Sister

21

Thursday

It’s a beautiful spring day, but I take the tube to the CPS offices rather than crossing the park, so that I’m always in a crowd.

When I get there, I am glad for the crush in the lift but anxious, as usual, that my pager and mobile don’t get reception and it’ll get stuck and Kasia won’t be able to get hold of me.

As soon as I’m spat out onto the third floor, I check that they’re both working. I didn’t tell her about the man at the window last night; I didn’t want to frighten her. Or to admit the other possibility—that it’s not just my body that is deteriorating but my mind too. I know that I am physically unwell but never thought I might be mentally unwell too. Is he simply a delusion, a product of a diseased mind? Maybe you need physical strength, which I no longer have, to keep a grip on sanity. Going mad is the thing I fear the most, even more than him, because it destroys who you are inside a body that somehow, grotesquely, survives you. I know you must have been afraid too. And I wish that you’d known it was PCP—not some weakness or disease in your own mind—that threatened your sanity.

Maybe I’ve been given PCP too. Has that thought crossed your mind before it has mine? Perhaps a hallucinogenic is responsible for creating the evil that stalks me. But no one could have given it to me. I’ve only been at the CPS offices, the Coyote and the flat, where no one wishes me harm.

I won’t tell Mr. Wright about the murderer at the window, not yet, nor my fear of going mad. If I don’t tell him, then he’ll treat me normally, and I will behave that way in return. He has expectations of me to be completely sane and I will rise to meet them. Besides, at least for the hours I’m with him, I know that I am safe. So I’ll wait till the end of the day and tell him then.

This morning, Mr. Wright’s office is no longer bright; there’s darkness around the edges, which I try to blink away. As I start talking to him, I hear my words slur a little and it’s an effort to remember. But Mr. Wright has said we may be able to finish my statement today, so I will just have to push myself on.

Mr. Wright doesn’t seem to notice anything wrong. Maybe I’ve become adept at hiding it, or he’s just totally focused on getting through the last part of my statement. He recaps the last part of our interview.

“Hattie Sim told you that the man who gave her the injection and delivered her baby wore a mask?”

“Yes. I asked her if it was the same person and she said it was. But she couldn’t remember any more—voice or hair color or height. She was trying to blank out the whole experience and I couldn’t blame her.”

“Did you think that the man who delivered her baby also delivered Tess’s?”

“Yes. And I was sure he was the man who murdered her. But I needed more before going to the police.”

“Heavy counterbalancing facts?” asks Mr. Wright.

“Yes. I needed to prove that he wore a mask to hide his identity. I hadn’t been able to find out who had delivered Tess’s baby—deliberately, I realized. But maybe I could find out who had given Tess and Hattie the injections.”

By the time I got to St. Anne’s Hospital from Hattie’s house in Chiswick, it was late, past midnight. But I had to find out straightaway. When I arrived, the wards were in darkness and I realized this wasn’t the most sensible time to start asking questions. But I’d already pressed the buzzer on the maternity ward door, and a nurse I didn’t recognize was opening it. She looked at me suspiciously and I remembered that the security was to prevent babies being stolen.

“Can I speak to the senior midwife? I think her name is Cressida.”

“She’s at home. Her shift finished six hours ago. She’ll be back tomorrow.”

But I couldn’t wait till then.

“Is William Saunders here?” I asked.

“You’re a patient?”

“No.” I hesitated a moment. “A friend.”

I heard the sound of a baby crying, then more joining in. A buzzer went. The young nurse grimaced and I saw how stressed she looked.

“Okay. He’s in the on-call room. Third door on the right.”

I knocked on the door, the nurse watching me, and then I went in. The room was in semidarkness, just lit by the open doorway. William woke up instantly, fully alert, presumably because he was on call and was expected to be functioning at 100 percent immediately.

“What are you doing here, Bee?”

No one but you has ever called me that and it was as if you’d lent him some of our closeness. He got out of bed and I saw that he was fully dressed in blue scrubs. His hair was tangled from where it had been on the pillow. I was conscious of the smallness of the room, the single bed.

