Sister: A Novel Part 25

A man who infringed the subtle boundaries of personal s.p.a.ce, as if it was his right to invade.

'Before we move on, I just want to get one thing clear,' says Mr Wright. 'How did you think the fraud was linked to Tess's death?'

'I thought she must have found out.'

DI Haines's jowly face loomed across the table at me, his physique matching his overbearing voice. Next to him was DS Finborough.

'Which do you think more likely, Miss Hemming,' DI Haines boomed, 'an established company with an international reputation, complying with a myriad of regulations, tests out a gene therapy on perfectly well babies or a student is mistaken about the father of her baby?'

'Tess wouldn't have lied about the father.'

'When I last spoke to you on the phone I asked you, courteously, to stop indiscriminately apportioning blame.'

'Yes, but-'

'On your phone message just a week ago, you put Mr Codi and Simon Greenly at the top of your list of suspects.'

I cursed the message I'd left on DS Finborough's phone. It showed me as emotional and unreliable, damaging any credibility I might have had.

'But now you've changed your mind?' he asked.

'Yes.'

'But we haven't, Miss Hemming. There is nothing new that brings into question the Coroner's verdict of suicide. I'll state the bald facts for you. You may not want to hear them but that does not mean they don't exist.'

Not just a double but a triple negative. His oratory wasn't as impressive as he believed it to be.

'An unmarried young woman,' he continued, enjoying his emphasised words, 'who is an art student in London, has an illegitimate baby with cystic fibrosis. The baby is successfully treated by a new genetic therapy in utero,' (I thought how proud he was of this little bit of knowledge, this smidgen of Latin thrown into his monologue) 'but unfortunately it dies when it is born of an unrelated condition.' (Yes, I know - 'it'.) 'One of her friends, of whom she apparently had many, leaves her a tactless message on her answerphone which drives her further down her path towards suicide.' I tried to say something but he continued, barely pausing for the breath needed to patronise me. 'Suffering hallucinations from the illegal drugs she was taking she takes a kitchen knife with her into the park.'

I noticed a look between DS Finborough and DI Haines.

'Maybe she bought the knife specially for the purpose,' snapped Haines. 'Maybe she wanted it to be expensive and special. Or just sharp. I am not a psychiatrist, I cannot read a suicidal young woman's mind.'

DS Finborough seemed to flinch away from DI Haines, his distaste for him clear.

'She went into a deserted toilets building,' continued Haines. 'Either so she wouldn't be found or because she wanted to be out of the snow, again I cannot accurately tell you her reason. Either outside in the park or in the toilets building, she took an overdose of sedatives.' (I was surprised he managed to hold back 'a belt and braces suicide' because that was the kind of thing he was itching to say.) 'She then cuts the arteries in her arms with her kitchen knife. Afterwards it transpires that the father of her illegitimate baby isn't her tutor as she'd thought but someone else, who must carry the cystic fibrosis gene.'

I did try to argue with him, but I might as well have been playing the triangle on the hard shoulder of the M4. I know, one of your sayings, but remembering it comforted me a little as he shouted me down. And as he patronised me, not listening to me, I saw how scruffy my clothes were and that my hair needed cutting and I was no longer polite, or respectful of his authority, and it was no wonder he didn't pay attention to me. I didn't used to pay attention to people like me.

As DS Finborough escorted me out of the police station, I turned to him. 'He didn't listen to a word I said.'

DS Finborough was clearly embarra.s.sed, 'It's the accusation you made about Emilio Codi. And Simon Greenly.'

'So it's because I've cried wolf too often?'

He smiled. 'And with such conviction. It doesn't help that Emilio Codi made a formal complaint against you and Simon Greenly is the son of a cabinet minister.'

'But surely he must be able to see that something's wrong?'

'Once he has arrived at a conclusion, backed up by facts and logic, it's hard to dissuade him. Unless there are heavier counterbalancing facts.'

I thought DS Finborough was too decent and professional to publicly criticise his boss.

'And you?'

He paused a moment, as if unsure whether to tell me. 'We've had the forensic results back on the Sabatier knife. It was brand new. And it had never been used before.'

'She couldn't have afforded Sabatier.'

'I agree, it doesn't fit when she didn't even own a kettle or a toaster.'

So the last time he'd been in the flat, when he'd come to talk about the post-mortem results, he'd noticed. It hadn't just been, as I'd thought at the time, a compa.s.sionate visit. I was grateful to him for being first a policeman. I worked up the courage to ask my question.

'So do you now believe that she was murdered?'

There was a moment while my question was static in the silence between us.

