The Sister

Chapter 20 About Monday

7:07 a.m. (by my digital bedside clock)

I must tell you something. When I woke up just a few moments ago I had the most alarming sensation. It was a feeling of instant alertness. Usually my mind lags vaguely behind my brain when it wakes, like the cranking up of an old lethargic engine, taking several seconds to gain full speed. But this morning I know something’s up, because when my eyes opened my mind opened too, eager as a young person’s, with the immediacy of a lightbulb once you’ve flicked the switch. It’s as if my body has sensed something before my brain has had a chance to work it out.

Then, with a bolt of understanding, it strikes me: My little sister, Vivien, is dead.

Dead right here in this house, fifteen yards away in her room in the east wing, along the landing and left through the glass-paned double doors. I feel a sick surge of dread rising from the core of my stomach, spreading menace throughout my frail body. Pricking it coldly. Smothering all my usual morning aches.

Let me think now: I heard her during the night at five to one, when she got up to make her usual cup of tea, but I didn’t hear her again, as I have done every other night she’s been here, going to the lavatory at five, and I haven’t yet heard her this morning going down to get her morning tea, even though it’s now well past seven. Every other morning she’s been like clockwork, straight down to the kitchen at seven on the dot.

I’m still in bed with the blankets pulled up to my chin and my hands locked by my sides. I haven’t moved a muscle since I woke. I don’t dare, for fear that somehow it might upset the delicate balance of life and death that has threatened the house this morning. If I strain my eyes to the right, I can just about see my bedside clock. It makes me feel safer, knowing that it’s there, looking after the time for me.

I think I should tell you there’s a much more substantial reason for my knowing that she’s dead than not having heard her this morning. Did I tell you last night, when I found the poisons upstairs in the laboratory, that I took down a tin of potassium cyanide powder from the very top shelf? I secreted it up the left sleeve of my dressing gown (pinching the cuff around the bottom so it wouldn’t fall out) and took it downstairs to the kitchen. I put half a teaspoonful in her milk in the fridge, then hid the tin behind the bottles in the drinks cabinet in the library. And you know how she likes to take her tea milky.

But, of course, the problem is that I can’t be absolutely, one hundred percent sure she’s dead, unless I go and check on her. What if she’s not dead? What if she’s just half dead? (You can never be sure of getting the correct concentration per pound of body mass.) I can’t have her being found half dead; she’ll be prodded and probed until they find out she’s been poisoned. I can’t think why it didn’t occur to me before—that I’ll have to actually go and check on her. I can’t possibly do that. It’s not within my boundary. I’ve not been in that part of the house for forty-seven years. I wouldn’t feel safe.

I can’t get over it. It’s most unlike me—with my famously analytic and scientific mind—to neglect to think through all eventualities before I start on a course of action. I knew she would die but I’m astounded I never considered what would happen after that. It’s not that I’m afraid of seeing her dead (any more than anyone would be). Believe me, I’m far too levelheaded for that. It’s the dealing with it that scares me. Quite apart from making sure that she’s properly dead, I don’t know what to do next. I can’t call the ambulance; the phone’s not been connected for years, so I’ll have to go and find someone, and I’ve no idea where to start. Then I’ll have to find the time to sort through her room and all her clutter and I won’t know what to do with it. I’ll have to organize a funeral and make decisions like what I want her to wear and what her coffin should be made of, which patch of ground to put her in and what to carve on the headstone. I’ll have to find out who her friends were and invite them for sherry and canapés in a drawing room with no furniture and hear all the stories that, for whatever reason, she never wanted or bothered to tell me. It’s a shame she never got time to invite the entomologists to lunch on Tuesday. I was beginning to look forward to that.

Suddenly the house is unbearably large. I feel as if I’m part of a huge continent but that chunks of it are breaking off around me and drifting away in all directions, and all that’s left of me is this little island, floating motionless in the center as the other bits of land move farther and farther off, like icebergs from a glacier in summer. All of a sudden I wish it were her, not me, who had to suffer this silence. I’d like to lie down here and die as well, as if by complete coincidence, so that someone else has to deal with the problem of clearing up the both of us. But I can tell I’m not about to die. The events of the past couple of days have had quite the opposite effect. I feel a new life force coursing through my body, ousting the years of lethargy and inertia that I’ve learned to live with, waking me from slumber, showing me the world more clearly.

I need to get up. I need to concentrate, to think through my options in a methodical way, to devise a strategy to help me out of this blunder and follow it through to a logical conclusion. I elbow off my blankets and inch my legs over the side of the bed, bringing myself to sit up on the edge. It’s the first warm day of spring. The early light, which has just begun to pour through the window, is bright and hopeful. Thrown about by the movement of the creeper outside, it dances over the bare floorboards, daring to touch my feet. Through my bed socks, I feel a sudden rush of icy blood fill my swollen feet, feeding the pain that overflows. I find if I concentrate very hard, it goes away or turns into something less like pain, more like heat or pressure.

I lower my feet to the floor. They smart sharply as small needles race along them and up my lower leg. My feet and ankles are set solid as if, today, they have been carved together from a single block of wood. I turn my attention to getting to the bathroom, shuffling in the only way my body allows me, until I reach my halfway point and rest, leaning on the back edge of the nursing chair outside the bathroom door, supporting myself on it like a walking frame. No one can condemn me for lack of effort. I tried my best to rekindle our friendship. I tried to love her, to like her, to find her faults endearing and amusing as I once had by nature, to see them as Vivienisms, as Maud used to say, a statement of her free-thinking, fun-loving attitude, her breath of fresh air.

