Sister Read online

  “She might have been trying to phone while I’ve been gone,” Mum said.

  “She’ll try again.”

  But I’d checked my mobile countless times since the plane had landed.

  “Ridiculous of me,” continued Mum. “I don’t know why I should expect her to phone. She’s virtually given up calling me. Too much bother, I suppose.” I recognized the crust of annoyance. “And when was the last time she made the effort to visit?”

  I wondered when she’d move on to pacts with God.

  I rented a car. It was only six in the morning, but the traffic was already heavy on the M4 into London, the frustrated, angry crawl of the absurdly named rush hour made even slower because of the snow. We were going straight to the police station. I couldn’t make the heater work, and our words were spoken puffs hanging briefly in the cold air between us. “Have you already talked to the police?” I asked.

  Mum’s words seemed to pucker in the air with annoyance. “Yes, for all the good it did. What would I know about her life?”

  “Do you know who told them she was missing?”

  “Her landlord. Amias something or other,” Mum replied.

  Neither of us could remember his surname. It struck me as strange that it was your elderly landlord who reported you missing to the police.

  “He told them that she’d been getting nuisance calls,” said Mum.

  Despite the freezing car, I felt clammy with sweat. “What kind of nuisance calls?”

  “They didn’t say,” said Mum. I looked at her. Her pale, anxious face showed around the edge of her foundation, a middle-aged geisha in Clinique bisque.

  It was seven-thirty but still winter dark when we arrived at the Notting Hill police station. The roads were jammed, but the newly gritted pavements were almost empty. The only time I’d been in a police station before was to report the loss of my mobile phone; it hadn’t even been stolen. I never went past the reception area. This time I was escorted behind reception into an alien world of interview rooms and cells and police wearing belts loaded with truncheons and handcuffs. It had no connection to you.

  “And you met Detective Sergeant Finborough?” Mr. Wright asks.

  “Yes.”

  “What did you think of him?”

  I choose my words carefully. “Thoughtful. Thorough. Decent.”

  Mr. Wright is surprised, but quickly hides it. “Can you remember any of that initial interview?”

  “Yes.”

  To start with, I was dazed by your disappearance, but then my senses became overly acute; I saw too many details and too many colors, as if the world were animated by Pixar. Other senses were also on heightened alert; I heard the clank of the clock’s hand, a chair leg scraping on linoleum. I could smell cigarette smoke clinging to a jacket on the door. It was white noise turned up full volume, as if my brain could no longer tune out what didn’t matter. Everything mattered.

  Mum had been taken off by a policewoman for a cup of tea, and I was alone with DS Finborough. His manner was courteous, old-fashioned even. He seemed more Oxbridge don than policeman. Outside the window I could see it was sleeting.

  “Is there any reason you can think of why your sister may have gone away?” he asked.

  “No. None.”

  “Would she have told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You live in America?”

  “We phone and e-mail each other all the time.”

  “So you’re close.”

  “Very.”

  Of course we are close. Different, yes, but close. The age gap has never meant distance between us.

  “When did you last speak to her?” he asked.

  “Last Monday, I think. On Wednesday we went away to the mountains, just for a few days. I did try phoning her from a restaurant a few times, but her landline was always engaged; she can chat to her friends for hours.” I tried to feel irritated—after all, it’s me that pays your phone bill—trying to feel an old familiar emotion.

  “What about her mobile?”

  “She lost it about two months ago, or it was stolen. She’s very scatty like that.” Again trying to feel irritated. DS Finborough paused a moment, thinking of the right way to phrase it. His manner was considerate. “So you think her disappearance is not voluntary?” he asked.

  “Not voluntary.” Gentle words for something violent. In that first meeting no one said the word abduction or murder. A silent understanding had been reached between DS Finborough and me. I appreciated his tact; it was too soon to name it. I forced out my question. “My mother told me she’d been getting nuisance calls?”

