Sister: A Novel (19 page)

‘I can’t believe you’re making the poor man come here again, darling.’ Todd was making tea and laying out biscuits as if they could compensate DS Finborough for the inconvenience I’d put him to.

‘He needs to know about the drugs.’

‘The police will already know about them, darling.’

‘They can’t do.’

Todd added bourbons to the custard creams on the plate, arranging them in two neat yellow and brown rows, his annoyance expressed through the symmetry of biscuits.

‘Yes. They can. And they will have reached exactly the same conclusion as me.’

He turned away, taking the boiling pan of water off the hob. Last night he had been silent when I told him about the drugs, asking instead why I hadn’t told him the real purpose of meeting Christina.

‘I can’t believe your sister didn’t even own a kettle.’

The doorbell rang.

Todd greeted DS Finborough then left to collect Mum. The plan was for Mum and I to pack up your things together. I think he hoped that packing away your belongings would force me to find closure. Yes, I know, an American word, but I don’t know the English equivalent; ‘facing facts’ Mum would call it I suppose.

DS Finborough sat on your sofa, politely eating a bourbon, as I recounted what Christina had told me.

‘We already know about the sedative and PCP.’

I was startled. Todd had been right, after all. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I thought you and your mother had enough to deal with. I didn’t want to add what I thought would be unnecessary distress. And the drugs simply confirmed our belief that Tess took her own life.’

‘You think she
deliberately
took them?’

‘There was no evidence of any force. And taking a sedative is frequently used by people intent on committing suicide.’

‘But it wasn’t enough to kill her, was it?’

‘No, but maybe Tess didn’t know that. After all she hadn’t tried anything like this in the past, had she?’

‘No. She hadn’t. And she didn’t this time either. She must have been tricked into taking it.’ I tried to shake the self-possessed compassion on his face. ‘Don’t you see? He drugged her with the sedative so that he could kill her without a struggle. That’s why her body had no marks.’

But I hadn’t dislodged his expression or opinion.

‘Or she simply took an overdose that wasn’t quite big enough.’

I was nine years old in a comprehension class being guided firmly by a caring teacher to draw the correct answers from the text in front of us.

‘What about the PCP?’ I asked, thinking there was no answer that DS Finborough could possibly have for that drug being in your body.

‘I spoke to an inspector in Narcotics,’ replied DS Finborough. ‘He told me that dealers have been disguising it and selling it in place of LSD for years. There’s a whole list of aliases for it: hog, ozone, wack, angel dust. Tess’s dealer probably—’

I interrupted. ‘You think Tess had a “dealer”?’

‘I’m sorry. I meant the person who gave or sold the PCP to her. He or she would not have told Tess what she was actually getting. I also spoke to Tess’s psychiatrist, Dr Nichols and—’

I interrupted. ‘Tess wouldn’t have touched drugs, whatever they were. She loathed them. Even at school, when her friends were smoking and trying joints, she refused to have anything to do with it. She saw her health as a gift that she’d been given, when Leo hadn’t, and she had no right to destroy it.’

DS Finborough paused a moment, as if genuinely considering my point of view.

‘But she was hardly a schoolgirl any more, with a schoolgirl’s anxieties, was she? I’m not saying she wanted to use drugs, or ever had before, but I do think it would be totally understandable if she wanted to escape from her grief.’

I remembered him saying that after having Xavier you were in hell, a place where no one could join you. Even me. And I thought of my craving for the sleeping pills, for a few hours respite from grief.

But I hadn’t taken one.

‘Did you know that you can smoke PCP?’ I asked. ‘Or snort it or inject it or you can just simply swallow it? Someone could have slipped it in her drink without her even realising it.’

‘Beatrice—’

‘Dr Nichols was wrong about why she was having hallucinations. They weren’t from puerperal psychosis at all.’

‘No. But as I was trying to tell you, I did speak to Dr Nichols about the PCP. He said that although the cause of the hallucinations has clearly changed, her state of mind would be the same. And sadly the outcome. Apparently it’s not at all unusual for people on PCP to self-mutilate or to kill themselves. The inspector in Narcotics said much the same.’ I tried to interrupt but he kept going to his logical finale. ‘All the factual arrows are still pointing the same way.’

