Sister

Miss Crush Secretary comes in with mineral water and I am glad of the interruption. Oddly dehydrated, I gulp down the water and notice first her pearly pink nail varnish and then a wedding ring on her finger. Why was it that I had checked only Mr. Wright’s left hand yesterday? I feel sad for Mrs. Crush Secretary, who, while not in any danger of imminent sexual betrayal, is emotionally cuckolded 9:00 to 5:30 on a daily basis. Mr. Wright smiles at her. “Thanks, Stephanie.” His smile is innocent of any overtone, but its very openness is alluring and can be misinterpreted. I wait for her to leave.

“So I went to see Emilio Codi myself.”

I go back into that precipitous past, my grip a little firmer because of nail varnish and wedding rings.

I left the police station, anger sparking through exhaustion. DS Finborough had said that they didn’t yet know when you had died, but I knew. It was Thursday. You left Simon by the Lido in Hyde Park on that day as he’d said, but you never got out of the park. Nothing else made any sense.

I phoned your art college and a secretary with a German accent tartly told me Emilio was sorting out course work at home. But when I told her I was your sister, she sweetened and gave me his address.

As I drove there I remembered our conversation about where Emilio lives.

“I’ve no idea. We only meet at the college or at my flat.”

“So what’s he trying to hide?”

“It just doesn’t crop up, that’s all.”

“I expect he lives somewhere like Hoxton. Trendily middle class, but with the chic edge of poor people around.”

“You really loathe him, don’t you?”

“With just enough graffiti to keep the urban jungle look. I reckon people like him go out at night with spray paints just so the area stays trendily tagged and doesn’t degenerate into middle-class, middle-income nappy valley.”

“What’s he done to deserve this?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps having sex with my little sister, getting her pregnant and then abnegating all responsibility.”

“You make me sound like I’m completely incompetent at running my own life.”

I let your words hang in the wire between our two phones. I could hear the chuckle in your voice. “You left out him being my tutor and abusing his position of authority.”

You never could take my seriousness seriously. Well, I found out where he lives, and it isn’t Hoxton or Brixton or any of those places where the trendy middle classes arrive once there’s a café with skinny lattes. It’s Richmond, beautiful, sensible Richmond. And his house is not a Richard Rogers type of building but a Queen Anne gem whose large front garden alone must be worth a street or two in Peckham. I walked through his impressively long front garden and knocked on his original period doorknocker.

You can’t believe I went through with it, can you? My actions seem extreme, but new raw grief strips away logic and moderation. Emilio opened the door and I thought the adjectives which apply to him are stock phrases in romantic fiction: he is devilishly handsome; he has animal magnetism; adjectives that have threat embedded in them.

“Did you kill her?” I asked. “You didn’t answer my question last time.”

He tried to close the door on me, but I held it open. I had never used physical force against a man before and I was surprisingly strong. All those meticulously kept meetings with a personal trainer had had a purpose after all.

“She told her landlord she was getting frightening phone calls. Was that you?” I asked.

Then I heard a woman’s voice in the hallway behind him, “Emilio?” His wife joined him at the doorway. I still have our e-mails about her.From: tesshemming@hotmail.co.uk To: Beatrice Hemming’s iPhone