“Do you know who gives the women on the CF trial their injection?” I asked.

“No. Do you want me to try to find out?”

That simple. “Yes.”

“Okay.” He was looking businesslike, totally focused, and I was grateful to him for taking me seriously. “Are there any other patients, apart from your sister, whom you know about?”

“Kasia Lewski and Hattie Sim. Tess met them at the CF clinic.”

“Would you write them down?”

He waited while I fumbled in my bag and wrote down their names, then gently took the piece of paper from me. “Now can I ask why you want to know?”

“Because whoever he is wore a mask. When he gave the injections, when he delivered the babies.”

There was a pause and I sensed that any urgency he’d shared with me was dissipated.

“It’s not that unusual for medical staff to wear masks, especially in obstetrics,” he said. “Childbirth is a messy business, lots of body fluids around; medical staff wear protective gear as a matter of course.”

He must have seen the disbelief on my face, or my disappointment.

“It really is pretty routine, at least in this hospital,” he continued. “We have the highest percentage of patients with HIV outside Johannesburg. We’re tested regularly to avoid infecting our patients, but the same isn’t true the other way around. So we simply don’t know when a woman comes through our doors whether or not she’s ill or a carrier.”

“But what about giving the gene? Giving the injections?” I asked. “That procedure doesn’t have fluids around, does it? So why wear a mask then?”

“Maybe whoever it was has just got into the habit of being cautious.”

I had once found his ability to see the best in people endearing, reminding me of you, but now that same trait made me furious.

“You’d rather find an innocent explanation than think that someone murdered my sister and hid his identity with a mask?”

“Bee—”

“But I don’t have the luxury of choosing. The ugly violent option is the only one open to me.” I took a step away from him. “Do you wear a mask?”

“Often I do, yes. It might seem overly cautious but—”

I interrupted. “Was it you?”

“What?”

He was staring at me and I couldn’t meet his eye. “You think I killed her?” he asked. He sounded appalled and hurt.

I was wrong about conflict with words being trivial.

“I’m sorry.” I made myself meet his eye. “Someone murdered her. I don’t know who it is. Just that it is someone. And I have probably met that person by now, talked to him or her, and not known. But I don’t have a shred of proof.”

He took hold of my hand and I realized I was shaking.

His fingers stroked my palm, gently; too softly at first for me to believe that this was really a gesture of attraction. But as he continued, I knew, hardly believing it, that there was no mistake.

I took my hand away from his. His face looked disappointed, but his voice sounded kind. “I’m not a very good bet, am I?”

Still astonished, and more than flattered, I went to the door.

Why did I leave that room, with its possibilities? Because even if I could ignore the morality of his being married—not insurmountable, I realized—I knew it wouldn’t be long-term or secure or anything else I wanted and needed. It would be a moment of passion, nothing more, and afterward a heavy emotional debt would be exacted from me. Or maybe it was simply him calling me Bee. A name that only you used. A name that made me remember who I had been for so many years. A name that didn’t do this.

So I closed the door behind me and stayed wobbling but still upright on my narrow moral tightrope. Not because I was highly principled. But because I again chose safety rather than risk short-term happiness.

On the road a little way from the hospital I waited for a night bus. I remembered how strong his arms had felt when he’d hugged me that time, and the gentleness of his fingers as he’d stroked my palm. I imagined his arms around me now and the warmth of him, but I was alone in the dark and the cold, regretting now my decision to leave, regretting that I was a person who would always, predictably, leave.

I turned to go back, even started walking a few steps, when I thought I heard someone, just a few feet away. There were two unlit alleys leading off the road, or maybe he was crouching behind a parked car. Preoccupied before, I hadn’t noticed that there were virtually no cars on the road, and no one on the pavements. I was alone with whoever was watching me.

I saw a black cab, without a light on, and stuck out my hand, praying he would stop for me, which he did, chastising me for being on my own in the middle of the night. I spent money I no longer had on him driving me all the way home. He waited until I was safely inside the flat before driving off.