‘And the Coroner believed this? That someone with no history whatsoever of taking drugs, had voluntarily taken a powerful hallucinogenic? He didn’t even question that?’

‘No. In fact he told me that she . . .’ DS Finborough broke off, thinking better of it.

‘Told you what? What exactly did he say about my sister?’

DS Finborough was silent.

‘Don’t you think I have a right to know?’

‘Yes, you do. He said that Tess was a student, an art student, living in London and that he’d have been more surprised if she’d been . . .’

He trailed off and I filled the word in for him, ‘“Clean”?’

‘Something to that effect, yes.’

So you were unclean, with all the dirty baggage the word still carries with it into the twenty-first century. I got the phone bill out of its envelope.

‘You were wrong about Tess not telling me when her baby died. She tried to - over and over and over again, but she couldn’t. Even if you see these phone calls as ‘cries for help’, they were cries
to me
. Because we were close. I did know her. And she wouldn’t have taken drugs. And she wouldn’t have killed herself.’

He was silent.

‘She turned to me and I let her down. But
she did turn to me
.’

‘Yes, she did.’

I thought I saw a flicker of emotion on his face that wasn’t simply compassion.

12

An hour and a half after DS Finborough had left, Todd dropped Mum off at the flat. The heating seemed to have given up completely and she didn’t take her coat off.

Her breath was visible in the freezing sitting room. ‘Right then, let’s make a start on her things. I’ve brought bubble wrap and packing materials.’ Maybe she hoped her brisk sense of purpose could fool us into thinking we could sort out the chaos your death had left in its wake. Though to be fair, death does leave a daunting array of practical tasks; all those possessions that you were forced to leave behind had to be sorted and packed and redistributed in the living world. It made me think of an empty airport and one luggage carousel turning, with your clothes and paintings and books and contact lenses and Granny’s clock, round and round, with only me and Mum to claim them.

Mum started cutting lengths of bubble wrap, her voice accusatory. ‘Todd said you’d asked DS Finborough to see you again?’

‘Yes.’ I hesitated before going on. ‘There were some drugs found in her body.’

‘Todd told me that already. We all knew she wasn’t herself, Beatrice. And heaven knows, she had enough she wanted to escape from.’

Not giving me the opportunity to argue with her, she went into the sitting room, to ‘make some headway before lunch’.

I got out the nudes Emilio had painted of you and hurriedly wrapped them. Partly because I didn’t want Mum to see them, but also because I didn’t want to look at them. Yes I am a prude, but that wasn’t the reason. I just couldn’t bear to see the living colour of your painted body when your face in the morgue was so palely vivid. As I wrapped them, I thought that Emilio had the most obvious motive for murdering you. Because of you he could have lost his career and his wife. Yes, she already knew about your affair, but he didn’t know that and might have predicted a different response. But your pregnancy would have given him away so I couldn’t understand why - if he killed you to protect his marriage and career - he would have waited until after your baby was born.

I’d finished covering the nudes and begun wrapping one of your own paintings in bubble wrap - not looking at the picture and its singing colours, but remembering your four-year-old glee as you squeezed a bubble of bubble wrap between tiny thumb and finger ‘POP!’

Mum came in and looked at the stacks of your canvasses. ‘What on earth did she think she was she going to do with all of these?’

‘I’m not sure, but the art college wants to exhibit them at their show. It’s in three weeks and they want Tess to have a special display.’

They’d phoned me a couple of days earlier and I’d readily agreed.

‘They’re not going to pay for them though, are they?’ asked Mum. ‘I mean, what did she think the point of all of this was, exactly?’

‘She wanted to be a painter.’

‘You mean like a decorator?’ asked Mum, astonished.

‘No, it’s the word they use for an artist now.’

‘It’s the PC thing to call it,’ you said, teasing me for my outdated vocabulary. ‘Pop stars are artists, artists are painters and painters are decorators.’

