Sister: A Novel (18 page)

I get outside and tilt my head up towards the pale-blue sky, to stop the tears from spilling out. I remember the letter you wrote to me about Xavier, the one that in your story I haven’t yet read. I think of you walking home from the hospital through the driving rain. I think of you looking up at the black pitiless sky. I think of you yelling ‘Give him back to me.’ And that no one answered you.

I think of you phoning me.

11

Saturday

There’s hardly anyone up and about at 8.30 on a Saturday morning, the pavements virtually deserted. When I arrive at the CPS building there’s only one receptionist at the front desk, informally dressed, and when I get into the lift it’s empty. I go up to the third floor. There’s no Mrs Crush Secretary here today so I walk straight past the reception and into Mr Wright’s office.

I see that he’s lined up coffee and mineral water for me.

‘You’re sure you’re up to this?’ he asks.

‘Absolutely. I feel fine now.’

He sets the tape whirring. But he is looking at me with concern and I think that, since yesterday, he sees me as somebody who is far more fragile than he’d realised.

‘Can we start with the post-mortem report? You’d asked for a copy.’

‘Yes. Two days later it arrived in the post.’

Mr Wright has a copy of the post-mortem in front of him with lines highlighted in yellow pen. I know which the yellow lines will be and I’ll give you them in a moment but first there is a line that won’t be yellow but is highlighted in my memory. At the very beginning of your post-mortem report the pathologist makes a promise ‘
on soul and conscience
’ to tell the truth. Your body wasn’t treated with cold scientific analysis; it was afforded an archaic and more deeply human approach.

Department of Forensic Medicine, Chelsea & Westminster Hospital, London

I Rosemary Didcott, Bachelor of Medicine, hereby certify on soul and conscience that on the 30th January two thousand and ten at the Chelsea and Westminster hospital Mortuary and at the instance of the Coroner, Mr Paul Lewis-Stevens, I dissected the body of Tess Hemming (21), of 35 Chepstow Road, London, the body being identified to me by Detective Sergeant Finborough of the London Metropolitan Police and the following is a true report.

This was the body of a white Caucasian female of slim build and measuring 5 feet 7 inches in height. There was evidence of having given birth two days before death occurred.

There were old scars, dating from childhood, on the right knee and right elbow.

On the right wrist and forearm was a recent laceration ten centimetres in length and four centimetres in depth bisecting the interosseous muscle and damaging the radial artery. On the left wrist and forearm there was a smaller laceration of five centimetres in length and two centi metres in depth and a larger laceration of six centimetres in length and four centimetres in depth, which severed the ulnar artery. The wounds are consistent with the five-inch boning knife that was found with the body.

I could find no evidence of any other bruising or scars or marks of any kind.

There was no evidence of recent sexual intercourse.

Samples of blood and body tissues were collected and referred to the public analyst.

I estimate that this young woman died six days before the dissection, on the 23rd of January.

From this dissection I am of the opinion that this young woman died of exsanguination from the lacerations of arteries in her wrists and forearms.

London 30 January 2010.

I must have read that document a hundred times but ‘boning knife’ remains as vicious as it did the first time, no mention of Sabatier to blunt it a little with domesticity.

‘Were the results from the public analyst included?’ asks Mr Wright. (These are the results of the blood and tissue tests, which were done after the initial post-mortem at a different laboratory.)

‘Yes, they were attached at the back and had the previous day’s date on them, so they’d only just come through. But I couldn’t understand them. They were in scientific jargon, not written to be understood by a layperson. Fortunately, I have a friend who’s a doctor.’

‘Christina Settle?’

‘Yes.’

‘I have a witness statement from her.’

I realise there must be scores of people working on your case, taking concurrent statements.

I lost contact with my old friends from school and university when I went to the States. But since your death old friends have been phoning and writing; ‘rallying round’ as Mum calls it. Among the rallyers was Christina Settle, who’s a doctor now at Charing Cross Hospital. (She’s told me that over half my Nuffield biology A level set are pursuing a scientific career of some sort.) Anyhow, Christina wrote a warm letter of condolence, in exactly the same perfect italic writing that she had at school, ending, as many of the letters did, with ‘if there’s anything at all I can do to help, please let me know’. I decided to take her up on her offer and phoned her.

Christina listened attentively to my bizarre request. She said she was only a senior house officer and in paediatrics not pathology, so she wasn’t qualified to interpret the test results. I thought she didn’t want to get involved but at the end of our phone call she asked me to fax her over the report. Two days later she phoned and asked if I’d like to meet her for a drink. She’d got a pathologist friend of a friend to go over the report with her.

When I told Todd I was meeting Christina he was relieved, thinking I was venturing back into normal life by looking up old friends.

I walked into the bistro Christina had chosen and was punched by the normal world at full volume. I hadn’t been in a public place since you’d died and the loud voices and laughter made me feel vulnerable. Then I saw Christina waving at me and was reassured partly because she looks almost exactly as she did at school, same pretty dark hair, same unflattering thick glasses, and partly because she’d found a booth for us, closeted away from the rest of the bistro. (Christina is still good at bagging things first.) I thought she wouldn’t have remembered you very well - after all, she was in sixth form with me when you started at boarding school - but she was adamant that she did. ‘Vividly, actually. Even at eleven she was too cool for school.’

