Sister

13

Sunday

This morning there isn’t even one receptionist on the front desk and the large foyer area is deserted. I take the empty lift up to the third floor. It must just be Mr. Wright and me here today.

He told me that he wants to “go through the Kasia Lewski part of the statement this morning,” which will be strange because I saw Kasia an hour ago in your flat, wearing your old dressing gown.

I go straight into Mr. Wright’s office and again he has coffee and water waiting for me. He asks me if I’m okay, and I reassure him that I’m fine.

“I’ll start by recapping what you’ve told me so far about Kasia Lewski,” he says, looking down at typed notes, which must be a transcript of an earlier part of my statement. He reads out, “‘Kasia Lewski came to Tess’s flat on the twenty-seventh of January at about four in the afternoon asking to see her.’”

I remember the sound of the doorbell and running to get it; having “Tess” in my mouth, almost out, as I opened the door and the taste of your name. I remember my resentment when I saw Kasia standing on your doorstep with her high-heeled cheap shoes and the raised veins of pregnancy over goose-bumped white legs. I shudder at my remembered snobbishness but am glad my memory is still acute.

“She told you that she was in the same clinic as Tess?” asks Mr. Wright.

“Yes.”

“Did she say at which clinic?”

I shake my head and don’t tell him that I was too keen to get rid of her to take any interest, let alone ask any questions. He looks down at his notes again.

“She said she’d been single too but now her boyfriend had returned?”

“Yes.”

“Did you meet Mitch Flanagan?”

“No, he stayed in the car. He blared the horn and I remember she seemed nervous about him.”

“And the next time you saw her was just after you’d been to Simon Greenly’s flat?” he asks.

“Yes. I took some baby clothes round.”

But that’s a little disingenuous. I was using my visit to Kasia as an excuse to avoid Todd and the argument I knew would end our relationship.

Despite the snow and slippery pavements, it took me only ten minutes to walk to Kasia’s flat. She’s since told me that she always came to yours, and I guess that was to avoid Mitch. Her flat is in Trafalgar Crescent, an ugly concrete impostor among the crisp symmetrical garden squares and properly shaped crescents of the rest of W11. Alongside and above her street, as if you could reach it as easily as reaching a book on a tall bookshelf, is the Westway, the roar of traffic thundering down the street. In the stairwells, graffiti artists (maybe they’re called painters now) have left their tags, like dogs peeing, marking out their patch. Kasia opened the door, keeping it on the chain. “Yes?”

“I’m Tess Hemming’s sister.”

She unhooked the chain and I heard a bolt being pulled back. Even on her own (let alone the fact that it was snowing outside and she was pregnant), she was wearing a tight cropped top and high-heeled black patent boots with Diamanté studs up the sides. For a moment I worried that she was a prostitute and was expecting a client. I can hear you laughing. Stop.

“Beatrice.” I was taken aback that she remembered my name. “Come. Please.”

It had been just over two weeks since I’d last seen her—when she came round to the flat asking for you—and her bump had got noticeably bigger. I guessed she must be around seven months pregnant now.

I went into the flat, which smelled of cheap perfume and air freshener that didn’t mask the natural smells of mold and damp evident on the walls and carpet. An Indian throw like the one on your sofa (had you given her one of yours?) had been nailed up at the window. I’d thought that I wouldn’t try to put down Kasia’s exact words or try to get across her accent, but in this meeting her lack of fluency made what she said more striking.

“I’m sorry. You must be… How can I say?” She struggled for the word, then, giving up, shrugged apologetically. “Sad, but ‘sad’ not big enough.”

For some reason her imperfect English sounded more sincere than a perfectly phrased letter of condolence.

“You love her very much, Beatrice.” Love in the present tense because Kasia had yet to learn the past tense, or because she was more sensitive than anyone else to my bereavement?

“Yes, I do.”

She looked at me, her face warm and compassionate, and she baffled me. Straight off, she had hopped out of the box I’d so neatly stuck her into. She was being kind to me and it was meant to be the other way around. I gave her the small suitcase I’d brought with me. “I’ve brought some baby things.” She didn’t look nearly as pleased as I’d expected. I thought it must be because the clothes were intended for Xavier, that they were stained with sadness.

“Tess… funeral?” she asked.

“Oh yes, of course. It’s in Little Hadston, near Cambridge, on Thursday, the fifteenth of February at eleven o’clock.”

“Can you write…?”

I wrote down the details for her, and then I virtually pushed the suitcase of baby clothes into her hands.

