Sister

by Rosamund Lupton

  He looked at me, waiting for my response, as if this were a regular conversation, and I realized I would be the first and last person to whom he’d tell his story. Our story.

  “I waited awhile, to make sure the boy wasn’t coming back. Ten minutes maybe. She was relieved when she saw me; I told you that, didn’t I? She smiled. We had a good rapport. I’d brought a Thermos of hot chocolate and gave her a cup.”

  The gray park is darkening now into soft pansy purples and blacks.

  “He told me that the hot chocolate was full of dissolved sedative. After he’d drugged her, he pulled her into the toilets building.”

  I feel overwhelmed by exhaustion and my words are sluggish. I imagine them inching along, slow, ugly words.

  “Then he cut her.”

  I’ll tell you what he said; you have the right to know, although it will be painful for you. No, painful is the wrong word entirely. Even the memory of his voice makes me so afraid that I am five years old alone in the dark with a murderer bashing down the door and no one to help me.

  “It’s easy for a doctor to cut. Not at first. The first time a doctor cuts into skin, it feels a violation. The skin, the largest human organ, covering the entire body unbroken, and you deliberately harm it. But after the first time, it no longer feels an abuse because you know that it’s to enable a surgical procedure. Cutting is no longer violent or violating but the necessary step to healing.”

  Mr. Wright tightens his warm fingers around mine. My legs are turning numb now.

  I could hear my heart beating fast and hard against the concrete, the only part of my body that was alert as I looked at him. And then, astonishingly, I saw him put the knife into the inside pocket of his jacket.

  Optimism heated my numbed body.

  He helped me sit up.

  He told me that he wasn’t going to cut me because an overdose is less suspicious than a knife.

  I can’t use his actual words. I just can’t.

  He said he had already given me enough sedative in the tea to make it impossible for me to struggle or escape. And that now he was going to give me a fatal dose. He assured me that it would be peaceful and painless, and it was the false kindness of his words that made them so unbearable, because it was himself he was comforting.

  He said he’d brought his own sedatives but didn’t need to use them.

  He took a bottle out of his pocket, the sleeping pills Todd had brought with him from the States, prescribed for me by my doctor. He must have found them in the bathroom cupboard. Like the bicycle chain and the flashlight and the knife, the bottle of sleeping pills showed his detailed planning, and I understood why premeditated murder is so much worse than spontaneous killing; he had been evil for far longer than the time it would actually take to kill me.

  The dusk has brought the chill of darkness. They’re shutting the gates now, the last of the teenagers are packing up to go. The children will already be at home for baths and bedtime, but Mr. Wright and I remain, not finished yet. For some reason, they haven’t made us leave. Maybe they didn’t notice us here. And I’m grateful because I need to keep going. I need to reach the end.

  My legs have lost all feeling and I’m worried that Mr. Wright will have to carry me, fireman style, out of the park. Or maybe he will get an ambulance to drive all the way in.

  But I will finish this first.

  I pleaded with him. Did you do that too? I think that you did. I think that like me you were desperate to stay alive. But of course it didn’t work; it just irritated him. As he twisted the cap off the bottle of sleeping pills, I summoned the residue of my physical energy and tried logical argument.

  “If I’m found here, in the same place as Tess, it’s bound to make the police suspicious. And it’ll make them question Tess’s death too. It’s madness to do it here—isn’t it?”

  For a moment the irritation left his face and he stopped twisting the cap, and I’d won a reprieve in this perverted debate.

  Then he smiled, as if reassuring me as much as himself that I needn’t have such worries. “I did think about that. But the police know how you’ve been since Tess died; they already see you as a little unhinged, don’t they? And even if they don’t get it themselves, any psychiatrist will tell them that you chose this place to kill yourself. You wanted to kill yourself where your little sister had died.”

  He took the cap off the bottle of sleeping pills.

  “After all, if we’re being logical, who in their right mind would choose to end the life of two people in the same building?”