Mr. Wright looks at me with concern, and I’m aware of how ill I feel. My mouth is as dry as parchment. I drain the glass of water his secretary has left for me. He asks if I’m okay to carry on, and I say yes because I find it reassuring to be with him and because I don’t want to be on my own in the flat. “Did you think about the man following Tess?” asks Mr. Wright.

“Yes. But it was a sense of someone watching me, and a sound, I think, because something alerted me, but I didn’t actually see anyone.”

He suggests we get a sandwich and go into the park for a working picnic. I think it’s because I’m becoming groggy and inarticulate, and he hopes that a spell outside will wake me up. He picks up the tape recorder. It never occurred to me that it might be portable.

We get to St. James’s Park, which looks like that scene from Mary Poppins, all blossom and buds and blue sky with white meringue clouds. Office workers are splayed over the grass, turning the park into a beach without a sea. We walk side by side, closely, along a path looking for somewhere less crowded. His kind face is looking at mine, and I wonder if he can feel my warmth as I feel his.

A woman with a double stroller comes toward us and we have to go single file. On my own for a few moments I feel a sudden sense of loss, as if the warmth has gone from the left-hand side of my body now that he isn’t there. It makes me think of lying on a cold concrete floor, on my left side, feeling the chill of it go into me, hearing my heart beat too fast, unable to move. I’m panicking, fast-forwarding the story, but then he’s beside me again and we get back in step and I’ll return to the correct sequence.

We find a quiet spot and Mr. Wright spreads out a rug for us to sit on. I am touched that when he saw blue sky this morning, he thought ahead to a picnic in the park with me.

He switches on the tape recorder. I pause a moment while a group of teenagers walks past, then I begin.

“Kasia woke up when I got in, or maybe she’d been waiting up for me. I asked her if she could remember the doctor who’d given her the injection.”

She pulled your dressing gown around herself.

“I don’t know name,” she said. “Is there problem?”

“Was he wearing a mask; is that why you don’t know?”

“Yes, a mask. Something bad? Beata?”

Her hand moved unconsciously to her bump. I just couldn’t frighten her.

“Everything’s fine. Really.”

But she’s too astute to be fobbed off so easily. “You said Tess baby not ill. Not have CF. When you came to flat. When you ask Mitch to get tested.”

I hadn’t realized that she’d really understood. She’d probably been brooding about it ever since but hadn’t questioned me, presumably trusting me to tell her if there was something she needed to know.

“Yes, that’s true. And I’m trying to find out more. But it’s nothing to do with you. You and your baby are going to be fine, right as rain.”

She smiled at “right as rain,” an expression that she’d recently learned, a smile that seemed forced, on cue for me.

I gave her a hug. “You really will be all right. Both of you. I promise.”

I couldn’t help you and Xavier, but I would help her. No one was going to hurt her or her baby.

A little way away the teenagers are playing a game of softball, and I wonder for a moment what the person who listens to these tapes will make of the background noises of the park, the laughter and chatter around us.

“And the next day you got an e-mail from Professor Rosen?” Mr. Wright asks.

“Yes. On Saturday morning at around ten-fifteen.” I was on my way to work a shift for “weekend brunch,” a new idea of Bettina’s. “I noticed it was sent from his personal e-mail,” I continue, “rather than the Chrom-Med one he’d used before.” Mr. Wright looks down at a copy of the e-mail.

I didn’t know whether to trust him or not. I certainly didn’t know why he was helping me.

Bettina’s brunch initiative was a success and by twelve the Coyote was packed. I saw William pushing his way through, trying to get my attention. He smiled at my evident astonishment.

“Cressida, our senior midwife, told me you worked here; I hope that’s okay.”

I remember I’d given her my contact details at the flat and the Coyote when she was looking for your notes.

Bettina grinned at me and took over the drinks order I was doing, so that I could talk to William. I was perplexed that she wasn’t more surprised by a beautiful man’s coming to see me. I went down to the end of the bar and he followed me.