After a minute’s rest I summon the strength to continue my journey to the bathroom, concentrating on the pain of each slow step. Both my hands are screwed into cold fists that I know it will take me some minutes to open. Once I reach the washbasin I lean my elbows on the edge to take some weight off my feet, their marathon over. I look at my hands—witch’s hands, with their crooked fingers and swollen red knuckles—and try to straighten each in turn, rubbing them between my legs to work up the circulation. I feel it would be less painful to be rid of these joints for good, have them chopped off and the stumps wrapped up in soft bandages. This morning it requires an enormous effort of will to twist on the hot tap. Finally I have it running until it steams and put both hands underneath, soaking them. I can already feel the knuckles start to loosen for the day.

I don’t feel any different. I don’t feel like a murderer. After all, I only put it in her milk, I didn’t pour it down her throat. Then it was out of my hands. It’s almost as if I did it to get something off my chest, like writing a scathing letter in the temper of the night, only to burn it in the temperance of the morning. I hadn’t gone up to the attic for that reason. The moon led me up there. I hadn’t planned to pick up the cyanide or to bring it downstairs tucked up my sleeve. It seemed so natural, as if it was meant, one thing following another in a predestined way, as if somehow I were acting out of myself, the puppet for a force of something else.

After I’d put it into her milk I sort of believed that it was either meant to happen or not, and if it wasn’t meant to happen she wouldn’t drink the milk, or it would spill in the fridge. I don’t think I ever really believed that she would drink it or that, if she did, it would kill her. I’m not a real, cold-blooded murderer. It’s not as if I loaded a gun and shot her between the eyes or smashed a lead weight across her head.

I dry my hands and put on the black woolen mittens that I hung, as usual, over the storage heater last night so they’d be warm. I pull off my bed socks. My toes, like my hands, are peculiar. They’re driven to deform towards the middle, pushing together like the hoof of a single-toed goat. One by one I pick up the small scrolls of loo paper rolled carefully and left in a pile, for mornings like this one, and squeeze them between my toes, forcing them apart, a little trick I’ve developed to alleviate the constant painful pressure. Perhaps, I think, some cannabis tea would release the pain, and when I get back into the bedroom I turn on the kettle. Then I decide, quite irregularly, to forgo my normally stringent routine and go back to bed for a while. I feel thrilled by the deviance, like a naughty schoolgirl. I’ll wiggle my hands and feet, wait for them to wake up and listen for signs of life in the rest of the house.

It’s as I’m getting into bed that I notice my wristwatch, the digital one on my left wrist, is eleven minutes behind my bedside clock (it’s my habit to check them against each other as I get into bed and they are rarely out of time). I check my other wristwatch, my backup one, and I’m horrified to find that it stopped in the middle of the night—at half past two. I feel completely disoriented. I find it extremely distracting if I cannot at once get an accurate time reference, especially first thing in the morning. I need to know the time to start my daily routine or I’m thrown off for the rest of the day. (Although I’m not the superstitious type, I’ll admit I’m not completely immune to the coincidence that a watch that has never stopped should stop dead on this particularly haunting morning. I should think another, less pragmatic, less scientific sort of person would be spooked by the experience.)

I consider the facts: I trust all my digitals over any of my dial clocks. My bedside clock is my number-one timepiece, followed by my digital wristwatch. However, my bedside clock now says 8:08 and I’ve not yet heard the longcase in the hall strike the hour. If it were to strike in time with my digital wristwatch I’d be more inclined to trust those two than my number-one clock.

7:56 a.m. (by my digital wristwatch)

The longcase in the hall has just struck but my wristwatch is still a few minutes off eight so I’m no closer to knowing the correct time. I’m going to stay here awhile longer until I can get my bearings on the day.

9:55 a.m. (by my digital wristwatch)

I hear the start of Monday’s bell-ringing practice at the church, even though my digital wristwatch isn’t yet at ten. Apart from Michael’s irregular visits and the rare encounters I have with strangers coming to the door, all of whom I invariably check the time with, this Monday ten o’clock practice is about my only weekly time reference. It’s not very accurate, though. I’ve learned that they are in no way reliable. They do not normally start on time and it can be up to a quarter past ten before I hear their first peal. But rarely, if ever, do they start early, and because my wristwatch hasn’t yet reached ten, I suspect that this is the faulty one. I don’t know which is worse, trying to work out the time or trying not to think about Vivien. Did I really kill her? I’m not at all sure anymore that I actually did it. I don’t feel as if that was something I did last night.

I’m dreading the rest of today. I can feel its full weight on me now, pinning me to the bed, urging me not to participate in it any further. I’d like to freeze time right here and now. I’d be quite happy to be left alone, in eternal timelessness, comforted by the relief that I’ll never have to partake in the immediate future.

I wonder grimly how long it will be before I start to smell her. It’s a maddening thing to have entered my mind because now that it’s there I cannot dispel it, and because it’s there I can already smell her.

12:24 p.m. (by my bedside clock)

I think I’ve just heard a small cry, but I can’t be certain. I’m up, out of bed, pulling my dressing-gown cord round my middle to take the sudden chill off my spine. I move over to my door, which is closed. As I put my hand on the door handle I hear it again. A small, distant cry. I freeze. If I open this door, I face a dilemma. I will not be able to ignore the cries and will be forced to make a difficult choice: Should I go to her aid, or should I leave her and live with the knowledge that I could have helped her? It would be like killing someone twice. I couldn’t bear it. However, if I don’t open the door and block up the gaps around the edges I might not be able to hear any distant disturbing noises. I could sit and watch the plaster crumble and the creeper invade the room and concentrate on the pains in my joints. Then I would never be sure that the cries I might have heard were real or not.

