the police about this encounter?’

The file must be the police log of my calls.

‘No. Two days later, DS Finborough told me that Emilio Codi had made a formal complaint about me to his boss, Detective Inspector Haines.’

‘What did you think his reason was?’ asks Mr Wright.

‘I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t think about it at the time because in that same phone call DS Finborough said that they’d got the post-mortem results back. I was surprised they’d done it so quickly but he told me that they always try to, so that the family can have a funeral.’

I’m sorry that your body had to be cut again. The Coroner requested it and we had no say in it. But I don’t think you mind. You’ve always been a pragmatist about death, having no sentiment for the body left behind. When Leo died Mum and I hugged his dead body to us, cheating ourselves with the illusion that we were still hugging Leo. At just six years old you walked away. I pitied you for your courage.

I, on the other hand, have always been reverential. When we found Thumbelina dead in her hutch, you prodded her with slender five-year-old fingers to discover what death felt like, even as you wept; while I wrapped her in a silk scarf believing with all the solemnity of a ten-year-old that a dead body is precious. I can hear you laughing at me for talking about a rabbit - the point is I’ve always thought a body is more than a vessel for the soul.

But the night you were found I had a powerful sense of you leaving your body and vortex-like sucking up all that you are with you. You were trailing clouds of glory in the opposite direction. Maybe the image was prompted by your Chagall print in the kitchen, those ethereal people rising heavenwards, but whatever caused it, I knew that your body no longer held any part of you.

Mr Wright is looking at me and I wonder how long I have been silent.

‘What was your reaction to the post-mortem?’ he asks.

‘Strangely, I didn’t mind about what happened to her body,’ I say, deciding to keep Chagall and trailing clouds of glory in reverse to myself. But I will confide in him a little. ‘A child’s body is so much a part of who they are; maybe because we can hold a little boy in our arms. We can hold the whole of him. But when we grow too large to be held our body no longer defines us.’

‘When I asked you what your reaction was to the post-mortem, I meant whether you believed its findings.’

I am hotly embarrassed but thankful that I at least kept Chagall to myself. His face softens as he looks at me. ‘I’m glad I wasn’t clear.’

I still feel heatedly ridiculous but smile back at him, a tentative first step to laughing at myself. And I think I knew, really, that he wanted me to talk about its findings. But just as I’d chosen to ask DS Finborough why the post-mortem had been done so quickly, with Mr Wright I was again putting off its results. Now I must address it.

‘Later that day DS Finborough came round to the flat with the post-mortem report, to give me the results.’

He’d said he’d rather do it in person and I thought it kind of him.

From your sitting-room window I watched DS Finborough coming down the steep basement steps, and I wondered if he was walking slowly because they were slippery with ice or because he was reluctant to have this meeting. Behind him was WPC Vernon, her sensible shoes giving her a good grip, her gloved hand holding the railing just in case; a sensible woman who had children at home to look after that evening.

DS Finborough came into your sitting room but didn’t sit down or take off his coat. I’d tried to bleed your radiators but your flat was still uncomfortably cold.

‘I’m sure you’ll be relieved to know that Tess’s body showed no evidence of any sexual assault.’

That you had been raped had been an unarticulated anxiety, corrosively hideous at the edge of my imagining. I felt relief as a physical force.

DS Finborough continued, ‘We know for definite now that she died on Thursday twenty-third of January.’

It confirmed what I already knew, that you had never made it out of the park after seeing Simon.

‘The post-mortem shows that Tess died because of bleeding from the lacerations to her arms,’ continued DS Finborough. ‘There are no signs of any struggle. There’s no reason to believe that anyone else is involved.’

It took a moment for the meaning of his words to make sense, as if I was translating a foreign language into my own.

‘The Coroner has returned a verdict of suicide,’ he said.

‘No. Tess wouldn’t kill herself.’

DS Finborough’s face was kind. ‘Under normal circumstances I’m sure you’re right, but these weren’t normal circumstances, were they? Tess was suffering not only grief but also post-natal—’

I interrupted him, angry that he dared tell me about you when he didn’t know you. ‘Have you ever watched someone die from cystic fibrosis?’ I asked. He shook his head, and was going to say something, but I headed him off. ‘We watched our brother struggling to breathe and we couldn’t help him. He tried so hard to live, but he drowned in his own fluid and there was nothing we could do. When you’ve watched someone you love fight for life, that hard, you value it too highly to ever throw it away.’

‘As I said, in normal circumstances, I’m sure—’

‘In
any
circumstances.’

