The Good Sister

by Gillian McAllister

  Layla’s room is untouched. It was never the crime scene. That was at Becky’s house. They photographed her spare room—the makeshift nursery where Layla had been sleeping while Becky looked after her. They’d done it immediately, before suspicion was even raised. A scenes-of-crime officer attended. I haven’t seen the photographs yet; I’m not sure what they showed. Nothing, probably.

  I ease open the door and flick the light on. Her cot is still there. White railings. It looks enormous. She never slept in it. A rocking horse stands in the corner. Scott bought it from Etsy. It’s wooden, its back sweeping and elegant—impractical really—but nevertheless the injustice comes into the room with me. She’ll never get to ride it. Not ever.

  I think of the one-year-olds I know. Fat feet. She’d have little fat feet, just like Xander did. Spongy bulges on the tops of his arches . . . and now, his are a bony child’s feet, stuffed into football boots. New school shoes every term. The luck of it. To experience that. Does Becky know how lucky she is that he is still here with us?

  There on the floor is Flappy—the cuddly toy Becky and I used to share—that Becky passed to Xander, that Xander passed to Layla. It’s an unidentifiable animal: small, yellowing, with long, soft brown ears that flap.

  Becky and I discovered it in the loft when Mum and Dad decided to sell our childhood home. They were downstairs. Becky had hit her head on one of the rafters in the hot loft and was sitting cross-legged, a hand held to the developing lump, when I found the box marked miscellaneous.

  “Look,” I said, pointing to the items spilling from the box.

  “Oh, man!” she said, reaching for him. “Shit, what was his name?”

  “Flappy,” I said immediately.

  I always had the better memory of the two of us. Becky remembers almost nothing of the past. Where I know every date, every event and its relation to another, Becky seems to remember only the broad emotional tone of something, not who was there, or when it happened, not even the year. I wish I could forget things now, of course. Perhaps I will remember every moment of this trial forever, whatever the result, and hold it against her forever.

  “Flappy. Of course.” She brought him close to her face and breathed in. “Let’s have him,” she said. She was in her early twenties. She already had Xander, who was two. “My babies can have him, then yours.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  We kept Flappy, emerging down the ladder with him. On the cooler upstairs landing, Becky passed the toy to me.

  “I used to suck his ears,” she said.

  “Gross,” I said, holding it carefully by its body.

  “It’ll have helped your immune system,” she said with a sage nod. “So you’re welcome.”

  Becky took Flappy from me and put the toy in the back pocket of her jeans; its ears moved as she walked. Marc was waiting downstairs for her.

  “Look,” she said, showing him Flappy.

  “Ah, a Blackwater relic,” he said, with no sense of irony at all. He took Flappy off her and turned it over in his hands. “Let’s put it on the mantelpiece,” he said, and she cracked up; evidently, it was yet another inside joke between them.

  He enfolded her in his arms then, and I looked away. They were perfect together. Where could Scott and I find that secret language? I found myself thinking. I wished fervently I could purchase it, bottled.

  It was a strange day, clearing out the family home all together. Mum removed a canvas photograph from the living-room wall that Becky had always hated, and the wallpaper was fresh underneath it, a bright square surrounded by faded paper. I reached a finger out to touch it as we were leaving.

  Standing now in the room that Layla never got to sleep in, holding Flappy, I find myself thinking: This cannot be right. It cannot have been her. Becky cannot have done it. I feel it with a certainty, right in my stomach. I cannot help but notice, though, that I also have the other moments. When I remembered the recorder club, I was sure she had done it, too. They are both true and untrue, at the same time. Becky is suspended, Schrödinger’s cat in the dock. And next week, we will know. Ethan keeps trying to tell me we might not. That the trial may run on, get adjourned, that it won’t give me the answers I’m looking for, but I ignore him.

  I’m going to make a list. In here, in the room with the too-big cot and the impractical rocking horse. A list of likely scenarios and outcomes. There must be another possibility besides murder.

