Sister: A Novel (33 page)

She stroked my hair. ‘You still haven’t had a haircut.’

‘I know.’

She smiled at me, still stroking my hair. ‘You look so like her.’

22

When I arrived home William was waiting for me at the bottom of the steps. He looked up at me, his face was white, his usual open expression pinched hard with anxiety.

‘I’ve found out who’s in charge of the cystic fibrosis trial at St Anne’s. Can I come in? I don’t think we should be . . .’

His normally measured voice was rushed and uneven. I opened the door and he followed me inside.

There was a moment before he spoke. I heard Granny’s clock tick twice into the silence.

‘It’s Hugo Nichols.’

Before I could ask any questions William turned to me, his voice still quick, pacing now.

‘I don’t understand. Why on earth has he been putting babies without cystic fibrosis on the trial? What the hell’s he been doing? I just don’t understand.’

‘The CF trial at St Anne’s has been hijacked,’ I replied. ‘To test out another gene.’

‘My God. How did you find that out?’

‘Professor Rosen.’

‘And he’s going to the police?’

‘No.’

There was a moment before he spoke. ‘So it’ll be up to me then. To tell them about Hugo. I’d hoped it would be someone else.’

‘It’s hardly telling tales, is it?’

‘No. It’s not. I’m sorry.’

But I still couldn’t make sense of it. ‘But why would a psychiatrist run a genetic therapy trial?’

‘He was a research fellow at Imperial. Before he became a hospital doctor. I told you that, didn’t I?’

I nodded.

‘His research was in genetics,’ continued William.

‘You never said.’

‘I never thought - my God - I just never thought it was relevant.’

‘That was unfair of me. I’m sorry.’

I remembered William telling me that Dr Nichols was rumoured to have been brilliant and ‘destined for greatness’, but I’d thought the rumour must be wrong, believing instead my own opinion that he was scruffily hopeless. Remembering my view of Dr Nichols, I realised that I’d dismissed him as a suspect not only because I’d thought him too hopeless to be violent, nor even because I’d thought he had no motive, but because of my entrenched belief that he was fundamentally decent.

William sat down, his face strained, his hands drumming the arms of the sofa. ‘I spoke to him about his research once, years ago now. He told me about a gene he’d discovered and that a company had bought it from him.’

‘Do you know which company?’

‘No. I’m not sure he even said. It was a long time ago. But I do remember some of what he said because he was so passionate, so different to how he usually is.’ He was pacing again now, his movements jerky and angry. ‘He told me it had been his life’s ambition, actually no, he said it was his life’s
purpose
, to get his gene into humans. He said he wanted to leave his fingerprint on the future.’

‘Fingerprint on the future?’ I echoed, repelled, thinking of your future being cut from you.

William thought I didn’t understand. ‘It meant he wanted to get his gene into the germ cells so it would be passed to future generations. He said he wanted to “improve what it is to be human”. But although the animal tests went well he wasn’t allowed to test his gene on humans. He was told it was genetic enhancement and it’s illegal to use that in people.’

‘What was “his” gene?’ I asked.

‘He said it increases IQ.’

William said that he hadn’t believed him because it would have been such an extraordinary and astonishing achievement, and he was so young, and something else but I wasn’t really listening. Instead I remembered my visit to Gene-Med.

I remembered that IQ was measured by fear.

‘I thought he had to have been making most of it up,’ continued William. ‘Or at least embellishing it a hell of a lot. I mean, if his research really was that glittering, why on earth leave it to go into humdrum hospital medicine? But he must have become a hospital doctor deliberately - waiting all this time for the opportunity to test out his gene in humans.’

I went into the garden as if I needed more literal space to accommodate the hugeness of these facts. I didn’t want to be alone with them and was glad when William joined me.

‘He must have destroyed Tess’s notes,’ William said. ‘And then fabricated the real reason why the babies died, so that their deaths couldn’t be connected to the trial. And somehow he managed to get away with it. Christ, it makes you talk like, I don’t know, somebody else, somebody off the telly or something. This is Hugo I’m talking about for God’s sake. A man I thought I knew. Liked.’

I’d been talking in that alien language since your body was found. I understood the realisation that your previous vocabulary can’t describe what is happening to you now.

I looked at the little patch of earth where Mum and I had decided to plant the winter-flowering clematis for you.

‘But someone else must have been part of this?’ I said. ‘He can’t have been with Tess when she had her baby.’

‘All doctors do six months obstetrics as part of their training, Hugo would know how to deliver a baby.’

‘But surely someone would have noticed? A psychiatrist delivering a baby, surely someone . . . ?’

