Sister: A Novel Part 16

'Of course.'

'You did English, chemistry and biology didn't you, Hemms?'

That old nickname, dusty with age; it took a moment to connect it to me. 'Yes.'

'Any biochemistry since then?'

'No, I did an English degree, actually.'

'I'll translate into layman's terms then. Putting it very simply, Tess had three drugs in her body when she died.'

She didn't see my reaction, looking down at her notebook. But I was stunned.

'What were the drugs?'

'One was Cabergoline, which stops breast milk being produced.'

Simon had told me about that drug and again the fact of it gave me a glimpse into something so painful that I couldn't look any further; I interrupted my own thoughts. 'And the others?'

'One was a sedative. She'd taken a fairly large amount. But because it was a few days before Tess was found and a sample of her blood was taken-' She broke off, upset, and gathered herself before continuing. 'What I mean is, because of the time delay it's hard to be accurate about the actual amount of sedative. James said all he could offer was educated guesswork.'

'And . . . ?'

'She had taken far more than would have been indicated as a normal dose. He thought that it wasn't high enough to kill her, but it would have made her very sleepy.'

So that was why there had been no sign of a struggle, he'd doped you first. Did you realise it too late? Christina read out more of her perfect italic writing, 'The third drug is phenylcyclohexylpiperidine, PCP for short. It's a powerful hallucinogenic, developed in the fifties as an anaesthetic but stopped when patients experienced psychotic reactions.'

I was startled into parrotlike repet.i.tion, 'Hallucinogenic?'

Christina thought I didn't understand, her voice patient. 'It means the drug causes hallucinations, in lay terms "trips". It's like LSD but more dangerous. Again James says it's hard to be certain how much she'd taken and how long before she died, because of the delay in finding her. It's also complicated because the body stores this drug in muscle and fatty tissues at full psychoactive potential so it can continue to have an effect, even after the person has stopped taking it.'

For a moment I just heard scientific babble until it settled into something I could understand. 'This drug meant she would have been having hallucinations in the days before she died?' I asked.

'Yes.'

So Dr Nichols had been right after all; but your hallucinations weren't because of puerperal psychosis, but a hallucinogenic drug.

'He planned it all. He sent her out of her mind first.'

'Beatrice . . . ?'

'He made her mad, made everyone think she was mad and then he drugged her before he murdered her.'

Christina's brown eyes looked enormous through the lenses of her pebble gla.s.ses, their sympathetic expression magnified. 'When I think about how much I love my own baby, well, I can't imagine what I'd do in Tess's place.'

'Suicide wasn't an option to her, even if she'd wanted to take it. She simply wouldn't have been able to. Not after Leo. And she never touched drugs.'

There was a silence between us and the inappropriate noise of the bar around us broke into the booth.

'You knew her best, Hemms.'

'Yes.'

She smiled at me; a gesture of capitulation to my certainty, which carried a blood-tied weight.

'I really appreciate all your help, Christina.'

She was the first person to have helped me in a practical way. Without her I wouldn't have known about the sedative and the hallucinogenic. But I was grateful to her too for respecting my view enough to withhold her own. Six years of being in the same cla.s.s as emerging adolescents and I doubt we even touched, but outside the door of the restaurant we hugged tightly goodbye.

'Did she tell you any more about PCP?' Mr Wright asks.

'No, but it was relatively simple to research it on the net. I found out that it causes behavioural toxicity, making the victim paranoid and giving them frightening visions.'

Did you realise you were being mentally tortured? If not, what did you think was happening to you?

'It's especially destructive for people already suffering psychological trauma.'

He used your grief against you, knowing that it would make the effect of the drug even worse.

'There were sites accusing the US military of using PCP at Abu Ghraib and in rendition cases. It was clear that the trips it caused were terrifying.'

What was worse for you: the trips? Or thinking that you were going mad?

'And you told the police?' asks Mr Wright.

'Yes, I left a message for DS Finborough. It was late by then, way past office hours. He phoned back the next morning to say that he'd meet me.'

'I can't believe you're making the poor man come here again, darling.' Todd was making tea and laying out biscuits as if they could compensate DS Finborough for the inconvenience I'd put him to.

'He needs to know about the drugs.'

'The police will already know about them, darling.'

'They can't do.'

Todd added bourbons to the custard creams on the plate, arranging them in two neat yellow and brown rows, his annoyance expressed through the symmetry of biscuits.

'Yes. They can. And they will have reached exactly the same conclusion as me.'

He turned away, taking the boiling pan of water off the hob. Last night he had been silent when I told him about the drugs, asking instead why I hadn't told him the real purpose of meeting Christina.

'I can't believe your sister didn't even own a kettle.'

The doorbell rang.

Todd greeted DS Finborough then left to collect Mum. The plan was for Mum and I to pack up your things together. I think he hoped that packing away your belongings would force me to find closure. Yes, I know, an American word, but I don't know the English equivalent; 'facing facts' Mum would call it I suppose.

DS Finborough sat on your sofa, politely eating a bourbon, as I recounted what Christina had told me.

'We already know about the sedative and PCP.'

I was startled. Todd had been right, after all. 'Why didn't you tell me?'

'I thought you and your mother had enough to deal with. I didn't want to add what I thought would be unnecessary distress. And the drugs simply confirmed our belief that Tess took her own life.'

'You think she deliberately took them?'

'There was no evidence of any force. And taking a sedative is frequently used by people intent on committing suicide.'

'But it wasn't enough to kill her, was it?'

'No, but maybe Tess didn't know that. After all she hadn't tried anything like this in the past, had she?'

