Sister

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 in 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. “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 rumored to have been brilliant and “destined for greatness,” but I’d thought the rumor must be wrong, believing instead my own opinion that he was scruffily hopeless. Remembering my view of Dr. Nichols, I realized 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 from how he usually is.” William 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 Chrom-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 realization 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 labor 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 temps and sixty percent of our midwives are too, 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 one another 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 woolen picnic rug, I am shivering.

“I realized 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 had only 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 that 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 his 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 colored onto the ground.

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

“Okay. 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 dialed 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 wanted 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 organized. 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 my having sex with William, and I like him so much for not being judgmental.

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, reenter the world again; and I thought of Donne chastising the busy old fool of a sun for making him leave his lover and marveled that his poetry now applied to me.

For a moment the wine has boosted me a little, I can feel it warming my body.

“William went to the bathroom, and looked in the cupboard. He found a bottle of pills with a hospital label on them. It was the PCP. It had been there all the time. He said many drugs are illegal on the street but are legally prescribed by doctors for therapeutic reasons.”

“Did the label give the name of the prescribing doctor?”

“No, but he said the police could easily trace it to Dr. Nichols through the hospital pharmacy records. I felt so stupid. I’d thought that an illegal drug would be hidden, not openly on show. It had been there all the time.”

I’m sorry; I’m starting to repeat myself. My mind is losing focus.

“And then…?” he asks.

But we’re nearly at the end, so I summon what remains of my mental energy and continue.

“We left the flat together. William had left his bike chained to the railings on the other side of the road, but it had been stolen, though they’d left the chain. He took that with us, and joked that we could report the theft of his bike at the same time.

We decided to walk through Hyde Park to the police station, rather than take the ugly road route. At the gates of the park there was a flower stall. William suggested we lay flowers where you’d died and went to buy some.

As he spoke to the stall holder, I texted Kasia two words: “odcisk palca”—and knew she’d understand that I was finally putting on my own fingerprint of love.

William turned to me, holding two bunches of daffodils.

“You told me they were Tess’s favorite flower. Because of the yellow in a daffodil saving children’s sight.”

I was pleased and surprised that he had remembered.

He put his arm around me and as we walked into the park together, I thought I heard you teasing me, and I admitted to you that I was a big fat hypocrite. The truth is, I knew that the affair wouldn’t last, that he’d stay married. But I also knew that I wouldn’t be broken by it. I wasn’t proud of myself, but I did feel liberated from the person I no longer was or wanted to be. And as we walked together, I felt small green shoots of hope and decided I would allow them to grow. Because now that I had found out what happened to you, I could look forward and dare to imagine a future without you. I remembered being here almost two months before, when I had sat in the snow and wept for you among the lifeless, leafless trees. But now there were ball games and laughter and picnics and bright new foliage. It was the same place, but the landscape was entirely changed.

We reached the toilets building and I took the cellophane off the daffodils, wanting them to look homegrown. As I laid them at the door, a memory—or lack of one—tugged its way through, unbidden.

“But I never told you that she liked daffodils, or the reason.”

“Of course you did. That’s why I chose them.”

“No. I talked about it with Amias. And Mum. Not you.”

I had actually told him very little about you, or me for that matter.

“Tess must have told you herself.”

Carrying his bunch of daffodils for you, he came toward me. “Bee—”

“Stop calling me that.” I backed away from him.

He came closer, then pushed me hard inside.

“He shut the door behind us and put a knife against my throat.”

I break off, shaking from the adrenaline. Yes, his call to DI Haines had been faked. He probably got the idea from a daytime TV soap—they’re on all the time in the wards—I remember that from Leo’s hospital stays. Maybe it was sheer desperation. And maybe I was too distracted to notice anything very much. Mr. Wright is considerate enough not to point out my ludicrous gullibility.

The teenagers have abandoned their loud game of softball for raucous music. The office workers picnicking have been replaced by mothers with preschool children; their high, barely formed voices quickly turning from shrieks of happiness into tears and back again, a mercurial quicksilver sound. And I want the children to be louder, the laughter more raucous, the music turned up full volume. And I want the park to be crowded with barely a place to sit. And I want the sunshine to be blinding.