'I think there's a query.'

'Are you going to answer your "query"?'

'I'll try. That's the best I can offer.'

Mr Wright is concentrating intently on what I am telling him, his body bent towards mine, his eyes responding; not a pa.s.sive but an active partic.i.p.ant in the tale and I realise how seldom people are fully listened to.

'When I left the police station I went straight to Kasia's flat. I needed her and Mitch to be tested for the CF gene. If either of them tested negative, then the police would have to act.'

Kasia's dingy sitting room had become damper since my last visit. A one-bar electric fire didn't stand a chance against the coldly seeping concrete walls. The thin fabric of the Indian throw at the closed window flapped in the draught around the window frame. Three weeks had pa.s.sed since I'd last seen her, and she was nearly eight months pregnant now. She looked bewildered.

'But I don't understand, Beatrice.'

Again I wished someone wouldn't use the intimacy of my name this time because, coward that I was, I didn't want to be close to her as I distressed her. I put on my corporate distancing voice as I spelt it out, 'Both parents have to carry the cystic fibrosis gene for the baby to be born with cystic fibrosis.'

'Yes. They tell me in clinic.'

'Xavier's father doesn't carry the gene. So Xavier couldn't have had cystic fibrosis.'

'Xavier not ill?'

'No.'

Mitch came in from the bathroom. He must have been eavesdropping. 'For f.u.c.k's sake, she just lied about who she had s.e.x with.'

Without the plaster dust his face was handsome, but the contrast between his finely sculpted face and muscular tattooed body was oddly menacing.

'She had no embarra.s.sment about having s.e.x,' I said. 'If she'd been having s.e.x with someone else as well she would have told me. There was no reason for her to lie. I really think you should get tested, Mitch.'

Using his name was a mistake. Instead of sounding friendly I sounded like a primary school teacher. Kasia was still looking bemused. 'I have cystic fibrosis gene. I test plus for that.'

'Yes. But maybe Mitch is negative, maybe he isn't a carrier and-'

'Yeah right,' he interrupted, sarcasm biting. 'The doctors are wrong and you know best?' He looked at me like he hated me, perhaps he did. 'Your sister lied about who the father was,' he said. 'And who'd blame her? With you looking down your nose at her. Patronising b.i.t.c.h.'

I hoped he was being verbally aggressive for Kasia's sake; that he was trying to prove that your baby did have cystic fibrosis, like their baby had had cystic fibrosis, that the treatment wasn't a con. And the only way for that to be true was for you to be a liar and me an uptight, patronising b.i.t.c.h. But he was enjoying his verbal attack too much for it to be for a kinder reason.

'Truth is, she probably f.u.c.ked so many men she had no idea who the father was.'

Kasia's voice was quiet but clear. 'No. Tess not like that.'

I remembered how she'd said you were her friend, the simplicity of her loyalty. The glance he gave her was spiked with anger but she continued, 'Beatrice is right.' As she spoke, she stood up and I knew as I watched that reflexive movement that he had hit her in the past, that she'd instinctively stood up to avoid him.

The silence in the room met the damp coldness in the walls and as it continued I wanted the heat of a row, for words to be fighting, rather than the fear that it would be fought later with physical brutality. Kasia motioned me to the door and I went with her.

We walked down the stained sharp-edged concrete steps. Neither of us said anything. As she turned to go back I took hold of her arm. 'Come and stay with me.'

Her hand moved to her b.u.mp, she didn't meet my eye. 'I can't.'

'Please, Kasia.'

I startled myself. The most I'd ever given of myself before was my signature on a cheque to a worthy cause, but now I was asking her to stay and really hoping that she would. It was the hope that startled me. She turned away from me and walked back up the stained concrete steps towards the cold damp flat and whatever waited for her there.

As I walked home, I wondered if she'd told you why she once loved Mitch. I was sure that she must have done, that she wasn't the kind of person who had s.e.x without love. I thought how William's wedding ring was a sign that he was taken, spoken for, but that the small gold crucifix Kasia wore around her neck wasn't about owners.h.i.+p or promises; it was a 'no trespa.s.sing' sign unless you have love and kindness for the wearer. And I was furious that Mitch was ignoring it. Because he did ignore it, violently.

At just after midnight, the doorbell rang and I hurried to answer it, hoping that it would be Kasia. When I saw her standing on the doorstep I didn't see her tarty clothes and cheap hair colour only the bruises on her face and the welts on her arms.