“Tess would want you to have them.”

“Our priest, he says Mass for her on Sunday.” I wondered why she was changing the subject. She hadn’t even opened the suitcase. “That was okay?”

I nodded. I’m not sure what you’ll make of it though.

“Father John. He’s very nice man. He’s very…” She absentmindedly moved her hand onto her bump.

“Very Christian?” I asked.

She smiled, getting the joke. “For priest. Yes.”

Was she joking too? Yes, straight back. She was much sharper than I’d thought.

“The Mass. Does Tess mind?” she asked. Again I wondered if the present tense was intentional. Maybe it was—if a Mass is all it’s cracked up to be, then you’re up there in heaven, or in the waiting room of purgatory, present tense. You’re in the now, if not in the here and now—and maybe Kasia’s Mass reached you and you’re now feeling a little foolish about your earthly atheism.

“Would you like to look in the case and decide what you want?”

I’m not sure if I was being kind or trying to get back into a place where I felt superior. I certainly didn’t feel comfortable being the recipient of kindness from someone like Kasia. Yes, I was still snobby enough to think “someone like.”

“I make tea first?”

I followed her into the dingy kitchen. The linoleum on the floor was torn, exposing concrete underneath. But everything was as clean as it could be given the handicap it started with. White chipped china gleamed, old saucepans shone around their rust spots. She filled the kettle and put it on the stove top. I didn’t think she’d be able to tell me anything useful but decided to try anyway. “Do you know if anyone had tried to give Tess drugs?”

She looked aghast. “Tess never take drugs. With baby, nothing bad. No tea, no coffee.”

“Do you know who Tess was afraid of?”

Kasia shook her head. “Tess not afraid.”

“But after she had the baby?”

Her eyes filled with tears and she turned away from me, struggling to regain her composure. Of course she’d been away with Mitch in Majorca when you had Xavier. She hadn’t come back till after you’d died, when she’d come knocking on your door and found me instead. I felt guilty for upsetting her, for questioning her when she clearly couldn’t help me at all. She was now making me tea, so I could hardly leave, but I had no idea what to say to her. “So do you work?” I asked, a rather unsubtle variation on the standard cocktail party query, “So what do you do?”

“Yes. Cleaning… sometime supermarket shelves, but night work, horrible. Sometime I work for magazines.”

I immediately thought of porn mags. My prejudices, based on her wardrobe choices, were too stubbornly entrenched to be shifted without some effort. Though to be a little bit fair to myself, I had started to worry about her being in the sex trade rather than simply being judgmental. She was astute enough to sense I had reservations about her “magazine work.”

“The free ones,” she continued. “I put them in the letter boxes. The house that have ‘No Junk Mail’ I put in too. I can’t read English.”

I smiled at her. She seemed pleased by the first genuine smile I’d given her.

“All the doors in the rich places not want free papers. But we not go to the poor places. Funny, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” I searched for another opening conversational gambit. “So where did you meet Tess?”

“Oh. I not tell you?”

Of course she had, but I’d forgotten, which isn’t surprising when you remember how little interest I took in her.

“The clinic. My baby ill too,” she said.

“Your baby has cystic fibrosis?”

“Cystic fibrosis, yes. But now…” She touched her stomach. “Better now. A miracle.” She made a sign of the cross, a gesture as natural to her as pushing her hair away from her face. “Tess called it the Mummies with Disasters Clinic. First time I met her she made me laugh. She asked me to flat.” Her words caught in her throat. She turned away from me. I couldn’t see her face but I knew she was trying not to cry. I reached out my hand to put on her shoulder but just couldn’t do it. I find being tactile toward a person I don’t know as hard as touching a spider if you’re arachnophobic. You may find it funny, but it really isn’t. It’s almost a handicap.

Kasia finished making the tea and put it all on a tray. I noticed how proper she was, with cups and saucers, a small pitcher for milk, a strainer for the tea leaves, the cheap teapot warmed first.

As we went through to the sitting room, I saw a picture on the opposite wall that hadn’t been visible to me before. It was a charcoal drawing of Kasia’s face. It was beautiful. And it made me see that Kasia was beautiful too. I knew you’d done it.

“Tess’s?” I asked.

“Yes.”

Our eyes met and for a moment something was communicated between us that didn’t need language and therefore there was no barrier. If I had to translate that “something” into words, it would be that you and she were clearly close enough for you to want to draw her, that you saw beauty in people that others didn’t see. But it wasn’t as verbose as that, no language clunked between us; it was a more subtle thing. The sound of a door slamming startled me.

