Sister Page 7

  You believed him when he said he’d be back. I was five years older but no wiser, and for years I had a fantasy of a happy-ever-after ending. The first night I spent at university my fantasy ended, because I thought a happy-ever-after was pointless. Because with my father I didn’t want to hope for a happy ending but to have had a happy beginning. I wanted to have been looked after by Daddy in childhood, not finding resolution with my father as an adult. But I’m not so sure of that now.

  Outside your window I see the reporters have all gone. Pudding bends her purring body around my ankles, blackmailing me into giving her more food. When I’ve fed her, I fill a watering can and go out the kitchen door.

  “This is your backyard?” I asked on my first visit to your flat, astonished that you hadn’t meant “backyard” in the American sense of a garden, but in the literal one of a few feet of rubble-strewn earth and a couple of wheelie bins. You smiled. “It’ll be beautiful, Bee, just wait.”

  You must have worked like a Trojan. All the stones cleared, the earth dug through and planted. You’ve always been passionate about gardening, haven’t you? I remember when you were tiny you’d trail Mum around the garden with your child-sized, brightly painted trowel and your special gardening apron. But I never liked it. It wasn’t the long wait between seed and resulting plant that I minded about (you did, hotly impatient), it was that when a plant finally flowered, it was over too quickly. Plants were too ephemeral and transient. I preferred collecting china ornaments, solid and dependable inanimate objects that wouldn’t change or die the following day.

  But since staying in your flat, I have really tried, I promise, to look after this little patch of garden outside the back door. (Fortunately, Amias is in charge of your flowerpot garden of Babylon down the steps to your flat at the front.) I’ve watered the plants out here every day, even adding flower food. No, I’m not absolutely sure why—maybe because I think it matters to you, maybe because I want to nurture your garden because I didn’t nurture you? Well, whatever the motivation, I’m afraid I have failed abysmally. All the plants out here are dead. Their stalks are brown and the few remaining leaves desiccated and crumbling. Nothing is growing out of the bare patches of earth. I empty the last drops from the watering can. Why do I carry on this pointless task of watering dead plants and bare earth?

  “It’ll be beautiful, Bee, just wait.”

  I’ll refill the watering can and wait a while longer.

  5

  Wednesday

  I arrive at the Crown Prosecution Service offices and notice Miss Crush Secretary staring at me. Actually, scrutinizing seems more accurate. I sense that she is assessing me as a rival. Mr. Wright hurries in, briefcase in one hand, newspaper in the other. He smiles at me openly and warmly; he hasn’t yet made the switch from home life to office. Now I know that Miss Crush Secretary is definitely assessing me as a rival because when Mr. Wright smiles at me, her look becomes openly hostile. Mr. Wright is oblivious. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Come through.” Mentally he’s still knotting his tie. I follow him into his office and he closes the door. I feel his secretary’s eyes on the other side, still watching him.

  “Were you all right last night?” he asks. “I know this must be harrowing.”

  Before you died, the adjectives about my life were second league: stressful, upsetting, distressing; at the worst, deeply sad. Now I have the big-gun words—harrowing, traumatic, devastating—as part of my thesaurus of self.

  “We’d got to your finding someone in Tess’s bedroom?”

  “Yes.”

  His mental tie is knotted now, and we resume business. He reads me back my own words, “‘What the fuck are you doing?’”

  The man turned. Despite the freezing flat, his forehead had a film of sweat. There was a moment before he spoke. His Italian accent was, intentionally or not, flirtatious. “My name is Emilio Codi. I’m sorry if I startled you.” But I’d known immediately who he was. Did I sense threat because of the circumstances—because I suspected him of killing you—or would I have found him threatening even if that wasn’t the case? Because unlike you, I find Latinate sexuality—that brash masculinity of hard jawline and swarthy physique—menacing rather than attractive.

  “Do you know that she’s dead?” I asked, and the words sounded ridiculous—an over-the-top stagy piece of dialogue that I didn’t know how to deliver. Then I remembered your colorless face.