  End the life. He was turning brutal killing into something passive, as if it was assisted euthanasia and not murder.

  As he poured the pills into his cupped hand, I wondered who would question my suicide or vouch for my sane state of my mind. Dr. Nichols, at whom I had furiously sung the lullaby? Even if he thought I wasn’t suicidal at our last meeting, he would probably doubt that diagnosis, as he did with you, and blame himself for not seeing the signs. And DI Haines? He already thought I was overly emotional and irrational, and I doubted DS Finborough, even if he wanted to try, could convince him otherwise. Todd thought I was “unable to accept the facts,” and many others agreed, even if they were too kind to say so to my face. They’d think that in emotional turmoil after your death, irrational and depressed, I could easily have become suicidal. The sensible, conventional person I’d been a few months ago would never have been found dead from an overdose in this place. They would have asked questions for her but not for the person I had become.

  And Mum? I’d told her I was about to find out what happened to you and I knew she would tell the police that. But I knew too that they wouldn’t believe her, or rather what I’d said to her. And I thought that after a while Mum wouldn’t believe it either, because she’d choose to bear the guilt of my suicide rather than think that I had felt a moment of this fear. And I found it unbearable to imagine her anguish when she’d have to mourn me too, with no one to comfort her.

  He put the empty bottle in my coat pocket. Then he told me that the postmortem must show I swallowed the pills whole because that would make it look voluntary. I am trying to shut out his voice but it breaks in, refusing to be silenced.

  “Who can make another person swallow pills against her will?”

  He held a knife to my throat; in the darkness I could feel the cold edge of metal against the warmth of my skin.

  “This isn’t what I am. It’s like a nightmare and I’ve turned into a stranger.”

  I think he expected my pity.

  He put his hand with the pills in it up to my mouth. The bottle had been full, which meant at least twelve pills. The dose was one in twenty-four hours. Any more was dangerous. I remembered reading that on the label. I knew that twelve would be more than enough to kill me. I remembered Todd telling me I should take one, but refusing because I had to stay alert; because I wasn’t allowed a few hours of drugged oblivion, however much I craved it; because I knew taking a sedative would be a cowardly reprieve that I’d want to repeat over and over again. This is what I was thinking as he pushed the pills into my mouth, my tongue uselessly trying to stop him.

  Then he tipped water from a mineral water bottle into my mouth and told me to swallow.

  It’s dark now, countryside black. I think of all the nocturnal creatures that are out here now the humans have gone home. I think of that storybook we had about the teddy bears coming out at night to play in the park. “There goes the bear at number three, sliding down the slide.”

  “Beatrice…?”

  Mr. Wright is helping me along, prompting and coaxing so I can finish this statement. His hand still holds mine, but I can hardly see his face anymore.

  “Somehow I managed to wedge the pills behind my teeth and inside my cheeks, and the water went down my throat with just one, maybe two, I think. But I knew it wouldn’t be long before they all dissolved in my own saliva. I wanted to spit them out, but his flashlight was still full on my face.”

&nbs
p; “And then?”

  “He took a letter out of the inside pocket of his jacket. It was from Tess to me. It must have been the one she was writing on the park bench just before she died.”

  I pause, my tears falling onto the grass, or maybe onto Mr. Wright; in the dark I can’t tell.

  “He shone his flashlight on her letter so he could read it out to me. It meant that the flashlight was no longer shining on me. I had a brief opportunity, and I hung my head down toward my knees and spat out the sleeping pills onto my lap. They fell into the folds of my coat and made no sound.”

  You know what you wrote to me, but it was William’s voice not yours that I heard, William’s voice telling me of your fear, your desperation, your grief. It was your murderer’s voice telling me that you walked the streets and through parks, too afraid to be in the flat, that you yelled up at the dark winter sky at a God you no longer believed in, yelling at him to give your baby back. And that you thought this was also a sign of your madness. It was your killer who told me that you couldn’t understand why I hadn’t come over, hadn’t phoned, hadn’t answered your calls. It was the man who killed you who told me that you were sure there was a good reason, and his voice as he spoke your written words violated their faith in me. But at the end of your letter your soft voice whispered to me beneath his:

  “I need you, right now, right this moment, please Bee.”