The thudding of my heart is so strong that it’s making me rock slightly where I stand, back and forth, back and forth. I turn the handle and pull the door open by a hand’s width. And then I hear it. Scratching. Unmistakable desperate scratching, like a dog at a door. Now another cry, this time more of a whimper. Simon! He’s in the kitchen. I am instantly relieved, elated, even; I feel so thrilled I could almost giggle, like being in an accident that, just at the last moment, didn’t happen. But what do I do with Simon? I’d forgotten him, the dog that wasn’t going to last long. He’s lasted longer than Vivien herself. But surely he can’t survive independently of her—he can’t even walk. The quietest dog in the world is making noises he’s never made before. He’s probably hungry, I think. He’s not been fed today. I open my door and pad quietly along the landing and down the stairs, so as not to wake the dead, my bed socks soft against the wood.

When I open the kitchen door, Simon looks up at me biddably, as if he knows his owner is gone and I am his only hope. I spot a little piddle in front of the fridge, as if it has leaked in the night. His bottom wiggles in an attempt to wag his stumpy tail, as if he’s sure this will please me. I don’t want to hear his noises. I just want to shut him up. I open the fridge door and see only Cheddar cheese and poisoned milk. I put the cheese onto the floor in front of him, then remember the cereal in the store cupboard. I tip a heap of Shreddies onto the cheese and Simon looks at it. I leave him and shut the door behind me, then go back to my bedroom and lock myself in, relieved, as if I’d been holding my breath the entire time.

I know that nothing is going to happen if I stay here in my room all day. I must make a plan. I need to find someone else to discover her body. I need to think of a way to get someone to the house and then up to her room so they can sound the alarm and set the deceased-person engine in motion.

Chapter 21 Pranksters and a Second Dose

2:11 p.m. (by my digital wristwatch)

I’ve been standing, quite still, in the middle of the landing for the last fifteen minutes, and I’m just beginning to feel the effects of a draft, level with the skirting board, that drags itself east to west from the floor-to-ceiling arched window to the stairs. Before that—for the previous eight and a half minutes—I was pacing a rectangular path round the landing. For each of the long sides I tread the length of the same floorboard, while the short ends of the rectangle line up the door frames on opposite walls of the landing. I go anticlockwise and I can actually feel that it’s the wrong way, against the normal movement of all timepieces and even against time itself—so going that way helps me to feel that I am struggling against the problem, rather than being swept up by it and riding with it.

I have been collaborating with myself, working through my options, boxing them up, assembling and assessing them, ordering, grading, cataloging, tabulating and selecting, trying to see the most succinct path through the maze. I have found that the pacing helps me Create—to come up with new ideas—and the standing very still is necessary to Evaluate. Over and over I have strained for a way to get someone else to the house to check on Vivien. I’ve even considered flooding it or setting fire to the loggia so that Michael or anyone in the south lodges might see it, anything that would allow someone else to deal with the problem of Vivien. But I’ve not come up with anything that doesn’t bring with it an extremely unattractive consequence further down the line, one that I know I couldn’t bear—too many people with too many questions.

To my dismay, I’ve determined by this systematic process of assimilation and disqualification that no one is likely to come to the house for weeks, and the idea of waiting here and thinking of her festering down the corridor may send me quite mad. I know the only feasible option is to investigate Vivien myself but it’s as I’m finally mustering the courage to do so that I hear the urgent pounding of the brass door knocker—thud, thud, thud—as if in a last-minute answer to my pleas. The noise grates on me, as it used to Maud, all the way up my spine—it’s quite unnecessary to bang it so violently when a more than adequate noise is achieved with a good grip on the goat’s horns and a rattle from side to side—yet for the first time in my life I welcome it with unexpected delight. I hurry down the stairs. Perhaps they’ll also have the correct time.

My excitement is shattered when I pull back the door. There’s no one there. A beautiful day dances on the fresh leaves of the beech hedge to my left and there’s a hum of activity over the area where a once-ornamental pond has been lost in the undergrowth. I feel betrayed by hope.

I begin to Create and Evaluate once again, quickly, the possibilities of the door knocker being banged at one minute and yet at the next there’s no one there. Then a curious movement at the turn of the drive catches my eye and I see a shadow, now another, racing behind the laburnum hedge. I am being watched. Children. They dare each other to come close to the house of the Moth Woman and an exceptionally brave one must have mustered the courage to bang the door knocker. The shadows shift and disappear out of sight behind the conifers and along the Tunnel Walk to the brook.

I review the day just because I can; sixty-nine degrees and rising, clear and dry. I suck my middle finger and hold it up to check the light wind—east to northeasterly. The wind seems faint, almost still, but that’s what people forget—it’s not about the wind. It’s the air currents that count, and often they run paradoxically to the wind. The rising heat and falling humidity point to thermals, and I notice the treetops are rustling, so at twenty-five feet it’s moderately gusty, far stronger than at ground level. Yes, I’d say strong, dry, upper thermals. A shiver of excitement runs up my back.

Today is the perfect day for catching rare immigrants.

For a prolific catch of immigrants—quantity, not quality—you’d wait for the south southeasterly air currents that blow them from the Med and across the Channel in their thousands, sailing effortlessly on the thermal smells of Spain, France and Portugal. On this type of current, I’d head straight to the poor patch of forgotten scrubland just behind the beach café at Branscombe. It’s an unnoticed little spot, often strewn with litter, but protected from the wind by the giant chalk cliffs guarding the sea, a warm oasis of wild petunia, viper’s bugloss and knapweed, a first-stop welcome for weary southern visitors. I remember a hot summer night, on a day that brought smells from Moroccan markets, when Clive and I trapped more than fourteen hundred moths on the dump behind the café. We anesthetized the entire catch with 20ml potassium phosphate and enlisted a local committee to help us count and log them.