‘I’m not sure that “cool” is how I’d—’

‘Oh I didn’t mean it in a bad way, not cold or aloof or anything. That was the extraordinary thing. Why I remember her so well I think. She smiled all the time; a cool kid who laughed and smiled. I’d never seen that combination in someone before.’ She paused, her voice a little hesitant. ‘She must have been a hard act to compete with . . . ?’

I didn’t know if it was nosiness or concern, but decided to get to the purpose of our meeting. ‘Can you tell me what the report means?’

She got the report and a notebook out of her briefcase. As she did so, I saw a sachet of Calpol and a baby’s cloth book. Christina’s glasses and handwriting might not have changed, but her life clearly had. She looked down at her notebook. ‘James, the friend of a friend I told you about on the phone, is a senior pathologist so he knows his stuff. But he’s anxious about getting involved, pathologists are being sued all the time and minced by the media. He can’t be quoted.’

‘Of course.’

‘You did English, chemistry and biology didn’t you, Hemms?’

That old nickname, dusty with age; it took a moment to connect it to me. ‘Yes.’

‘Any biochemistry since then?’

‘No, I did an English degree, actually.’

‘I’ll translate into layman’s terms then. Putting it very simply, Tess had three drugs in her body when she died.’

She didn’t see my reaction, looking down at her notebook. But I was stunned.

‘What were the drugs?’

‘One was Cabergoline, which stops breast milk being produced.’

Simon had told me about that drug and again the fact of it gave me a glimpse into something so painful that I couldn’t look any further; I interrupted my own thoughts. ‘And the others?’

‘One was a sedative. She’d taken a fairly large amount. But because it was a few days before Tess was found and a sample of her blood was taken—’ She broke off, upset, and gathered herself before continuing. ‘What I mean is, because of the time delay it’s hard to be accurate about the actual amount of sedative. James said all he could offer was educated guesswork.’

‘And . . . ?’

‘She had taken far more than would have been indicated as a normal dose. He thought that it wasn’t high enough to kill her, but it would have made her very sleepy.’

So that was why there had been no sign of a struggle, he’d doped you first. Did you realise it too late? Christina read out more of her perfect italic writing, ‘The third drug is phenylcyclohexylpiperidine, PCP for short. It’s a powerful hallucinogenic, developed in the fifties as an anaesthetic but stopped when patients experienced psychotic reactions.’

I was startled into parrotlike repetition, ‘Hallucinogenic?’

Christina thought I didn’t understand, her voice patient. ‘It means the drug causes hallucinations, in lay terms “trips”. It’s like LSD but more dangerous. Again James says it’s hard to be certain how much she’d taken and how long before she died, because of the delay in finding her. It’s also complicated because the body stores this drug in muscle and fatty tissues at full psychoactive potential so it can continue to have an effect, even after the person has stopped taking it.’

For a moment I just heard scientific babble until it settled into something I could understand. ‘This drug meant she would have been having hallucinations in the days before she died?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’

So Dr Nichols had been right after all; but your hallucinations weren’t because of puerperal psychosis, but a hallucinogenic drug.

‘He planned it all. He sent her out of her mind first.’

‘Beatrice . . . ?’

‘He made her mad, made everyone think she was mad and then he drugged her before he murdered her.’

Christina’s brown eyes looked enormous through the lenses of her pebble glasses, their sympathetic expression magnified. ‘When I think about how much I love my own baby, well, I can’t imagine what I’d do in Tess’s place.’

‘Suicide wasn’t an option to her, even if she’d wanted to take it. She simply wouldn’t have been able to. Not after Leo. And she never touched drugs.’

There was a silence between us and the inappropriate noise of the bar around us broke into the booth.

‘You knew her best, Hemms.’

‘Yes.’

She smiled at me; a gesture of capitulation to my certainty, which carried a blood-tied weight.

‘I really appreciate all your help, Christina.’

She was the first person to have helped me in a practical way. Without her I wouldn’t have known about the sedative and the hallucinogenic. But I was grateful to her too for respecting my view enough to withhold her own. Six years of being in the same class as emerging adolescents and I doubt we even touched, but outside the door of the restaurant we hugged tightly goodbye.

‘Did she tell you any more about PCP?’ Mr Wright asks.

‘No, but it was relatively simple to research it on the net. I found out that it causes behavioural toxicity, making the victim paranoid and giving them frightening visions.’

Did you realise you were being mentally tortured? If not, what did you think was happening to you?

‘It’s especially destructive for people already suffering psychological trauma.’

He used your grief against you, knowing that it would make the effect of the drug even worse.

‘There were sites accusing the US military of using PCP at Abu Ghraib and in rendition cases. It was clear that the trips it caused were terrifying.’

What was worse for you: the trips? Or thinking that you were going mad?

‘And you told the police?’ asks Mr Wright.

‘Yes, I left a message for DS Finborough. It was late by then, way past office hours. He phoned back the next morning to say that he’d meet me.’