‘Painting pictures all day is what children do at nursery school,’ continued Mum. ‘I didn’t mind so much about the GCSE. I thought it was nice for her to have a break from real subjects, but to call it further education is ridiculous.’

‘She was just pursuing her talent.’

Yes, I know. It was a little weak.

‘It was infantile,’ snapped Mum. ‘A waste of all her academic achievements.’

She was so angry with you for dying.

I hadn’t told Mum about my arrangements for Xavier to be buried with you, fearful of the confrontation, but I couldn’t put it off any longer.

‘Mum, I really think that she’d want Xavier—’

Mum interrupted. ‘Xavier?’

‘Her baby, she would want—’

‘She used Leo’s name?’

Her voice was horrified; I’m sorry.

She went back into the sitting room and started shoving clothes into a black bin liner.

‘Tess wouldn’t want it all just thrown away, Mum, she recycled everything.’

‘These aren’t fit for anyone.’

‘She mentioned a textile recycling place once, I’ll see—’

But Mum had turned away and was pulling out the drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe. She took a tiny cashmere cardigan out of its tissue paper. She turned to me, her voice soft. ‘It’s beautiful.’

I remembered my astonishment too when I first arrived at finding such exquisite baby things amongst the poverty of the rest of your flat.

‘Who gave them to her?’ Mum asked.

‘I don’t know. Amias just said she had a spree.’

‘But with what? Did the father give her money?’

I braced myself; she had a right to this information. ‘He’s married.’

‘I know.’

Mum must have seen my confusion; the softness in her voice had gone. ‘You asked me if I wanted to “put an A on her coffin for good measure”. Tess wasn’t married so “the scarlet letter”, the badge of adultery, could only mean that the father was.’ Her voice tensed further as she noted my surprise. ‘You didn’t think I understood the reference, did you?’

‘I’m sorry. And it was a cruel thing to say.’

‘You girls thought that once you got to A levels you left me behind. That all I ever thought about was the menu for a dull supper party three weeks away.’

‘I’ve just never seen you read, that’s all.’

She was still holding Xavier’s tiny cardigan, her fingers stroking it as she spoke. ‘I used to. I’d stay up with my bedside light on while your father wanted to go to sleep. It irritated him but I couldn’t stop. It was like a compulsion. Then Leo was ill. I didn’t have the time any more. Anyway, I’d realised that books were full of trivia and tripe. Who cares about someone else’s love affair, what a sunrise looks like for page after page? Who cares?’

She put down the tiny cardigan and resumed shoving your clothes into a bin liner. She hadn’t taken off the wire hangers and the hooks tore the flimsy black plastic. As I watched her clumsily anguished movements I thought of the kiln at school and our trayload of soft clay pots being put inside. They would bake harder and harder until the ones that were imperfectly thrown would break into pieces. Your death had thrown Mum way off centre and I knew, as I watched her tie the bin liner into a knot, that when she finally faced your death grief was a kiln that would shatter her.

An hour later, I drove Mum to the station. When I returned I put your clothes from her frantically crammed bin liners back into your wardrobe; Granny’s clock back onto the mantelpiece. Even your toiletries were left untouched in the bathroom cupboard, with mine kept in my washbag on a stool. Who knows, maybe that’s the real reason I’ve stayed in your flat all this time. It’s meant I’ve been able to avoid packing you away.

Then I finished wrapping your paintings. This was just preparing for an exhibition, so I had no problem with it. Finally only four paintings were left. They were the nightmarish canvasses in thick gouache of a masked man bending over a woman, her mouth ripping and bleeding as she screamed. The shape in her arms, the only white in the canvas, I’d realised was a baby. I’d also realised that you’d painted them when you were under the effect of the PCP; that they were a visual record of your tormented trips to hell. I saw the marks my tears had made when I first looked at them, the paint streaking down the canvas. Then, tears were the only response open to me, but now I knew that someone had deliberately tortured you and my tears had dried into hatred. I would find him.