He closed the door of the toilets building and used the bicycle chain to fasten it shut. There had never been a bicycle, had there? Light seeped through the filthy cracked windows and was turned dirty by them, casting the gloom of a nightmare. The sounds of the park outside—children laughing and crying, music from a CD player—were muffled by the damp bricks. Yes, it’s uncanny how similar that day was to today in the park with Mr. Wright, but maybe the sounds of a park remain the same, day to day, give or take. And in that cold, cruel building I also wanted the children to be louder, the laughter more raucous, the music turned up to full volume. Maybe because if I could hear them, then there was a chance they could hear my screams; but no, it couldn’t have been that because I knew if I screamed, he would silence me with a knife. So it must have been simply that I wanted the comfort of hearing life as I died.

“You killed her, didn’t you?” I asked.

If I’d been sensible, maybe I would have given him a let-out, made out that I thought he had pushed me in there for some weird sort of sadistic sex; because once I’d accused him, was he ever going to let me go? But he was never going to. Whatever I did or said. I had wild thoughts racing through my head about how you’re meant to make friends with your kidnapper. (Where on earth did that nugget of information come from? And why did anyone think the general population would need to know such a thing?) Remarkably, I did, but I couldn’t make friends with him because he’d been my lover and there was nowhere for us to go.

“I’m not responsible for Tess’s death.”

For a moment I thought that he wasn’t, that I’d read him all wrong, that everything would play out the way I’d been so sure of, with us going to the police and Dr. Nichols being arrested. But self-deception isn’t possible with a knife and a chain on the other side of the equation.

“I didn’t want it to happen. I didn’t plan it. I’m a doctor, for God’s sake. I wasn’t meant to kill anyone. Have you any idea what it feels like? It’s a living hell.”

“So stop now with me. Please.”

He was silent. Fear pricked my skin into a hundred thousand goose bumps, a hundred thousand tiny hairs standing to upright attention as they offered their useless protection.

“You were her doctor?”

I had to keep him talking—not because I thought anyone was on the way to rescue me, but because a little longer to live, even in this building with this man, was precious.

And because I needed to know.

“Yes. I looked after her all through her pregnancy.”

You’d never mentioned his name, just said “the doctor,” and I hadn’t asked, too busy multitasking with something else.

“We had a good rapport, liked each other. I was always kind to her.”

“You delivered Xavier?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I thought of the masked man in your nightmarish paintings, dark with menace in the shadows.

“She was relieved to see me in the park that day,” William continued. “Smiled at me. I—”

I interrupted. “But she was terrified of you.”

“The man who delivered the baby, not me.”

“But she must have known it was you, surely? Even with a mask, she must have recognized your voice at least. If you’d looked after her for all her pregnancy, surely…”

He was silent. I hadn’t realized that it was possible to be more appalled by him.

“You didn’t speak to her. While she was in labor. When she gave birth. Even when her baby was dead. You didn’t speak to her.”

“I came back and comforted her, twenty minutes or so later. I’ve told you. I was always kind to her.”

So he’d taken off the mask, switching personas back into the caring man you thought he was, who I’d thought he was.

“I suggested I phone someone for her,” he continued. “And she gave me your number.”

You thought I knew. All that time, you thought I knew.

Mr. Wright looks at me with concern. “You look pale.”

“Yes.”

I feel pale, inside and out. I think of that expression “paling into insignificance” and think how well it fits me, a pale person in a bright world that turns me invisible.

Outside I could hear people in the bright afternoon sunshine, but in the toilets building I was invisible to them. He’d taken off his tie and used it to bind my hands behind my back.

“You called her Tess, the first time I met you.”

Still keeping him talking—the only way to stay alive. And still needing to know.

“Yes, it was a stupid blunder,” he replied. “And it shows I’m not good at this, doesn’t it? I’m useless at subterfuge and lies.”

