Sister полностью

I’d do anything to have a second chance, Tess. But unlike our storybooks, there’s no flying back past the second star to the right and through the open window to find you alive in your bed. I can’t sail back through the weeks and in and out of the days returning to my bedroom where my supper is warm and waiting for me and I’m forgiven. There is no new beginning. No second chance.

You turned to me and I wasn’t there.

You are dead. If I had taken your call, you would be alive.

It’s as blunt as that.

I’m sorry.

10

Mr. Wright comes back into the room with a glass of water for me. I remember that his wife died in a car crash. Maybe it was his fault; perhaps he was driving after drinking or momentarily distracted—my guilt shadow would feel better with some company. But I cannot ask him. Instead I drink the glass of water and he switches on the cassette recorder again.

“So you knew Tess had turned to you?”

“Yes.”

“And that you had been right all along?”

“Yes.”

There was a flipside to the guilt. You had looked to me for help, we were close, I did know you, and therefore I could be absolutely confident in my conviction that you didn’t kill yourself. Had my confidence ever wavered? A little. When I thought you hadn’t told me about your baby, when I thought you hadn’t turned to me for help when you were frightened. Then I questioned our closeness and wondered if I really knew you after all. Then quietly, privately, I also wondered, Did you really value life too highly to end it? Your phone calls meant that the answer, however painfully obtained, was an unequivocal yes.

The next morning I woke up so early it was still night. I thought about taking one of the sleeping pills, to escape from guilt now as much as grief, but I couldn’t be that cowardly. Careful not to wake Todd, I got out of bed and went outside hoping for escape from my own thoughts or at least some kind of distraction from them.

When I opened the front door, I saw Amias putting carrier bags on your pots, using a flashlight. He must have seen me illuminated in the doorway.

“Some of them blew off in the night,” he said. “So I need to get them put back again before too much damage is done.”

I thought about him recently planting daffodil bulbs in the freezing earth. From the beginning the bulbs never stood a chance. Not wanting to upset him, but not wanting to give him false platitudes about the efficacy of his carrier-bag greenhouses, I changed the subject.

“It’s so quiet at this time in the morning, isn’t it?”

“You wait till spring, then it’s a racket out here.”

I must have looked confused because he explained, “The dawn chorus. Not sure why the birds like this street particularly, but for some reason best known to themselves they do.”

“I’ve never really understood what the dawn chorus was about actually.” Keeping the conversation going to humor him or to avoid my thoughts?

“Their songs are to attract a mate and define territories,” replied Amias. “A shame that humans can’t take the musical approach to that, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know that they have an order?” he asked. “First blackbirds, then robins, wrens, chaffinches, warblers, song thrushes. There used to be a nightingale too.”

As he told me about the dawn chorus, I knew that I would find the person who had murdered you.

“Did you know that a single nightingale can sing up to three hundred love songs?”

That was my single-minded, focused destination; there was no more time for the detour of a guilt trip.

“A musician slowed down the skylark’s song and found it’s close to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.”

I owed it to you, even more than before, to win you some kind of justice.

As Amias continued telling me about the musical miracles within the dawn chorus, I wondered if he knew how comforting I found it, and thought that he probably did. He was letting me think, but not on my own, and was giving me a soothing score to bleak emotion. In the darkness I tried to hear a bird singing, but there was nothing. And in the silence and the dark it was hard to imagine a bright spring dawn filled with birdsong.

As soon as it was 9 a.m. I picked up the phone and dialed the police station.

“DS Finborough, please. It’s Beatrice Hemming.”

Todd, still half asleep, looked at me bemused and irritated. “What are you doing, darling?”

“I’m entitled to a copy of the postmortem report. There was a whole load of paperwork that PC Vernon gave me, and there was a leaflet about it.” I had been too passive, too accepting of information I had been given.

“Darling, you’ll just be wasting everyone’s time.”

I noted that Todd didn’t say “it’s a waste of time,” but that I was wasting somebody else’s time, somebody he didn’t even know. Todd is always conscious of when he’s being a nuisance. I used to be too.

“The day before she died, she called me every hour, and God knows how many more times on my mobile. That same day she asked Amias to look after her spare key because she was too afraid to leave it under the pot.”

“Maybe she’d just started bothering about basic security.”