Sister

I couldn’t answer him, winded by his punch to a part of me already bruised and fragile. He’d told me once before, indirectly, that we weren’t close, but then it came with the upside that you had run off somewhere without telling me. Not being close had meant you were still alive. But this time there was no huge payoff.

“She bought airmail stamps, just before she died, didn’t she? From the post office on Exhibition Road. So she must have written to me.”

“Has a letter from her arrived?”

I’d asked a neighbor to go in and check the apartment daily. I’d phoned our local post office in New York and demanded they search. But there was nothing, and it would surely have arrived by now.

“Maybe she meant to write to me but was prevented.”

I heard how weak it sounded. DS Finborough was looking at me with sympathy.

“I think Tess was going through hell after her baby died,” he said. “And it isn’t a place anyone could join her. Even you.”

I went through to the kitchen, “stropping off,” as Mum used to call it, but it wasn’t a strop, more of an absolute physical denial of what he was saying. A few minutes later I heard the front door shut. They didn’t know that words could seep through your badly fitting windows.

PC Vernon’s voice was quiet. “Wasn’t that a little …?” She trailed off, or maybe I just couldn’t hear.

Then DS Finborough’s voice, sounding sad, I thought. “The sooner she accepts the truth, the sooner she’ll realize she’s not to blame.”

But I knew the truth, as I know it now: we love each other; we are close; you would never have ended your own life.

A minute or so later, PC Vernon came back down the steps, carrying your knapsack.

“I’m sorry, Beatrice. I meant to give you this.”

I opened the knapsack. Inside was just your wallet with your library card, your travel card and your student ID card—membership badges of a society with libraries and public transport and colleges for studying art, not a society in which a twenty-one-year-old can be murdered in a derelict toilets building and left for five days before being dismissed as a suicide case.

I tore open the lining, but there was no letter to me trapped inside.

PC Vernon sat on the sofa next to me. “There’s this too.” She took a photograph out of a board-backed envelope, sandwiched between more cardboard. I was touched by her care, as I had been by the way she’d packed your clothes for the reconstruction. “It’s a photo of her baby. We found it in her coat pocket.”

I took the Polaroid from her, uncomprehending. “But her baby died.”

PC Vernon nodded—as a mother she had more understanding. “Then maybe a photo was even more important to her.”

To start with, all I looked at in the photo were your arms as you held the baby, your uncut wrists. The photo didn’t show your face, and I didn’t dare imagine it. I still don’t.

I looked at him. His eyes were closed, as if asleep. His eyebrows were just a pencil line of down, barely formed and impossibly perfect, nothing crude or cruel or ugly in the world had ever been seen by his face. He was beautiful, Tess. Faultless.

I have the photo with me now. I carry it all the time.

PC Vernon wiped her tears so that they wouldn’t drop onto the photo. She had no edge around her compassion. I wondered if someone as open would be able to stay as a policewoman. I was trying to think of something other than your baby, other than you as you held him.

As soon as I’ve told Mr. Wright about the Polaroid, I abruptly stand up and say I need to go to the loo. I get to the ladies’ room, tears running as soon as the door closes behind me. There’s a woman at the basins, maybe a secretary, or lawyer. Whoever she is, she’s discreet enough not to comment on my tears, but gives a little half smile as she leaves, a gesture of some kind of solidarity. There’s more for me to tell you, but not Mr. Wright, so as I sit in here and have a weep for Xavier, I’ll tell you the next part.

An hour or so after PC Vernon had gone, Mum and Todd arrived at the flat. He’d driven all the way to Little Hadston to pick her up in my rented car, showing himself to be, as I knew he would, a chivalrous son-in-law. I told Mum and Todd what DS Finborough had said, and Mum’s face seemed to crumple into relief. “But I think the police are wrong, Mum,” I said and saw her flinch. I saw her willing me not to carry on, but I did. “I don’t think she committed suicide.”

Mum pulled her coat more tightly around her. “You’d rather she’d been murdered?”

“I need to know what really happened. Don’t you—”

She interrupted me. “We all know what happened. She wasn’t in her right mind. The inspector’s told us that.” She’d promoted DS Finborough to inspector, reinforcing her side of the argument. I caught the note of desperation in her voice. “She probably didn’t even know what she was doing.”

“Your mother’s right, darling,” Todd chimed in. “The police know what they’re talking about.”