But he had been good at it. He’d manipulated me from the start, guiding conversations and subtly deflecting questions. From my wanting your notes to asking who was in charge of the CF trial at St. Anne’s, he’d made sure I had no real information. He’d even given an excuse, in case his acting wasn’t convincing.

“Christ, it makes you talk like, I don’t know, somebody else, somebody off the telly or something.”

Because that was what he was imitating.

“I didn’t plan this. A vandal threw a stone through her window, not me; she just thought it was targeted at her.”

He was using twine to tie my legs together.

“The lullabies?” I asked.

“I was panicking, just doing whatever came into my head. The CD was in the postnatal ward. I took it home, not really knowing what I was doing. Not thinking anything through. I never stopped to think she’d record the lullabies onto a tape. Who has an answering machine nowadays with a tape? Everyone’s got voice mail through their telephone provider.”

He was lurching between the minutiae of the everyday and the large horror of murder. The enormity of what he had done ensnared in small domestic details.

“You knew Mitch’s notes would be useless, because Kasia would never be believed.”

“The worst-case scenario was that you’d take her boyfriend’s notes to the police. And make a fool of yourself.”

“But you needed me to trust you.”

“It was you who kept on going with this. Making me do this. You left me no other choice.”

But I’d trusted him before he’d produced Mitch’s notes, long before. And it had been my insecurity that had helped him. I’d thought my suspicion of him was because of my customary anxiety around handsome men, rather than seriously suspecting him of your murder, and so I had dismissed it. He was the one person in all this who’d been about me—not about you.

But I’d been thinking too long; I couldn’t allow a silence to grow between us.

“It was you and not Dr. Nichols who was the researcher who found the gene?”

“Yes. Hugo’s a sweet man. But hardly brilliant.”

His tale about Dr. Nichols had been a boast as much as a deceit. I realized that he had been framing Dr. Nichols from early on, carefully casting the shadow of guilt onto him so that it wouldn’t fall on himself. The long-term planning was viciously calculated.

“Imperial College and their absurd ethics committee wouldn’t allow a human trial,” continued William. “They didn’t have the vision. Or the guts to go for it. Imagine it, a gene that increases IQ—think of what that means. Then Chrom-Med approached me. My only requirement was that they run human trials.”

“Which they did.”

“No. They lied, let me down. I—”

“You really believe that? The directors of Chrom-Med are pretty bright. I’ve read their biographies. They’re certainly clever enough to want someone else to do their work for them. To take the rap in case it went wrong.”

He shook his head, but I could see I’d got to him. An avenue was opening up and I ran hell for leather down it. “Genetic enhancement, that’s where the real money lies, isn’t it? As soon as it becomes legal, it’ll be huge. And Chrom-Med wants to be ahead of the game, ready for it.”

“But they can’t know.”

“They’ve been playing you, William.”

But I’d done it wrong, too scared to be as slick as I’d needed to be; I’d simply dented his ego and released new anger. He’d been holding the knife almost casually; now his fingers tightened around it.

“Tell me about the human trial; what happened?”

His fingers were still gripping the knife, but the knuckles were no longer white, so he wasn’t gripping as hard. In his other hand he held a flashlight. He had come equipped for this: knife and flashlight and bicycle chain, a grotesque parody of a Boy Scout trip. I wondered what else he’d thought to bring.

Mr. Wright holds my hand and I’m again overwhelmingly grateful, not brushing away kindness anymore.

“He told me that in humans his IQ gene codes for two totally different things. It affects not only memory capacity but also lung function. It meant that the babies couldn’t breathe when they were born.”

I’m so sorry, Tess.

“He told me that if the babies are intubated immediately after they’re born, if they’re helped to breathe for a while, they’d be fine. They’d live.”

He had made me lie on the floor, on my left side; the damp cold of the concrete was seeping into my body. I tried to move, but my limbs were too heavy. He must have drugged me when he gave me the tea. I could only use words to stay alive.

“But you didn’t help them to breathe, did you? Xavier. Hattie’s baby.”