But today’s brood wouldn’t be for quantity but scarcity. It’s an unusual current, a hot east to northeasterly, which by tonight will bring many a rare species from southern Scandinavia and northern Europe, including the Clifden Nonpareil and the Bedstraw Hawk. I wonder where the Dorset and Somerset moth hunters will be grouping later, where they will join forces and head. I can almost feel the buzz of phones ringing round this small, exclusive group of people, arrangements firmed up for this evening’s hunt, all other engagements canceled, nothing too important to miss this great night of all nights of the moth-hunting season. Some will head for the high heaths of Ratnedge Deveril, or to the wetter lowlands—the bog in the Furze-brook Reserve, the meadows at Barton’s Shoulder, the clump of willows at Templecombe. It’s been a long while since I’ve hunted. I wonder if today’s hunters still know that the eastern edge of the Mawes Fir Estate was bordered by a footpath, just above Oakers Wood, where a few last elms huddled in a peaceful copse, having somehow escaped disease. The rare Norwegian Dogtail always found it and the next day, when news of the previous night’s catches flushed through the moth community, Oakers Wood would often turn out to be the Dogtail’s only sighting in the entire country.

It’s as I stop my musings and start to close the door on the exceptional day that my eye is drawn to something on the ground. There, on the worn flagstones, I see a heap of freshly mutilated moths, victims of an unkind massacre.

I bend over them. It’s the product of last night’s collection—fresh, spring specimens. I can feel the warm sun through my nightgown and I sit down on the smooth flagstones, like a little girl, to sort my prize. I make little piles, arranging them into residents and nonresidents, commoners, newcomers, crossbreeds, mutants and unviables. Among them are Tigers, Underwings, a Pug, two Marbled Carpets and three types of Hawk—beautiful specimens, recently emerged and vibrant. There’s nothing particularly surprising, perhaps the Carpets are usually farther south, but I’d really like to know where and how they were caught. They must have gone to more than a little effort because I presume it’s from at least two different locations; there’s a couple of Vapourers, which would never cohabit with the Satins and the Underwings. But the real delight for me is a Puss Moth caterpillar that I find all curled up at the bottom of the pile. Now, the Puss Moth is common around here, but it’s still my favorite. It’s the nearest you can get to communicating with a caterpillar. It has a soft coat, zigzagged in green and brown, and when you stroke it, it wriggles and squirms with pleasure. When it gets angry it hisses and waves the two hairlike protrusions on its tail and, if it’s in a real temper, it’ll spit at you.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had the chance to examine a fresh collection. The children who made me this offering have no idea of the delightful distraction they have given me on this particular Monday morning. They will be assuming, perhaps, that because I have bred moths (even, perhaps, bred some of these moths’ forefathers), nurtured their pupae in my cellar and witnessed their first flight in my attic, to discover them half mutilated on my doorstep would make me recoil in horror. They are wrong, of course, for we naturalists strive for the greater proliferation of the entire lepidoptera genera, not for the survival of individuals. The children may be surprised to know how many moths I’ve gassed and pinned; how many caterpillars I’ve rolled, still alive, to squeeze out their insides, reinflating them with wood chip to give them structure; how many peaceful cocoons I’ve dug up and cut open from under the roots of poplars, apples and crack willows. But all of this for a scientific cause, for a greater understanding of and insight into a little-known insect.

3:05 p.m. (by my digital wristwatch)

I am inching along Vivien’s landing, on the other side of the double doors, still in my nightgown and bed socks, and I can feel the pressure of the whole unfamiliar space crowding in on me. I have spent much of the day finding the courage to be here, to check on Vivien myself.

I can see that her door is wide open and I stop on the landing outside it. From this angle I can’t see her, but I can see a slice of her room: the end of her bed and the far corner. Shoes and slippers are stacked up on top of each other in the corner. Next to them I see a little basket and a rug, which I presume are for Simon, and a large plastic Mother and Child attached to an electric cord, which makes me wonder if it lights up or preaches when it’s plugged in. Lifting my gaze to a shelf on the wall, I see a bookstand—the seat of an ugly green marble toad—and next to that, to my delight, an ornate little carriage clock. I’ll be happy to have that clock, I think. You can never have enough clocks. Then I admonish myself for the inappropriate thought outside a dead woman’s room. The clock is at an oblique angle, so I have to move closer to the door frame and peer in for several seconds to read the time. Ten to four. I check it against my wristwatch—much too fast. I tut.

“Ginny, come in.”

A surge of terror. My heart thuds within its cage, and I freeze—right there by the door. The marble toad stares mockingly at me. Oh, my God, she’s not dead! She didn’t drink her milk after all. Every part of me is tight with a fear I’ve never known before. I had been utterly convinced she was dead. Is this her ghost talking? I can’t concentrate enough to think. Am I relieved or frustrated? I had thought I couldn’t bear to see her dead but to see her alive when I think she’s dead feels far worse.

“Ginny,” she says again, weakly, “are you there?”

So she’s guessing. Silently I shift backwards, towards the landing’s double doors, out of sight of the toad. I’m going to leave her. I don’t want to confront her. I’m going to creep away quietly and she’ll never know for sure that I was really here.

“I know you’re there,” she whispers. She’s bluffing, of course….

“Ginny, I know you’re just outside my door. Ginny?” I’m caught. I can’t expose myself now or it would be admitting that I’ve been hiding from her for the past few minutes. But I can’t bring myself to walk away either because now I know she knows I’m here. I lean my head against the landing wall, the other side of her room, defeated. Trapped.

