The Good Sister

by Gillian McAllister

  Carefully, he picked Layla up and began wrapping the blanket around her. Nice and tight. Safe. There: She wouldn’t cry now. He held her to him. She was warm, and moving, her little fists coming out to clutch at him, but still he held on. He held her tight, so tight to him, his hand supporting her neck, his thumb right by her ear. As tight as can be, that’s what Mum once said about swaddling. He held her tight, so tight and warm to his chest, and held and held and held until she stopped moving, and stilled, peacefully, in his safe arms.

  Eventually, standing in the cold air coming in through the window, she cooled, too, and he placed her back in the Moses basket, completely, peacefully asleep.

  65

  Becky

  Martha is leaving the courtroom and I should go to her—I know I should—but my body is turned, against my will, to my child, emerging from the stairs, his face blotchy and wet. Marc is right behind me.

  Martha crosses in front of me and time seems to stand still, for just a moment. She stops, expecting something from me, but I don’t give it to her.

  Instead, I cross the foyer, continuing up the stairs to Xander.

  I look behind me, just once. She’s standing, in the center of a forming crowd, microphones pointed at her. Her eyes are wide and wet. She has supported me here, every day of my trial for the killing of her daughter, hoping that I am innocent, looking at me encouragingly, sometimes, across the courtroom, but I can’t do it. I have to go to him.

  I choose him: That is motherhood. She would do the same.

  “Xander,” I say to him.

  We walk up the stairs. We will have only a few minutes, I am sure, before the authorities will want to speak to him. Marc and I go into a meeting room with him and close the door.

  I sit down. I’ve got to play it carefully. It is the most important conversation of my life.

  “Is it true?” Marc says gently. He reaches across the table to touch Xander’s hand.

  I take the other. It unfurls on the desk, on its back, like a creature, and I hold it. It’s warm and clammy.

  Xander nods. He looks at Marc, and then at me, and then down at his lap. He withdraws his hand from mine and wipes a tear from his cheek. My baby. Those little red cheeks. He used to smear Bourbon biscuits all over them when he was first feeding himself. The chocolate would get everywhere; I would find it in the folds of his ears at bath time, and laughingly wash it out.

  “It’s okay,” I say to him.

  “I was trying to help—to do the, the swaddling thing like you did. I opened the window, in case she was too hot, and I wrapped her up tight . . . and I was too . . . I was too . . . I was too afraid to tell Dad.”

  Marc closes his eyes, just briefly. Just once. His shouts at Xander. His door slamming. His masculine assertions, in the face of his infertility. They have all led us here. To our son making a terrible error, and not being able to tell the only parent he was regularly alone with. To keeping a terrible, terrible secret, out of fear, even though he knew I might go to prison for it.

  Oh, Xander, oh, my baby Xander.

  “I know. It’s okay. We know.” I close my eyes.

  All those experts’ testimonies about the time of death were based on the temperature if the window had been closed the entire time, but it hadn’t been. It had been open all night. And then I had closed it. How could I have forgotten something so crucial? I could have saved us all of this pain, this public unsheathing of the secret at our family’s core.

  “But I thought she was asleep, she was so still, and then I realized in the morning what I must have . . . that it must have been . . . that it was me.”

  He looks at me. His face is creased up, his chin trembling, his eyes wet. I scoot my chair around to him and, wordlessly, he climbs—all five feet of him—into my lap, leans his head against my shoulder, and sobs.

  66

  Judge Christopher Matthews, QC

  Not guilty,” Christopher says to Rumpole as he lets himself in.

  Rumpole tilts his head to the side.

  “Her kid did it,” he adds.

  Rumpole turns around and pads away.

  Christopher sits down alone on the sofa. What would he say to Sadie if she were here now? She always listened intently to debriefs about his cases.

  “There had been an error with the forensics,” he would say. “A window threw the time of death completely out. They thought the baby died at eight or nine, but she actually died at one thirty in the morning. Nobody even thought about the window. The defendant had forgotten she’d closed it. Even though the paramedic noted it in her evidence. What a comedy of errors.”

  “Kind of crazy,” she would say, with a faint smile. Christopher takes a deep, cleansing breath and thinks of Becky: Well, look at that. She was innocent, after all.

  But now she will have to live with Xander having done it. He shakes his head. He doesn’t know which is worse. He takes Rumpole’s lead off the peg in the hallway and opens the door. Rumpole runs out ahead of him.

  The Blackwaters left the courtroom together after Xander’s confession, their body language still close, despite everything. That was love.

  He has lost his love, but he can find it again. He closes the door behind him.

  It is time to get out into the world.

  epilogue

  Becky

  One year later

  Xander is here with us as we walk along the country lanes, and so is Marc. Together again, the family unit. So different to last year.

  It is exactly a year since the day I woke up and thought I would be receiving a verdict of guilty for something I didn’t do. I had packed a bag containing items allowed in prisons—plain clothes, non-spray deodorant—and left Mum and Dad’s for what I thought was the last time as me, innocent-until-proven-guilty Becky.