I turned to see a man coming into the room. Large and muscular, about twenty years old, he looked absurdly big in the tiny flat. He was wearing laborers’ overalls, no T-shirt underneath, his muscular arms tattooed like sleeves. His hair was matted with plaster dust. His voice was surprisingly quiet for such a large man, but it had the timbre of threat. “Kash? Why the fuck haven’t you bolted the door? I told you—” He stopped as he saw me. “Health visitor?”

“No,” I replied.

He ignored me, directing his question to Kasia. “So who the fuck is this then?”

Kasia was nervous and embarrassed. “Mitch…”

He sat down, stating his claim to the room and by implication my lack of one.

Kasia was nervous of him, the same expression I’d seen that day outside your flat when he’d blared the horn. “This is Beatrice.”

“And what does ‘Beatrice’ want with us?” he asked, mocking.

I suddenly felt conscious of my designer jeans and gray cashmere sweater, de rigueur weekend wardrobe in New York but hardly the kind of outfit to blend in on a Monday morning in Trafalgar Crescent.

“Mitch doing nights. Very hard,” said Kasia, “He gets very…” She struggled to find the word, but you need to have a mother tongue phrase book in your brain to find a euphemism for Mitch’s behavior. “Out of sorts” was the one that sprang to my mind most quickly; I almost wanted to write it down for her.

“You don’t need to fucking apologize for me.”

“My sister, Tess, was a friend of Kasia’s,” I said, but my voice had become Mum’s; anxiety always accentuates my upper-class accent.

He looked angrily at Kasia. “The one you were always running off to?” I didn’t know whether Kasia’s English was good enough for her to understand he was bullying her. I wondered if he was a physical bully too.

Kasia’s voice was quiet. “Tess my friend.”

It was something I hadn’t heard since primary school, standing up for someone simply by saying “She’s my friend.” I was touched by the powerful simplicity of it. I stood up, not wanting to make things more awkward for her. “I’d better be going.”

Mitch was sprawled in an armchair; I had to step over his legs to get to the door. Kasia came with me. “Thank you for the clothes. Very kind.”

Mitch looked at her. “What clothes?”

“I brought some baby things round. That’s all.”

“You like playing Lady Bountiful then?”

Kasia didn’t understand what he was saying, but could sense it was hostile. I turned to her. “They’re just such lovely things and I didn’t want to throw them away or give them to a charity shop where they might have been bought by anybody.”

Mitch leaped in, a pugnacious man intent on a fight, and enjoying it. “So it’s us or a charity shop?”

“When do you get off from your macho posturing?”

Confrontation, which used to seem so alien to me, now felt familiar territory.

“We’ve got our own fucking baby clothes,” he said, going into a bedroom. Moments later he came out with a box and dumped it at my feet. I looked inside. It was filled with expensive baby clothes. Kasia seemed very embarrassed. “Tess and me, shopping. Together. We…”

“But how did you have the money?” I asked. Before Mitch could explode, I hurriedly continued, “Tess had no money either, and I just want to know who gave it to her.”

“The people doing the trial,” said Kasia. “Three hundred pounds.”

“What trial? The cystic fibrosis trial?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I wondered if it could be a bribe. I’d got into the mental habit of suspecting everyone and everything connected to you, and this trial, which I’d had misgivings about from the very start, was already a soil rich with anxiety for seeds of distrust to take root.

“Can you remember the person’s name?”

Kasia shook her head. “It was in envelope. Just with leaflets, no letter. A surprise.”

Mitch cut across her. “And you spent the whole fucking lot on baby clothes, which it’ll be out of in weeks and Christ knows there’s enough else we need.”

Kasia looked away from him. I sensed this argument was old and much worn and had broken any joy she had once felt in buying the clothes.

She accompanied me out of the flat. As we walked down the concrete steps in the graffiti-decorated stairwell, she guessed what I would say if we were fluent in each other’s languages and said, “He is father. Nothing change that now.”

“I’m staying in Tess’s flat. Will you come round?”

I was surprised by how much I hoped she would.

Mitch yelled from the top of the stairwell. “You forgot this.” He threw the suitcase of clothes down the stairwell. As the case hit the concrete landing, it opened; tiny cardigans, a hat and baby blanket lay strewn across the damp concrete. Kasia helped me to pick them up.

“Don’t come to the funeral, Kasia. Please.”

Yes, because of Xavier. It would have been too hard for her.

