Sister

7

I arrive for the afternoon session with Mr. Wright a few minutes late. My head still feels strange, not quite in focus. I ask Mrs. Crush Secretary for a strong coffee. I need to tell your story with sharp reflexes, a memory with neurons firing, not half asleep. I want to say what I have to and go home and phone Mum to make sure she’s okay.

Mr. Wright reminds me where we’d got to.

“Then you went to Hyde Park?”

I left Mum and Todd, walking hurriedly up your icy basement steps, pulling on my coat. I’d thought that my gloves were in my pocket, but only one remained. It was mid-afternoon and the pavements were almost deserted; it was too cold to be out for no reason. I walked hurriedly toward Hyde Park, as if there was a deadline to keep, as if I was late. When I got to the Lancaster Gate entrance I stopped. What was I doing here? Was this just a sulk that had needed to find a focus? “I’m not in a temper! I’m going to find my tea set!” I remember my six-year-old outrage as I ran up the stairs. There was a real purpose this time, even if it had been prompted by wanting to get away from Mum and Todd. I needed to see where your life had ended.

I went through the open wrought-iron gates. The cold and the snow were so like the day you were found that I felt time pulling me back through the previous six days to that afternoon. I started walking toward the derelict toilets building, pushing my gloveless hand deep into the pocket of my coat. I saw young children building a snowman with energetic earnestness, a mother watching and stamping her feet to keep warm. She called to them to finish now. The children and their snowman were the only things to be different; perhaps that was why I focused on them, or maybe it was their ignorance and innocence of what had happened here that meant I wanted to watch them.

I walked on toward the place you were found, my gloveless hand stinging with cold. I could feel the packed snow beneath the thin soles of my shoes. They were meant not for a snowy park but for a New York lunch party in a different life.

I reached the derelict toilets building, totally unprepared for the bouquets. There were hundreds of them. We’re not talking a Princess Diana ocean of floral grief, but masses, nonetheless. Some were half buried in snow—they must have been there for a few days—others were newer, still pristine in their bouquet cellophane. There were teddy bears too, and for a moment I was perplexed before realizing they were for Xavier. There was a police cordon around the small building, making a neat parcel of the scene of your death with a yellow and black plastic ribbon. I thought it odd that the police should make their presence felt here so long after you’d needed their help. The ribbon and flowers were the only colors in the whiteout park.

I checked that there was no one around, then climbed over the yellow and black ribbon. I didn’t think it strange then that there was no police officer. PC Vernon has since told me that a police officer always has to be present at a crime scene. They have to stand by that cordon, come what may, in all weather. She says she gets desperate for the loo. It’s this, she’s told me, that will end her career as a policewoman rather than being too empathetic. Yes, I’m procrastinating.

I went inside. I don’t need to describe to you what it looked like. Whatever state you were in, you’d have noticed your surroundings in detail. Your eyes are an artist’s eyes and I wish that the last place you’d seen hadn’t been stained and vile and ugly. I went into a cubicle and saw bloodstains on the concrete floor and splatters of blood on the peeling walls. I vomited into a basin, before realizing it wasn’t attached to any drain. I knew that no one would willingly choose to go into that place. No one would choose to die there.

I tried not to think of your being there for five nights, all alone. I tried to cling to my Chagall image of your leaving your body, but I couldn’t be sure of the time frame. Did you leave your body, as I so fervently hoped, the moment you died? Or maybe it was later, when you were found, when your body was seen by someone other than your murderer. Or was it in the morgue when the police sergeant pulled back the blanket and I identified you—did grief release you?

I walked out of the foul-smelling, vile building and breathed in the cold till it hurt my lungs, grateful for the white iced air. The bouquets made sense to me now. Decent people were trying to fight evil with flowers, the good fighting under the pennants of bouquets. I remembered the road to Dunblane lined with soft toys. I had not understood before why anyone would think a family whose child had been shot would want a teddy. But now I did; against the sound of gunshots, a thousand compassionate soft toys muffled a little their reverberating horror. “Mankind isn’t like this,” the offerings say, “we are not like this. The world isn’t only this way.”