“I couldn’t find out who gave Tess the injection, or the other women; their notes have seemingly just disappeared without trace. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have offered to do it.”

But I’d already realized it would be impossible for him. If no one could find out who was with you when you gave birth to Xavier, an event covering at least a few hours, it would be impossible for him, without notes, to find out who gave you an injection, which presumably was quick and uneventful.

“I knew I’d let you down,” continued William. “So I did a bit of asking around at the genetic clinic. Pulled in a few favors. I’ve got you these.”

He handed me a packet of hospital notes as if giving me flowers. “Your shreds of proof, Bee.”

I saw the notes were Mitch’s.

“Mitch Flanagan is Kasia Lewski’s partner,” William said, and I realized how little I’d told him about my friendship with Kasia. “He isn’t a carrier of the cystic fibrosis gene.”

So Mitch had got himself tested—and clearly hadn’t told Kasia the results. I presumed that like Emilio he had assumed—or chosen to assume—that he wasn’t the father of her baby. I imagined his relief at the result, his get-out clause, turning Kasia into the trollop who’d tricked him. I wondered if he could really believe that.

From my silence and lack of excitement, William thought I hadn’t understood. “Both parents need to be carriers of the cystic fibrosis gene for their baby to have it. This dad doesn’t carry the CF gene, so there’s no way the baby could have had it. I don’t know what’s going on with the CF trial, but something’s clearly very wrong and these notes prove it.”

Again he misinterpreted my silence. “I’m sorry. I should have listened to you properly, supported you from the beginning. But you can take these to the police, can’t you? Or would you like me to?”

“It won’t do any good.”

He looked at me, perplexed.

“Kasia, his former partner, she’s the type of person people make mistakes about. The police will think that she was wrong about Mitch Flanagan being the father, or lied about it. Just like they did with my sister.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

But I did, because I myself had once been prejudiced against Kasia. I knew DI Haines would see her, as I once had, as a girl who most probably slept around, a girl who could easily be mistaken, or lie, about the father of her baby.

William’s pager went off, a strange sound among the conversations and clinking drinks at the bar. “I’m sorry, I have to go.”

I remembered he had only twenty minutes to get back to the hospital.

“Will you make it?”

“Absolutely. I brought the bike.”

As he left, I saw Bettina grinning at me again. I returned her smile. Because despite the fact that his shreds of proof were worthless, I was buoyed up. For the first time, someone was on my side.

Bettina sent me home early, as if giving me a present for my smile.

When I got home, I found Kasia on her knees scrubbing the kitchen floor.

“What on earth are you doing?”

She looked up at me, face sweating. “They said it be good for baby; get in right position.” Your flat had quickly come to resemble hers, everything gleaming around the chips and the rust and the stains. “Anyway, I said I like cleaning.”

She told me that when she was a child, her mother worked long shifts at a factory. After school, Kasia would scrub and polish so that when her mother got home the apartment would sparkle for her. It’s a gift, Kasia’s cleaning.

I didn’t tell her that Mitch wasn’t a carrier of the CF gene. I hadn’t yet told her that Hattie’s baby had died. Last night I’d thought I was protecting her, but now I wondered if I was betraying her trust in me. I honestly didn’t know which was true.

“Here,” I said, handing her tickets. “I have something for you.”

She took the tickets from me, a little bemused.

“I couldn’t afford the air fare to Poland, so these are just coach tickets, six weeks after your baby is due. There’s one for each of us, the baby will travel free.”

I thought that she should take her baby to Poland to meet his grandparents, all four of them, and her uncles and aunts and cousins. She has a cat’s cradle of relations for this baby to be supported by. Mum and Dad both being only children meant we had no web of relations to fall back on. Our family was preshrunk before we were born.

Kasia was just staring at the tickets, uncharacteristically quiet.

“And I’ve got you support stockings, because my friend who’s a doctor says you must be careful not to get a thrombosis, zakrzepica,” I said, translating the last word into Polish, which I’d looked up before. I couldn’t read her expression and was worried I was imposing.