'No. She hadn't. And she didn't this time either. She must have been tricked into taking it.' I tried to shake the self-possessed compa.s.sion on his face. 'Don't you see? He drugged her with the sedative so that he could kill her without a struggle. That's why her body had no marks.'

But I hadn't dislodged his expression or opinion.

'Or she simply took an overdose that wasn't quite big enough.'

I was nine years old in a comprehension cla.s.s being guided firmly by a caring teacher to draw the correct answers from the text in front of us.

'What about the PCP?' I asked, thinking there was no answer that DS Finborough could possibly have for that drug being in your body.

'I spoke to an inspector in Narcotics,' replied DS Finborough. 'He told me that dealers have been disguising it and selling it in place of LSD for years. There's a whole list of aliases for it: hog, ozone, wack, angel dust. Tess's dealer probably-'

I interrupted. 'You think Tess had a "dealer"?'

'I'm sorry. I meant the person who gave or sold the PCP to her. He or she would not have told Tess what she was actually getting. I also spoke to Tess's psychiatrist, Dr Nichols and-'

I interrupted. 'Tess wouldn't have touched drugs, whatever they were. She loathed them. Even at school, when her friends were smoking and trying joints, she refused to have anything to do with it. She saw her health as a gift that she'd been given, when Leo hadn't, and she had no right to destroy it.'

DS Finborough paused a moment, as if genuinely considering my point of view.

'But she was hardly a schoolgirl any more, with a schoolgirl's anxieties, was she? I'm not saying she wanted to use drugs, or ever had before, but I do think it would be totally understandable if she wanted to escape from her grief.'

I remembered him saying that after having Xavier you were in h.e.l.l, a place where no one could join you. Even me. And I thought of my craving for the sleeping pills, for a few hours respite from grief.

But I hadn't taken one.

'Did you know that you can smoke PCP?' I asked. 'Or snort it or inject it or you can just simply swallow it? Someone could have slipped it in her drink without her even realising it.'

'Beatrice-'

'Dr Nichols was wrong about why she was having hallucinations. They weren't from puerperal psychosis at all.'

'No. But as I was trying to tell you, I did speak to Dr Nichols about the PCP. He said that although the cause of the hallucinations has clearly changed, her state of mind would be the same. And sadly the outcome. Apparently it's not at all unusual for people on PCP to self-mutilate or to kill themselves. The inspector in Narcotics said much the same.' I tried to interrupt but he kept going to his logical finale. 'All the factual arrows are still pointing the same way.'

'And the Coroner believed this? That someone with no history whatsoever of taking drugs, had voluntarily taken a powerful hallucinogenic? He didn't even question that?'

'No. In fact he told me that she . . .' DS Finborough broke off, thinking better of it.

'Told you what? What exactly did he say about my sister?'

DS Finborough was silent.

'Don't you think I have a right to know?'

'Yes, you do. He said that Tess was a student, an art student, living in London and that he'd have been more surprised if she'd been . . .'

He trailed off and I filled the word in for him, '"Clean"?'

'Something to that effect, yes.'

So you were unclean, with all the dirty baggage the word still carries with it into the twenty-first century. I got the phone bill out of its envelope.

'You were wrong about Tess not telling me when her baby died. She tried to - over and over and over again, but she couldn't. Even if you see these phone calls as 'cries for help', they were cries to me. Because we were close. I did know her. And she wouldn't have taken drugs. And she wouldn't have killed herself.'

He was silent.

'She turned to me and I let her down. But she did turn to me.'

'Yes, she did.'

I thought I saw a flicker of emotion on his face that wasn't simply compa.s.sion.

12.

An hour and a half after DS Finborough had left, Todd dropped Mum off at the flat. The heating seemed to have given up completely and she didn't take her coat off.

Her breath was visible in the freezing sitting room. 'Right then, let's make a start on her things. I've brought bubble wrap and packing materials.' Maybe she hoped her brisk sense of purpose could fool us into thinking we could sort out the chaos your death had left in its wake. Though to be fair, death does leave a daunting array of practical tasks; all those possessions that you were forced to leave behind had to be sorted and packed and redistributed in the living world. It made me think of an empty airport and one luggage carousel turning, with your clothes and paintings and books and contact lenses and Granny's clock, round and round, with only me and Mum to claim them.

Mum started cutting lengths of bubble wrap, her voice accusatory. 'Todd said you'd asked DS Finborough to see you again?'

'Yes.' I hesitated before going on. 'There were some drugs found in her body.'

'Todd told me that already. We all knew she wasn't herself, Beatrice. And heaven knows, she had enough she wanted to escape from.'

Not giving me the opportunity to argue with her, she went into the sitting room, to 'make some headway before lunch'.

I got out the nudes Emilio had painted of you and hurriedly wrapped them. Partly because I didn't want Mum to see them, but also because I didn't want to look at them. Yes I am a prude, but that wasn't the reason. I just couldn't bear to see the living colour of your painted body when your face in the morgue was so palely vivid. As I wrapped them, I thought that Emilio had the most obvious motive for murdering you. Because of you he could have lost his career and his wife. Yes, she already knew about your affair, but he didn't know that and might have predicted a different response. But your pregnancy would have given him away so I couldn't understand why - if he killed you to protect his marriage and career - he would have waited until after your baby was born.

I'd finished covering the nudes and begun wrapping one of your own paintings in bubble wrap - not looking at the picture and its singing colours, but remembering your four-year-old glee as you squeezed a bubble of bubble wrap between tiny thumb and finger 'POP!'