Sister

That you had been raped had been an unarticulated anxiety, corrosively hideous at the edge of my imagining. I felt relief as a physical force.

DS Finborough continued, “We know for definite now that she died on Thursday, the twenty-third of January.”

It confirmed what I already knew, that you had never made it out of the park after seeing Simon.

“The postmortem shows that Tess died because of bleeding from the lacerations to her arms,” continued DS Finborough.

“There are no signs of any struggle. There’s no reason to believe that anyone else is involved.”

It took a moment for the meaning of his words to make sense, as if I were translating a foreign language into my own.

“The coroner has returned a verdict of suicide,” he said.

“No. Tess wouldn’t kill herself.”

DS Finborough’s face was kind. “Under normal circumstances I’m sure you’d be right, but these weren’t normal circumstances, were they? Tess was suffering not only grief but also postpartum—”

I interrupted him, angry that he dared tell me about you when he didn’t know you. “Have you ever watched someone die from cystic fibrosis?” I asked. He shook his head, and was going to say something, but I headed him off. “We watched our brother struggling to breathe and we couldn’t help him. He tried so hard to live, but he drowned in his own fluid and there was nothing we could do. When you’ve watched someone you love fight for life, that hard, you value it too highly to ever throw it away.”

“As I said, in normal circumstances, I’m sure—”

“In any circumstances.”

My emotional assault had not dented his certainty. I would have to convince him with logic: muscular, masculine argument. “Surely there must be a connection to the threatening phone calls she was getting?”

“Her psychiatrist told us that they were most likely all in her head.”

I was astonished. “What?”

“He’s told us that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.”

“The phone calls were delusional and my sister was mad? Is that it now?”

“Beatrice—”

“You told me before that she was suffering from postpartum depression. Why has that suddenly changed to psychosis?”

Against my hectoring anger, his tone was so measured. “From the evidence, that seems now to be the most probable.”

“But Amias said the phone calls were real, when he reported her missing, didn’t he?”

“But he was never actually there when she got one of the phone calls.”

I thought about telling him that your phone was unplugged when I arrived. But that didn’t prove anything. The calls could still have been delusional.

“Tess’s psychiatrist has told us that symptoms of postpartum psychosis include delusions and paranoia,” DS Finborough continued. “Sadly, many of the women suffering also have thoughts of harming themselves, and tragically some actually do.”

“But Tess didn’t.”

“A knife was found next to her body, Beatrice.”

“You think she carried a knife now?”

“It was a kitchen one. And it had her fingerprints on it.”

“What kind of kitchen knife?”

I’m not sure why I asked, maybe some dimly remembered seminar on the questioner taking authority. There was a moment of hesitation before he replied, “A Sabatier five-inch boning knife.”

But I only heard the word Sabatier, maybe because it distracted me from the ugly violence of the rest of the description. Or maybe the word Sabatier struck me because it was so absurd to think you would own one.

“Tess couldn’t possibly have afforded a Sabatier knife.”

Was this conversation degenerating into farce? Bathos?

“Maybe she got it from a friend,” suggested DS Finborough. “Or it was a gift from someone.”

“She would have told me.”

Sympathy tempered his look of disbelief. I wanted to make him understand that we shared the details of our lives, because they were the threads that braided us so closely together. And you would have been certain to tell me about a Sabatier knife, because it would have had the rare value of being a detail in your life that tied directly into mine—our lives sharing top-end kitchenware.

“We told each other the little things. That’s what made us so close, I think, all the small things, and she’d have known I’d want to hear about a Sabatier knife.”

No, I know, it didn’t sound convincing.

DS Finborough’s voice was sympathetic but firm, and I briefly wondered if, like parents, the police believed in setting parameters. “I understand how hard this must be for you to accept. And I understand why you need to blame someone for her death, but—”

I interrupted with my certainty about you. “I’ve known her since she was born. I know her better than anyone else possibly could. And she would never have killed herself.”

He looked at me with compassion; he didn’t like doing this. “You didn’t know when her baby died, did you?”