  “Yes. I saw it on the local news. A terrible, terrible tragedy.” His default voice mode was charm, however inappropriate, and I thought that to charm can also mean to entrap. “I just came to get my things. I know it seems like indecent haste—”

  I interrupted him, “Do you know who I am?”

  “A friend, I presume.”

  “Her sister.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m intruding.”

  He couldn’t hide the adrenaline in his voice. He started to walk toward the door, but I blocked his path.

  “Did you kill her?”

  I know, pretty blunt, but then this wasn’t a carefully crafted Agatha Christie moment.

  “You’re obviously very upset—” he replied, but I cut him off.

  “You tried to make her have an abortion. Did you want her out of the way too?”

  He put down what he was carrying and I saw that they were canvases. “You’re not being rational, and that’s understandable, but—”

  “Get out! Get the fuck out!”

  I yelled my ugly grief at him, yelling over and over, still yelling when he’d gone. Amias came hurrying in through the open front door, bleary from sleep. “I heard shouting.” In the silence he looked at my face. He knew without my saying anything. His body caved and then he turned away, not wanting me to witness his grief.

  The phone rang and I let the answering machine get it. “Hi, it’s Tess.”

  For a moment the rules of reality had been broken, you were alive. I grabbed the receiver.

  “Darling? Are you there?” asked Todd. What I had heard earlier was, of course, just your answering machine greeting. “Beatrice? Have you picked up?”

  “She was found in a public lavatory. She’d been there for five days. All alone.”

  There was a pause, the information not squaring with his predicted scenario. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  Todd was my safety rope. That was why I’d chosen him. Whatever happened, I’d have him to hold on to.

  I looked at the pile of canvases Emilio had left behind. They were all nudes of you. You’ve never had my shyness that way. He must have painted them. In each of the paintings your face was turned away.

  “The next morning you went to DS Finborough with your concerns?” Mr. Wright asks.

  “Yes. He said that Emilio collecting his paintings was extremely insensitive, but not necessarily anything more than that. He told me the coroner would be asking for a postmortem and we should wait for the results before making any accusations or reaching any conclusions.”

  His language was so measured, so controlled. It infuriated me. Maybe in my volatile state I was jealous of his balance.

  “I thought that DS Finborough would at least ask Emilio what he was doing the day she was killed. He told me that until the results of the postmortem were available, they wouldn’t know when Tess had died.”

  Miss Crush Secretary comes in with mineral water and I am glad of the interruption. Oddly dehydrated, I gulp down the water and notice first her pearly pink nail varnish and then a wedding ring on her finger. Why was it that I had checked only Mr. Wright’s left hand yesterday? I feel sad for Mrs. Crush Secretary, who, while not in any danger of imminent sexual betrayal, is emotionally cuckolded 9:00 to 5:30 on a daily basis. Mr. Wright smiles at her. “Thanks, Stephanie.” His smile is innocent of any overtone, but its very openness is alluring and can be misinterpreted. I wait for her to leave.

  “So I went to see Emilio Codi myself.”

  I go back into that precipitous past, my grip a little firmer because of nail varnis
h and wedding rings.

  I left the police station, anger sparking through exhaustion. DS Finborough had said that they didn’t yet know when you had died, but I knew. It was Thursday. You left Simon by the Lido in Hyde Park on that day as he’d said, but you never got out of the park. Nothing else made any sense.

  I phoned your art college and a secretary with a German accent tartly told me Emilio was sorting out course work at home. But when I told her I was your sister, she sweetened and gave me his address.

  As I drove there I remembered our conversation about where Emilio lives.

  “I’ve no idea. We only meet at the college or at my flat.”

  “So what’s he trying to hide?”

  “It just doesn’t crop up, that’s all.”

  “I expect he lives somewhere like Hoxton. Trendily middle class, but with the chic edge of poor people around.”

  “You really loathe him, don’t you?”

