Sister: A Novel Part 32

His fingers were still gripping the knife, but the knuckles no longer showed white, so he wasn't gripping as hard. In his other hand he held a torch. He had come equipped for this: knife and torch and bicycle chain, a grotesque parody of a Boy Scout trip. I wondered what else he'd thought to bring.

Mr Wright holds my hand and I'm again overwhelmingly grateful, not brus.h.i.+ng away kindness any more.

'He told me that in humans his IQ gene codes for two totally different things. It affects not only memory capacity but also lung function. It meant that the babies couldn't breathe when they were born.'

I'm so sorry, Tess.

'He told me that if the babies are intubated immediately after they're born, if they're helped to breathe for a while, they'd be fine. They'd live.'

He had made me lie on the floor, on my left side, the damp cold of the concrete was seeping into my body. I tried to move but my limbs were too heavy. He must have drugged me when he gave me the tea. I could only use words to stay alive.

'But you didn't help them to breathe, did you? Xavier. Hattie's baby.'

'It wasn't my fault. It's a rare lung disorder and someone would ask questions. I just need to be left alone. Then there would be no problems. It's other people, crowding around me, not giving me s.p.a.ce.'

'So you lied to them about what really killed their babies?'

'I couldn't risk people asking questions.'

'And me? Surely you're not going to stage my suicide, like you staged Tess's? Frame me for my own murder like you did my sister? Because if it happens twice the police are bound to be suspicious.'

'Staged? You make it sound so thought out. I didn't plan it, I told you that. You can see that because of my mistakes, can't you? My research and my trial I planned in meticulous detail, but not this. I was forced into doing this. I even paid them, for G.o.d's sake, not stopping to think that it might look suspicious. And I never thought they might talk to each other.'

'So why did you pay them?'

'It was just kindness, that's all. I just wanted to make sure they had a decent diet, so the developing foetuses had the optimum conditions. It was meant to be spent on food, not b.l.o.o.d.y clothes.'

I didn't dare ask him if there were others or how many. I didn't want to die with that knowledge. But there were some things I needed to know.

'What made you choose Tess? Because she was single? Poor?'

'And Catholic. Catholic women are far less likely to terminate when they know there's a problem with their baby.'

'Hattie is Catholic?'

'Millions of Filipinos are Catholic. Hattie Sim put it on her form, no father's name mind you, but her religion.'

'Did her baby have cystic fibrosis?'

'Yes. Whenever I could I treated the cystic fibrosis and tested my gene out too. But there weren't enough babies who fitted all the criteria.'

'Like Xavier?'

He was silent.

'Did Tess find out about your trial? Is that why you killed her?'

He hesitated a moment. His tone was close to self-pitying; I think that he genuinely hoped I would understand.

'There was another consequence that I hadn't foreseen. My gene got into the mother's ovaries. It means there is the same genetic change in every egg and if the women have more babies they will have the same problem with their lungs.

Logistically I couldn't expect to be there for the next baby, or the next. People move house, move away. Eventually someone would discover what was going on. That's why Hattie had to have a hysterectomy. But Tess's labour was too quick. She arrived at the hospital with the baby's head already engaged. There wasn't time to do a caesarean, let alone an emergency hysterectomy.'

You hadn't found out anything at all.

He killed you because your body was living evidence against him.

Around us people are starting to leave the park, the gra.s.s turning from green to grey, the air cooling into evening. My bones ache with cold and I focus on the warmth of Mr Wright's hand, holding mine.

'I asked him what made him do it; suggested it was money. He was furious, told me his motives weren't avaricious. Impure. He said he wouldn't be able to sell a gene, which hadn't been legally trialled. Fame wasn't motivating him either. He couldn't publish his results.'

'So did he tell you the reason?'

'Yes.'

I'll tell you what he said out here, in this grey-green park in the cool fresh air. Neither of us need to return to that building to hear him.

'He said that science has the power that religion once claimed, but it's real and provable, not superst.i.tion and cant. He said that miracles don't happen in fifteenth-century churches but in research labs and hospitals. He said the dead are brought back to life in ITU units; the lame walk again after hip replacements; the blind see again because of laser surgery. He told me that in the new millennium there are new deities with real, provable powers and that the deities are scientists who are improving what it is to be human. He said that his gene would one day safely get into the gene pool and that would mean who we are as humans would be irrevocably changed for the better.'

His overweening hubris was huge and naked and shocking.

He was s.h.i.+ning his torch in my face and I couldn't see him. I was still trying to move but my body had been too drugged by the spiked tea to respond to my brain's screamed commands for action.

'You followed her into the park that day?'

I dreaded hearing it, but I needed to know how you died.

'When the boy left, she sat on a bench and started writing a letter, in the snow. Extraordinary thing to do, don't you think?'

He looked at me, waiting for my response, as if this were a regular conversation and I realised I would be the first and last person to whom he'd tell his story. Our story.