I started reading the cards. Some of them were illegible, soaked with snow, the ink melting into the sodden paper. I recognized Kasia’s name—she’d left a teddy with “Xavier” in large childish writing, the dot of the i a heart, crosses to show kisses, circles for hugs. The snob in me flinched at her bad taste, but I was also touched and felt guilty for my snobbishness. I resolved to look up her phone number when I got home and thank her for her thoughtfulness.

I gathered up the legible cards to take away with me—no one else would want to read them but Mum and me. As I put them into my pockets, I saw a middle-aged man with a Labrador a little distance away, his dog on a tight leash. He was carrying a bunch of chrysanthemums. I remembered him from the afternoon you were found, watching the police activity; the dog was straining to get away then too. He was hesitating, maybe waiting for me to go before he laid his flowers. I went up to him. He was wearing a tweed hat and a Barbour jacket, a country squire who should be out on his estate not in a London park.

“Were you a friend of Tess’s?” I asked.

“No. I didn’t even know her name till it was on the television,” he replied. “We just used to wave, that’s all. When you pass someone quite frequently, you start to form some kind of connection. Just a small one of course, more like recognition.” He blew his nose. “I’ve really no right to be upset, absurd I know. How about you, did you know her?”

“Yes.”

No matter what DS Finborough said, I knew you. The Country Squire hesitated, unsure of the etiquette of keeping up a conversation by floral tributes. “That policeman’s gone then? He said the cordon will be going down soon, now that it’s not a crime scene.”

Of course it wasn’t a crime scene, not when the police had decided you’d committed suicide. The Country Squire seemed to be hoping for a reaction; he prodded a little further.

“Well you knew her, so you probably know what’s going on better than I do.”

Perhaps he was enjoying having a chat about this. The sensation of tears pricking isn’t unpleasant. Terror and tragedy at enough removes are titillating, exciting even, to have a little connection to grief and tragedy that isn’t yours. He could tell people, and no doubt did, that he was involved a little in all this, a bit player in the drama.

“I am her sister.”

Yes, I used the present tense. You being dead didn’t stop me being your sister; our relationship didn’t go into the past—otherwise I wouldn’t be grieving now, present tense. The squire looked appalled. I think he hoped I was at a decent emotional remove too.

I walked away.

The snow, which had been falling randomly in soft flakes, became denser and angrier. I saw that the children’s snowman was disappearing, engorged with new snow. I decided to go out of a different park exit, the memory of how I felt leaving the previous time too raw to be walked over again.

As I neared the Serpentine Gallery, the blizzard became fiercer, suffocating trees and grass with white. Soon your flowers and Xavier’s bears would be covered, turned invisible. My feet were numb, my gloveless hand aching with cold. The vomiting had left me with a foul taste in my mouth. I thought I’d go into the Serpentine Gallery to see if they had a café with water. But as I approached the building, I saw it was in darkness, the doors chained. A notice on the window said the gallery was not opening again until April. Simon could not have met you there. He was the last person to see you alive and he’d lied. His lie played over in my head, like tinnitus, the only sound not muffled by the falling snow.

I walked along Chepstow Road back to your flat, holding on my mobile for DS Finborough, my pockets stuffed with the cards from teddies and bouquets. From a distance, I saw Todd outside, pacing in short anxious strides. Mum had already taken the train home. He followed me into the flat, relief mutating his anxiety into annoyance. “I tried to phone you, but you’ve been engaged.”

“Simon lied about meeting Tess at the Serpentine Gallery. I have to tell DS Finborough.”

Todd’s reaction, or rather lack of it, should have prepared me for DS Finborough’s. But just then DS Finborough came on the line. I told him about Simon.

He sounded patient, gentle even. “Maybe Simon was just trying to look good.”