I walked home, the sharp wind cutting across my face. With my coat collar pulled up and a scarf around my head, trying to protect myself from the cold, I didn’t hear my mobile, so it went through to message. It was Mum saying Dad wanted to talk to me and giving me his number. But I knew I wouldn’t call him. Instead, I became the insecure adolescent who felt her growing body was the wrong shape to fit into his completely formed new life. I felt again the smothering rejection as he blanked me out. Oh, I knew he’d remembered our birthdays, sending us extravagant presents that were too old for us, as if trying to accelerate us into adulthood and away from his responsibility. And the two weeks with him in the summer holidays, when we tarnished the Provence sunshine with our reproachful English faces, bringing our microclimate of sadness. And when we left, it was as if we’d never been. I once saw the trunks where “our” bedroom things were kept—stowed away in the attic for the rest of the year. Even you, in your optimism for life and capacity to see the best in people, felt that too.

As I think about Dad, I suddenly understand why you didn’t ask Emilio to take any responsibility for Xavier. Your baby was too precious, too loved, for anyone to turn him into a blemish on their lives. He should never feel unvalued or unwanted. You weren’t protecting Emilio but your child.

I haven’t told Mr. Wright about my non–phone call with Dad, just the money that you and Kasia received for being on the trial.

“The payments weren’t large,” I continue. “But I thought they could have been an inducement to Tess and to Kasia to take part.”

“Tess hadn’t told you about the payment?”

“No. She always saw the best in people, but she knew I was more skeptical. She probably wanted to avoid the lecture.”

You’d have guessed my bumper-sticker warnings: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch”; “Corporate altruism is a contradiction in terms.”

“Did you think it was the money that persuaded her?” asks Mr. Wright.

“No. She believed the trial was her baby’s only chance for a cure. She’d have paid them to be on the trial. But I thought that maybe whoever had given her money didn’t know that. Like Kasia, Tess looked in need of cash.” I pause while Mr. Wright makes a note, then continue. “I’d researched the medical side of the trial thoroughly when Tess first told me about it, but I’d never looked at the finances. So I started doing that. On the Net, I discovered that people are legitimately paid in drug trials. There are even dedicated websites that advertise for volunteers, promising the money will ‘pay for your next holiday.’”

“And the volunteers on the Chrom-Med trial?”

“There was absolutely nothing about their being paid. Chrom-Med’s own website, which had a lot of detail about the trial, had nothing about any payments. I knew that the development of the genetic cure would have cost a fortune, and three hundred pounds was a tiny amount of money in comparison, but it still seemed strange. Chrom-Med’s website had e-mail addresses for every member of the company—presumably, to look open and approachable—so I e-mailed Professor Rosen. I was pretty sure it would go to a minion but thought it was worth a try.”

Mr. Wright has a copy of my e-mail in front of him.

As I’d predicted, I didn’t hear back from Professor Rosen. But I carried on searching on the Net, still wearing my coat from when I’d got in from visiting Kasia, my bag just dumped at my feet. I hadn’t switched the light on and now it was dark. I hardly noticed Todd coming in. I didn’t even wonder, let alone ask, where he’d been all day, barely glancing up from the screen.

“Tess was paid to take part in the CF trial, so was Kasia, but there’s no record of that anywhere.”

“Beatrice…”

He’d stopped using the word darling.

“But that’s not the important thing,” I continued. “I hadn’t thought to look at the financial aspect of the trial before, but several reputable sites—the Financial Times, the New York Times—are saying that Chrom-Med is going to float on the stock market in just a few weeks’ time.”

It would have been in the papers, but since your death I had stopped reading them. Chrom-Med’s flotation was a crucial bit of news to me, but Todd didn’t react at all.

“The directors of Chrom-Med stand to make a fortune,” I continued. “The sites have different estimates, but the amount of money is enormous. And the employees are all shareholders, so they’re going to get their share of the bonanza.”

“The company will have invested millions, if not billions, in their research,” Todd said, his voice impatient. “And now they’re having a massively successful trial, which is payback time for their investment. Of course they’re going to float on the stock market. It’s a completely logical business decision.”

“But the payments to the women—”

“Stop. For God’s sake, stop,” he shouted. For a moment both of us were taken aback. We’d spent four years being polite to each other. Shouting was embarrassingly intimate. He struggled to sound more measured. “First it was her married tutor, then an obsessed weirdo student and now you’ve added this trial to your list—which everyone, including the world’s press and scientific community, has wholeheartedly endorsed.”