  “According to her landlord, yes, she has. Unfortunately, she hadn’t given him any details. Has Tess told you anything about them?”

  “No.”

  “And she didn’t say anything to you about feeling frightened or threatened?” he asked.

  “No. Nothing like that. She was normal, happy.” I had my own question. “Have you checked all the hospitals?” As I asked it, I heard the rudeness and implicit criticism. “I just thought she might have gone into labor early.”

  DS Finborough put his coffee down, the sound made me jump.

  “We didn’t know she was pregnant.”

  Suddenly there was a lifebelt and I swam for it. “If she went into labor early, she could be in hospital. You wouldn’t have checked the maternity wards, would you?”

  “We ask hospitals to check all their inpatients, which would include maternity,” he replied and the lifebelt slipped away.

  “When’s the baby due?” he asked.

  “In just under three weeks.”

  “Do you know who the father is?”

  “Yes. Emilio Codi. He’s a tutor at her art college.”

  I didn’t pause, not for a heartbeat. The time for discretion was over. DS Finborough didn’t show any surprise, but then maybe that’s part of police training.

  “I went to the art college—” he began, but I interrupted. The smell of coffee in his Styrofoam cup had become nauseatingly strong.

  “You must be very worried about her.”

  “I like to be thorough.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  I didn’t want DS Finborough to think me hysterical, but reasonable and intelligent. I remember thinking it shouldn’t matter what he thought of me. Later I would discover that it mattered a great deal.

  “I met Mr. Codi,” said DS Finborough. “He didn’t say anything about his relationship with Tess, other than as a former student.”

  Emilio still disowned you, even when you were missing. I’m sorry. But that’s what his “discretion” always was—disownership hiding behind a more acceptable noun.

  “Do you know why Mr. Codi wouldn’t want us to know about their relationship?” he asked.

  I knew it all too well. “The college doesn’t allow tutors to have sex with their students. He’s also married. He made Tess take a ‘sabbatical’ when the bump started to show.”

  DS Finborough stood up; his manner had shifted up a gear, more policeman now than Oxbridge don. “There’s a local news program we sometimes use for missing people. I want to do a televised reconstruction of her last known movements.”

  Outside the metal-framed window a bird sang. I remembered your voice, so vividly that it was as if you were in the room with me:

  “In some cities birds can’t hear each other anymore above the noise. After a while they forget the complexity and beauty of each other’s song.”

  “What on earth’s that got to do with me and Todd?” I asked.

  “Some have given up birdsong altogether, and faultlessly imitate car alarms.”

  My voice was annoyed and impatient. “Tess.”

  “Can Todd hear your song?”

  At the time, I dismissed your student intensity of emotion as something I’d grown out of years before. But in that police room I remembered our conversation again, because thoughts about birdsong, about Todd, about anything were an escape from the implications of
what was happening. DS Finborough sensed my distress. “I think it’s better to err on the side of caution. Especially now I know she’s pregnant.”

  He issued instructions to junior policemen. There was a discussion about the camera crew and of who would play you. I didn’t want a stranger imitating you, so I offered to do it. As we left the room, DS Finborough turned to me. “Mr. Codi is a great deal older than your sister?”

  Fifteen years older, and your tutor. He should have been a father figure, not a lover. Yes, I know I’ve told you that before, many times, building to a critical mass that forced you to tell me in so many words to butt out, only you would have used the English equivalent and told me to stop putting my nose in. DS Finborough was still waiting for my reply.

  “You asked me if I am close to her, not if I understand her.”

  Now, I think I do, but not then.

  DS Finborough told me more about the reconstruction.

  “A lady working at the post office on Exhibition Road remembers Tess buying a card and also airmail stamps, sometime before two p.m. She didn’t say Tess was pregnant, but I suppose there was a counter between them so she wouldn’t have seen.”

  I saw Mum coming along the corridor toward us as DS Finborough continued.