“I don’t have to stay with your family. But I really don’t think you should go that far with a new baby on your own.”

She kissed me. I realized that, despite everything, this was the first time I’d seen her cry.

I have told Mr. Wright about Mitch’s notes.

“I thought that was another reason poor single girls were being chosen—they were less likely to be believed.”

The sunshine has made me feel sleepier rather than waking me up. I finish telling Mr. Wright about Mitch’s notes.

It’s now an effort to be coherent.

“Then I gave Kasia tickets to Poland, and she cried.”

My intellect is too unfocused now to decide what is relevant.

“That night I realized, properly, how brave she’d been. I’d thought her naive and immature, but she’s actually really courageous and I should have seen that when she stood up for me with Mitch, knowing that she’d be hit for it.”

The bruises on her face and the welts on her arms were clear enough badges of courage. But so too was her smiling and dancing in the face of whatever was thrown at her. Like you, she has the gift of finding happiness in small things. She pans life for gold and finds it daily.

And so what if, like you, she loses things? It’s no more a sign of immaturity than my knowledge of where my possessions are is a sign of my adulthood. And imagine acquiring a new language and only learning the words to describe a wonderful world, refusing to know the words for a bleak one and in doing so linguistically shaping the world that you inhabit. I don’t think that’s naive, but fantastically optimistic.

The next morning I knew that I had to tell her what was going on. Who was I to think that after what happened to you, I could look after another person?

“I was going to tell her, but she was already on her mobile phoning half of Poland to tell them about bringing the baby to see them. And then I got another e-mail from Professor Rosen, asking to meet me. Kasia was still chatting to her family when I left the flat.”

I met Professor Rosen, at his suggestion, at the entrance to the Chrom-Med building, which was bustling despite it being Sunday. I was expecting him to escort me to his office, but instead he led me to his car. We got in and he locked the doors. The demonstrators were still there—a distance away—and I couldn’t hear their chants.

Professor Rosen was trying to sound calm but there was a shake in his voice that he couldn’t control. “An active virus vector has been ordered under my cystic fibrosis trial number at St. Anne’s.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Either there’s been a monumental cock-up,” he said, and I thought that he never used words like cock-up, that this was as extreme as his language would get, “or a different gene is being tested out at St. Anne’s, one that needs an active virus vector, and my cystic fibrosis trial is being used as a cover.”

“The cystic fibrosis trial has been hijacked?”

“Maybe, yes. If you want to be melodramatic about it.”

He was trying to belittle what was happening but couldn’t quite pull it off.

“For what?” I asked.

“My guess is that, if an illegal trial is happening, it is for genetic enhancement, which in the UK is illegal to test on humans.”

“What kind of enhancement?”

“I don’t know. Blue eyes, high IQ, big muscles. The list of absurdity goes on. But whatever gene it is, it needs an active virus vector to transport it.”

He was talking as a scientist, in facts, but beneath the words his emotion was clear. He was livid.

“Do you know who is giving the injection for the CF gene therapy at St. Anne’s?” I asked.

“I don’t have access to that type of information. They keep us very much inside our own pigeonholes at Chrom-Med. It’s not like a university, no cross-pollination of ideas or information. So no, I don’t know the doctor’s name. But if I were him or her, I would administer the genetic treatment for cystic fibrosis to fetuses who genuinely had CF and at the same time test the illicit gene. But maybe whoever it is became careless, or there just weren’t enough patients.” He broke off and I saw the anger and hurt in him. “Someone is trying to make babies even more perfect in some way. But healthy is already perfect. Healthy is already perfect.” I saw that he was shaking.

I wondered then if you’d found out about the hijacked trial—and the hijacker’s identity. Was that why you’d been murdered?

“You must tell the police.”

He shook his head, not meeting my eyes.

“But you have to tell them.”

“It’s still just conjecture.”

“My sister and her baby are dead.”

