Sister

Or perhaps Professor Rosen has decided to do the right thing in the present and risked his mark on the future. Maybe he chanced his CF trial and academic glory and went to the police. He does want to do something for good, to cure, and his ambitions—fame, glory, even money—are so human against William’s hubristic lust for unadulterated power. And he did come to your funeral and he did try to find out what was happening even if, initially, he did nothing with his findings. So I choose to believe that Professor Rosen is, at his core, a good man as much as he is a vainglorious one. I choose to think the best of him.

So maybe one of these two men have set in motion the wheels that have led to William’s arrest and my rescue. And if I strain hard enough, can I hear a siren on the very edge of the night’s stillness?

I hear the trees’ leafy whispers and timber groans, and know that there are no sirens for me.

But I will allow myself a final daydream and hope. That Kasia isn’t in labor after all. Instead, she returned home as usual for her English lesson, pages of optimistic vocabulary learned and ready to tell me. William doesn’t know that she’s living with me now, that after you died, my conversion to being thoughtful was done absolutely properly. So when I wasn’t there and she couldn’t reach me on my mobile or pager, she knew something was very wrong. My castle in the sky looks selfish, but I have to tell her that her baby needs help to breathe. So I imagine that she went to the police and demanded that they search for me. She stood up for me once before, even though she knew she’d be hit for it, so she’d square up to DI Haines.

My pager goes again and my fantasy splinters into razor-edged shards.

I can hear birds. For a moment I think it must be the dawn chorus and morning already. But it’s still dark, so the birds must have got it wrong. Or more probably I’m imagining them, some drug-induced kind of bird tinnitus. I remember the sequence Amias told me: blackbirds, robins, wrens, tawny owls, chaffinches, warblers, then song thrushes. I remember you telling me about urban birds losing their ability to sing to one another and linking that to me and Todd, and I hope that I put that in my letter to you. Did I tell you I researched more about birdsong? I found out that when a bird sings, it doesn’t matter if it’s dark or there’s thick vegetation because birdsong can penetrate through or around objects and even over great distances, it can always be heard.

I know I can never fly like you, Tess. The first time I tried it, or thought I was, I have ended up here, tied up, lying on a concrete floor. So if that was flying, I crash-landed pretty spectacularly. But, astonishingly, I’m not broken. I’m not destroyed. Terrified witless, shaking, retching with fear, yes. But no longer insecure. Because during my search for how you died, I somehow found myself to be a different person. And if by a miracle I was freed and my fantasy played out, with William arrested and Kasia and her baby on a coach to Poland with me next to them, then that mountain I’ve been clinging to would tilt right over until it was lying flat on the ground and I wouldn’t need footholds and safety ropes because I’d be walking, running, dancing even. Living my life. And it wouldn’t be my grief for you that toppled the mountain, but love.

I think I can hear my name being called, high and light, a girl’s voice. I must be imagining it, an auditory hallucination born of thinking about you.

Did you know that there’s a dawn chorus far out in space? It’s made by high-energy electrons getting caught in the earth’s radiation belts, then falling to earth as radio waves that sound like birds singing. Do you think that is what seventeenth-century poets heard and called the music of the spheres? Can you hear it now where you are?

I can hear my name again, on the periphery of the birdsong, barely audibly legible.

I think the darkness is turning to dark gray.

The birds are still singing, more clearly now.

I hear men’s voices, a group of them, shouting out my name. I think they must be imagined too. But if they aren’t, then I must call back to them. But the gag is still tight around my mouth, and even if it weren’t, my mouth is incapable of making a sound. To start with, I tried to spit out any saliva, fearful the sedative would have dissolved in it, but then my mouth became salt dry and in my imagination Mr. Wright’s secretary brought me endless cups of water.

“Beata!”

Her voice is clear among the men’s as she screams out my name. Kasia. Unmistakable and real. She isn’t having her baby. William isn’t with her. I want to laugh out loud with relief. Unable to laugh through the gag, I feel tears, warm on my cold cheeks.