“Look, you don’t have to come in. Stay there and listen if you want,” she continues, as if she knows my every thought and fear. “But please listen. This is very important.”

I am very still. I am very listening.

“Ginny, I’m ill. I think I’m dying. I need you to get me a doctor.”

Oh, my God, she did drink the milk, or, rather, she could have drunk the milk. But, equally, she could be genuinely ill, a torturous coincidence that no one would ever need know about.

No, I can’t get a doctor. I can have someone find her dead, but not ill. Dead old ladies are commended for their contribution in life, laid to rest and, along with their secrets, swallowed forever by the earth. But ill old ladies are investigated until the poison coursing through their bodies is hunted down. And that, as you can imagine, would get me into a lot of trouble. My head is spinning. I want to sit down and tabulate my options. I can’t control them flying about in my head: I need to pull them together on a page and consider them methodically, one by one, but I don’t have that luxury. I’ve been leaning my head against the wall of the landing as I listened, and now I put the palm of my right hand up—flat—just a couple of inches in front of my face so I can stare at it. I find that sometimes this helps me focus my concentration, helps draw it back to me rather than flying off, spiraling out of control.

“Ginny, I know this isn’t easy for you. I understand that.” A few days ago I would have taken comfort in the way she seems to know me inside out, but now I hate it. “But if you go to Eileen’s she will…” I can hear the struggle in her voice as she tries to summon energy. “Ginny, for me…please,” she begs finally.

I am looking at the multitude of crisscrossing lines on the palm of my right hand and the dry calluses on the knobbles at the base of my fingers. As I begin to close the hand, bending it in the middle and curling my deformed fingers, I can see the lines fold in on themselves, making deeper and deeper crevices, until my hand is a fist. Then I notice lines that have not grown out of any folds of a fist—like the ones that run lengthways along the fingers—but have simply matured from a gradual desiccation of the skin.

I want to tell you something now, while we’re in this awful predicament outside Vivien’s room: all my life, it seems, I have sacrificed my own will for those around me. Not that I’ve offered much resistance and not that I haven’t wanted to. But I think you’ll agree that I fall into that category of people who prefer to give than to get, who feel better about themselves when they’ve been helping others and derive satisfaction from knowing that some of their own suffering has directly aided someone else’s, indeed someone they love’s, happiness. But I think even people like us have to believe that, just once or twice in our lives, our love is appreciated, perhaps even reciprocated.

“A doctor…Ginny?”

I open my fist sharply, decisively, last night’s new persona coming to the fore. The range of movement in my knuckles is impressive now. It’s good to exercise arthritic joints, keep them loose so they don’t seize up. I look at Vivien’s door through the gap between my fingers.

“Okay,” I say gently.

I leave the landing, go downstairs and open the front door. I have been forced, for what seems like the first time in my entire life, to make an active decision, a choice. A choice that will have an irreversible impact on the future.

I give myself time for one deep breath of honeysuckle, then close the front door, loudly, so Vivien will hear it upstairs. I go into the library, open the drinks cabinet and find the black tin of potassium cyanide, KCN, behind a sticky bottle of vermouth, where I hid it last night. I’m half surprised to find it there, to have confirmation of my actions during the moonlit hours. I reach to the shelf above for a glass and measure in half a teaspoon of the powder, snapping closed the lid and replacing it behind the vermouth. I suppose this is what is meant by premeditated—the calm and considered preparation of death. But I feel released, unshackled. For the first time ever I am not only in control of my life, I am taking control of the future. For once I am causing an event to happen. Yet at the same time another force is thrusting me forward, an overwhelming one that, to my surprise, makes each action follow the last as if I am paralyzed and looking down on myself with horror.

I am impassive and incurious as I continue. It’s the scientist in me, I know. You learn early on, as a scientist, not to trust your feelings and to rise above any unqualified instinct or emotion. All calculations must be backed up with undeniable evidence and absolute qualified conclusions.

It feels no different from making the tea, an everyday practical occurrence. Murder. I take no pleasure in it, yet feel no shame, no anxiety. But this time there is no pretending that I am leaving it up to chance. I accept fully what I am doing. This time it is no different from loading a gun and shooting someone between the eyes, or cracking a lead weight across their skull, and rather than being appalled by myself, I’m feeling strangely empowered, released from the forces that I have, so far, allowed to dictate my life. This time it is me, it is my will. I am in control.

I think I’m in control and yet, perhaps, I have no choice. I cannot help the way the events of my life and those of the past three days have worked on my inherent and coded characteristics to bring me to this unpleasant outcome. As you must know, once a domino is pushed, the motion is started and, as long as the others are lined up one after another with the correct spacing, there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them. It is the consequence of my lifetime experiences on the character that I was given. From that viewpoint, it cannot be called premeditated. It is as strictly governed as a mathematical equation. It is the result of

me + Vivi falling off the bell tower + taunting at school + Maud’s sherry drinking + the existence of poison in the house…

I feel like the caterpillar that we think is making a choice when he eats or pupates but, in actual fact, is not. He’s completely ruled by molecular forms of influence acting on the base components of a moth. Likewise, perhaps I have become a killer through circumstances acting on my biological makeup. Which means, of course, that none of this is my fault and that it’s all out of my hands.

I like to think that, for once, I am in control of my actions, but I also like to know that I am not.