  There was no suspicion, at first, in A&E, just shock so intense I can’t remember anything except images. A brick-colored circle from a cup of tea on my knee. A medical tag around Layla’s tiny gray wrist.

  Becky came straight over when they charged her. She was still holding her charge sheet in her hands, on police bail. Marc brought her and sat in the car, the engine running, outside on the street. Layla had been dead for ten days, a sixth of the length of her life, something I knew to be a fact but struggled to comprehend.

  Becky was to attend the magistrates’ court a couple of days later. Scott was sitting on the sofa, staring at nothing. I was pretending, as I unthinkingly let my sister in, that Layla was with him, that he was burping her, that she was crying, not sleeping, being red and angry and alive.

  “Nothing happened,” Becky said, as she stood in the center of our hallway. “I didn’t do anything.”

  I didn’t say anything to her. I was poorly prepared, didn’t know how to behave. My sister was accused. My baby was dead. What was the done thing?

  When I hadn’t spoken for a moment, she said, “Please believe me.”

  I didn’t ask her to leave in order to be dramatic, or to make a point. That was just the first day that I had that glass-spilling-over feeling. I was at full capacity and had room for no more.

  She raised her hands in a kind of surrender, and turned to leave, but just before she did, she jerked her head, trying to look into Layla’s nursery, I thought. The door was closed.

  As she walked down the corridor, I said I would be in touch. But I haven’t been, because then the slow, creaking wheels of the justice system had begun to turn, and my relationship with Becky had ceased being about sisters discovering a childhood teddy, or sharing takeout together, or a series of jokey text messages. It had become something beyond itself, expanding from just us, and being invaded by bigger concepts: justice, evidence, guilt. We were no longer sisters, instead a witness and a defendant.

  Contact was prohibited, and so that was the last time we spoke.

  Please believe me. Would she say that if she were innocent?

  Or guilty? I sit down on the floor next to the cot and pick up Flappy. I close my eyes. Please believe me. Why not I’m so sorry, Martha? Was it the shock of being under suspicion, or something more? It was all about Becky. That’s the thing. The thing I try to forget. Things have always revolved around Becky. Especially now.

  But being selfish doesn’t mean she’s guilty.

  I reach up and take out the notepad and pen I kept by the breastfeeding chair. Those early days of motherhood felt like I had become the CEO of a vast, sprawling company, with no training, and I had been forever making lists of things to buy, and what needed to go in the washing with the muslin cloths, and how much tummy time I needed to start introducing.

  I have always been hardworking, effortlessly organized. My binders at school and university were color-coded, alphabetized by topic, practice papers printed out on the first day of term and filed in the back of a lever arch file, ready for exam season. Becky used to think it was hilarious, but then I became a teacher, and every single one of my colleagues was like me, too. I spent my summers reorganizing my classroom displays, and Becky helped sometimes. “If you’re going to be anal about it, you may as well make them look pretty,” she’d said once, joining me with construction paper, glitter pens, and glue.

  But motherhood took even me by surprise. Owning a charity, having been a teacher for y
ears . . . and yet nothing could have prepared me. Keeping a small human fed, clean, and happy was the biggest undertaking of my life.

  It’s impossible to explain the juggernaut of motherhood to anybody who hasn’t been there: the vast reorientation that takes place in the labor suite and never really rights itself again or, rather, doesn’t need to. Even Scott, he didn’t matter, not up against Layla. He was her co-creator with me, but at her conception we ceased to matter. We passed the gauntlet to the next generation, but—and it was a surprise to me—it happened willingly, happily.