  “Tess posted the card from the same post office sometime before two-fifteen.”

  Mum’s voice snapped with exhausted patience. “The card was my birthday card. She hasn’t been to see me for months. Hardly ever phones. But sends me a card as if that makes it all right.”

  A couple of weeks before, I’d reminded you that it was her birthday coming up, hadn’t I?

  Before we go on, as I want to be honest in the telling of this story, I have to admit that you were right about Todd. He didn’t hear my song. Because I’d never once sung to him. Or to anyone else for that matter. Perhaps I am like one of those birds that can only imitate car alarms.

  Mr. Wright gets up to close a venetian blind against the bright spring sunshine.

  “And later that day you did the reconstruction?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  Mr. Wright has the reconstruction on tape and doesn’t need additional details of my extraordinary game of dress up, but I know you do. You’d love to know what kind of you I made. I didn’t do badly, actually. I’ll tell you about it without hindsight’s glaring clarity.

  A middle-aged woman police officer, PC Vernon, took me to a room to change. She was pink cheeked and healthy, as if she’d just come in from milking cows rather than policing London streets. I felt conscious of my pallor, the red-eye flight taking its toll.

  “Do you think it’ll do any good?” I asked.

  She smiled at me and gave me a quick hug, which I was taken aback by but liked. “Yes, I do. Reconstructions are too much of a palaver if there isn’t a good chance of jogging someone’s memory. And now we know that Tess is pregnant, it’s more likely that someone will have noticed her. Right, then, let’s get your clothes sorted out, shall we?”

  I found out later that although forty, PC Vernon had been a police officer for only a few months. Her policing style reflected the warm and capable mother in her.

  “We’ve fetched some clothes from her flat,” she continued. “Do you know what kind of thing she might have been wearing?”

  “A dress. She’d got to the point where nothing else would fit over the bump and she couldn’t afford maternity clothes. Luckily most of her clothes are baggy and shapeless.”

  “Comfortable, Bee.”

  PC Vernon unzipped a suitcase. She had neatly folded each tatty old garment and wrapped them in tissue paper. I was touched by the care that she had shown. I still am.

  I chose the least scruffy dress: your purple voluminous vintage one with the embroidery on the hem.

  “She got this in a sale five years ago,” I said.

  “A good make lasts, doesn’t it?”

  We could have been in a Selfridges’ changing room.

  “Yes, it does.”

  “Always worth it if you can.”

  I was grateful to PC Vernon for her ability to make small talk, a verbal bridge between two people in the most unlikely of situations.

  “Let’s go with that one then,” she said, and tactfully turned away while I took off my uncomfortable tailored suit.

  “So do you look like Tess?” she asked.

  “No, not anymore.”

  “You used to?”

  Again I appreciated her small talk, but suspected it would get bigger.

  “Superficially I did.”

  “Oh?”

  “My mother always tried to dress us the same.”

  Despite the difference in age, we’d be in kilts and Fair Isle sweaters, or striped cotton dresses depending on the season. Nothing fussy or frilly, remember? Nothing nylon.

  “And we had our hair the same too.”

  “A decent trim,” Mum would command and our hair would fall to the floor.

  “People said Tess would look just like me when she was older. But they were being kind.”

  I was startled that I had said that out loud. It wasn’t a path I had gone down with anyone else before, but it’s well worn with my footsteps. I’ve always known that you would grow up to be far more beautiful than me. I’ve never told you that, have I?

  “That must have been hard on her,” said PC Vernon. I hesitated before correcting her, and by then she had moved on. “Is her hair the same color as yours?”

  “No.”

  “Not fair the way some people get to stay blonde.”

  “Actually, this isn’t natural.”

  “You’d never guess.”

  This time there was a point bedded down in the small talk that spiked through. “Probably best if you wear a wig then.”

  I flinched, but tried to hide it. “Yes.”