“It wasn’t my fault. It’s a rare lung disorder and someone would ask questions. I just needed to be left alone. Then there would be no problems. It’s other people, crowding around me, not giving me space.”

“So you lied to them about what really killed their babies?”

“I couldn’t risk people asking questions.”

“And me? Surely you’re not going to stage my suicide, the way you staged Tess’s? Frame me for my own murder like you did my sister? Because if it happens twice, the police are bound to be suspicious.”

“Staged? You make it sound so thought out. I didn’t plan it—I told you that. You can see that because of my mistakes, can’t you? My research and my trial I planned in meticulous detail, but not this. I was forced into doing this. I even paid them, for God’s sake, not stopping to think that it might look suspicious. And I never thought they might talk to each other.”

“So why did you pay them?”

“It was just kindness, that’s all. I just wanted to make sure they had a decent diet, so the developing fetuses had the optimum conditions. It was meant to be spent on food, not bloody clothes.”

I didn’t dare ask him if there were others or how many. I didn’t want to die with that knowledge. But there were some things I needed to know.

“What made you choose Tess? Because she was single? Poor?”

“And Catholic. Catholic women are far less likely to terminate when they know there’s a problem with their baby.”

“Hattie is Catholic?”

“Millions of Filipinos are Catholic. Hattie Sim put it on her form—no father’s name, mind you, but her religion.”

“Did her baby have cystic fibrosis?”

“Yes. Whenever I could, I treated the cystic fibrosis and tested my gene out too. But there weren’t enough babies who fitted all the criteria.”

“Like Xavier?”

He was silent.

“Did Tess find out about your trial? Is that why you killed her?”

He hesitated a moment. His tone was close to self-pitying; I think that he genuinely hoped I would understand.

“There was another consequence that I hadn’t foreseen. My gene got into the mother’s ovaries. It means there is the same genetic change in every egg, and if the women have more babies, the babies will have the same problem with their lungs.

“Logistically I couldn’t expect to be there for the next baby, or the next. People move away. Eventually someone would discover what was going on. That’s why Hattie had to have a hysterectomy. But Tess’s labor was too quick. She arrived at the hospital with the baby’s head already engaged. There wasn’t time to do a caesarean, let alone an emergency hysterectomy.”

You hadn’t found out anything at all.

He killed you because your body was living evidence against him.

Around us people are starting to leave the park, the grass turning from green to gray, the air cooling into evening. My bones ache with cold and I focus on the warmth of Mr. Wright’s hand, holding mine.

“I asked him what made him do it, suggested it was money. He was furious, told me his motives weren’t avaricious. Impure. He said he wouldn’t be able to sell a gene that hadn’t had a legal trial. Fame wasn’t motivating him either. He couldn’t publish his results.”

“So did he tell you the reason?”

“Yes.”

I’ll tell you what he said out here, in this gray-green park in the cool fresh air. Neither of us need to return to that building to hear him.

“He said that science has the power that religion once claimed, but it’s real and provable, not superstition and cant. He said that miracles don’t happen in fifteenth-century churches but in research labs and hospitals. He said the dead are brought back to life in intensive care units; the lame walk again after hip replacements; the blind see again because of laser surgery. He told me that in the new millennium there are new deities with real, provable powers and that the deities are scientists who are improving what it is to be human. He said that his gene would one day safely get into the gene pool, and that would mean who we are as humans would be irrevocably changed for the better.”

His overweening hubris was huge and naked and shocking.

He was shining his flashlight in my face and I couldn’t see him. I was still trying to move but my body had been too drugged by the spiked tea to respond to my brain’s screamed commands for action.

“You followed her into the park that day?”

I dreaded hearing it, but I needed to know how you died.

“When the boy left, she sat on a bench and started writing a letter, in the snow. Extraordinary thing to do, don’t you think?”

He looked at me, waiting for my response, as if this were a regular conversation, and I realized I would be the first and last person to whom he’d tell his story. Our story.