'I waited a while, to make sure the boy wasn't coming back. Ten minutes maybe. She was relieved when she saw me, I told you that, didn't I? She smiled. We had a good rapport. I'd brought a Thermos of hot chocolate and gave her a cup.'

The grey park is darkening now into soft pansy purples and blacks.

'He told me that the hot chocolate was full of dissolved sedative. After he'd drugged her, he pulled her into the toilets building.'

I feel overwhelmed by exhaustion and my words are sluggish. I imagine them inching along, slow, ugly words.

'Then he cut her.'

I'll tell you what he said; you have the right to know, although it will be painful for you. No, painful is the wrong word entirely. Even the memory of his voice makes me so afraid that I am five years old alone in the dark with a murderer bas.h.i.+ng down the door and no one to help me.

'It's easy for a doctor to cut. Not at first. The first time a doctor cuts into skin, it feels a violation. The skin, the largest human organ, covering the entire body unbroken and you deliberately harm it. But after the first time it no longer feels an abuse, because you know that it's to enable a surgical procedure. Cutting is no longer violent or violating but the necessary step to healing.'

Mr Wright tightens his warm fingers around mine.

My legs are turning numb now.

I could hear my heart beating fast and hard against the concrete; the only part of my body that was alert as I looked at him. And then, astonis.h.i.+ngly, I saw him put the knife into the inside pocket of his jacket.

Optimism heated my numbed body.

He helped me sit up.

He told me that he wasn't going to cut me because an overdose is less suspicious than a knife.

I can't use his actual words. I just can't.

He said he had already given me enough sedative in the tea to make it impossible for me to struggle or escape. And that now he was going to give me a fatal dose. He a.s.sured me that it would be peaceful and painless and it was the false kindness of his words that made them so unbearable, because it was himself he was comforting.

He said he'd brought his own sedatives but didn't need to use them.

He took a bottle out of his pocket, the sleeping pills Todd had brought with him from the States, prescribed for me by my doctor. He must have found them in the bathroom cupboard. Like the bicycle chain and the torch and the knife, the bottle of sleeping pills showed his detailed planning and I understood why premeditated murder is so much worse than spontaneous killing; he had been evil for far longer than the time it would actually take to kill me.

The dusk has brought the chill of darkness. They're shutting the gates now, the last of the teenagers are packing up to go. The children will already be at home for baths and bedtime but Mr Wright and I remain, not finished yet. For some reason they haven't made us leave. Maybe they didn't notice us here. And I'm grateful because I need to keep going. I need to reach the end.

My legs have lost all feeling and I'm worried Mr Wright will have to carry me, fireman style, out of the park. Or maybe he will get an ambulance to drive all the way in.

But I will finish this first.

I pleaded with him. Did you do that too? I think that you did. I think that like me you were desperate to stay alive. But of course it didn't work, it just irritated him. As he twisted the cap off the bottle of sleeping pills, I summoned the residue of my physical energy and tried logical argument.

'If I'm found here, in the same place as Tess, it's bound to make the police suspicious. And it'll make them question Tess's death too. It's madness to do it here - isn't it?'

For a moment the irritation left his face and he stopped twisting the cap and I'd won a reprieve in this perverted balloon debate.

Then he smiled, as if rea.s.suring me as much as himself that I needn't have such worries. 'I did think about that. But the police know how you've been since Tess died; they already see you as a little unhinged, don't they? And even if they don't get it themselves, any psychiatrist will tell them that you chose this place to kill yourself. You wanted to kill yourself where your little sister had died.'

He took the cap off the bottle of sleeping pills.

'After all, if we're being logical, who in their right mind would choose to end the life of two people in the same building?'

'End the life.' He was turning brutal killing into something pa.s.sive; as if it was a.s.sisted euthanasia not murder.

As he poured the pills into his cupped hand I wondered who would question my suicide or vouch for my sane state of my mind. Dr Nichols, at whom I had furiously sung the lullaby? Even if he thought I wasn't suicidal at our last meeting he would probably doubt that diagnosis, as he did with you, and blame himself for not seeing the signs. And DI Haines? He already thought I was overly emotional and irrational, and I doubted DS Finborough, even if he wanted to try, could convince him otherwise. Todd thought I was 'unable to accept the facts', and many others agreed, even if they were too kind to say so to my face. They'd think that, in emotional turmoil after your death, irrational and depressed, I could easily have become suicidal. The sensible, conventional person I'd been a few months ago would never have been found dead from an overdose in this place. They would have asked questions for her but not for the person I had become.

And Mum? I'd told her I was about to find out what happened to you and I knew she would tell the police that. But I knew too that they wouldn't believe her, or rather what I'd said to her. And I thought that after a while Mum wouldn't believe it either, because she'd choose to bear the guilt of my suicide rather than think that I had felt a moment of this fear. And I found it unbearable to imagine her anguish when she'd have to mourn me too, with no one to comfort her.

