Sister Read online

  Sister

  Rosamund Lupton

  “Lupton enters the highly charged ring where the best psychological detective writers spar… Like Kate Atkinson, Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell… Both tear-jerking and spine-tingling, Sister provides an adrenaline rush that could cause a chill on the sunniest afternoon.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  When her mom calls to tell her that Tess, her younger sister, is missing, Bee returns home to London on the first flight. She expects to find Tess and give her the usual lecture, the bossy big sister scolding her flighty baby sister for taking off without letting anyone know her plans. Tess has always been a free spirit, an artist who takes risks, while conservative Bee couldn’t be more different. Bee is used to watching out for her wayward sibling and is fiercely protective of Tess (and has always been a little stern about her antics). But then Tess is found dead, apparently by her own hand.

  Bee is certain that Tess didn’t commit suicide. Their family and the police accept the sad reality, but Bee feels sure that Tess has been murdered. Single-minded in her search for a killer, Bee moves into Tess’s apartment and throws herself headlong into her sister’s life—and all its secrets.

  Though her family and the police see a grieving sister in denial, unwilling to accept the facts, Bee uncovers the affair Tess was having with a married man and the pregnancy that resulted, and her difficultly with a stalker who may have crossed the line when Tess refused his advances. Tess was also participating in an experimental medical trial that might have gone very wrong. As a determined Bee gives her statement to the lead investigator, her story reveals a predator who got away with murder—and an obsession that may cost Bee her own life.

  A thrilling story of fierce love between siblings, Sister is a suspenseful and accomplished debut with a stunning twist.

  Rosamund Lupton

  SISTER

  A Novel

  To my parents, Kit and Jane Orde-Powlett,

  for their lifelong gift of encouragement.

  And to Martin, my husband, with my love.

  “Where shall we see a better daughter or a kinder sister or a truer friend?”

  —Jane Austen, Emma

  “But flowers distill’d, though they with winter meet,

  Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.”

  —Shakespeare, Sonnet 5

  1

  Sunday evening

  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? When I went off to boarding school and we had to replace games and laughter and low-voiced confidences for letters to each other. I can’t remember what I said in my first letter, just that I used a jigsaw, broken up, to avoid the prying eyes of my house mistress. (I guessed correctly that her jigsaw-making inner child had left years ago.) But I remember word for word your seven-year-old reply to my fragmented homesickness and that your writing was invisible until I shone a flashlight onto the paper. Ever since, kindness has smelled of lemons.

  The journalists would like that little story, marking me out as a kind of lemon-juice detective even as a child and showing how close we have always been as sisters. They’re outside your flat now, actually, with their camera crews and sound technicians (faces sweaty, jackets grimy, cables trailing down the steps and getting tangled up in the railings). Yes, that was a little throwaway, but how else to tell you? I’m not sure what you’ll make of becoming a celebrity, of sorts, but suspect you’ll find it a little funny. Ha-ha funny and weird funny. I can only find it weird funny, but then I’ve never shared your sense of humor, have I?

  “But you’ve already been suspended once, it’s serious,” I said. “Next time you’ll be expelled for definite and Mum’s got enough on her plate.”

  You’d been caught smuggling your rabbit into school. I was so very much the older sister.

  “But it’s a little funny too, isn’t it, Bee?” you asked, your lips pursed trying not to let the laughter out, reminding me of a bottle of Lucozade with giggle bubbles rising, bound to escape with fizzing and popping on the surface.

  Just thinking of your laughter gives me courage and I go to the window.

  Outside, I recognize a reporter from a satellite news channel. I am used to seeing his face flattened into 2D on a plasma screen in the privacy of my New York apartment, but here he is large as life and in 3D flesh standing in Chepstow Road and looking straight back at me through your basement window. My finger itches for the off button on the remote; instead I pull the curtains.

  But it’s worse now than when I could see them. Their lights glare through the curtains, their sounds pound against the windows and walls. Their presence feels like a weight that could bulldoze its way into your sitting room. No wonder the press are called the press—if this goes on much longer I could suffocate. Yes, okay, that was a little dramatic, you’d probably be out there offering them coffee. But as you know, I am easily annoyed and too precious about my personal space. I shall go into the kitchen and try to get on top of the situation.

  It’s more peaceful in here, giving me the quiet to think. It’s funny what surprises me now; often it’s the smallest things. For instance, yesterday a paper had a story on how close we have always been as sisters and didn’t even mention the difference in our age. Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore now that we’re grown-up, but as children it seemed so glaring. “Five years is a big gap…” people would say who didn’t know, a slight rise at the end of the sentence to frame it as a question. And we’d both think of Leo and the gap he left, though maybe gaping void would be more accurate, but we didn’t ever say, did we?

  The other side of the back door I can just hear a journalist on her mobile. She must be dictating to someone on the phone; my own name jumps out at me, “Arabella Beatrice Hemming.” Mum said no one has ever called me by my first name so I’ve always assumed that even as a baby they could tell I wasn’t an Arabella, a name with loops and flourishes in black-inked calligraphy, a name that contains within it girls called Bella or Bells or Belle—so many beautiful possibilities. No, from the start I was clearly a Beatrice, sensible and unembellished in Times New Roman, with no one hiding inside. Dad chose the name Arabella before I was born. The reality must have been a disappointment.