“I waited awhile, to make sure the boy wasn’t coming back. Ten minutes maybe. She was relieved when she saw me; I told you that, didn’t I? She smiled. We had a good rapport. I’d brought a Thermos of hot chocolate and gave her a cup.”

The gray park is darkening now into soft pansy purples and blacks.

“He told me that the hot chocolate was full of dissolved sedative. After he’d drugged her, he pulled her into the toilets building.”

I feel overwhelmed by exhaustion and my words are sluggish. I imagine them inching along, slow, ugly words.

“Then he cut her.”

I’ll tell you what he said; you have the right to know, although it will be painful for you. No, painful is the wrong word entirely. Even the memory of his voice makes me so afraid that I am five years old alone in the dark with a murderer bashing down the door and no one to help me.

“It’s easy for a doctor to cut. Not at first. The first time a doctor cuts into skin, it feels a violation. The skin, the largest human organ, covering the entire body unbroken, and you deliberately harm it. But after the first time, it no longer feels an abuse because you know that it’s to enable a surgical procedure. Cutting is no longer violent or violating but the necessary step to healing.”

Mr. Wright tightens his warm fingers around mine. My legs are turning numb now.

I could hear my heart beating fast and hard against the concrete, the only part of my body that was alert as I looked at him. And then, astonishingly, I saw him put the knife into the inside pocket of his jacket.

Optimism heated my numbed body.

He helped me sit up.

He told me that he wasn’t going to cut me because an overdose is less suspicious than a knife.

I can’t use his actual words. I just can’t.

He said he had already given me enough sedative in the tea to make it impossible for me to struggle or escape. And that now he was going to give me a fatal dose. He assured me that it would be peaceful and painless, and it was the false kindness of his words that made them so unbearable, because it was himself he was comforting.

He said he’d brought his own sedatives but didn’t need to use them.

He took a bottle out of his pocket, the sleeping pills Todd had brought with him from the States, prescribed for me by my doctor. He must have found them in the bathroom cupboard. Like the bicycle chain and the flashlight and the knife, the bottle of sleeping pills showed his detailed planning, and I understood why premeditated murder is so much worse than spontaneous killing; he had been evil for far longer than the time it would actually take to kill me.

The dusk has brought the chill of darkness. They’re shutting the gates now, the last of the teenagers are packing up to go. The children will already be at home for baths and bedtime, but Mr. Wright and I remain, not finished yet. For some reason, they haven’t made us leave. Maybe they didn’t notice us here. And I’m grateful because I need to keep going. I need to reach the end.

My legs have lost all feeling and I’m worried that Mr. Wright will have to carry me, fireman style, out of the park. Or maybe he will get an ambulance to drive all the way in.

But I will finish this first.

I pleaded with him. Did you do that too? I think that you did. I think that like me you were desperate to stay alive. But of course it didn’t work; it just irritated him. As he twisted the cap off the bottle of sleeping pills, I summoned the residue of my physical energy and tried logical argument.

“If I’m found here, in the same place as Tess, it’s bound to make the police suspicious. And it’ll make them question Tess’s death too. It’s madness to do it here—isn’t it?”

For a moment the irritation left his face and he stopped twisting the cap, and I’d won a reprieve in this perverted debate.

Then he smiled, as if reassuring me as much as himself that I needn’t have such worries. “I did think about that. But the police know how you’ve been since Tess died; they already see you as a little unhinged, don’t they? And even if they don’t get it themselves, any psychiatrist will tell them that you chose this place to kill yourself. You wanted to kill yourself where your little sister had died.”

He took the cap off the bottle of sleeping pills.

“After all, if we’re being logical, who in their right mind would choose to end the life of two people in the same building?”

End the life. He was turning brutal killing into something passive, as if it was assisted euthanasia and not murder.

