Sister

He had brought a case of clothes for me with everything he thought I’d need, including an appropriate outfit for your funeral and a prescription of sleeping pills from my U.S. doctor. That first morning, and from then on, he made sure I ate properly. The description of him, of us, feels a little disconnected, I know, but that’s how it felt.

He was my safety rope. But he wasn’t—yet—breaking my fall.

I have left out Todd’s arrival but have told Mr. Wright about my confrontation on Emilio’s doorstep and my time in the garden with his wife.

“I knew Emilio had a motive for killing Tess—losing his job and possibly his marriage. Now I also knew that he was capable of living with a lie. And of twisting the truth into the shape he wanted. Even in front of me, her sister, he had claimed Xavier was no more than the fantasy of an obsessed student.”

“And Mrs. Codi, did you believe her alibi for him?”

“At the time, I did. I liked her. But later, I thought she might have chosen to lie for him to protect her little girl and unborn baby. I thought that her children came first with her, and for their sake she wouldn’t want him in prison; and that her little girl was the reason she hadn’t left Emilio when she’d discovered he’d been unfaithful.”

Mr. Wright looks down at a file in front of him. “You didn’t tell the police about this encounter?”

The file must be the police log of my calls.

“No. Two days later, DS Finborough told me that Emilio Codi had made a formal complaint about me to his boss, Detective Inspector Haines.”

“What did you think his reason was?” asks Mr. Wright.

“I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t think about it at the time because in that same phone call DS Finborough said that they’d got the postmortem results back. I was surprised they’d done it so quickly but he told me that they always try to, so that the family can have a funeral.”

I’m sorry that your body had to be cut again. The coroner requested it and we had no say in it. But I don’t think you mind. You’ve always been a pragmatist about death, having no sentiment for the body left behind. When Leo died, Mum and I hugged his dead body to us, cheating ourselves with the illusion that we were still hugging Leo. At just six years old you walked away. I pitied you for your courage.

I, on the other hand, have always been reverential. When we found Thumbelina dead in her hutch, you prodded her with slender five-year-old fingers to discover what death felt like, even as you wept, while I wrapped her in a silk scarf, believing with all the solemnity of a ten-year-old that a dead body is precious. I can hear you laughing at me for talking about a rabbit—the point is I’ve always thought a body is more than a vessel for the soul.

But the night you were found, I had a powerful sense of you leaving your body and vortexlike sucking up all that you are with you. You were trailing clouds of glory in the opposite direction. Maybe the image was prompted by your Chagall print in the kitchen, those ethereal people rising heavenward, but whatever caused it, I knew that your body no longer held any part of you.

Mr. Wright is looking at me and I wonder how long I have been silent.

“What was your reaction to the postmortem?” he asks.

“Strangely, I didn’t mind about what happened to her body,” I say, deciding to keep Chagall and trailing clouds of glory in reverse to myself. But I will confide in him a little. “A child’s body is so much a part of who they are, maybe because we can hold a little boy in our arms. We can hold the whole of him. But when we grow too large to be held, our body no longer defines us.”

“When I asked you what your reaction was to the postmortem, I meant whether you believed its findings.”

I am hotly embarrassed but thankful that I at least kept Chagall to myself. His face softens as he looks at me. “I’m glad I wasn’t clear.”

I still feel heatedly ridiculous but smile back at him, a tentative first step to laughing at myself. And I think I knew, really, that he wanted me to talk about its findings. But just as I’d chosen to ask DS Finborough why the postmortem had been done so quickly, with Mr. Wright I was again putting off its results. Now I must address it.

“Later that day DS Finborough came round to the flat with the postmortem report, to give me the results.”

He’d said he’d rather do it in person and I thought it kind of him.

From your sitting-room window I watched DS Finborough coming down the steep basement steps, and I wondered if he was walking slowly because they were slippery with ice or because he was reluctant to have this meeting. Behind him was PC Vernon, her sensible shoes giving her a good grip, her gloved hand holding the railing just in case—a sensible woman who had children at home to look after that evening.

DS Finborough came into your sitting room but didn’t sit down or take off his coat. I’d tried to bleed your radiators but your flat was still uncomfortably cold.

“I’m sure you’ll be relieved to know that Tess’s body showed no evidence of any sexual assault.”