  The journalist comes within earshot again, on a new call, I think, apologizing for working late. It takes me a moment before I realize that I, Arabella Beatrice Hemming, am the reason for it. My impulse is to go out and say sorry, but then you know me, always the first to hurry to the kitchen the moment Mum started her tom-tom anger signal by clattering pans. The journalist moves away. I can’t hear her words but I listen to her tone, appeasing, a little defensive, treading delicately. Her voice suddenly changes. She must be talking to her child. Her tone seeps through the door and windows, warming your flat.

  Maybe I should be considerate and tell her to go home. Your case is sub judice so I’m not allowed to tell them anything till after the trial. But she, like the others, already knows this. They’re not trying to get facts about you but emotions. They want me to clench my hands together, giving them a close-up of white knuckles. They want to see a few tears escaping and gliding snaillike down my cheek, leaving black mascara trails. So I stay inside.

  The reporters and their entourage of technicians have all finally left, leaving a high tidemark of cigarette ash on the steps down to your flat, the butts stubbed out in your pots of daffodils. Tomorrow I’ll put out ashtrays. Actually, I misjudged some of them. Three apologized for intruding, and
a cameraman even gave me some chrysanthemums from the corner shop. I know you’ve never liked them.

  “But they’re school-uniform maroon or autumnal browns, even in spring,” you said, smiling, teasing me for valuing a flower for its neatness and longevity.

  “Often they’re really bright colors,” I said, not smiling.

  “Garish. Bred to be spotted over acres of concrete in garage forecourts.”

  But these wilting examples are stems of unexpected thoughtfulness, a bunch of compassion as surprising as cowslips on the shoulders of a motorway.

  The chrysanthemum cameraman told me that this evening the News at 10 is running a special on your story. I just phoned Mum to tell her. I think in a strange Mum-like way she’s actually proud of how much attention you’re getting. And there’s going to be more. According to one of the sound technicians, there’ll be foreign media here tomorrow. It’s funny, though—weird funny—that when I tried to tell people a few months ago, no one wanted to listen.

  Monday afternoon

  It seems that everyone wants to listen now—the press, the police, solicitors—pens scribble, heads crane forward, tape recorders whir. This afternoon I am giving my witness statement to a lawyer at the Crown Prosecution Service in preparation for the trial in four months’ time. I’ve been told that my statement is vitally important to the prosecution’s case, as I am the only person to know the whole story.

  Mr. Wright, the CPS lawyer who is taking my statement, sits opposite me. I think he’s in his late thirties, but maybe he is younger and his face has just been exposed to too many stories like mine. His expression is alert and he leans a fraction toward me, encouraging confidences. A good listener, I think, but what type of man?

  “If it’s okay with you,” he says, “I’d like you to tell me everything, from the beginning, and let me sort out later what is relevant.”

  I nod. “I’m not absolutely sure what the beginning is.”

  “Maybe when you first realized something was wrong?”

  I notice he’s wearing a nice Italian linen shirt and an ugly printed polyester tie—the same person couldn’t have chosen both. One of them must have been a present. If the tie was a present, he must be a nice man to wear it. I’m not sure if I’ve told you this, but my mind has a new habit of doodling when it doesn’t want to think about the matter in hand.

  I look up at him and meet his eye.

  “It was the phone call from my mother saying she’d gone missing.”

  When Mum phoned, we were hosting a Sunday lunch party. The food, catered by our local deli, was very New York—stylish and impersonal; same said for our apartment, our furniture and our relationship—nothing homemade. The Big Apple with no core. You are startled by the about-face, I know, but our conversation about my life in New York can wait.

  We’d got back that morning from a “snowy romantic break” in a Maine cabin, where we’d been celebrating my promotion to account director. Todd was enjoying regaling the lunch party with our big mistake:

  “It’s not as though we expected a Jacuzzi, but a hot shower wouldn’t have hurt, and a landline would have been helpful. It wasn’t as if we could use our cell phones—there’s no cell system out there.”

  “And this trip was spontaneous?” asked Sarah incredulously.

  As you know, Todd and I were never noted for our spontaneity. Sarah’s husband, Mark, glared across the table at her. “Darling.”

  She met his gaze. “I hate ‘darling.’ It’s code for ‘shut the fuck up,’ isn’t it?”

  You’d like Sarah. Maybe that’s why we’re friends—from the start she reminded me of you. She turned to Todd. “When was the last time you and Beatrice had a row?” she asked.

  “Neither of us is into histrionics,” Todd replied, self-righteously trying to puncture her conversation.

  But Sarah’s not easily deflated. “So you can’t be bothered either.”

  There followed an awkward silence, which I politely broke, “Coffee or herbal tea, anyone?”

  In the kitchen I put coffee beans into the grinder, the only “cooking” I was doing for the meal. Sarah followed me in, contrite. “Sorry, Beatrice.”

  “No problem.” I was the perfect hostess, smiling, smoothing, grinding. “Does Mark take it black or white?”

