Sister

by Rosamund Lupton

  “Tess was paid to take part in the CF trial, so was Kasia, but there’s no record of that anywhere.”

  “Beatrice…”

  He’d stopped using the word darling.

  “But that’s not the important thing,” I continued. “I hadn’t thought to look at the financial aspect of the trial before, but several reputable sites—the Financial Times, the New York Times—are saying that Chrom-Med is going to float on the stock market in just a few weeks’ time.”

  It would have been in the papers, but since your death I had stopped reading them. Chrom-Med’s flotation was a crucial bit of news to me, but Todd didn’t react at all.

  “The directors of Chrom-Med stand to make a fortune,” I continued. “The sites have different estimates, but the amount of money is enormous. And the employees are all shareholders, so they’re going to get their share of the bonanza.”

  “The company will have invested millions, if not billions, in their research,” Todd said, his voice impatient. “And now they’re having a massively successful trial, which is payback time for their investment. Of course they’re going to float on the stock market. It’s a completely logical business decision.”

  “But the payments to the women—”

  “Stop. For God’s sake, stop,” he shouted. For a moment both of us were taken aback. We’d spent four years being polite to each other. Shouting was embarrassingly intimate. He struggled to sound more measured. “First it was her married tutor, then an obsessed weirdo student and now you’ve added this trial to your list—which everyone, including the world’s press and scientific community, has wholeheartedly endorsed.”

  “Yes. I am suspicious of different people, even a trial. Because I don’t know yet who killed her. Or why. Just that someone did. And I have to look at every possibility.”

  “No. You don’t. That’s the police’s job, and they’ve done it. There’s nothing left for you to do.”

  “My sister was murdered.”

  “Please, darling, you have to face the truth at some point that—”

  I interrupted him. “She would never have killed herself.”

  At this point in our argument, both of us awkward and a little embarrassed, I felt that we were going through the motions, actors struggling with a clunky script.

  “Just because it’s what you believe,” he said. “What you want to believe, that doesn’t make it true.”

  “How can you possibly know what the truth is?” I snapped back. “You only met her a few times, and even then you barely bothered to talk to her. She wasn’t the kind of person you wanted to get to know.”

  I was arguing with apparent conviction, my voice raised and my words sharpened to hurt, but in truth I was still on our relationship beltway, and inside I was uninvolved and unscathed. I continued my performance, marveling slightly at how easy it was to get into my stride. I’d never had a row before.

  “What did you call her? ‘Kooky’?” I asked, not waiting for a reply. “I don’t think you even bothered to listen to anything she said to you on the two occasions we all actually had a meal together. You judged her without even having a proper conversation with her.”

  “You’re right. I didn’t know her well. And I admit that I didn’t like her all that much either. She irritated me, as a matter of fact. But this isn’t about how well—”

  I interrupted him. “You dismissed her because she was an art student, because of the way she lived and the clothes she wore.”

  “For God’s sake.”

  “You didn’t see the person she was at all.”

  “You’re going way off the point here. Look, I do understand that you want to blame someone for her death. I know you don’t want to feel responsible for it.” The composure in his voice sounded forced and I was reminded of myself talking to the police. “You’re afraid of having to live with that guilt,” he continued. “And I do understand that. But what I want you to try to understand is that once you accept what really happened, then you’ll realize that you weren’t to blame at all. We all know that you weren’t. She took her own life, for reasons that the police, the coroner, your mother, and her doctors are satisfied with, and no one else is to blame, including you. If you could just believe that, then you can start to move forward.” He awkwardly put his hand on my shoulder and left it there—like me he finds being tactile difficult. “I’ve got tickets home for both of us. Our flight leaves the evening after her funeral.”

  I was silent. How could I possibly leave?

  “I know you’re worried your mother needs you here for support,” continued Todd. “But she agrees that the sooner you get back home, back to your normal life, the better.” His hand slammed onto the table. I noticed the disturbance on my screen before his uncharacteristic physicality. “I don’t recognize you anymore. And now I’m laying my guts out here and you can’t even be bothered to look up from the fucking Internet.”

  I turned to him, and only then saw his white face and his body huddled into itself in misery.

  “I’m sorry. But I can’t leave. Not till I know what happened to her.”

  “We know what happened to her. And you need to accept that. Because life has to go on, Beatrice. Our life.”

  “Todd…”

  “I do know how hard it must be for you without her. I do understand that. But you do have me.” His eyes were blurred with tears. “We’re getting married in three months.”

  I tried to work out what to say and in the silence he walked away from me into the kitchen. How could I explain to him that I couldn’t get married anymore, because marriage is a commitment to the future, and a future without you was impossible to contemplate? And that it was for this reason, rather than my lack of passion for him, that meant I couldn’t marry him.

  I went into the kitchen. His back was toward me and I saw what he would look like as an old man.

  “Todd, I’m sorry but—”

  He turned and yelled at me, “For fuck’s sake I love you.” Shouting at a foreigner in your own language as if volume will make her understand, make me love him back.

  “You don’t really know me. You wouldn’t love me if you did.”