  If I let myself—which I don’t often—I can still remember the smell of the courtroom. Recently hoovered carpets and old wood and dusty books. I can still feel the chill of the glass I stood behind like a goldfish, staring at the jury who were about to try me, staring at my childless sister as she wept in the public gallery. I can still conjure up the feeling I got as Xander appeared on the monitor. The rising horror that began in my gut and spread outward, knowledge feeling like acid as it moved through my body. Xander is out of counseling now. He seems okay.

  Happy, even, some days.

  Martha has said only a handful of words to me since the trial ended. No, that’s not fair: more than a handful. But nothing compared to how it used to be. She’s never been angry with me. Just sad: quiet and sad.

  The last time I saw her, we were outside. I was smoking.

  She was sipping a takeout coffee, outside my house. She had this expression on her face, worn permanently since the final day of the trial. Regret, I think.

  “I didn’t know,” I said. “I never even considered it.”

  “But it wasn’t you,” Martha said, looking at me, a drop of milky coffee on her bottom lip. “You knew it wasn’t you. Therefore you must have suspected it was somebody else.”

  “No, I didn’t,” I said.

  I went to add: He’s my child. But I didn’t. Couldn’t. The truth was, you didn’t suspect somebody you loved as much as I loved Xander. You just didn’t. Or, at least, I didn’t.

  “I just . . . I just hoped it wasn’t anyone. That it wasn’t anything. The medical stuff wasn’t conclusive. I hoped it was an accident. That she’d rolled over.”

  Martha stared at me, saying nothing.

  “You wanted the same,” I added simply.

  “I did hope for that, for Layla, yes,” she said. She didn’t say anything else.

  She left her coffee cup on my garden wall and went home. Later, I cleared it up and found it was still half-full.

  I turn to Marc now, his hair glowing almost white in the sunlight. “I don’t want to think about it today,
” I say to him. “Just for one day.”

  “Don’t, then,” he says. “It won’t help.”

  I swallow. He is still Marc. My simple Marc.

  “Sammy,” he adds softly.

  And there it is. A hint of something. What is it, after all this time? Laughter, happiness? Joy, maybe. There is still a little bit of joy in my world, against all the odds, like a summer flower pushing up through the barren winter earth. I can, almost—if I stretch my hands out to touch it—grasp it, and hold on.

  I close my eyes and banish the thoughts from my mind. I replace them with others. It is hot; the sun is warm on my arms and face. Marc’s hand is in mine. Our son is just in front of us. I think he might just be okay. I dare to hope it.

  And now, just for this moment, I think only about Marc’s hand. About our son. And for a second, there is no guilt or shame. There is even joy.

  I open my eyes and stare. Is that Martha in the distance?

  Martha

  I know Becky will be doing the school run at three, so I make sure we’re on her route on a sunny Friday afternoon. She arrives like clockwork, at quarter to four, with Xander and Marc.

  She holds herself differently these days, I think, as we approach each other in the lane. More upright. Prouder, in a funny kind of way. Perhaps she is less cynical these days. I don’t know.

  We don’t speak. We couldn’t talk during the trial, and we still don’t now. I know why, of course. Your children should come first. Mine should have. And Becky’s does. That’s the way of it, the natural order.

  I look at her. She still has the same walk.

  Marc is by her side. Their hands are entwined. They hold each other differently to the way Scott and I do. They tangle, always moving. Scott’s is firm in mine. He removes it, just as I am thinking about it, and replaces his arm around my shoulders, solid as a rock. My Nice Guy. He reaches up to ruffle my hair. It is regrowing, slowly: a crown of unruly fuzz around my temples.

  Xander is walking with her. He wasn’t charged, in the end. And neither was she, for failing to protect. They said she couldn’t have known; none of us could.

  That much is true.

  She’s looking intently at me, just like she did for all those days when she was in the dock in the courtroom.

  I still remember that morning we left the court. She wasn’t guilty. We should have been relieved. Mum and Dad and Ethan and me. But nobody was. Later on, Ethan texted and told me he was glad we had both believed in her, but it felt too raw to respond to.

  Scott and I are going out to Kos next week for a fortnight. We have found an Airbnb with mismatched duvets, old tiles on the floor, an avocado-colored bath suite. It is perfect: unpretentiously perfect. It would have been Layla’s second birthday.

  Becky opens her mouth to say something, then closes it. Without thinking, I slow my pace. She stops, too. And now we are standing, all five of us, in the sunny lane, looking at each other.

  An image flashes into my mind. Layla dying in Xander’s arms. Not smothered, in anger, like the lawyers said, but held near to his warm body. Still gone, but . . . loved. I close my eyes, then open them again and look at him. He’s looking nervously up at me: my optimistic, caring, eleven-year-old nephew.

  “You doing okay?” I say to Becky.

  She nods, too enthusiastically. “Yeah. Are you?” she says.

  “We’re fine,” I say.

  She reaches a hand out to me, but I don’t take it. Instead, I turn to Xander. “How’re you?” I say to him. “Any progress on Tomb Raider?”

  He doesn’t say anything for a couple of seconds, and then a wide smile spreads across his features. “Location fourteen,” he says. “One more to go.”