  “White. We don’t laugh anymore either,” she said, levering herself up onto the counter, swinging her legs. “And as for sex…”

  I turned on the grinder, hoping the noise would silence her. She shouted above it, “What about you and Todd?”

  “We’re fine, thanks,” I replied, putting the ground beans into our seven-hundred-dollar espresso maker.

  “Still laughing and shagging?” she asked.

  I opened a case of 1930s coffee spoons, each one a different colored enamel, like melted sweets. “We bought these at an antiques fair last Sunday morning.”

  “You’re changing the subject, Beatrice.”

  But you’ve picked up that I wasn’t, that on a Sunday morning, when other couples stay in bed and make love, Todd and I were out and about antique shopping. We were always better shopping partners than lovers. I thought that filling our apartment with things we’d chosen was creating a future together. I can hear you tease me that even a Clarice Cliff teapot isn’t a substitute for sex, but for me it felt a good deal more secure.

  The phone rang. Sarah ignored it. “Sex and laughter. The heart and lungs of a relationship.”

  “I’d better get the phone.”

  “When do you think it’s time to turn off the life-support machine?”

  “I’d really better answer that.”

  “When should you disconnect the shared mortgage and bank account and mutual friends?”

  I picked up the phone, glad of an excuse to interrupt this conversation. “Hello?”

  “Beatrice, it’s Mummy.”

  You’d been missing for four days.

  I don’t remember packing, but I remember Todd coming in as I closed the case. I turned to him. “What flight am I on?”

  “There’s nothing available till tomorrow.”

  “But I have to go now.”

  You hadn’t shown up to work since the previous Sunday. The manager had tried to ring you but she had only got your answering machine. She’d been round to your flat but you weren’t there. No one knew where you were. The police were now looking for you.

  “Can you drive me to the airport? I’ll take whatever they’ve got.”

  “I’ll phone a cab,” he replied. He’d had two glasses of wine. I used to value his carefulness.

  Of course I don’t tell Mr. Wright all of this. I just tell him Mum phoned me on the twenty-sixth of January at 3:30 p.m. New York time and told me you’d gone missing. Like you, he’s interested in the big picture, not tiny details. Even when you were a child, your paintings were large, spilling off the edge of the page, while I did my careful drawings using pencil and ruler and eraser. Later, you painted abstract canvases, expressing large truths in bold splashes of vivid color, while I was perfectly suited to my job in corporate design, matching every color in the world to a Pantone number. Lacking your ability with broad brushstrokes, I will tell you this story in accurate dots of detail. I’m hoping that as in a pointillistic painting, the dots will form a picture and when it is completed, we will understand what happened and why.

  “So until your mother phoned, you had no inkling of any problem?” asks Mr. Wright.

  I feel the familiar, nauseating, wave of guilt. “No. Nothing I took any notice of.”

  I went first class—it was the only seat they had left. As we flew through cloud limbo land I imagined telling you off for putting me through this. I made you promise not to pull a stunt like this again. I reminded you that you were going to be a mother soon and it was about time you started behaving like an adult.

  “‘Older sister’ doesn’t need to be a job title, Bee.”

  What had I been lecturing you about at the time? It could have been one of so m
any things; the point is that I’ve always viewed being an older sister as a job, one that I am ideally suited for. And as I flew to find you, because I would find you (looking after you is an essential part of my job description), I was comforted by the familiar scenario of being the superior, mature, older sister telling off the flighty, irresponsible young girl who should know better by now.

  The plane started to descend toward Heathrow. West London sprawled beneath us, thinly disguised with snow. The seat-belt light came on and I made deals with God: I’d do anything if you were found safe. I’d have made a deal with the devil if he’d been offering.

  As the plane bumped clumsily onto the tarmac, my fantasy annoyance crumbled into sickening anxiety. God became the hero in a children’s fairy story. My powers as an older sister dwindled to still impotency. I remembered viscerally Leo’s death. Grief like swallowed offal made me wretch. I couldn’t lose you too.

  The window is surprisingly huge for an office, and spring sunshine floods through it.

  “So you made a connection between Tess’s disappearance and Leo’s death?” Mr. Wright asks.

  “No.”

  “You said you thought about Leo?”

  “I think about Leo all the time. He was my brother.” I’m tired of going through this. “Leo died of cystic fibrosis when he was eight. Tess and I didn’t inherit it, we were born perfectly healthy.”

  Mr. Wright tries to turn off the glaring overhead light, but for some reason it won’t switch off. He shrugs at me apologetically and sits down again.

  “And then what happened?” he asks.

  “Mum met me and I went to the police station.”

  “Can you tell me about that?”

  Mum was waiting at the arrivals gate wearing her Jaeger camel coat. As I got closer, I saw that she hadn’t brushed her hair, and her makeup was clumsily applied. I know; I hadn’t seen her that way since Leo’s funeral.

  “I got a taxi all the way from Little Hadston. Your plane was late.”

  “Only ten minutes, Mum.”

  All around us lovers and relatives and friends were hugging each other, reunited. We were physically awkward with each other. I don’t think we even kissed.