As he poured the pills into his cupped hand, I wondered who would question my suicide or vouch for my sane state of my mind. Dr. Nichols, at whom I had furiously sung the lullaby? Even if he thought I wasn’t suicidal at our last meeting, he would probably doubt that diagnosis, as he did with you, and blame himself for not seeing the signs. And DI Haines? He already thought I was overly emotional and irrational, and I doubted DS Finborough, even if he wanted to try, could convince him otherwise. Todd thought I was “unable to accept the facts,” and many others agreed, even if they were too kind to say so to my face. They’d think that in emotional turmoil after your death, irrational and depressed, I could easily have become suicidal. The sensible, conventional person I’d been a few months ago would never have been found dead from an overdose in this place. They would have asked questions for her but not for the person I had become.

And Mum? I’d told her I was about to find out what happened to you and I knew she would tell the police that. But I knew too that they wouldn’t believe her, or rather what I’d said to her. And I thought that after a while Mum wouldn’t believe it either, because she’d choose to bear the guilt of my suicide rather than think that I had felt a moment of this fear. And I found it unbearable to imagine her anguish when she’d have to mourn me too, with no one to comfort her.

He put the empty bottle in my coat pocket. Then he told me that the postmortem must show I swallowed the pills whole because that would make it look voluntary. I am trying to shut out his voice but it breaks in, refusing to be silenced.

“Who can make another person swallow pills against her will?”

He held a knife to my throat; in the darkness I could feel the cold edge of metal against the warmth of my skin.

“This isn’t what I am. It’s like a nightmare and I’ve turned into a stranger.”

I think he expected my pity.

He put his hand with the pills in it up to my mouth. The bottle had been full, which meant at least twelve pills. The dose was one in twenty-four hours. Any more was dangerous. I remembered reading that on the label. I knew that twelve would be more than enough to kill me. I remembered Todd telling me I should take one, but refusing because I had to stay alert; because I wasn’t allowed a few hours of drugged oblivion, however much I craved it; because I knew taking a sedative would be a cowardly reprieve that I’d want to repeat over and over again. This is what I was thinking as he pushed the pills into my mouth, my tongue uselessly trying to stop him.

Then he tipped water from a mineral water bottle into my mouth and told me to swallow.

It’s dark now, countryside black. I think of all the nocturnal creatures that are out here now the humans have gone home. I think of that storybook we had about the teddy bears coming out at night to play in the park. “There goes the bear at number three, sliding down the slide.”

“Beatrice…?”

Mr. Wright is helping me along, prompting and coaxing so I can finish this statement. His hand still holds mine, but I can hardly see his face anymore.

“Somehow I managed to wedge the pills behind my teeth and inside my cheeks, and the water went down my throat with just one, maybe two, I think. But I knew it wouldn’t be long before they all dissolved in my own saliva. I wanted to spit them out, but his flashlight was still full on my face.”

“And then?”

“He took a letter out of the inside pocket of his jacket. It was from Tess to me. It must have been the one she was writing on the park bench just before she died.”

I pause, my tears falling onto the grass, or maybe onto Mr. Wright; in the dark I can’t tell.

“He shone his flashlight on her letter so he could read it out to me. It meant that the flashlight was no longer shining on me. I had a brief opportunity, and I hung my head down toward my knees and spat out the sleeping pills onto my lap. They fell into the folds of my coat and made no sound.”

You know what you wrote to me, but it was William’s voice not yours that I heard, William’s voice telling me of your fear, your desperation, your grief. It was your murderer’s voice telling me that you walked the streets and through parks, too afraid to be in the flat, that you yelled up at the dark winter sky at a God you no longer believed in, yelling at him to give your baby back. And that you thought this was also a sign of your madness. It was your killer who told me that you couldn’t understand why I hadn’t come over, hadn’t phoned, hadn’t answered your calls. It was the man who killed you who told me that you were sure there was a good reason, and his voice as he spoke your written words violated their faith in me. But at the end of your letter your soft voice whispered to me beneath his:

“I need you, right now, right this moment, please Bee.”

Then, as now, your words pricked my face with tears.

“He put the letter back in his pocket, presumably to destroy it later. I’m not sure why he kept it or why he read it to me.”

But I think it’s because, like me with Mr. Wright earlier, his guilt was desperate for some company.