That first night we shared the bed. She snored like a steam train and I remembered you telling me that pregnancy could make you snore. I liked the sound. I had spent night after night awake, listening to my grief, my sobbing the only sound in the room, my heart screaming as it rhythmically thumped into the mattress, and her snoring was an everyday sound, innocent and annoyingly soothing. That night I slept deeply for the first time since you'd died.

Mr Wright has had to go off to a meeting, so I am coming home early today. It's pouring with rain when I leave the tube station and I get drenched as I walk home. I see Kasia looking for me out of the window. Seconds later she greets me, smiling, at the front door. 'Beata!' (It's Polish for Beatrice.) As I think I told you, she has the bed to herself now and I have a futon in the sitting room and it feels absurdly cramped; my feet touching the wardrobe and my head the door.

As I change into dry clothes, I think that today has been a good day. I've managed to keep my morning resolutions of not being afraid or intimidated. And when I felt faint and s.h.i.+very and sick, I tried to ignore it and not let my body dominate my mind, and I think I succeeded pretty well. I didn't get as far as finding something beautiful in the everyday, but maybe that's just a step too far.

Now changed, I give Kasia her English lesson, which I do every day. I have a textbook for teaching Polish people English. The book groups words together and she learns a group before our 'lesson'.

'Pikn,' I say, following the p.r.o.nunciation instructions.

'Beautiful, lovely, gorgeous,' she replies.

'Brilliant.'

'Thank you, Beata,' she says, mock solemn. I try to hide how much I like her using her Polish name for me. 'Ukochanie?' I continue.

'Love, adore, fond of, pa.s.sionate.'

'Well done. Nienawi?'

She's silent. I am on the other side of the page now and the antonyms. I gave her the Polish word for hate. She shrugs. I try another, the Polish for unhappy, but she looks at me blankly.

At the beginning I got frustrated at the holes in her vocabulary, thinking it was childish that she refused to learn the negative words, a linguistic head-in-the-sand policy. But on the positive ones she's forging ahead, even learning colloquialisms.

'How are you, Kasia?'

'Tip-top, Beata.' (She likes 50s musicals.) I've asked her to stay on with me after her baby's born. Both Kasia and Amias are delighted. He's offered us the flat rent free, till we 'get on our feet again' and somehow I'll just have to look after her and her baby. Because I will get through this. It will all be OK.

After our lesson, I glance out of the window and only now notice the pots down the steps to your flat. They are all in flower, a host (a smallish host but a host nonetheless) of golden daffodils.

I ring on Amias's bell. He looks genuinely delighted to see me. I kiss him on the cheek. 'The daffodils you planted, they're flowering.'

Eight weeks before I'd watched him planting the bulbs in snow-covered earth and even with my lack of gardening knowledge knew they couldn't survive. Amias smiles at me, enjoying my confusion. 'You don't need to sound quite so surprised.'

Like you, I see Amias regularly, sometimes for supper, sometimes just for a whisky. I used to think you went out of charity.

'Did you pop some in ready potted when I wasn't looking?' I ask.

He roars with laughter, he's got a very loud laugh for an old person doesn't he? Robust and strong.

'I poured some hot water in first, mixed it with the earth, then planted the bulbs. Things always grow better if you warm their soil up.'

I find the image comforting.

19.

Wednesday.

When I arrive at the CPS offices this morning, I discover other people also have diminutive hosts of daffodils growing because Mr Wright's secretary is taking a bunch out of damp paper. Like Proust's tea-soaked pet.i.tes madeleines, the soggy kitchen roll around their stems pulls me sensuously backwards to a sunny cla.s.sroom and my bunch of home-picked daffodils on Mrs Potter's desk. For a moment I hold a thread to the past back to when Leo was alive and Dad was with us and boarding school hadn't cast its shadow over Mum's goodnight kiss. But the thread frays to nothing as I hold it and is replaced by a hardier, harsher memory five years later - when you brought a bunch of daffodils to Mrs Potter, and I was upset because I didn't have a teacher I wanted to bring flowers to any more, and because I was off to boarding school where I suspected even if they had flowers they wouldn't let me pick them. And because everything had changed.

Mr Wright comes in, his eyes red and streaming.

'Don't worry. Hay fever. Not infectious.'

As we go into his office I feel sorry for his secretary who even now must be binning the happy beauty of her daffodils out of loving consideration for her boss.

He goes to the window. 'Would you mind if I close it?'

'No, that's fine.'

He's clearly in a great deal of discomfort, and I'm glad I can focus on someone else's maladies rather than my own, it makes me feel a little less self-centred.

'We'd got to Kasia coming to stay with you?' he asks.

'Yes.'

He smiles at me. 'And I see that she's still staying with you.'