“Yes. I am suspicious of different people, even a trial. Because I don’t know yet who killed her. Or why. Just that someone did. And I have to look at every possibility.”

“No. You don’t. That’s the police’s job, and they’ve done it. There’s nothing left for you to do.”

“My sister was murdered.”

“Please, darling, you have to face the truth at some point that—”

I interrupted him. “She would never have killed herself.”

At this point in our argument, both of us awkward and a little embarrassed, I felt that we were going through the motions, actors struggling with a clunky script.

“Just because it’s what you believe,” he said. “What you want to believe, that doesn’t make it true.”

“How can you possibly know what the truth is?” I snapped back. “You only met her a few times, and even then you barely bothered to talk to her. She wasn’t the kind of person you wanted to get to know.”

I was arguing with apparent conviction, my voice raised and my words sharpened to hurt, but in truth I was still on our relationship beltway, and inside I was uninvolved and unscathed. I continued my performance, marveling slightly at how easy it was to get into my stride. I’d never had a row before.

“What did you call her? ‘Kooky’?” I asked, not waiting for a reply. “I don’t think you even bothered to listen to anything she said to you on the two occasions we all actually had a meal together. You judged her without even having a proper conversation with her.”

“You’re right. I didn’t know her well. And I admit that I didn’t like her all that much either. She irritated me, as a matter of fact. But this isn’t about how well—”

I interrupted him. “You dismissed her because she was an art student, because of the way she lived and the clothes she wore.”

“For God’s sake.”

“You didn’t see the person she was at all.”

“You’re going way off the point here. Look, I do understand that you want to blame someone for her death. I know you don’t want to feel responsible for it.” The composure in his voice sounded forced and I was reminded of myself talking to the police. “You’re afraid of having to live with that guilt,” he continued. “And I do understand that. But what I want you to try to understand is that once you accept what really happened, then you’ll realize that you weren’t to blame at all. We all know that you weren’t. She took her own life, for reasons that the police, the coroner, your mother, and her doctors are satisfied with, and no one else is to blame, including you. If you could just believe that, then you can start to move forward.” He awkwardly put his hand on my shoulder and left it there—like me he finds being tactile difficult. “I’ve got tickets home for both of us. Our flight leaves the evening after her funeral.”

I was silent. How could I possibly leave?

“I know you’re worried your mother needs you here for support,” continued Todd. “But she agrees that the sooner you get back home, back to your normal life, the better.” His hand slammed onto the table. I noticed the disturbance on my screen before his uncharacteristic physicality. “I don’t recognize you anymore. And now I’m laying my guts out here and you can’t even be bothered to look up from the fucking Internet.”

I turned to him, and only then saw his white face and his body huddled into itself in misery.

“I’m sorry. But I can’t leave. Not till I know what happened to her.”

“We know what happened to her. And you need to accept that. Because life has to go on, Beatrice. Our life.”

“Todd…”

“I do know how hard it must be for you without her. I do understand that. But you do have me.” His eyes were blurred with tears. “We’re getting married in three months.”

I tried to work out what to say and in the silence he walked away from me into the kitchen. How could I explain to him that I couldn’t get married anymore, because marriage is a commitment to the future, and a future without you was impossible to contemplate? And that it was for this reason, rather than my lack of passion for him, that meant I couldn’t marry him.

I went into the kitchen. His back was toward me and I saw what he would look like as an old man.

“Todd, I’m sorry but—”

He turned and yelled at me, “For fuck’s sake I love you.” Shouting at a foreigner in your own language as if volume will make her understand, make me love him back.

“You don’t really know me. You wouldn’t love me if you did.”

It was true. He didn’t know me. I’d never let him. If I had a song, I’d never tried singing it to him, never stayed in bed with him on a Sunday morning. It was always my idea to get up and go out. Maybe he had looked into my eyes but if he had, I hadn’t been looking back.

“You deserve more,” I said, and tried to take his hand. But he pulled it away. “I’m so sorry.”

He flinched from me. But I was sorry. I still am. Sorry that I had neglected to notice that it was only me on the safe beltway while he was inside the relationship, alone and exposed. Once again I had been selfish and cruel toward someone I was meant to care for.

Before you died, I’d thought our relationship was grown-up and sensible. But on my part it was cowardly, a passive option motivated by my insecurity rather than what Todd deserved: an active choice inspired by love.

A few minutes later he left. He didn’t tell me where he was going.

Mr. Wright had decided on a working lunch and has now got sandwiches from the deli. He leads me through empty corridors to a meeting room that has a table. For some reason, the large office space, deserted apart from us two, feels intimate.