He stared through the windshield as if driving the car rather than hiding in it. “I need to get proof first that it’s a rogue trial that’s to blame. Once I have that proof, I can save my cystic fibrosis trial. Otherwise my trial will be stopped in all hospitals until they’ve found out what’s going on and that could be months away, or years away. It may never be resumed.”

“But the cystic fibrosis trial shouldn’t be affected at all. Surely—”

He interrupted. “When the press get hold of this, with their level of subtlety and intelligence, it won’t be a maverick trial that’s to blame for babies dying—and God knows what else—it will be my cystic fibrosis trial.”

“I don’t believe that’s true.”

“Really? Most people are so poorly informed and poorly educated that they don’t see a difference between genetic enhancement and genetic therapy.”

“But that’s absurd—”

Again he interrupted. “Mobs of imbeciles have hounded pediatricians, even attacked them, because they think pediatrician is the same thing as pedophile, so yes, they will target the cystic fibrosis trial as wicked too because they won’t understand there’s a difference.”

“So why did you investigate in the first place?” I asked. “If you’re going to do nothing with the findings?”

“I investigated because I’d told you I’d answer your questions.” He looked at me, anger sparking in his face, furious with me for putting him in this position. “I thought there’d be nothing to find.”

“So I’ll have to go to the police without your support?” I asked.

He looked physically intensely uncomfortable, trying to smooth out the sharp creases of his pressed gray trouser legs, which wouldn’t lie flat.

“The order of the virus vector could well be a mistake; computer glitches occur. Administrative errors happen worryingly frequently.”

“And that’s what you’ll tell the police?”

“It’s the most credible explanation. So yes, that’s what I’ll tell them.”

“And I won’t be believed.”

Silence hung between us like glass.

I broke it. “What’s this really about, curing babies or your own reputation?”

He unlocked the car doors, then turned to me. “If your brother were an unborn baby now, what would you have me do?”

I did hesitate, but only for a moment. “I’d want you to go to the police and tell them the truth and then work like hell at saving your trial.”

He walked away from the car, not bothering to wait for me, not bothering to lock it again.

The woman with the spiky hair recognized him and yelled at him, “Leave playing God to God!”

“If God had done his job properly in the first place, we wouldn’t need to,” he snapped at her. She spat at him.

The demonstrator with the gray ponytail shouted, “Say no to designer babies!”

Professor Rosen pushed his way through them and went back into the building.

I didn’t think he was wicked, just weak and selfish. He simply couldn’t bear to give up his newfound status. But he had a mental alibi for his lack of action, exonerating circumstances that he could plead to himself—the cystic fibrosis cure is very important. You and I both know that.

I reached the tube station and only then realized that Professor Rosen had given me a crucial piece of information. When I’d asked him if he knew who was giving the injections for the CF trial at St. Anne’s, he’d said that he didn’t know, that he didn’t have access to that information. But he had talked about that person’s choosing fetuses “who genuinely had CF and at the same time test the illicit gene.” In other words, the person giving the injection was the same person who was running the CF trial at St. Anne’s. It had to be, if that person was responsible for choosing who was on it. And finding out who was in charge of the CF trial at St. Anne’s was light-years easier than finding the identity of someone giving a single injection.

It’s lovely out here, the sky a pure Wedgwood blue. As office workers straggle back to work, I remember at St. Mary’s how we had lessons outside when it was hot, the children and the teacher all pretending to be interested in a book while soaking up summer, and for a moment I forget how cold I am.

“Do you think Professor Rosen meant to tell you?” Mr. Wright asks.

“Yes. He’s far too clever and too pedantic to be careless. I think that he salved his conscience by hiding this tidbit of information, and it was up to me to have the intelligence to find it. Or maybe his better self won out at this one point of our conversation. But whatever it was, I now just had to find out who was administering the trial at St. Anne’s.”

My legs are almost completely numb now. I’m not sure that when I try to stand up, I’m going to be able to.