I carry the glass to the front door. Once again I open and close the door loudly, as if I’ve just returned to the house. Then I go to the kitchen and turn on the tap. The cold water pipes start up their chorus of banging and thudding, shaking awake the rest of the house. I fill the glass halfway with water, swirling it gently to dissolve the poison, and I am reminded of the faint aroma it releases, a bitter tinge of almond. I carry it through the hall, past Jake the pig, up the stairs, past the huge stained-glass window, slow and steady, missing the second from last stair, which squeaks, and reach the landing.

I stop at the top as an image of Vivien’s coffin passes me, carried by unknown men in black, helping her on her last journey down these stairs and out of Bulburrow. It is a final call for caution, to make sure that this is how I really want to change the future. But I am now certain I have no choice: I am the puppet of myself.

I step aside to make way for the procession and continue across the landing, through the double doors and onto Vivien’s landing. I’m concentrating, blocking out everything but the Method that the palm of my hand has helped me to devise. It is so easy. Thank you, Maud. After all, it was she who had taught me how to substitute for my lack of natural strength, she who had taught me how to believe in myself. What would she say, do you suppose, one daughter killing the other? Is she looking at me now from her heaven and taking full responsibility for my actions, as she always did?

As I enter the room Vivien’s clock says fourteen minutes past four. Her eyes are closed, she doesn’t know yet that I have entered. I can now see the rest of the room, which had been out of view from my listening post on the landing. It is such an onslaught of color and clutter that my eyes wander for too long on the accessories before I look at Vivien. She has hung fairy lights round the picture rail and stuck photos of herself with people I don’t recognize on the wall above her bed. A mirror has more photos jammed in its frame, and on the other side of her bed, on the floor, there are three tea-stained mugs and a dirty plate. Above this, four nails have been banged into the wall as hooks and clothes slung over them. A small dressing table is covered with a disarray of bottles—perfume, face creams and other unguents—without a hint of order to any of it. One or two items have fallen off while a tin of talc hangs over the edge on its side, having coughed some of its contents onto the floor through the holes in its lid. It taunts me, the way it lies teetering, and I am overcome with an unbearable desire to push it back on. With a great effort of will I ignore its precariousness and instead summon myself to concentrate on the matter at hand. I focus on Vivien.

Her eyes are now flickering open and shut. She is trying to keep them directed, but they race peevishly this way and that within their sockets. Her right hand is lying palm up on the bedcover, quite close to me, and when she opens and closes it, grabbing at the air, I realize it is an invitation for me to hold it. I don’t want to be part of a last-minute fingertip reconciliation, but I oblige her handhold anyway, like swallowing a mouthful of something disgusting because soon you know it will all be over.

“The doctor’s on his way,” I lie. “Eileen is waiting for him and will bring him up.” She squeezes my hand. I stare at her clock: method, results, conclusions, method, results, conclusions. Tick, tock, tick. The second hand is about to pass Go, pushing the minute hand to half past four by this clock, tick, tock, four, three, two, one, Go. It’s four-thirty in the afternoon of 27 April.

“He says you must drink some water. That’s very important, he says. It’ll make you feel better. Can you sit up?”

Vivien’s eyes are now open, not fully, but open, and she manages to shift herself a little way up the bed so that her head is more upright on her pillow. I wonder vaguely, as she gulps thankfully at the water, whether if I’d had it in me to kill the flies in Lower 5B when I was thirteen, I might not now have it in me to kill my sister at seventy.

I put the glass on the floor beside the bed. Vivien’s eyes stare blankly above her. Her lips move, drinking the air like a fish out of water, and she beats her arm on the bed, just once. I wonder, with sudden curiosity, if I’m about to feel something like a life force leaving her body as she dies, but I don’t. Her body starts to convulse, wracking violently, as if another being is trying to expel itself through her skin. I don’t mind watching her. I know she’s not feeling this. She’s already dead. But I’ll tell you something—as I watch the involuntary twitches of a poisoned body, I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t admit I find it interesting, from a purely scientific point of view, of course.

I’ll tell you more about it, if you like. Potassium cyanide is what’s called a synaptic blocker poison. It blocks the tiny electrical impulses with which our nervous system functions, at the synapses, the communication junctions between nerves. At a molecular level the poison is a compound that can fit into the same receptor sites that the synaptic messenger compounds would normally lock into, thereby inhibiting them doing their job and preventing any signals being passed along the nerves. In other words, the body is paralyzed within seconds, as long as you administer enough to block the receptor sites before the body can metabolize and excrete the poison. It’s a race between the kidneys’ toxin-removal efficiency and the potency of the poison.

Vivien is still now and I am stroking her hair because—I don’t know if you will understand this—I still love her. I love her and hate her at the same time. I even love the same parts of her that I hate, her vitality and her color, her disruption and disorder, her humor and her despair, her conceit and her narcissism, her everything that isn’t me. Now that she is dead, I can already feel the love overriding the hatred once more. Besides our moment of happiness on the porch when Vivien first came home on Friday, these are the next best few minutes I’ve had with her. She should have stayed away. Why did she come home? I wonder. I know so little about her.

I hear a car advancing up the drive and, glancing through the window, I am surprised to see it’s a police car.

Chapter 22 PC Bolt and Inspector Piggott

The policeman steps out of the car onto the drive as I walk towards him. My new self had little trouble in opening the front door, and I’m feeling far less threatened as I walk up to him than I would have felt yesterday with any other visitor. The sun catches his windscreen, dazzling me. The sky is a watery blue and I can smell honeysuckle, carried to me on the breeze.

“Vivien Morris?” he says, from afar, and I think of Vivien, her body ratcheting her life from itself. “I’m PC Bolt, from the Beaminster station. Sorry, did I get you out of bed?” he says, looking at my nightgown, then the open-toed slippers on my feet.