  “With just enough graffiti to keep the urban jungle look. I reckon people like him go out at night with spray paints just so the area stays trendily tagged and doesn’t degenerate into middle-class, middle-income nappy valley.”

  “What’s he done to deserve this?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps having sex with my little sister, getting her pregnant and then abnegating all responsibility.”

  “You make me sound like I’m completely incompetent at running my own life.”

  I let your words hang in the wire between our two phones. I could hear the chuckle in your voice. “You left out him being my tutor and abusing his position of authority.”

  You never could take my seriousness seriously. Well, I found out where he lives, and it isn’t Hoxton or Brixton or any of those places where the trendy middle classes arrive once there’s a café with skinny lattes. It’s Richmond, beautiful, sensible Richmond. And his house is not a Richard Rogers type of building but a Queen Anne gem whose large front garden alone must be worth a street or two in Peckham. I walked through his impressively long front garden and knocked on his original period doorknocker.

  You can’t believe I went through with it, can you? My actions seem extreme, but new raw grief strips away logic and moderation. Emilio opened the door and I thought the adjectives which apply to him are stock phrases in romantic fiction: he is devilishly handsome; he has animal magnetism; adjectives that have threat embedded in them.

  “Did you kill her?” I asked. “You didn’t answer my question last time.”

  He tried to close the door on me, but I held it open. I had never used physical force against a man before and I was surprisingly strong. All those meticulously kept meetings with a personal trainer had had a purpose after all.

  “She told her landlord she was getting frightening phone calls. Was that you?” I asked.

  Then I heard a woman’s voice in the hallway behind him, “Emilio?” His wife joined him at the doorway. I still have our e-mails about her.

  From: tesshemming@hotmail.co.uk

  To: Beatrice Hemming’s iPhone

  Hi Bee, I asked him about her, before any of this started, and he told me that they married in haste and are at leisure together but not repenting. They enjoy each other’s company but the physical relationship between them stopped years ago. Neither of them is jealous of the other. Happy now?

  T XXXX

  From: Beatrice Hemming’s iPhone

  To: tesshemming@hotmail.co.uk

  Dearest T,

  How convenient for him. I imagine she’s also fortysomething, and because nature’s far crueler to women than men, what other choice is she left with? Not happy.lol

  Bee

  P.S. Why are you using Coreyshand as a typeface for e-mails? It’s not easy to read.

  From: tesshemming@hotmail.co.uk

  To: Beatrice Hemming’s iPhone

  Dearest Bee,

  You walk down your straight-and-narrow moral tightrope, not even teetering, while I fall off at the first small wobble. But I do believe him. There’s no reason why anyone should get hurt.

  T XXXX

  PS I thought it was a friendly kind of typeface.

  PPS Did you know lol means laughing out loud?

  From: Beatrice Hemming’s iPhone

  To: tesshemming@hotmail.co.uk

  Dear Tess,

  You’re surely not that naïve? Wise up.

  Lol

  Bee

  (From me it means lots of love)

  From: tesshemming@hotmail.co.uk

  To: Beatrice Hemming’s iPhone

  “Wise up”? You’ll be telling me next to seek closure. You need to leave the states and come home. Have a nice day, hon,

  T. X

  I had imagined a fortysomething woman whose looks had unfairly faded while her husband’s had not. I had imagined parity at twenty-five but a marriage of unequals fifteen years later. But the woman in the hall was no more than thirty. She has unnervingly pale-blue eyes.

  “Emilio? What’s going on?”

  Her voice was cut-glass aristocratic—the house must be hers. I didn’t look at her, directing my question at Emilio. “Where were you last Thursday, the twenty-third of January, the day my sister was murdered?”

  Emilio turned to his wife. “One of my students, Tess Hemming. She was on the local news last night, remember?”

  Where was I when the news was on? Still in the morgue with you? Putting Mum to bed? Emilio put his arm around his wife, his voice measured. “This is Tess’s older sister. She’s going through a terribly traumatic time and is… lashing out.” He was explaining me away. Explaining you away.