“I need you. Right now, right this moment, please Bee.”

He wanted to make me as culpable in some way as he was.

“And then?” asks Mr. Wright, needing to prompt me now to make sure I remember all of it. But we’re nearly finished.

“He switched off my phone and put it near the door where I couldn’t reach it. Then he took a scarf of mine out of his pocket—he must have taken it from the flat. He tied it around my mouth, gagging me.”

As he gagged me, panicking thoughts filled my head, one bashing into the other, a six-lane highway of thoughts, all happening simultaneously, backing up, bumper to bumper, unable to get out, and I thought that some would be released simply by screaming, others by crying, others if I was held. Most of my thoughts had become primal and physical. I hadn’t known before that it’s our bodies that think most powerfully, and that was why it was so cruel to be gagged. It wasn’t because I couldn’t shout for help—who’d hear me in an empty building in the middle of a deserted park? It was because I couldn’t scream or sob or moan.

“Then his pager went off. He phoned the hospital on his mobile and said that he’d be on his way. I suppose it would have looked too suspicious not to go.”

I hear myself catch my breath in the darkness.

“Beatrice?”

“I worried that Kasia was in labor and that was why he was leaving.”

Mr. Wright’s hand feels solid in the darkness. I am reassured by the definition of his knuckles in my soft palm.

“He checked the gag and the ties around my wrists and legs. He told me that he’d come back and remove them later, so that nothing would look suspicious when I was found. He still didn’t know I’d spat out so many of the pills. But I knew that if I was still alive when he came back, he’d use the knife, as he did on Tess.”

“If you were still alive?”

“I wasn’t sure how many pills I’d swallowed, or how much sedative had dissolved in my saliva—if it was enough to kill me.”

I try to just focus on Mr. Wright’s hand holding mine.

“He left. Minutes later my pager went off. He’d turned off my phone, but he didn’t know about the pager. I tried to persuade myself that Kasia was paging me for something trivial. After all, her baby wasn’t due for another three weeks.”

Yes, like you.

Mr. Wright strokes my fingers, and the gentleness of it makes me want to cry.

“And then?” he asks.

“He’d taken the flashlight with him. I’d never been in such total darkness.”

I was alone in the black. Pitch black. Pitch that is made from tar.

The blackness smelled rotten, putrid with fear. It smothered my face, going into my mouth and nose, and I was drowning and I thought of you on holiday in Skye, coming out of the sea, spluttering and pink cheeked—“I’m okay! Just seawater going up the wrong way!”—and I took a breath. The blackness choked my lungs.

I saw the darkness move—a monstrous, living thing, filling the building and out into the night beyond, no skin of sky to contain it. I felt it dragging me with it into a void of infinite fear—away from light, life, love, hope.

I thought of Mum in her rustling silk dressing gown, smelling of face cream, coming toward our beds, but the memory of her was padlocked into childhood and couldn’t lighten the darkness.

I wait for Mr. Wright to prompt me further. But there is no further to go. We have finally arrived at the end.

It’s finished now.

I try to move my hands, but they are bound tightly together with a tie. The fingers of my right hand are tightly clasped around my left. I wonder if it’s because I am right-handed that my right hand has taken the role of comforter.

I am alone in the pitch black, lying on a concrete floor.

My mouth is as dry as parchment. The harsh cold concrete has seeped into my body, numbing me through to the bone.

I begin a letter to you, my beloved younger sister. I pretend it’s Sunday evening, my safest time, and that I’m surrounded by press all wanting to tell our story.

Dearest Tess,

I’d do anything to be with you, right now, right this moment, so I could hold your hand, look at your face, listen to your voice. How can touching and seeing and hearing—all those sensory receptors and optic nerves and vibrating eardrums—be substituted by a letter? But we’ve managed to use words as go-betweens before, haven’t we?

I think back to boarding school and the first letter you ever sent me, the one with invisible ink, and that ever since kindness has smelled of lemons.

And as I think of you and talk to you, I can breathe again.