  I remember the first night we had started trying. Scott had made a lasagne—I loved to watch him cook. He was methodical and calm, one saucepan discarded and placed in the waiting dishwasher immediately. His layers of pasta and sauce and Bolognese were careful and neat. I had looked around our flat, after we had eaten: half a bottle of wine left on the driftwood table, but nothing else. I looked at it and thought: After all these years, I still love spending the evening with you. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, and I walked across to him. He immediately hugged me, as he always did, always would. Never moody, never highly strung, never petty. Always ready to hold me.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice if there was someone else here, just over there?” I had said lightly. “Somebody to look after. Somebody to . . .” I didn’t finish the sentence. Somebody to bind us together. It would have sounded wrong.

  He didn’t say anything, but his eyes were bright as he looked at me. “Yes?” he said. “Go on.”

  “A tiny little someone,” I said softly.

  And he’d nodded.

  It was simple to him. He was following the formula to life. Buy a flat, get married, have a baby. It was all instinct, all correct—none of Marc and Becky’s chaos—and there was nothing wrong with that. Perhaps it had been just right.

  We threw the condoms away and made love while the dishwasher rumbled in the background. I went to get a glass of water in the kitchen, later, and looked at it, our tidy kitchen, our life together, the underfloor heating warm under my bare feet, and felt totally and completely safe. I wanted our baby to feel that way, too. I was ready for it. To bring someone else into our lives, and to make them feel safe. I hoped they would have Scott’s calm manner, his still mind.

  I draw a dark, navy-blue swirl across the top of the page now, in the nursery. I was always making lists at work, too. Lists that led me to leave Layla with Becky. What had I been thinking? How could I? Scott tried to talk to me about it, a few months ago. The circumstances were unusual, he said. My job at Stop Gap, the charity, hadn’t been a normal one. I had stared silently into my dinner.

  It won’t bring her back, this list. But it might help me. I lean my head against the wall. I stare out of the window and look at the way the Brighton streetlights flare up into the sky and I write at the top of the pad:

  In order to recover, I need to understand it.

  I google the definition of murder and write it out on the next, clean, smooth piece of paper:

  Murder is committed where a person of sound mind and discretion unlawfully kills . . . with intent to kill or cause grievous bodily harm.

  I stare at the piece of paper. I think the defense’s case is that Layla’s death is unexplained. Natural causes, or an accident. No murder, just tragedy.

  On the left, I write:

  An accident?

  Underneath the list, I draw a line. On it, I write down Layla’s bedtime. Only Becky, Scott, and I know it, her routine. I start there. It’s as good a place as any. It won’t bring her back, but it might bring me peace. I stretch my legs out in front of me and nudge the rocking horse. It starts swaying gently, ridden by a phantom child.

  Above the timeline, I write:

  The night in question.

  6

  Judge Christopher Matthews, QC

  Christopher lets himself into his seafront town house alone. It smells empty. Cold, too, despite the late-summer heat wave. The cleaner has been here—he has never met her, but he imagines her to be petite and ruthless—and the wooden floor gleams as he sets his briefcase down on it. The dog walker has been, too, and Rumpole emerges, the sound of his claws on the tiles like clinking marbles.

  “All right,” Christopher says to him, as if he is a housemate or child.

  Rumpole stops and looks at him seriously, then turns his head to look sideways, pointedly, at his bowl.

  For the first time in years, Christopher feels unsettled by a case. He shivers in his cold kitchen and rubs the dog’s head.

  It is a baby case. Is that why it feels eerie? He supposes so. An eight-week-old, found unresponsive in the morning. Of course that is chilling. Of course it is.

  Not to mention the rest. Two sisters, ripped apart by the justice system. An ad hoc nannying arrangement gone horribly wrong.

  No, that isn’t why, he realizes, as he looks out onto his back garden. That isn’t why he feels spooked and strange.

  It is the cause of death.

  Smothering.

  Even the word is sinister. The images it brings to mind.

  “Horrible, isn’t it, Rumpole?” he says.

  Layla had been found unresponsive in the morning, and had been in the sole care of the defendant, Becky, for the entire previous evening. There had been no witnesses.

  It is cut-and-dried, surely.