He put the empty bottle in my coat pocket. Then he told me that the post-mortem must show I swallowed the pills whole because that would make it look voluntary. I am trying to shut out his voice but it breaks in, refusing to be silenced.

'Who can make another person swallow pills against their will?'

He held a knife to my throat; in the darkness I could feel the cold edge of metal against the warmth of my skin.

'This isn't what I am. It's like a nightmare and I've turned into a stranger.'

I think he expected my pity.

He put his hand with the pills in it up to my mouth. The bottle had been full which meant at least twelve pills. The dose was one in twenty-four hours. Any more was dangerous. I remembered reading that on the label. I knew that twelve would be more than enough to kill me. I remembered Todd telling me I should take one, but refusing because I had to stay alert; because I wasn't allowed a few hours of drugged oblivion, however much I craved it; because I knew taking a sedative would be a cowardly reprieve which I'd want to repeat over and over again. This is what I was thinking as he pushed the pills into my mouth, my tongue uselessly trying to stop him.

Then he tipped water from a mineral water bottle into my mouth and told me to swallow.

It's dark now, countryside black. I think of all the nocturnal creatures, which are out here now the humans have gone home. I think of that storybook we had about the teddy bears coming out at night to play in the park. 'There goes the bear at number three, sliding down the slide.'

'Beatrice . . . ?'

Mr Wright is helping me along, prompting and coaxing so I can finish this statement. His hand still holds mine but I can hardly see his face any more.

'Somehow I managed to wedge the pills behind my teeth and inside my cheeks, and the water went down my throat with just one, maybe two, I think. But I knew it wouldn't be long before they all dissolved in my own saliva. I wanted to spit them out, but his torch was still full on my face.'

'And then?'

'He took a letter out of the inside pocket of his jacket. It was from Tess to me. It must have been the one she was writing on the park bench just before she died.'

I pause, my tears falling onto the gra.s.s, or maybe onto Mr Wright, in the dark I can't tell.

'He shone his torch on her letter so he could read it out to me. It meant that the torch was no longer s.h.i.+ning on me. I had a brief opportunity and I hung my head down towards my knees, and spat out the sleeping pills onto my lap. They fell into the folds of my coat and made no sound.'

You know what you wrote to me, but it was William's voice not yours that I heard; William's voice telling me of your fear, your desperation, your grief. It was your murderer's voice telling me that you walked the streets and through parks, too afraid to be in the flat, that you yelled up at the dark winter sky at a G.o.d you no longer believed in, yelling at him to give your baby back. And that you thought this was also a sign of your madness. It was your killer who told me that you couldn't understand why I hadn't come over, hadn't phoned, hadn't answered your calls. It was the man who killed you who told me that you were sure there was a good reason; and his voice as he spoke your written words violated their faith in me. But at the end of your letter your soft voice whispered to me beneath his: 'I need you, right now, right this moment, please Bee.'

Then, as now, your words p.r.i.c.ked my face with tears.

'He put the letter back in his pocket, presumably to destroy it later. I'm not sure why he kept it or why he read it to me.'

But I think it's because, like me with Mr Wright earlier, his guilt was desperate for some company.

'I need you. Right now, right this moment, please Bee.'

He wanted to make me as culpable in some way as he was.

'And then?' asks Mr Wright, needing to prompt me now to make sure I remember all of it. But we're nearly finished.

'He switched off my phone and put it near the door where I couldn't reach it. Then he took a scarf of mine out of his pocket, he must have taken it from the flat. He tied it around my mouth, gagging me.'

As he gagged me, panicking thoughts filled my head, one bas.h.i.+ng into the other, a six-lane highway of thoughts, all happening simultaneously, backing up, b.u.mper to b.u.mper, unable to get out and I thought that some would be released simply by screaming, others by crying, others if I was held. Most of my thoughts had become primal and physical. I hadn't known before that it's our bodies that think most powerfully, and that was why it was so cruel to be gagged. It wasn't because I couldn't shout for help - who'd hear me in an empty building in the middle of a deserted park? It was because I couldn't scream or sob or moan.

'Then his bleep went off. He phoned the hospital on his mobile and said that he'd be on his way. I suppose it would have looked too suspicious not to go.'

I hear myself catch my breath in the darkness.

'Beatrice?'

'I worried that Kasia was in labour and that was why he was leaving.'

Mr Wright's hand feels solid in the darkness. I am rea.s.sured by the definition of his knuckles in my soft palm.

'He checked the gag and the ties around my wrists and legs. He told me that he'd come back and remove them later, so that nothing would look suspicious when I was found. He still didn't know I'd spat out so many of the pills. But I knew if I was still alive when he came back he'd use the knife, as he did on Tess.'