PC Bolt looks about nineteen. He’s standing by his car, leaning on the open door, which makes a barrier between us, like a desk.

“No,” I say, but I’m trying hard to work out how and why he’s here, how on earth he found out so quickly that I’ve poisoned my sister. For a moment I imagine he has a special insight that allows him to detect any injustices being carried out within the county.

“There’s nothing to be alarmed about,” he says, smiling. “It’s what we call a courtesy call.” My sense of relief gives way to light-headedness and I have to steady myself. I remember I’ve not eaten today. Once my routine goes, I forget to do things like eat.

“Oh, and also,” he continues flippantly, “we had a very excited telephone call from a”—he takes a flip-pad from his breast pocket and consults it—“from an Eileen Turner, who lives at Willow Cottage. She was frantic, saying you were supposed to be having tea with her this afternoon at four and as it’s now, well, long gone…”

“Is it?” I check my digital wristwatch: 4:12.

“Well, I just meant it’s past teatime and she thought something might be wrong because you didn’t turn up. I did tell her you’d most probably forgotten, but she didn’t think you would have, and she was insistent that I come and make sure myself and”—he shakes his head in a way that makes me wonder how often he’s had to mediate tea dates among the elderly—“you know what some of these old dears can be like. She didn’t want to walk up to the house herself.” He pauses, perhaps waiting for me to say something. “She made me promise her I’d pay you a visit and check that everything was all right,” he says apologetically. I don’t say anything.

“Well, I’ll pop into Eileen’s on my way back to the station and let her know, then, shall I? Do you want me to tell her you’ll be calling in later…or not?”

I nod. “Was that a ‘not’ or not a ‘not’?” He laughs.

I nod again.

“Well, then…” He coughs and plants one foot inside the car as if to go. Then he glances up at the towering house, the turrets and the gargoyles that seem to hold the bricks together around the crenellations. “Great place,” he says. “Fascinating.” He pauses. I think I see him shiver.

“Well, have a good evening, madam.”

“What time did you say it was?” I ask quickly, quite forgetting that a minute ago I wanted him to go away as quickly as possible, quite forgetting for a moment that Vivien is upstairs, dead. Murdered, in fact.

“Well”—he flicks over his wrist—“it’s just gone seven.”

“Is it?” I’m unable to hide my astonishment. “I make it twelve minutes past four.” He laughs as if I’ve made a joke. It’s such a shock that I can’t say anything more. I can’t think straight.

“Well, there you go,” he starts, as if he’s solved a case. “That will explain the confusion….” But I’m not listening. I’m appalled. The tops of the limes along the drive are swaying…. I had thought that at most I’d be out by eleven minutes. Not three hours. I’m watching his mouth. His lips are wet and full and form their words with large slow ovals so that I can clearly see the pink gums inside. Nothing feels real. I have a rush of dizziness. The limes look as if they’re about to uproot and topple.

That’s it.

Two men are peering down at me. One is PC Bolt, I remember, and the other, whom I don’t recognize, is shining a bright torch into my eye. There’s a sharp throbbing pain at the back of my head. I can hear a woman’s voice and a lot of other people talking and walking about outside the room. Soon I realize I am on my bed in my room and the previous events come back to me. I remember being on the drive, PC Bolt telling me how out of time I was, and then I must have fainted. I have no idea how long ago that would have been.

I hear a soft voice. “Miss Stone? Can you hear me? It’s PC Bolt.” I look at him. “Are you Miss Virginia Stone?” I nod. “Right, I didn’t realize you were the sister,” he says.

“What’s the time?” I ask.

“Just relax,” says the other man. “Please don’t try to talk.”

“What’s the time?” I ask again.

“It’s all right. I’m a doctor and you’re going to be fine,” he says, raising his voice, assuming I’m a bit deaf. This is torturous.

“I’d just like to know what time it is, please, Doctor,” I say once more, but this time in a taut, stifled voice that’s not attached to my throat. I have my eyes shut tight to expel the frustration.

“It’s about eight o’clock,” the doctor says nonchalantly, without consulting any sort of timepiece.

Now I look at PC Bolt in despair, as if he, out of the two of them, might just understand. “Constable, please tell me the exact time. I need to know,” I beseech him.

He studies his watch for a suitably long time. “It’s ten minutes past eight.”

I had been straining my neck without realizing it, and now I let my head fall back onto the pillow and relax.

Fifteen minutes later I am sitting up on my bed. A mug (which I don’t recognize) of tea is steaming on my bedside table, which I want but can’t bring myself to drink, as I didn’t make it. Besides, it’s too milky. Now a different, much older policeman is in the room with me, standing by my bed. “Would you like some tea?” he asks, gesturing to the mug.

“No, thank you.”

“I’m Inspector Piggott.”

Inspector Piggott goes into the bathroom without a word and comes back fifty seconds later (I’m looking at my bedside clock while he is away). He hands me a glass of water.

“Drink this,” he orders. “It’ll make you feel better.”

“What is it?” I look inside the glass, which reminds me that I’d said the same thing to Vivien only this afternoon. My God! I’d completely forgotten. Vivien!

“Water,” he says. Oh, Lord, does he know about Vivien? Has he smelt her yet?

I take a sip and hand it back.

“I hope you’ll understand what I’m about to tell you,” he says, loudly and clearly. “Look, I’m very sorry, I’ve got some rather alarming news.” He places the glass on the table.

As you can imagine I’ve had rather too much alarming news recently and I’m not sure I’m up to it. I feel a little frail and my head hurts. The anticipation is unbearable.

“Your sister, Vivien. I’m afraid she’s dead.”

Is that it? I think, and I’m very thankful Inspector Piggott’s news isn’t in the least bit alarming.