I haven’t told Mr. Wright that during my research I broke off my engagement, and that with no friends in London, Todd must have walked through the snow to a hotel that night. I just tell him about Chrom-Med floating on the stock market.

“And you phoned DS Finborough at eleven-thirty p.m.?” he asks, looking down at the police call log.

“Yes. I left a message for him asking him to phone me back. By nine-thirty the next morning he still hadn’t, so I went to St. Anne’s.”

“You’d already planned to go back there?”

“Yes. The senior midwife had said she would have found Tess’s notes by then and had made an appointment for me to see her.”

I arrived at St. Anne’s, the skin around my skull tight with nerves because I thought I would soon have to meet the person who was with you when you had Xavier. I knew I had to do this but wasn’t exactly sure why. Maybe as a penance, my guilt faced full on. I arrived fifteen minutes early and went to the hospital café. As I sat down with my coffee, I saw I had a new e-mail.

I e-mailed straight back.

It felt like a reasonable place to be writing such an e-mail. Illness and death may be shut away in the wards above, but I imagined the fall-out blowing invisibly into the atrium and landing in the hospital café’s cappuccinos and herbal teas. I wouldn’t have been the first to write an emotional e-mail at this table. I wondered if the “Media PA” would pass it on to Professor Rosen. I doubted it.

I resolved to ask the hospital staff if they knew anything about the money.

Five minutes before my appointment time I took the lift up to the fourth floor, as instructed, and walked to the maternity wing.

The senior midwife seemed fraught when she saw me, although maybe her escaping frizzy red hair made her seem that way all the time. “I’m afraid we still haven’t found Tess’s notes. And without them I haven’t been able to find out who was with her when she gave birth.”

I felt relief but thought it cowardly to give in to.

“Doesn’t anyone remember?”

“I’m afraid not. For the last three months we’ve been very short staffed, so we’ve had a high percentage of agency midwives and temporary doctors. I think it must have been one of them.”

A young punky nurse standing at the nurses’ station, her nose pierced, joined in, “We have the basic info on a central computer, such as the time and date of admission and discharge, and sadly in your sister’s case, that her baby died. But nothing more detailed. Nothing about their medical history or the medical staff looking after them. I did check with the psych department yesterday. Dr. Nichols said her notes hadn’t ever got to him. Told me our department should ‘pull our socks up,’ which is pretty angry coming from him.”

I remembered Dr. Nichols commenting that he didn’t have your psychiatric history. I hadn’t known it was because your notes had got lost.

“But aren’t her notes also on computer somewhere? I mean the detailed information, as well as the basics?” I asked.

The senior midwife shook her head. “We use paper notes for maternity patients, so the woman can carry them with her in case she goes into labor when she’s not near her home hospital. We then attach the handwritten notes of the delivery and it’s all meant to be safely stored.”

The phone rang but the senior midwife ignored it, focusing on me. “I really am sorry. We do understand how important it must be to you.”

As she answered the phone, my initial relief that your notes were lost became weighted by suspicion. Did your medical notes hold some clue about your murder? Was that why they were “lost”? I waited for the senior midwife to finish her phone call.

“Isn’t it odd that a patient’s notes just go missing?” I asked.

The senior midwife grimaced. “Unfortunately it’s not odd at all.”

A portly consultant in a chalk-striped suit who was passing stopped and chipped in, “An entire cart of notes went missing from my diabetic clinic on Tuesday. The whole lot vanished into some administrative black hole.”

I noticed that Dr. Saunders had arrived at the nurses’ station and was checking a patient’s notes. He didn’t seem to notice me.

“Really?” I said, uninterested, to Chalk-striped Consultant. But he carried on warming to his theme. “When they built St. John’s hospital last year, no one remembered to build a morgue and when their first patient died, there was nowhere to take him.”

The senior midwife was clearly embarrassed by him and I wondered why he was being so open with me about hospital errors.

“There’s been relocation of teenage cancer patients and no one remembered to transport their frozen eggs,” continued Chalk-striped Consultant. “And now their chances of a baby when they’ve recovered are zero.”

Dr. Saunders noticed me and smiled reassuringly. “But we’re not totally incompetent all of the time, I promise.”

“Did you know that women were being paid to take part in the cystic fibrosis trial?” I asked.

Chalk-striped Consultant looked a little peeved by my abrupt change of subject. “No, I didn’t know that.”