  The experts were in agreement that the baby had died in the evening—between 8:00 P.M. and 9:30 P.M. The 999 call was made at eight o’clock the next morning. The delay doesn’t look good, Christopher thinks.

  That said, the police hadn’t suspected murder for a whole week. Cot death, they’d thought, until the postmortem showed smothering. No, not smothering, he corrects himself. Asphyxiation. There is a subtle difference. Often, asphyxiation means smothering, but not always. Sometimes, it is an accident. She could have rolled over. Become tangled up in her blankets. Something he hopes for. Natural causes. The only possible defense, he thinks.

  “We’ll have to see, won’t we?” he says.

  Rumpole looks back at him, cocking his head.

  Sadie bought them the dog. Completely out of nowhere, when they were forty-five, and still in love, he supposes. He arrived home from a case about one prisoner encouraging another to hang himself, his gut still in knots from it, and there was Sadie, her slim ankles tucked up underneath her, her legs tanned from the summer, a Labrador sitting upright, primly, next to her as if they were in a waiting room.

  “He was abandoned,” she said immediately. Apologetically, he thought.

  He studied the dog. Blond fur, eyes rimmed with dark brown. The dog considered him, too.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” he said to Sadie. A sentence he bitterly regrets.

  He pours himself a glass of water now from a bottle in the fridge. He should read the submissions, later tonight. There is something in Becky Blackwater’s past they want him to consider. He hopes it isn’t something bad. Something even worse than what is playing out in front of him.

  He’s never seen an aunt accused before. Had Becky done it? He holds the glass up to the light and looks at its cloudy contents. It is a hard-water area. Sadie had always said it made her hair fluffy. He had never said it didn’t. That her hair looked just fine. It was dark, no grays until she was in her late forties, and it shone with glimmers of light when she turned her head. Why hadn’t he told her how beautiful she was?

  Is Becky guilty? Hmm. She’d been the only person there that night. And eight-week-olds weren’t mobile enough to have accidents. What other explanation can there be? He hopes for one, though. Some tragic explanation he can’t quite think of at the moment.

  Her lawyer is under pressure, though: He can tell. He sips the water again. Sometimes, the lawyers look tense like that when their clients are innocent and they know it. But sometimes they just look like that when they’ve had a run of bad luck, toug
h cases. It’s hard to tell.

  Well, what will be will be, he tells himself. The jury will sort it. He reveres them, these laypeople who are summoned, who give up their time for justice, who listen carefully and—pretty much always—return the right result, even when faced with the most complex of legal concepts.

  He finishes the glass and gets the file out of his briefcase. Rumpole places his head on his lap, and Christopher shifts comfortably, content.

  Now. Yes. To Becky’s history. He sets the papers on the arm of the sofa and begins to leaf through them. As he does, his hands still. He reads the words again and again.

  Oh God, he thinks to himself. Oh God.

  Now, that changes things.

  tuesday

  7

  Martha

  I sometimes dream of Becky. Nothing much happens, I’m just watching her, as though my brain is trying to hang on to her features, to memorize her, so she doesn’t slip away. Her arched eyebrows. Her bottom lip, slightly bigger than her top. The crooked incisors. Those Bambi lashes.

  Pulling the laces of my trainers tight still gives me a kind of Pavlovian pleasure, even though all of my last three hundred morning runs have been bleak. It takes only five minutes to get down onto the seafront, and the air seems to expand as I arrive. They are digging up the ground, near the marina, and I slow as I negotiate pedestrians on a temporary walkway, joining throngs of commuters in my leggings and T-shirt.

  After a few minutes, I escape and run behind the beach huts.

  Do they wonder how I could leave her? The lawyers didn’t question me on it. Perhaps it is too delicate, or perhaps it is irrelevant. Either way, I appreciate it.

  In a funny sort of way, it was a morning run just over two years ago that led me to leave her, though she wasn’t born yet. Scott and I were in Kos, on an all-inclusive break during the school holidays, when I first saw the refugees, though such a word does not do them justice at all.