“Oh dear,” I muster in reply, because he’s looking at me, waiting for one.

“Yes, earlier this afternoon, we think,” he continues, loud and slow. “Did you happen to see her today?” he asks casually.

“Yes,” I reply and then I say, “Actually, no,” and, to tell you the truth, I’m completely confused. I’m trying to give him the right answer rather than the real answer.

“Don’t worry, Miss Stone. You’ve had a little knock to your head and I think everything will become clear in a while. We’re taking her away now so we can look into the specific cause of death,” he adds, sitting on the edge of my bed, rather as if he’s settling into a long bedtime story. I can feel the heat rising to my face and I can’t stop it. I’m not used to strangers sitting on my bed. “Do you know if she was ill,” he asks, “or taking any medication?”

“No. I don’t.”

Inspector Piggott waits while PC Bolt and the doctor leave the room. When they’ve gone he sighs heavily and rubs his brow with the tips of his fingers as if he’s trying to rub out the lines he has there. “I know this is a lot for you to take in right now but I’ll be frank. We’ve come across something in the glass by your sister’s bed and, well, we think it might be cyanide. It has a very distinct smell.”

Suddenly my mouth is extraordinarily dry. I know that almond smell well.

“Cyanide,” I repeat, because again, I know some sort of response is required.

“Miss Stone, do you have any idea where the cyanide could have come from?” Wasn’t he going to ask me why I killed her? Now, that would have been a tricky question. Where the cyanide came from was easy.

“We’ve got plenty of cyanide here,” I say.

Inspector Piggott looks down at me, surprised. “Have you? What on earth for?”

I hold out my arm for him to steady me as I lift myself from the bed. A sharp pain anchors my head as I tilt up and I wish I hadn’t decided to move, but within a minute or two I am leading him slowly out of the room, turning right and crossing the landing. A young man I’ve never seen before rushes up to us and offers me a walking stick—Vivien’s, as it happens, the one she used only once to embellish her arrival.

As we approach my lookout I see Eileen Turner and PC Bolt come out through the double doors from the east wing. Eileen is sobbing and saying, “She’d only been back for three days…,” but as soon as they see us their conversation stops abruptly and their pace slows. As we walk past, the two policemen exchange glances and Eileen looks down. I must admit I have no idea if it is a quiet consolatory nod or if she’s scared to look at me. I have an odd impression that my house is crammed with people, strangers wandering all over it, getting into every crevice like a swarm of ants in a larder.

I open the door to the spiral staircase and walk extra slowly up the stairs, all at once overwhelmed by age. I can hear Eileen’s voice again, this time low and muffled, floating up intermittently from the far side of the landing. I have Vivien’s walking stick in my left hand and Piggott is still gripping my right arm at the elbow, steadying me now and again. He and I do not speak to one another. I, for one, am concentrating on my footing until, finally, we’re at the top and I’m opening the door to the attic. Two bats are disturbed as we enter and the inspector flinches in surprise as they squall and flutter into the next room. I think I hear him gag as, with his spare hand, he retrieves a handkerchief from his top pocket and holds it over his nose and mouth. I lead him to the laboratory and point, with Vivien’s stick, to the left-hand side, where the bottles are labeled with the skull and crossbones.

“Killing fluid,” I say.

“Ah,” says the inspector, muffled by the handkerchief. “Killing what?”

“Moths, mainly. That was our family…” I was going to say “living,” but at the last moment I change my mind. “Our family expertise,” I say proudly. He asks me if I could show him which ones are cyanide so I point to the different types. Mainly, I explain, there’s either sodium or potassium cyanide, NaCN or KCN, but there’s also prussic acid, which is another name for hydrogen cyanide, HCN, and that in the bottles they are all solutions but on the very top shelf are the powdered poisons in their purest form.

“Is there one missing?” He cuts across my lecture, pointing to an obvious gap along the shelf.

“Yes,” I tell him. After he’s helped himself to a couple of bottles and tins, carefully sealing them in a polythene bag, I lead him back downstairs to the hall. The house is quiet again but for the hollow tick of the longcase clock. I look slowly round the decrepit hall. It’s capacious and empty. Wallpaper is peeling badly at the top edge near the cornice where the damp has nuzzled through, but everything is as it should be, in its place. To me, it is safe again. Safe and still and workable. I can feel the entire week’s buildup of tension start to loosen and melt away. I feel happy, even.

Nearing the front door Inspector Piggott turns to me. “Miss Stone,” he says, very formally, “can you think of any reason why your sister might have wanted to take her life?”

I hadn’t thought of that. “No,” I say, and then I think that taking her own life was probably the last thing Vivien would have done.

He nods and is turning to go when I stop him. “Inspector Piggott, I just wondered…”

“Yes?” he says, turning keenly, eager for me to divulge a secret.

“Do you have the time, please?”

“The time?”

“Yes. I’d like to know what time it is.”

“Nine o’clock,” he replies.

“What, exactly nine?”

“Well, no, a little after.” He looks at his watch again. “Five past.” He turns to go again.

“Exactly five past?” I ask quickly. It still sounds a little general to me. He stops, turns back to me, and studies his watch carefully, filling me with confidence that he is about to give me the most accurate answer he can.

“I make it almost seven minutes past nine,” he says, eyeing me cautiously.

“Oh, thank you,” I say, really meaning it. “And does that, do you think, correspond with the police-station clock? I mean, do you check it against the station clock sometimes?”

He pauses. “Yes. Regularly,” he says reassuringly.

“Oh, thank you, Inspector, thank you.” I sigh. I am truly relieved. I reset both my wristwatches and close the front door after him.