“Nor I,” said Dr. Saunders. “Do you know how much?”

“Three hundred pounds.”

“It could well have been a doctor or nurse being kind,” Dr. Saunders said, his tone considerate. And again he reminded me of you, this time for thinking the best of people. “There was that nurse in oncology last year, wasn’t there?” he asked.

Chalk-striped Consultant nodded. “Spent the department’s entire transport fund on new clothes for an old man she felt sorry for.”

The young punky nurse joined in, “And midwives sometimes try to help hard-up mums by giving them nappies and formula when they leave. Occasionally a sterilizer or a baby bath finds its way out too.”

Chalk-striped Consultant grinned. “You mean we’ve reverted to the days when nurses were caring?”

The punky nurse glowered at him and Chalk-striped Consultant laughed.

Two pagers went off and a phone rang on the nurses’ station. Chalk-striped Consultant walked away to answer his page; the punky nurse answered the phone; the senior midwife was answering a patient’s buzzer. I was left alone with Dr. Saunders. I’ve always been intimidated by handsome men, let alone beautiful ones. I associate them not so much with inevitable rejection as with turning me completely invisible.

“Would you like to have a coffee?” he asked.

Probably blushing, I shook my head. I didn’t want to be the recipient of emotional charity.

I have to admit, that despite still being with Todd, I entertained a fantasy about Dr. Saunders, but knew that it wasn’t one to pursue. Even if I could create a fantasy in which he was attracted to me, his wedding ring prevented it from stretching into something long-term or secure or anything else I wanted in a relationship.

“I gave the senior midwife my contact details in case she found Tess’s notes. But she warned me they might be permanently lost.”

“You said you found her notes going missing suspicious?” asks Mr. Wright.

“To start with, yes. But the longer I was at the hospital, the harder it was to imagine anything sinister happening. It just seemed too public, a cheek-by-jowl working environment with people literally looking over one another’s shoulders. I couldn’t see how anyone would get away with something. Not that I knew what that ‘something’ was.”

“And the payments?”

“The people at St. Anne’s didn’t even seem surprised by them, let alone suspicious.”

He looks down at the police log of our calls. “DS Finborough didn’t return your call and you didn’t chase that?”

“No, because what could I tell him? That women had been paid, but no one I’d spoken to at the hospital thought that sinister or even strange; that Chrom-Med was floating on the stock market, but even my own fiancé thought that was just a logical business decision. And Tess’s notes had gone missing, but the medical staff thought that pretty routine. I had nothing to go to him with.”

My mouth has become dry. I drink some water, then continue, “I thought that I’d been going down a dead end and should have kept going with my initial distrust of Emilio Codi and Simon. I knew most murders were domestic. I can’t remember where I heard that.”

But I remember thinking that domestic murder was an oxymoron. Doing the ironing on Sunday night and emptying the dishwasher is domestic, not murder.

“I thought Simon and Emilio were both capable of killing her. Emilio had an obvious motive and Simon was clearly obsessed by her; his photos were evidence of that. Both of them were connected to Tess through the college: Simon as a student there and Emilio as a tutor. So after I left the hospital I went to the college. I wanted to see if anyone there could tell me anything.”

Mr. Wright must think I was keen and energetic. But it wasn’t that. I was putting off going home. Partly because I didn’t want to return home without being any farther forward, but also because I wanted to avoid Todd. He’d phoned and offered to come to your funeral but I’d told him there was no need. So he planned to fly back to the States as soon as possible and would be coming to the flat to pick up his things. I didn’t want to be there.

The snow hadn’t been cleared from the paths up to the art college and most of the windows were in darkness.

The secretary with the German accent told me it was the last of three staff training days, so the students were absent. She agreed to my putting up a couple of notices. The first was information about your funeral. And the second asked your friends to meet me in a couple of weeks’ time at a café I’d seen opposite the college. It was an impulsive note, the date of the meeting chosen randomly, and as I pinned it up next to flat shares and equipment for sale I thought it looked like a ridiculous kind of notice and that nobody would come. But I left it anyway.

When I got home, I saw Todd waiting in the darkness, his hood pulled up against the sleet.

“I don’t have a key.”

I’d thought he’d taken one with him. “I’m sorry.”

I unlocked the door and he went into the bedroom.

I watched from the doorway as he packed his clothes, so meticulously. Suddenly he turned and it was as if he’d caught me off guard; for the first time we were properly looking at each other.

“Come back with me? Please.”