‘The labour ward is heaving with people and we’re desperately understaffed. If you see a white coat in a room you’re just grateful and move on to the next potential calamity. Many of the doctors are locums and sixty per cent of our midwives are agency so they don’t know who’s who.’ He turned to me, his expression harsh with anxiety. ‘And he was wearing a mask, Bee, remember?’

‘But surely someone . . .’

William took my hand. ‘We’re all so bloody busy. And we trust each other because it’s just too exhausting and too much hassle to do anything else and we’re naive enough to think our colleagues are there for the same purpose as we are - to be treating people and trying to make them well.’

His body was taut and his hands were clenched tightly around mine. ‘He had me fooled too. I thought he was a friend.’

Despite the warm sun and the woollen picnic rug, I am shivering.

‘I realised that he’d been perfectly positioned all along,’ I say. ‘Who better than a psychiatrist to drive someone mad? To force someone into suicide? And I only had his word about what really happened at their session.’

‘You thought he actually tried to force Tess into taking her life?’

‘Yes. And then when she didn’t - even though she was being mentally tortured to a sadistic degree - then he murdered her.’

I thought it no wonder Dr Nichols had been so adamant about his failure to diagnose puerperal psychosis - loss of professional face was a small price to pay next to murder.

Mr Wright glances at a note I remember him making much earlier. ‘You said that Dr Nichols wasn’t among the people you suspected of playing Tess the lullabies?’

‘No. As I said, I didn’t think he had a motive.’ I pause a moment. ‘And because I’d thought he was a hopeless but decent man who had owned up to a terrible mistake.’

I am still shivering. Mr Wright takes off his jacket and puts it around my shoulders.

‘I thought Tess must have found out about him hijacking the CF trial and that’s why he murdered her. Everything fitted into place.’

‘Fitted into place’ sounds so neat, a piece completing the jigsaw picture and proving satisfying rather than metal grinding into metal, blood spilling rust-coloured onto the ground.

We stood in silence in your tiny back garden and I saw the green shoots had grown a good few centimetres along the once-dead twigs, and that there were now tiny buds, everything alive and growing, the tight tiny buds containing the open-petalled flowers of summer.

‘We’d better phone the police,’ said William. ‘Shall I do it or you?’

‘You’re probably more credible. No history of crying wolf or getting hysterical.’

‘OK. What’s the policeman’s name?’

‘Detective Inspector Haines. If you can’t get him, ask for Detective Sergeant Finborough.’

He picked up his mobile. ‘This is going to be bloody hard.’ Then he dialled the number as I gave it to him, and asked for DI Haines.

As William spoke to DI Haines, telling him everything he had told me, I wanted to yell at Dr Nichols. I want to hit him, blow after blow; I wanted to kill him actually, and the sensation was oddly liberating. At last my rage had a target and it was a release to give way to it - finally throwing the grenade you’ve been holding for so long, pin out, that’s been threatening to destroy you, and you’re freed of the burden and tension as you hurl it.

William hung up. ‘He’s asked us to go down to the police station but wants us to give him an hour to get the top brass in.’

‘You mean he’s asked you to go.’

‘I’m sorry, Bee, coming in at the last minute, the Americans at the end of the war and all that.’

‘But if we’re being honest, they’re the reason we won.’

‘I think both of us should go. And I’m glad we have a little time to ourselves first.’

He reached over to my face and stroked a strand of hair away from my eyes.

He kissed me.

I hesitated. Could I step off my mountainside - or that moral tightrope you had me on?

I turned and walked into the flat.

He followed me and I turned and kissed him back. And I was grabbing the moment as hard as I could and living it to the full because who knew when it would be taken away. If all your death has taught me it is that the present is too precious to waste. I finally understood the sacrament of the present moment, because it’s all we have.

He undressed me and I shed my old self. All of me exposed. The wedding ring was no longer hanging around his neck, his chest bare. And as my cool skin felt the warmth of him on me, my safety ropes fell away.

Mr Wright produces a bottle of wine from a carrier bag, with two plastic cups from the water dispenser at the CPS offices, and I think how like him it is to be so thoughtful and organised. He pours me a cup and I drink it straight down, which is probably not sensible. He doesn’t comment on this, just as he didn’t comment on me having sex with William and I like him so much for not being judgemental.

We lay in your bed together, the low rays of early spring sunshine coming in through the basement window. I leaned against him and drank the tea he’d made for me, trying to make it last as long as possible, still feeling the warmth of his skin against mine, knowing that we would have to get out of bed, re-enter the world again; and I thought of Donne chastising the busy old fool of a sun for making him leave his lover and marvelled that his poetry now applied to me.