The office is overheated, sunshine pouring in through the window warming it further, making me drowsy. I drain my cup of coffee and try to snap awake.

‘And then you went to Simon’s flat?’ Mr Wright asks.

He must be cross-checking what I am telling him with other witness statements, making sure all our time-lines coincide.

‘Yes.’

‘To question him about the drugs?’

‘Yes.’

I rang on Simon’s bell and, when a cleaning lady answered, I walked in as if I had every right to be there. I was again struck by the opulence of the place. Having lived in your flat for a while, I had become less dulled to material wealth. Simon was in the kitchen, sitting at a breakfast bar. He looked startled when he saw me and then annoyed. His baby face was still unshaved but I thought that, like the piercings, it was an affectation.

‘Did you give Tess money to buy baby things?’ I asked. I hadn’t even thought of the question until I was inside his flat, but it then seemed so probable.

‘What are you doing here, just barging in?’

‘Your door was open. I need to ask you some more questions. ’

‘I didn’t give her money. I tried once but she wouldn’t take it.’ He sounded affronted and therefore credible.

‘So do you know who did give her the money?’

‘No idea.’

‘Was she sleepy that day in the park?’

‘Jesus. What is this?’

‘I just want to know if she was sleepy when you met her?’

‘No. If anything she was jumpy.’

So he’d given you the sedative later, after Simon had left you.

‘Was she hallucinating?’ I asked.

‘I thought you didn’t believe that she had post-natal psychosis?’ he taunted.

‘Was she?’

‘You mean apart from seeing a non-existent man in the bushes?’

I didn’t reply. His voice was ugly with irony. ‘No, apart from that she seemed completely normal.’

‘They found sedatives and PCP in her blood. It’s also called wack, angel dust—’

He interrupted, his response immediate and with conviction. ‘No. That’s wrong. Tess was a puritan tight arse about drugs.’

‘But you take them, don’t you?’

‘So?’

‘So maybe you wanted to give her something to feel better, a drink? With something in it that you thought would help?’

‘I didn’t spike her drink. I didn’t give her money. And I want you to leave now, before this gets out of hand.’ He was trying to imitate a man with more authority, his father maybe.

I went into the hall, and passed an open doorway to a bedroom. I caught sight of a photo of you on the wall, your hair loose down your back. I went into the bedroom to look at it. It was clearly Simon’s room, his clothes neatly folded, his jackets on wooden coat hangers, an obsessively tidy room.

There was a banner in meticulous calligraphy along one wall,
The Female of The Species
. Underneath it were photos of you, scores of them, Blu-Tacked to the walls. In all of them your back was to the camera. Suddenly Simon was close to me, studying my face.

‘You knew I was in love with her.’

But these pictures made me think of Bequia islanders who believe a photograph is the theft of a soul. Simon’s tone was boastful. ‘They’re for my final year portfolio. I chose reportage photography of a single subject. My tutor thinks it’s the most original and exciting project of the year group.’

Why hadn’t he taken any of your face?

He must have guessed my thoughts. ‘I didn’t want the project to be about a particular person so I made sure she had no identity. I wanted her to be an every woman.’

Or was it so he could watch you, follow you, unobserved?

Simon’s tone was still smug. ‘“The Female of the Species” is the opening of a poem. The next line is “more deadly than the male”.’

My mouth felt tinder dry and my words sparked with anger. ‘The poem is about mothers protecting their young. That’s why the female is more deadly than the male. She has more courage. It’s men that Kipling brands as cowards. “At war with conscience”.’

Simon was taken aback that I knew the Kipling poem, probably any poem for that matter, and maybe you are too. But I did read English at Cambridge, remember? I was once an arty kind of person. Though being truthful, it was my scientific analysis of structure that got me through rather than insights into the meaning.

I took a photo of you off the wall, then another and another. Simon tried to stop me, but I carried on until there were no photos of you on his wall; until he couldn’t look at you again. Then I left his flat, taking the photographs, with Simon furiously protesting that he needed them for his end of year assessment; that I was a thief and something else that I didn’t hear because I’d slammed the door shut behind me.