I faltered, looking at his immaculately packed clothes, remembering the order and neatness of our life in New York, a refuge from the maelstrom here. But my neatly contained life was in the past. I could never fly back to it.

“Beatrice?”

I shook my head and the small movement of denial made me vertiginous.

He offered to take the car back to the rental car people at the airport. After all, I clearly had no idea how long I’d be staying. And it was ludicrously expensive. The mundanity of our conversation, the attention to practical detail, was so soothingly familiar that I wanted to ask him to stay with me, plead with him to stay. But I couldn’t ask that of him.

“You’re sure you don’t want me to stay for the funeral?” he asked.

“Yes. Thank you, though.”

I gave him the keys to the rental car and only when I heard the car start up realized I should have given him the engagement ring. Twisting it around my finger, I watched through the basement window as he drove away and continued watching long after his car had disappeared from sight, the sounds of cars now strangers’ cars.

I felt caged in loneliness.

I have told Mr. Wright about my notice at the college but not about Todd.

“Shall I go and get us some cakes?” he asks.

I am completely taken aback. “That would be nice.”

Nice—I should bring a thesaurus tomorrow. I wonder if he’s being kind. Or hungry. Or maybe it’s a romantic gesture—an old-fashioned tea together. I am surprised by how much I hope it’s the latter.

When he’s left, I dial Todd’s number at work. His PA answers the phone but doesn’t recognize my voice; it must be fully reanglicized. She puts me through to Todd. It’s still awkward between us but less so than it was. We’ve started the process of selling our apartment and discuss the sale. Then he abruptly changes the subject. “I saw you on the news,” he says. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Fine, thank you.”

“I’ve been meaning to apologize.”

“You have nothing to apologize for. Really, I’m the one who—”

“Of course I should apologize. You were right all along about your sister.”

There’s a silence between us, which I break. “So are you moving in with Karen?”

There’s a slight pause before he answers. “Yes. I’ll still pay my share of the mortgage, of course, until it’s sold.”

Karen is his new girlfriend. When he told me, I felt guiltily relieved that he had found a relationship so quickly.

“I didn’t think you’d mind,” says Todd and I think he wants me to mind. He sounds falsely cheerful. “I expect it’s a little like you and me, with the shoe on the other foot.”

I have no idea what I can say to that.

“‘If equal affections cannot be,’” says Todd, his tone light, but I know not to misinterpret that now. I dread him adding “let the more loving one be me.”

We say good-bye.

I reminded you I studied literature, didn’t I? I’ve had an endless supply of quotations at my disposal, but they have always highlighted the inadequacy of my life rather than provided an uplifting literary score to it.

Mr. Wright comes back with the cakes and cups of tea and we have five minutes’ time out from my statement and talk instead about small inconsequential things: the unseasonably warm weather, the bulbs in St. James’s Park, the emerging peony in your garden. Our tea together feels a little romantic, in a safe nineteenth-century kind of way, though I doubt Jane Austen’s heroines took tea from Styrofoam cups and had cakes packed inside clear plastic boxes.

I hope he isn’t slighted that I was too nauseated to finish my cake.

After our tea, we go back over a couple of pages in my statement as he double-checks a few points, and then he suggests we end for the day. He has to stay and finish off some paperwork, but he still accompanies me to the lift. As we walk down the long corridor, past empty unlit offices, it feels as if he’s escorting me to my front door. He waits for the lift doors to open and I am safely inside.

I leave the CPS offices and go to meet Kasia. I’m blowing two days’ wages on tickets for the London Eye, which I had promised her. But I’m worn out, my limbs feel too heavy to belong to me, and I just want to go home and sleep. When I see the length of the queues, I resent the Eye that’s turned London into an urban Cyclops.

I spot Kasia waving at me from the front of a queue. She must have been waiting for hours. People are glancing at her, probably afraid she’s about to go into labor in one of the capsules.

I join her and ten minutes later we are “boarding.”

As our capsule climbs higher, London unfurls beneath us and I no longer feel so ill or tired, but actually elated. And I think that although I’m hardly robust, at least I didn’t black out today, which must be a good sign. So maybe I should allow myself to hope that I’ve survived this intact, that everything really might be okay.

I point out the sights to Kasia, asking people on the south side to move so I can show her Big Ben, Battersea Power Station, the House of Commons, Westminster Bridge. As I wave my arms around, showing off London to Kasia, I feel surprised, not just by the pride I feel for my city but also by the word my. I’d opted to live in New York, an Atlantic Ocean away, but for no discernible reason I feel a sense of belonging here.