“By lying?”

“By saying they met at a gallery.” I could hardly believe DS Finborough was making excuses for him. “We did talk to Simon, when we knew he’d been with her that day,” he continued. “And there’s no reason to think that he had any involvement in her death.”

“But he lied about where they were.”

“Beatrice, I think you should try to—”

I flipped through the clichés I imagined he was about to use: I should try to “move on,” “put it behind me,” even with a little flourish of clauses “accept the truth and get on with my life.” I interrupted before any of these clichés took verbal form.

“You’ve seen the place where she died, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Do you think anyone would choose to die there?”

“I don’t think it was a matter of choice.”

For a moment I thought he had started to believe me, then realized he was blaming mental illness for your murder. Like an obsessive compulsive who has no choice but to repeat the same task a hundred times, a woman with postpartum psychosis gets swept along by her mental tide of madness to inevitable self-destruction. A young woman with friends, family, talent and beauty who is found dead arouses suspicion. Even if her baby has died, there’s still a question mark about the end of her life. But throw psychosis into the list of life-affirming adjectives and you take away the question mark; you give a mental alibi to the killer, framing the victim for her own murder.

“Somebody forced her into that terrible place and killed her there.”

DS Finborough was still patient with me. “But there was no reason anyone would want to kill her. It wasn’t a sexual crime, thank God, and there was no theft involved. And when we were investigating her disappearance, we couldn’t find anyone who wished her harm, in fact quite the reverse.”

“Will you at least talk to Simon again?”

“I really don’t believe there’s anything to be gained by that.”

“Is it because Simon is the son of a cabinet minister?”

I threw that at him in an attempt to make him change his mind, to shame him into it.

“My decision not to talk to Simon Greenly again is because there is no purpose to be served by it.”

Now that I know him better, I know that he uses formal language when he feels emotionally pressured.

“But you’re aware that Simon’s father is Richard Greenly, MP?”

“I don’t think this phone call is getting us very far. Perhaps—”

“Tess isn’t worth the risk to you, is she?”

Mr. Wright has poured me a glass of water. Describing the toilets building made me retch. I have told him about Simon’s lie and my phone call to DS Finborough. But I have left out that as I spoke to DS Finborough, Todd hung up my coat; that he took the cards out of the pockets and neatly laid each one out to dry; that instead of feeling that he was being considerate, each damp card smoothed out felt a criticism; and that I knew he was taking DS Finborough’s side, even though he could hear only mine.

“So after DS Finborough said he wouldn’t interview Simon, you decided to do it yourself?” asks Mr. Wright. I think I detect a hint of amusement in his voice; it wouldn’t be surprising.

“Yes, it was getting to be something of a habit.”

And just eight days earlier, flying into London, I’d been someone who always avoided confrontation. But in comparison to the murderous brutality of your death, confrontation with words seemed harmless and a little trivial. Why had I ever been daunted by it before, afraid even? That seemed so cowardly—ludicrous—now.

Todd was going off to buy a toaster. (“I can’t believe your sister had to grill her toast.”) Our toaster in New York had a defrost function and a croissant-warming mode that we actually used. At the door he turned to me.

“You look exhausted.”

Was he being concerned or critical?

“I told you last night that you should take one of Dr. Broadbent’s sleeping pills I got for you.”

Critical.

He left to go and get the toaster.

I hadn’t explained to him why I couldn’t take a sleeping pill—that it would have felt cowardly blotting you out, even for a few hours. Nor would I tell him now that I was going to see Simon, because he would have felt duty-bound to stop me being “so rash and ridiculous.”

I drove to Simon’s address, which I’d found on a Post-it in your address book, and parked outside a three-story mansion in Kensington. Simon buzzed me in and I made my way up to the top flat. When he opened the door, I barely recognized him. His soft baby face was ridged with tiredness, his designer stubble grown into the beginnings of a sparse beard.