“I phoned William and he said that he would find out who was in charge of the CF trial and get back to me, he hoped by the end of the day. Then I phoned Kasia on her mobile, but she was engaged, presumably still chatting to her family, although by now her phone credit would have run out and it must be them phoning her. I knew that she was going to meet some Polish friends from church, so I thought I’d tell her when she got back. When we’d know who was behind it all and she’d be safe.”

In the meantime, I went to meet Mum at Petersham Nursery to choose a plant for your garden, as we’d arranged. I was glad of the distraction; I needed to do something rather than pace the flat waiting for William to ring me.

Kasia had been on at me again to lay flowers at the toilets building for you.

She’d told me I’d be putting my “odcisk palca” of love onto something evil. (Odcisk palca is “fingerprint,” the nearest translation we could find, and a rather lovely one.) But that was for other people to do, not me. I had to find that evil and confront him head on, not with flowers.

After weeks of cold and wet, it was the first warm dry day of early spring, and at the nursery camellias and primroses and tulips were unfolding into color. I kissed Mum and she hugged me tightly back. As we walked, under the canopy of old greenhouses, it was as if we’d stepped back in time and into a stately home’s garden.

Mum checked plants for frost hardiness and repeat flowering while I was preoccupied—after searching for almost two months, by the end of the day I should know who killed you.

For the first time since I’d arrived in London, I felt too warm and took off my expensive thick coat, revealing the outfit underneath.

“Those clothes, they’re awful, Beatrice.”

“They’re Tess’s.”

“I thought they must be. You have no money at all now?”

“Not really, no. Well some, but it’s tied up in the flat until it’s sold.”

I have to own up that I had been wearing your clothes for quite a while. My New York outfits seemed ludicrous outside that lifestyle, besides which I’d discovered how much more comfortable yours are. It should have felt odd, and definitely serious, to be wearing my dead sister’s clothes, but all I could imagine was your amusement at seeing me in your hand-me-downs of hand-me-downs, me who had to have the latest designer fashion, who had outfits dry-cleaned after one wearing.

“Do you know what happened yet?” asked Mum. It was the first time she’d asked me.

“No. But I think I will. Soon.”

Mum reached out her fingers and stroked a petal of an early-flowering clematis. “She’d have liked this one.”

And suddenly she was mute, a paroxysm of grief passing through her body that looked unbearable. I put my arm around her but she was unreachable. For a while I just held her, then she turned to me.

“She must have been so frightened. And I wasn’t there.”

“She was an adult; you couldn’t have been with her all the time.”

Her tears were a wept scream. “I should have been with her.”

I remembered being afraid as a child, and the sound of her dressing gown rustling in the dark and the smell of her face cream, and how just the sound of her and the smell of her banished my fears, and I wished she’d been with you too.

I hugged her tightly, trying to make myself sound believable.

“She wouldn’t have known anything about it, I promise, nothing at all. He put a sedative into her drink, so she’d have fallen asleep. She wouldn’t have been afraid. She died peacefully.”

I had learned finally, like you, to put love before truth.

We carried on through the greenhouse, looking at plants, and Mum seemed a little soothed by them.

“So you won’t be staying much longer then,” she said. “As you’ll know soon.”

I was hurt that she could think I could leave her again, after this.

“No. I’m going to stay, for good. Amias has said I can stay in the flat, pretty much rent free I think.”

My decision wasn’t entirely selfless. I’d decided to train as an architect. Actually, I needn’t put that in the past tense; it’s what I still want to do when the trial is over. I’m not sure whether they’ll take me, or how I’ll fund it and look after Kasia and her baby at the same time, but I want to try. I know my mathematical brain, obsessed with detail, will do the structural side well. And I’ll search myself for something of your creative ability. Who knows? Maybe it’s lying dormant somewhere, an unread code for artistic talent wrapped tightly in a coiled chromosome waiting for the right conditions to spring into life.

My phone signaled and I saw a text from William wanting to meet, urgently. I texted back the address of the flat. I felt sick with anticipation.

“You have to go?” asked Mum.

“In a little while, yes. I’m sorry.”

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.”