Sister

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.”