“I’d like to talk to you about Tess.”

“Why? I thought you knew her best.” His voice was snide with jealousy.

“You were close to her too, weren’t you?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“So may I come in?”

He left the door open and I followed him into a large, opulent drawing room. It must be his father’s London pad when he isn’t in his constituency. On one wall, running along the length of the double drawing room, was a vast painting of a prison. Looking closer, I saw that it was actually a collage, the prison made from thousands of passport-sized photos of babies’ faces. It was engrossing and repelling.

“The Serpentine Gallery is closed until April; you couldn’t have met Tess there.”

He just shrugged, apparently unconcerned.

“Why did you lie?” I asked.

“I just liked the idea, that’s all,” he replied. “It made our meeting sound like a date. The Serpentine Gallery is the kind of place Tess would choose for a date.”

“But it wasn’t a date, was it?”

“Does it really matter now if I rewrite our history a little? Make it something I want it to be? Put a little fantasy in? There’s no harm in that.”

I wanted to yell at him, but nothing would be served but the brief instant gratification of expressed rage.

“So why did you meet her in the park? It must have been freezing out.”

“It was Tess who wanted to go to the park. Said she needed to be outside. Told me she was going crazy stuck indoors.”

“‘Crazy’? She used that word?”

I’ve never heard you say it. Although you talk nineteen to the dozen, you choose words carefully, and you’re patriotically English about vocabulary, berating me for my Americanisms.

Simon picked up a velvet bag from a mirrored-glass cabinet. “Maybe she said she was claustrophobic. I don’t remember.” That sounded more likely.

“Did she give a reason for wanting to see you?” I asked.

He fussed around with Rizla rolling papers, not replying.

“Simon…?”

“She just wanted to spend time with me. Jesus, is that so hard for you to understand?”

“How did you find out she was dead?” I asked. “Did a friend tell you? Did they tell you about the slashes to the insides of her arms?”

I wanted to tip him into tears, because I know that tears dissolve into wet saltiness the defenses around what we want to keep private.

“Were you told she’d been there for five nights, all alone, in a stinking foul toilets building?”

Tears were welling up in his eyes, his voice quieter than usual. “That day you found me outside her flat. I waited, just round the corner, till you left. Then followed you on my bike.”

I dimly remembered the sound of a motorbike revving as I left for Hyde Park. I hadn’t taken any notice of it after that.

“I waited, for hours, outside the park gates. It was snowing,” continued Simon. “I was already frozen, remember? I saw you come out with that policewoman. I saw a blacked-out van. No one would tell me anything. I wasn’t family.”

His tears were flowing now; he made no effort to stop them. I found him repellent, like his art.

“Later that evening it was on the local news,” he continued. “Just a short item, barely two minutes, about a young woman who had been found dead in a Hyde Park toilet. They showed the student picture of her. That’s how I discovered she was dead.”

He had to blow his nose and wipe his eyes, and I judged it the right time to confront him.

“So why did she really want to meet you?”

“She said she was frightened and wanted me to help her.”

The tears had worked, as I knew they would, since that first night at boarding school when I broke down and admitted to my house mistress that it wasn’t home and Mum I missed, but Dad.

“Did she tell you why she was frightened?” I asked.

“She said she’d been getting weird phone calls.”

“Did she tell you who it was?”

He shook his head. And I suddenly wondered if his tears were genuine or like the proverbial crocodile’s, ruthless and without remorse.

“Why do you think she chose you, Simon? Why not one of her other friends?” I asked.

He had dried his tears now, closing up. “We were very close.”

Maybe he saw my skepticism, because his tone became angrily wounded. “It’s easier for you—you’re her sister, you have a right to mourn her. People expect you to be in pieces. But I can’t even say she was my girlfriend.”

“She didn’t phone you, did she?” I asked.

He was silent.

“She would never have exploited your feelings for her.”

He tried to light his joint, but his fingers were trembling and he couldn’t get his lighter to work.