  As she got out a box of wigs, I put your dress over my head and felt the much-washed soft cotton slip down over my body. Then suddenly you were hugging me. A fraction of a moment later I realized it was just the smell of you, a smell I hadn’t noticed before: a mix of your shampoo and your soap and something else that has no label. I must have only smelled you like that when we hugged. I drew in my breath, unprepared for the emotional vertigo of your being close and not there.

  “Are you okay?”

  “It smells of her.”

  PC Vernon’s maternal face showed her compassion. “Smell is a really powerful sense. Doctors use it to try to wake up people in a coma. Apparently, newly cut grass is a favorite evocative smell.”

  She wanted me to know that I wasn’t overreacting. She was sympathetic and intuitive and I was grateful that she was there with me.

  The wig box had every type of hair, and I presumed wigs were used not only for reconstructions of missing people but also for the victims of violent crimes. They made me think of a collection of scalps, and I felt nauseated as I rummaged through them. PC Vernon noticed.

  “Here, let me try. What’s Tess’s hair like?”

  “Long. She hardly ever cuts it, so it’s ragged round the edges. And it’s very shiny.”

  “And the color?”

  PMS 167, I thought immediately, but other people don’t know the colors of the world by their Pantone Matching System numbers, so instead I replied, “Caramel.” And actually, your hair has always made me think of caramel. The inside of a Rolo, to be precise, liquidly gleaming. PC Vernon found a wig that was reasonably similar and nylon shiny. I forced myself to put it on over my own neatly cut hair, my fingers recoiling. I thought we were finished. But PC Vernon was a perfectionist. “Does she wear makeup?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Would you mind taking yours off?”

  Did I hesitate? “Of course not,” I replied. But I did mind. Even when I woke up, I would have pink lip and cheek stain applied from the previous night. At the small institutional sink, with dirty coffee cups balanced on the rim, I washed off my makeup. I turned and caught sight of you. I was stabbed by love. Moments lat
er I saw that it was just my own reflection caught in a full-length mirror. I went closer and saw myself, scruffy and exhausted. I needed makeup, properly cut clothes and a decent haircut. You don’t need any of those to look beautiful.

  “I’m afraid we’ll have to improvise the bump,” said PC Vernon. As she handed me a cushion I voiced a question that had been itching at the back of my mind, “Do you know why Tess’s landlord didn’t tell you she was pregnant when he reported her missing?”

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t. You could ask Detective Sergeant Finborough.”

  I stuffed a second cushion under the dress and tried to plump them into a convincing-looking bump. For a moment the whole thing turned into an absurd farce and I laughed. PC Vernon laughed too, spontaneously, and I saw that a smile was her natural expression. It must be a facial effort for her to be genuinely serious and sympathetic so much of the time.

  Mum came in. “I’ve got you some food, darling,” she said. “You need to eat properly.” I turned to see her holding a bag full of food, and her mothering touched me. But as she looked at me, her face turned rigid. Poor Mum. The farce I found blackly comic had turned cruel.

  “But you have to tell her. It’ll just get worse the longer you leave it.”

  “I saw a tea towel the other day with that printed on it. Underneath was ‘Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.’”

  “Tess…” (Or did I just give an eloquent older-sister sigh?)

  You laughed, warmly teasing me. “Do you still have knickers with days of the week embroidered on them?”

  “You’re changing the subject. And I was given those when I was nine.”

  “Did you really wear them on the right day?”

  “She’s going to be so hurt if you don’t tell her.”

  I looked back at Mum, acknowledging and answering her question without a word being spoken. Yes, you were pregnant; yes, you hadn’t told her; and yes, now the whole world, at least the TV-watching world, would know about it.

  “Who’s the father?”

  I didn’t reply—one shock at a time.

  “That’s why she hasn’t been to see me for months, isn’t it? Too ashamed.”

  It was a statement rather than a question. I tried to appease her, but she brushed my words aside, using her hands in a rare physical gesture. “I see he’s going to marry her at least.”