  “For God’s sake, Tess was your lover. And you know me because I interrupted you getting your paintings out of her flat last night.”

  His wife stared at him, her face suddenly looked fragile. He tightened his arm around her.

  “Tess had a crush on me. That’s all. It was just a fantasy. The fantasy got out of control. I wanted to make sure there was nothing in her flat that she’d fabricated about me.”

  I knew what you wanted me to say. “Was the baby a fantasy too?”

  His arm was still around his wife, who was still and mute. “There is no baby.”

  I’m sorry. And I’m sorry for this next bit too.

  “Mummy?”

  A little girl was coming down the stairs. His wife took the child’s hand. “Bedtime, sweetie.”

  I asked you once if he had children, and you sounded astonished I’d even asked the question. “Of course he doesn’t, Bee.” It was an “Of course he doesn’t because if he did I wouldn’t be having sex with him, what do you take me for?” Your moral tightrope might be a lot wider than mine, but that’s your boundary and you wouldn’t have crossed it. Not after Dad. So that was what he’d been trying to hide at home.

  Emilio slammed the door shut in my face—this time my strength was no match for his. I heard him pulling the chain across. “Leave me and my family alone.” I was left on the doorstep shouting through the door. Somehow I’d become the obsessed madwoman on the doorstep, while he was part of a persecuted little family besieged in their beautiful period home. I know, the previous day I had used lines from a TV cop show, now I was going Hollywood. But real life, at least my real life, hadn’t given me any kind of model for what was happening.

  I waited in their front garden. It grew dark and icily cold. In this stranger’s snowy garden, with nothing familiar around me, I had Christmas carols playing silently in my head. You always liked the jolly ones: “Ding Dong! Merrily on High,” “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” singing about parties and presents and having a good time. I’ve always gone for the quiet, reflective ones: “Silent Night,” “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” This time it wasIn the bleak midwinter,Frosty wind made moan,Earth stood hard as iron,Water like a stone.

  I’d never realized that it was also a song for the bereaved.

  Emilio’s wife came out of the house, interrupting my silent solo. A security light switche
d on illuminating her path toward me. I imagined she was coming to appease the madwoman in the garden before I started boiling up the bunnies.

  “We weren’t introduced earlier. I’m Cynthia.”

  Maybe sangfroid is in the genes of the aristocracy. I found myself responding to this strange formal politeness, holding out my hand to take hers. “Beatrice Hemming.”

  She squeezed my hand, rather than shook it. Her politeness was something warmer. “I’m so sorry about your sister. I have a younger sister too.” Her sympathy seemed genuine. “Last night,” she continued, “just after the news, he said he’d left his laptop at the college. It’s an expensive one, important for his work, and he’s a convincing liar. But I’d seen it in his study before dinner. I thought he was going off for sex.” She was talking quickly, as if she needed to get this over and done with. “I’d known about it, you see, just hadn’t confronted him with it. And I’d thought it had stopped. Months ago. But it serves me right. I know that. I did the same to his first wife. I’d never properly realized before what she must have gone through.”

  I didn’t reply, but found myself warming to her in this most unlikely of situations. The security light from the house flipped off, and we were in almost darkness together. It felt strangely intimate.

  “What happened to their baby?” she asked. I’d never thought of him as anything other than your baby before. “He died,” I said, and in the darkness I thought her eyes had tears in them. I wondered if they were for your baby or for her failed marriage.

  “How old was he?” she asked.

  “He died while he was being born, so I don’t think he gets an age.”

  It adds to the stillness in stillborn. I saw her hand move unconsciously to her tummy. I hadn’t noticed until then that it was a little distended, maybe five months pregnant. She brusquely wiped her tears away. “This probably isn’t what you want to hear, but Emilio was working from home last Thursday; he usually does that one day a week. I was with him all day and then we went to a drinks party. Emilio’s weak, with no moral fiber to speak of, but he wouldn’t hurt anyone. Physically, at least.”