“What really happened?”

“I’d called her loads of times, but that ancient answering machine was always switched on, or the line was engaged. But this time she answered it. She said she needed to get out of the flat. I suggested the park and she agreed. I didn’t know that the Serpentine Gallery was shut. I’d hoped we could go there. When we met up in the park, she asked me if she could stay at my flat. Said she needed to be with someone twenty-four/seven.” He paused, angry. “She said I’m the only person at the college who doesn’t have a part-time job.”

“‘Twenty-four/seven’?”

“Round the clock. I can’t remember her exact expression. Jesus, does it matter?” It did matter because it authenticated what he was telling me. “She was frightened and she asked for my help, because I was convenient for her.”

“So why did you leave her?”

He seemed jolted by the question. “What?”

“You said she wanted to stay with you, so why didn’t you let her?”

He finally managed to light the joint and took a drag. “Okay, I told her what I felt for her. How much I loved her. Everything.”

“You came on to her?”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“And she rejected you?”

“Straight out. No wrapping the bullet. She said this time she didn’t think she could offer ‘with credibility’ to be friends.”

His monstrous ego had sucked any pity for you, for your grief, into turning himself into the victim. But my anger was bigger than his ego.

“She turned to you and you tried to exploit her need for protection.”

“She wanted to exploit me—it was that way round.”

“So she still wanted to stay with you?”

He didn’t answer, but I could guess the next bit. “But with no strings attached?”

Still he was silent.

“But you wouldn’t allow that, would you?” I asked.

“And be emasculated?”

For a moment I think I just stared at him, too astonished by his gross selfishness to respond. He thought I didn’t understand.

“The only reason she wanted to be with me was because she was terrified witless. How do you think that made me feel?”

“Terrified witless?”

“I exaggerated, I meant—”

“You said ‘frightened’ before, now it’s ‘terrified witless’?”

“Okay. She said she thought a man had followed her into the park.”

I forced my voice into neutral. “Did she tell you who the man was?”

“No. I searched for him. Even went scrapping around in the bushes, getting covered in snow and frozen dog turds. No one.”

“You have to go to the police. Talk to an officer called DS Finborough. He’s at the Notting Hill police station—I’ll give you the number.”

“There’s no point. She committed suicide. It was on the local news.”

“But you were there. You know more than the TV, don’t you?” I was talking as I would to a child, trying to coax, trying to hide my desperation. “She told you about the man following her. You know she was frightened.”

“He was probably just a paranoid delusion. They said postpartum psychosis makes women go completely crazy.”

“Who said that?”

“Must have been the TV.”

He heard how lame that sounded. He met my eye, casually unconcerned. “Okay. Dad found out for me. I hardly ever ask anything of him, so when I do…”

He trailed off, as if he couldn’t be bothered to complete the sentence. He took a step closer toward me and I smelled his aftershave, pungent in the overly warm flat. It brought into sharp, sensory focus the first sight I’d had of him, sitting in the snow outside your flat, holding a bouquet, smelling of the same aftershave despite the cold air. I hadn’t taken it in then, but why the flowers and the aftershave when you’d only offered him the consolation prize of friendship? And now, when I knew you’d turned him down outright?

“You had a bouquet when I found you waiting for her. You smelled of aftershave.”

“So?”

“You thought you’d try it again, didn’t you? Maybe she’d be desperate enough by then to accept your conditions.”

He shrugged, not finding fault with himself. Spoiled since the time he was born; spoiling him so that he’d turned into this man rather than the person he might once have had the potential to become.

I turned away from him, to see his enormous collage of babies’ faces making up a picture of a prison.

I flinched from it and went to the door.

As I opened it, I felt tears on my face before realizing I was crying.

“How could you have just left her there?”

“It wasn’t my fault she killed herself.”

“Is anything ever your fault?”

I am back with Mr. Wright, the smell of Simon and his flat still pungent in my memory. I am grateful for the open window, the faint scent of newly mown grass reaching us from the park.