  “That’s great,” I say. I reach out and squeeze his shoulder, then look again at Becky. “We should get takeout,” I say to her. “Sometime.”

  “I’d like that,” she says. “Yes.”

  Acknowledgments

  Like all good authors, I must disclaim liability here for any legal error or artistic license employed. The reality of a courtroom drama—which would be more than one week, and would have multiple adjournments, and many more witnesses!—is different from the fiction of it, and there are so many things I have manipulated for pace and plot.

  No author is much of anything without their agent, and mine is my linchpin. Clare Wallace at Darley Anderson plucked me off the slush pile, held my hand through initial rejections, and remains there most days of my literary career—even (I am ashamed to say) when she is supposed to be on maternity leave, which neither she nor I am especially good at. I couldn’t be without her.

  I am, too, nothing without my very incisive and kind editors at Michael Joseph, Penguin Books. I’m forever in debt to Maxine Hitchcock, who launched and made my first and second books bestsellers, but who does so very much more than that behind the scenes: author guidance, hand-holding, and so many updates I may as well be in the office with them all. Thanks to Eve Hall for her initial input into the script, and Matilda McDonald, who is so organized it’s unreal: Her edits are also forensic in their detail. Thanks, as always, to my brilliant marketer, Katie Bowden, and my publicist, Jenny Platt. You should really check out my Facebook page, because they’ve made it look beyond awesome. Thanks, too, to my copy editor, Shân Morley Jones, who went beyond this time, and actually made a timeline in order to line edit this beast of a script. I couldn’t have done it without her.

  And thanks, too (I am delighted to write), to my US editor, Sally Kim, who just three days before the writing of these acknowledgments acquired this novel to publish Stateside. Thanks to Camilla Wray for brokering the deal during what was one of the strangest and loveliest weeks of my life. I didn’t sleep for three whole nights—from the moment I learned there was serious American interest—and basically existed on New York time the entire week, refreshing my inbox in the small hours and speaking to Camilla on my sofa at midnight while my boyfriend and cat slept upstairs. Once the deal was done, I ate my body weight in American-style burgers and s’mores and couldn’t believe my luck. Sally, you’ve changed my life. You get this novel so well, and I’m so grateful. Likewise, thanks to her inimitable assistant, Gabriella Mongelli, and all the Putnam people I have yet to meet.

  Thanks, too, to the Darley Anderson rights team. I had a Chinese takeout when they sold my Chinese rights last week, so we are all winning here.

  Never has a book been so research-heavy as this one. At the outset, I knew almost nothing about the medicine of smothered babies, nor how that would be explored in a court of law. And so it’s thanks to the following people that this book exists.

  The first and largest thanks go to Patrick Davies and Cathy Cobley, who both responded to my many hundreds of emails during summer 2017 about, variously, retinal hemorrhages, MRI scans, initial police interviews, and more. The nomogram in this novel belongs entirely to Patrick: It was his idea and my entire plot turns on it.

  Patrick also facilitated my attending a trial of this nature, which was instrumental in writing sensitively and credibly about it. It was the strangest two days up in Lincoln in a hotel, attending a court case with my father, and I will remember that forever. I owe Patrick and Cathy both so much. I’m constantly surprised by how many experts will do so much for so little in return.

  Second thanks to my garden-variety medics who are always on hand to describe horrendous A&E scenes to me and to answer my sociopathic questions: Sami and my sister, Suzanne. Thanks, too, to the crew of lawyers—Alison Hardy, Ian Peddie, QC, Imran Mahmood (whose own novel is simply perfection), and Neil White. Thank you for making this a “real” courtroom drama with not a shouted “Objection!” in sight.

  Thanks also to my police—Phil and Marie Evison and Alice Vinten. You’re always steering me away from hard-cop clichés and into reality, and I remain forever grateful.

  And now—if you will bear with me—on to
my personal thanks. Thanks to those people who are always on the end of a phone and who are riding this roller coaster with me. The people I tell about my foreign rights and press reviews know who they are, but Mum, Dad, Paul, and Sarah Wade, G. X. Todd, Holly Seddon (afternoon!), and Lucy Blackburn—you’re in the inner sanctum. Sorry I’m so annoying.

  To Tom Davis, my old university professor, who taught me about free indirect speech, and then distinctive character voices, last summer: You saved my crazy multiple-narrator novel. I owe you my career.

  Penultimate thanks, as ever, to my father. Last spring I turned up at his house and said, “I don’t think I can do justice to all of the witness vignettes in this novel.” He said to me, “Let’s choose one witness per week, and we’ll walk and talk about them, and sort it all out.” We talked about Bridget, the midwife, while walking around Sutton Park, and about Sophie Cole in a bluebell wood. Every time I left him, I knew my characters a little better. I mean, could you really ask for a better dad than that?

  And finally, as ever, thanks go to David. I write about love, really, in all its forms, but for you it is the purest.

  About the Author

  Gillian McAllister graduated with a degree in English from the University of Birmingham. She lives in Birmingham where she worked as a lawyer and now writes full time. She is the author of Everything But the Truth and Anything You Do Say, both Sunday Times bestsellers in the UK. The Good Sister is her US debut.