My emotional assault had not dented his certainty. I would have to convince him with logic; muscular, masculine argument. ‘Surely there must be a connection to the threatening phone calls she was getting?’

‘Her psychiatrist told us that they were most likely all in her head.’

I was astonished. ‘What?’

‘He’s told us that she was suffering from post-natal psychosis.’

‘The phone calls were delusional and my sister was mad? Is that it now?’

‘Beatrice . . .’

‘You told me before she was suffering from post-natal depression. Why has that suddenly changed to psychosis?’

Against my hectoring anger, his tone was so measured. ‘From the evidence that seems now to be the most probable.’

‘But Amias said the phone calls were real, when he reported her missing, didn’t he?’

‘But he was never actually there when she got one of the phone calls.’

I thought about telling him that your phone was unplugged when I arrived. But that didn’t prove anything. The calls could still have been delusional.

‘Tess’s psychiatrist has told us that symptoms of post-natal psychosis include delusions and paranoia,’ DS Finborough continued. ‘Sadly, many of those women suffering also have thoughts of harming themselves and tragically some actually do.’

‘But Tess didn’t.’

‘A knife was found next to her body, Beatrice.’

‘You think she carried a knife now?’

‘It was a kitchen one. And it had her fingerprints on it.’

‘What kind of kitchen knife?’

I’m not sure why I asked, maybe some dimly remembered seminar on the questioner taking authority. There was a moment of hesitation before he replied, ‘A Sabatier five-inch boning knife.’

But I only heard the word ‘Sabatier’, maybe because it distracted me from the ugly violence of the rest of the description. Or maybe the word ‘Sabatier’ struck me because it was so absurd to think you would own one.

‘Tess couldn’t possibly have afforded a Sabatier knife.’

Was this conversation degenerating into farce? Bathos?

‘Maybe she got it from a friend,’ suggested DS Finborough. ‘Or it was a gift from someone.’

‘She would have told me.’

Sympathy tempered his look of disbelief. I wanted to make him understand that we shared the details of our lives, because they were the threads that braided us so closely together. And you would have been certain to tell me about a Sabatier knife, because it would have had the rare value of being a detail in your life which tied directly into mine - our lives sharing top-end kitchenware.

‘We told each other the little things, that’s what made us so close I think, all the small things and she’d have known I’d want to hear about a Sabatier knife.’

No, I know, it didn’t sound convincing.

DS Finborough’s voice was sympathetic but firm, and I briefly wondered if, like parents, the police believed in setting parameters. ‘I understand how hard this must be for you to accept. And I understand why you need to blame someone for her death, but—’

I interrupted with my certainty about you. ‘I’ve known her since she was born. I know her better than anyone else possibly could. And she would never have killed herself.’

He looked at me with compassion; he didn’t like doing this. ‘You didn’t know when her baby died, did you?’

I couldn’t answer him, winded by his punch to a part of me already bruised and fragile. He’d told me once before, indirectly, that we weren’t close, but then it came with the upside that you had run off somewhere without telling me. Not being close had meant you were still alive. But this time there was no huge pay-off.

‘She bought airmail stamps, just before she died, didn’t she? From the post office on Exhibition Road. So she must have written to me.’

‘Has a letter from her arrived?’

I’d asked a neighbour to go in and check the apartment daily. I’d phoned our local post office in New York and demanded they search. But there was nothing; and it would surely have arrived by now.

‘Maybe she meant to write to me, but was prevented.’

I heard how weak it sounded. DS Finborough was looking at me with sympathy.

‘I think Tess was going through hell after her baby died,’ he said. ‘And it isn’t a place anyone could join her. Even you.’

I went through to the kitchen, ‘stropping off’ as Mum used to call it, but it wasn’t a strop, more of an absolute physical denial of what he was saying. A few minutes later I heard the front door shut. They didn’t know that words could seep through your badly fitting windows.

WPC Vernon’s voice was quiet. ‘Wasn’t that a little . . . ?’ She trailed off, or maybe I just couldn’t hear.

Then DS Finborough’s voice, sounding sad, I thought. ‘The sooner she accepts the truth, the sooner she’ll realise she’s not to blame.’

But I knew the truth, as I know it now: we love each other; we are close; you would never have ended your own life.

A minute or so later, WPC Vernon came back down the steps, carrying your knapsack.

‘I’m sorry, Beatrice. I meant to give you this.’

I opened the knapsack. Inside was just your wallet with your library card, your travel card and your student ID card - membership badges of a society with libraries and public transport and colleges for studying art; not a society in which a twenty-one-year-old can be murdered in a derelict toilets building and left for five days before being dismissed as a suicide case.