“Did you tell the police what Simon had told you?” Mr. Wright asks.

“Yes, a junior of DS Finborough’s. He was polite but I knew it would do no good. The man following her was her murderer, but he could also have been a product of her supposed paranoia. The facts that pointed to murder also backed up the diagnosis of psychosis.”

Mr. Wright looks at his watch, five-fifteen. “Shall we call it a day?”

I nod. Somewhere at the back of my nose and throat linger the remembered particles of dope and aftershave, and I am grateful that I can go outside and breathe the fresh air firsthand.

I walk across St. James’s Park, then get a bus to the Coyote. I know you’re curious about how I’ve come to be working there. Initially I went to question the people you worked with, hoping someone could give me a clue about your death. But no one could help—they hadn’t seen you since the Sunday before you’d had Xavier and they didn’t know much about your life outside the Coyote. Meanwhile, my boss in the States had, “with great reluctance, Beatrice,” let me go, and I had no idea when I’d get another job. I knew my share of the mortgage for the New York apartment would soon eat up all my savings. I needed to earn something to live on, so I went back to ask Bettina for a job.

I was wearing my only clean outfit, which was a MaxMara pants suit, and Bettina thought I was joking to start with but then realized I was genuine.

“Okay. I could do with an extra pair of hands, two shifts at weekends and three during the week. You can start this evening. Six pounds per hour plus free dinner cooked by me if you’re doing a shift longer than three hours.”

I must have looked a little startled that she had offered me such immediate work.

“The truth is,” said Bettina, “I just really fancy you.” She giggled at my horror-struck face. “Sorry, I couldn’t resist.” Her laughter at my shockability reminded me of you; there was no cruelty in it.

As I did my shift that evening, I thought that because you had died, there was, of course, a part-time position that had needed filling. But recently I discovered that someone else had already taken the job, so she’d hired me out of loyalty to you and sympathy for me.

I get home from the Coyote at almost midnight and don’t expect many, if any, press. It’s too late and in any case after the frenzy of the last few days they must have got all the pictures and footage they need. But I was wrong. As I get near, I see there’s a gang of them, their huge lights shining, and illuminated in the middle is Kasia. She’s been at a friend’s house for the last two days, until I thought the press attack would have died down enough for her to return. She’s living with me now, which I think you’re pleased about but curious about how we fit. Well, she has your bed and I have a futon in the sitting room, which I unroll each night, and we somehow squash in.

As I get closer, I see how shy she looks, anxious about the attention, and exhausted. Feeling furiously protective, I shoo photographers and journalists out of the way.

“How long have you been waiting?” I ask her.

“Hours.”

For Kasia that could mean ten minutes upward.

“What happened to your key?”

She shrugs, embarrassed. “Sorry.” She’s always losing something and this reminds me of you. Sometimes I find her scattiness endearing. This evening, I have to admit to being a little irritated. (Old habits die hard, and to be fair, I’m exhausted after a long stint at the CPS, a shift as a barmaid, and now I’ve got the press shoving cameras into my face for what I imagine to be a poignant-moment shot.)

“Come on, you need something to eat.”

She’s only a week away from her due date now and she shouldn’t go too long without food. She gets faint and I’m sure it can’t be good for the baby.

I put my arm around her to usher her inside and the cameras click in synch.

Tomorrow, next to the picture of me with my arm around Kasia, there will be similar articles to the ones there were today about my “saving” Kasia. They actually use words like that: “saving” and “owing her life to,” comic-book words that are in danger of turning me into someone who wears pants on the outside of her tights, switches outfits and personas in telephone booths and has web coming out of her wrists. They will write that I was too late to save you (that telephone booth change just not quite quick enough), but how because of me, Kasia and her baby will live. Like all of us, their readers want a happy ending to the story. It’s just not my story. And my ending was a strand of hair caught in a zipper.