  Then, as now, your words pricked my face with tears.

  “He put the letter back in his pocket, presumably to destroy it later. I’m not sure why he kept it or why he read it to me.”

  But I think it’s because, like me with Mr. Wright earlier, his guilt was desperate for some company.

  “I need you. Right now, right this moment, please Bee.”

  He wanted to make me as culpable in some way as he was.

  “And then?” asks Mr. Wright, needing to prompt me now to make sure I remember all of it. But we’re nearly finished.

  “He switched off my phone and put it near the door where I couldn’t reach it. Then he took a scarf of mine out of his pocket—he must have taken it from the flat. He tied it around my mouth, gagging me.”

  As he gagged me, panicking thoughts filled my head, one bashing into the other, a six-lane highway of thoughts, all happening simultaneously, backing up, bumper to bumper, unable to get out, and I thought that some would be released simply by screaming, others by crying, others if I was held. Most of my thoughts had become primal and physical. I hadn’t known before that it’s our bodies that think most powerfully, and that was why it was so cruel to be gagged. It wasn’t because I couldn’t shout for help—who’d hear me in an empty building in the middle of a deserted park? It was because I couldn’t scream or sob or moan.

  “Then his pager went off. He phoned the hospital on his mobile and said that he’d be on his way. I suppose it would have looked too suspicious not to go.”

  I hear myself catch my breath in the darkness.

  “Beatrice?”

  “I worried that Kasia was in labor and that was why he was leaving.”

  Mr. Wright’s hand feels solid in the darkness. I am reassured by the definition of his knuckles in my soft palm.

  “He checked the gag and the ties around my wrists and legs. He told me that he’d come back and remove them later, so that nothing would look suspicious when I was found. He still didn’t know I’d spat out so many of the pills. But I knew that if I was still alive when he came back, he’d use the knife, as he did on Tess.”

  “If you were still alive?”

  “I wasn’t sure how many pills I’d swallowed, or how much sedative had dissolved in my saliva—if it was enough to kill me.”

  I try to just focus on Mr. Wright’s hand holding mine.

  “He left. Minutes later my pager went off. He’d turned off my phone, but he didn’t know about the pager. I tried to persuade myself that Kasia was paging me for something trivial. After all, her baby wasn’t due for another three weeks.”

  Yes, like you.

  Mr. Wright strokes my fingers, and the gentleness of it makes me want to cry.

  “And then?” he asks.

  “He’d taken the flashlight with him. I’d never been in such total darkness.”

  I was alone in the black. Pitch black. Pitch that is made from tar.

  The blackness smelled rotten, putrid with fear. It smothered my face, going into my mouth and nose, and I was drowning and I thought of you on holiday in Skye, coming out of the sea, spluttering and pink cheeked—“I’m okay! Just seawater going up the wrong way!”—and I took a breath. The blackness choked my lungs.

  I saw the darkness move—a monstrous, living thing, filling the building and out into the night beyond, no skin of sky to contain it. I felt it dragging me with it into a void of infinite fear—away from light, life, love, hope.

  I thought of Mum in her rustling silk dressing gown, smelling of face cream, coming toward our beds, but the memory of her was padlocked into childhood and couldn’t lighten the darkness.

  I wait for Mr. Wright to prompt me further. But there is no further to go. We have finally arrived at the end.

  It’s finished now.

  I try to move my hands, but they are bound tightly together with a tie. The fingers of my right hand are tightly clasped around my left. I wonder if it’s because I am right-handed that my right hand has taken the role of comforter.

  I am alone in the pitch black, lying on a concrete floor.

  My mouth is as dry as parchment. The harsh cold concrete has seeped into my body, numbing me through to the bone.