  It was true. He didn’t know me. I’d never let him. If I had a song, I’d never tried singing it to him, never stayed in bed with him on a Sunday morning. It was always my idea to get up and go out. Maybe he had looked into my eyes but if he had, I hadn’t been looking back.

  “You deserve more,” I said, and tried to take his hand. But he pulled it away. “I’m so sorry.”

  He flinched from me. But I was sorry. I still am. Sorry that I had neglected to notice that it was only me on the safe beltway while he was inside the relationship, alone and exposed. Once again I had been selfish and cruel toward someone I was meant to care for.

  Before you died, I’d thought our relationship was grown-up and sensible. But on my part it was cowardly, a passive option motivated by my insecurity rather than what Todd deserved: an active choice inspired by love.

  A few minutes later he left. He didn’t tell me where he was going.

  Mr. Wright had decided on a working lunch and has now got sandwiches from the deli. He leads me through empty corridors to a meeting room that has a table. For some reason, the large office space, deserted apart from us two, feels intimate.

  I haven’t told Mr. Wright that during my research I broke off my engagement, and that with no friends in London, Todd must have walked through the snow to a hotel that night. I just tell him about Chrom-Med floating on the stock market.

  “And you phoned DS Finborough at eleven-thirty p.m.?” he asks, looking down at the police call log.

  “Yes. I left a message for him asking him to phone me back. By nine-thirty the next morning he still hadn’t, so I went to St. Anne’s.”

  “You’d already planned to go back there?”

  “Yes. The senior midwife had said she would have found Tess’s notes by then and had made an appointment for me to see her.”

&
nbsp; I arrived at St. Anne’s, the skin around my skull tight with nerves because I thought I would soon have to meet the person who was with you when you had Xavier. I knew I had to do this but wasn’t exactly sure why. Maybe as a penance, my guilt faced full on. I arrived fifteen minutes early and went to the hospital café. As I sat down with my coffee, I saw I had a new e-mail.

  From: Professor Rosen’s office, Chrom-Med

  To: Beatrice Hemming’s iPhone

  Dear Ms. Hemming:

  I assure you that we offer no financial inducement whatsoever to the participants in our trial. Each participant volunteers without coercion or inducement. If you would like to check with the participating hospitals’ ethics committees you will see that the highest ethical principles are strictly enforced.

  Kind regards

  Sarah Stonaker, Media PA to Professor Rosen

  I e-mailed straight back.

  From: Beatrice Hemming’s iPhone

  To: professor.rosen@chrom-med.com

  One “participant” was my sister. She was paid £300 to take part in the trial. Her name was Tess Hemming (second name Annabel, after her grandmother). She was 21. She was murdered after giving birth to her stillborn baby. Her funeral and that of her son is on Thursday. I miss her more than you can possibly imagine.

  It felt like a reasonable place to be writing such an e-mail. Illness and death may be shut away in the wards above, but I imagined the fall-out blowing invisibly into the atrium and landing in the hospital café’s cappuccinos and herbal teas. I wouldn’t have been the first to write an emotional e-mail at this table. I wondered if the “Media PA” would pass it on to Professor Rosen. I doubted it.

  I resolved to ask the hospital staff if they knew anything about the money.

  Five minutes before my appointment time I took the lift up to the fourth floor, as instructed, and walked to the maternity wing.

  The senior midwife seemed fraught when she saw me, although maybe her escaping frizzy red hair made her seem that way all the time. “I’m afraid we still haven’t found Tess’s notes. And without them I haven’t been able to find out who was with her when she gave birth.”

  I felt relief but thought it cowardly to give in to.

  “Doesn’t anyone remember?”

  “I’m afraid not. For the last three months we’ve been very short staffed, so we’ve had a high percentage of agency midwives and temporary doctors. I think it must have been one of them.”

  A young punky nurse standing at the nurses’ station, her nose pierced, joined in, “We have the basic info on a central computer, such as the time and date of admission and discharge, and sadly in your sister’s case, that her baby died. But nothing more detailed. Nothing about their medical history or the medical staff looking after them. I did check with the psych department yesterday. Dr. Nichols said her notes hadn’t ever got to him. Told me our department should ‘pull our socks up,’ which is pretty angry coming from him.”

  I remembered Dr. Nichols commenting that he didn’t have your psychiatric history. I hadn’t known it was because your notes had got lost.

  “But aren’t her notes also on computer somewhere? I mean the detailed information, as well as the basics?” I asked.

  The senior midwife shook her head. “We use paper notes for maternity patients, so the woman can carry them with her in case she goes into labor when she’s not near her home hospital. We then attach the handwritten notes of the delivery and it’s all meant to be safely stored.”

  The phone rang but the senior midwife ignored it, focusing on me. “I really am sorry. We do understand how important it must be to you.”

  As she answered the phone, my initial relief that your notes were lost became weighted by suspicion. Did your medical notes hold some clue about your murder? Was that why they were “lost”? I waited for the senior midwife to finish her phone call.

  “Isn’t it odd that a patient’s notes just go missing?” I asked.

  The senior midwife grimaced. “Unfortunately it’s not odd at all.”