  I begin a letter to you, my beloved younger sister. I pretend it’s Sunday evening, my safest time, and that I’m surrounded by press all wanting to tell our story.

  Dearest Tess,

  I’d do anything to be with you, right now, right this moment, so I could hold your hand, look at your face, listen to your voice. How can touching and seeing and hearing—all those sensory receptors and optic nerves and vibrating eardrums—be substituted by a letter? But we’ve managed to use words as go-betweens before, haven’t we?

  I think back to boarding school and the first letter you ever sent me, the one with invisible ink, and that ever since kindness has smelled of lemons.

  And as I think of you and talk to you, I can breathe again.

  23

  Hours must have passed, so he will surely be back soon. I don’t know how much sedative I swallowed, but all through this night I have felt a torpor of exhaustion sucking the warmth from my body and the clarity from my brain. I think I have slipped in and out of consciousness; in total darkness how could I tell? But if so, in my unnatural forced sleep I was still talking to you and maybe that was when my imaginings became peculiarly vivid.

  Now I feel wide awake, all senses tense, buzzing and jittery; it must be adrenaline, a fight-or-flight hormone that’s powerful enough to restart a heart after a cardiac arrest, surely powerful enough to startle me into consciousness.

  I try to move, but my body is still too doped and numb, and the bindings are too tight. The darkness feels almost solid now—not velvety like storybooks, not smooth and soft, but with spikes of fear, and if you prodded it, you’d find hard, jagged evil crouching behind it. I can hear something inches away from my face as I lie on the concrete. A mouse? An insect? I have lost sense of auditory perspective. My cheek feels sore; it must be pressed into a little unevenness in the concrete.

  What if it isn’t adrenaline that’s keeping me awake, but I am properly conscious now? Perhaps I swallowed less sedative than I feared or have somehow come through the other side of the overdose and survived it.

  But it makes no difference. Even if my body isn’t fatally drugged, I am tied up and gagged and William will be back. And then he’ll discover that I’m alive. And he’ll use the knife.

  So before he returns, I need to make things clear to you. Everything happened as I told you, beginning with Mum’s phone call telling me you’d gone missing to th
e moment William left me here to die. But my ending will be the same as yours, here in this building, untold. I didn’t have the courage to face that, or maybe I just love life too much to let it go so quietly. I couldn’t fantasize a happy ever after, but I did imagine an ending that was just. And I made it as real as I could, my safe fantasy future, all details in place.

  I worry that you’ve been waiting for DS Finborough to save me, but I think you felt a judder in the story when I told you about our lunch in Carluccio’s. It was only a comforting rug of a daydream to lie on instead of cold concrete, and it wasn’t admirable or courageous of me, but I know you understand.

  And I think you’d already guessed, a little while ago, that there was no Mr. Wright. I invented a lawyer not only so I could play my part in a just ending—a trial and guilty verdict—but because he would make me keep to verifiable facts and a strict chronology. I needed someone who would help me understand what happened and why—and who would keep me from going mad. I’m not sure why being sane as I die is so important to me, just that it is, overwhelmingly. I do know that without him, my letter to you would have been a stream-of-consciousness scream, raging despair, and I would have drowned in it.

  I made him kind and endlessly patient as I told him our story, and bereaved so he would understand. Maybe I’m more Catholic than I realized because I also made him my confessor but one who, even when he knew everything about me, may in some fantasy future have loved me. And during the long hours he became more real to me than the darkness around me, more than just a figment of a desperate imagination, acquiring his own personality and whims that I had to go along with, because he didn’t always do my bidding or serve the purpose I asked of him. Instead of helping me paint a pointillistic painting of what happened, I made a mirror and saw myself properly for the first time.

  And around him I put a secretary with a crush and painted fingernails and daffodils and a coffee machine and inconsequential details that braided together made a rope of normality, because as I fell over the precipice of terror and my body became incontinent and shook with fear, I needed to grab hold of something.