  A portly consultant in a chalk-striped suit who was passing stopped and chipped in, “An entire cart of notes went missing from my diabetic clinic on Tuesday. The whole lot vanished into some administrative black hole.”

  I noticed that Dr. Saunders had arrived at the nurses’ station and was checking a patient’s notes. He didn’t seem to notice me.

  “Really?” I said, uninterested, to Chalk-striped Consultant. But he carried on warming to his theme. “When they built St. John’s hospital last year, no one remembered to build a morgue and when their first patient died, there was nowhere to take him.”

  The senior midwife was clearly embarrassed by him and I wondered why he was being so open with me about hospital errors.

  “There’s been relocation of teenage cancer patients and no one remembered to transport their frozen eggs,” continued Chalk-striped Consultant. “And now their chances of a baby when they’ve recovered are zero.”

  Dr. Saunders noticed me and smiled reassuringly. “But we’re not totally incompetent all of the time, I promise.”

  “Did you know that women were being paid to take part in the cystic fibrosis trial?” I asked.

  Chalk-striped Consultant looked a little peeved by my abrupt change of subject. “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “Nor I,” said Dr. Saunders. “Do you know how much?”

  “Three hundred pounds.”

  “It could well have been a doctor or nurse being kind,” Dr. Saunders said, his tone considerate. And again he reminded me of you, this time for thinking the best of people. “There was that nurse in oncology last year, wasn’t there?” he asked.

  Chalk-striped Consultant nodded. “Spent the department’s entire transport fund on new clothes for an old man she felt sorry for.”

  The young punky nurse joined in, “And midwives sometimes try to help hard-up mums by giving them nappies and formula when they leave. Occasionally a sterilizer or a baby bath finds its way out too.”

  Chalk-striped Consultant grinned. “You mean we’ve reverted to the days when nurses were caring?”

  The punky nurse glowered at him and Chalk-striped Consultant laughed.

  Two pagers went off and a phone rang on the nurses’ station. Chalk-striped Consultant walked away to answer his page; the punky nurse answered the phone; the senior midwife was answering a patient’s buzzer. I was left alone with Dr. Saunders. I’ve always been intimidated by handsome men, let alone beautiful ones. I associate them not so much with inevitable rejection as with turning me completely invisible.

  “Would you like to have a coffee?” he asked.

  Probably blushing, I shook my head. I didn’t want to be the recipient of emotional charity.

  I have to admit, that despite still being with Todd, I entertained a fantasy about Dr. Saunders, but knew that it wasn’t one to pursue. Even if I could create a fantasy in which he was attracted to me, his wedding ring prevented it from stretching into something long-term or secure or anything else I wanted in a relationship.

  “I gave the senior midwife my contact details in case she found Tess’s notes. But she warned me they might be permanently lost.”

  “You said you found her notes going missing suspicious?” asks Mr. Wright.

  “To start with, yes. But the longer I was at the hospital, the harder it was to imagine anything sinister happening. It just seemed too public, a cheek-by-jowl working environment with people literally looking over one another’s shoulders. I couldn’t see how anyone would get away with something. Not that I knew what that ‘something’ was.”

  “And the payments?”

  “The people at St. Anne’s didn’t even seem surprised by them, let alone suspicious.”

  He looks down at the police log of our calls. “DS Finborough didn’t return your call and you didn’t chase that?”

  “No, because what could I tell him? That women had been paid, but no one I’d spoken to at the hospital thought that sinis
ter or even strange; that Chrom-Med was floating on the stock market, but even my own fiancé thought that was just a logical business decision. And Tess’s notes had gone missing, but the medical staff thought that pretty routine. I had nothing to go to him with.”

  My mouth has become dry. I drink some water, then continue, “I thought that I’d been going down a dead end and should have kept going with my initial distrust of Emilio Codi and Simon. I knew most murders were domestic. I can’t remember where I heard that.”

  But I remember thinking that domestic murder was an oxymoron. Doing the ironing on Sunday night and emptying the dishwasher is domestic, not murder.

  “I thought Simon and Emilio were both capable of killing her. Emilio had an obvious motive and Simon was clearly obsessed by her; his photos were evidence of that. Both of them were connected to Tess through the college: Simon as a student there and Emilio as a tutor. So after I left the hospital I went to the college. I wanted to see if anyone there could tell me anything.”

  Mr. Wright must think I was keen and energetic. But it wasn’t that. I was putting off going home. Partly because I didn’t want to return home without being any farther forward, but also because I wanted to avoid Todd. He’d phoned and offered to come to your funeral but I’d told him there was no need. So he planned to fly back to the States as soon as possible and would be coming to the flat to pick up his things. I didn’t want to be there.

  The snow hadn’t been cleared from the paths up to the art college and most of the windows were in darkness.

  The secretary with the German accent told me it was the last of three staff training days, so the students were absent. She agreed to my putting up a couple of notices. The first was information about your funeral. And the second asked your friends to meet me in a couple of weeks’ time at a café I’d seen opposite the college. It was an impulsive note, the date of the meeting chosen randomly, and as I pinned it up next to flat shares and equipment for sale I thought it looked like a ridiculous kind of notice and that nobody would come. But I left it anyway.