Sister
Page 28
He walked away from the car, not bothering to wait for me, not bothering to lock it again.
The woman with the spiky hair recognized him and yelled at him, “Leave playing God to God!”
“If God had done his job properly in the first place, we wouldn’t need to,” he snapped at her. She spat at him.
The demonstrator with the gray ponytail shouted, “Say no to designer babies!”
Professor Rosen pushed his way through them and went back into the building.
I didn’t think he was wicked, just weak and selfish. He simply couldn’t bear to give up his newfound status. But he had a mental alibi for his lack of action, exonerating circumstances that he could plead to himself—the cystic fibrosis cure is very important. You and I both know that.
I reached the tube station and only then realized that Professor Rosen had given me a crucial piece of information. When I’d asked him if he knew who was giving the injections for the CF trial at St. Anne’s, he’d said that he didn’t know, that he didn’t have access to that information. But he had talked about that person’s choosing fetuses “who genuinely had CF and at the same time test the illicit gene.” In other words, the person giving the injection was the same person who was running the CF trial at St. Anne’s. It had to be, if that person was responsible for choosing who was on it. And finding out who was in charge of the CF trial at St. Anne’s was light-years easier than finding the identity of someone giving a single injection.
It’s lovely out here, the sky a pure Wedgwood blue. As office workers straggle back to work, I remember at St. Mary’s how we had lessons outside when it was hot, the children and the teacher all pretending to be interested in a book while soaking up summer, and for a moment I forget how cold I am.
“Do you think Professor Rosen meant to tell you?” Mr. Wright asks.
“Yes. He’s far too clever and too pedantic to be careless. I think that he salved his conscience by hiding this tidbit of information, and it was up to me to have the intelligence to find it. Or maybe his better self won out at this one point of our conversation. But whatever it was, I now just had to find out who was administering the trial at St. Anne’s.”
My legs are almost completely numb now. I’m not sure that when I try to stand up, I’m going to be able to.
“I phoned William and he said that he would find out who was in charge of the CF trial and get back to me, he hoped by the end of the day. Then I phoned Kasia on her mobile, but she was engaged, presumably still chatting to her family, although by now her phone credit would have run out and it must be them phoning her. I knew that she was going to meet some Polish friends from church, so I thought I’d tell her when she got back. When we’d know who was behind it all and she’d be safe.”
In the meantime, I went to meet Mum at Petersham Nursery to choose a plant for your garden, as we’d arranged. I was glad of the distraction; I needed to do something rather than pace the flat waiting for William to ring me.
Kasia had been on at me again to lay flowers at the toilets building for you.
She’d told me I’d be putting my “odcisk palca” of love onto something evil. (Odcisk palca is “fingerprint,” the nearest translation we could find, and a rather lovely one.) But that was for other people to do, not me. I had to find that evil and confront him head on, not with flowers.
After weeks of cold and wet, it was the first warm dry day of early spring, and at the nursery camellias and primroses and tulips were unfolding into color. I kissed Mum and she hugged me tightly back. As we walked, under the canopy of old greenhouses, it was as if we’d stepped back in time and into a stately home’s garden.
Mum checked plants for frost hardiness and repeat flowering while I was preoccupied—after searching for almost two months, by the end of the day I should know who killed you.
For the first time since I’d arrived in London, I felt too warm and took off my expensive thick coat, revealing the outfit underneath.
“Those clothes, they’re awful, Beatrice.”
“They’re Tess’s.”
“I thought they must be. You have no money at all now?”
“Not really, no. Well some, but it’s tied up in the flat until it’s sold.”
I have to own up that I had been wearing your clothes for quite a while. My New York outfits seemed ludicrous outside that lifestyle, besides which I’d discovered how much more comfortable yours are. It should have felt odd, and definitely serious, to be wearing my dead sister’s clothes, but all I could imagine was your amusement at seeing me in your hand-me-downs of hand-me-downs, me who had to have the latest designer fashion, who had outfits dry-cleaned after one wearing.
“Do you know what happened yet?” asked Mum. It was the first time she’d asked me.
“No. But I think I will. Soon.”
Mum reached out her fingers and stroked a petal of an early-flowering clematis. “She’d have liked this one.”
And suddenly she was mute, a paroxysm of grief passing through her body that looked unbearable. I put my arm around her but she was unreachable. For a while I just held her, then she turned to me.
“She must have been so frightened. And I wasn’t there.”
“She was an adult; you couldn’t have been with her all the time.”
Her tears were a wept scream. “I should have been with her.”
I remembered being afraid as a child, and the sound of her dressing gown rustling in the dark and the smell of her face cream, and how just the sound of her and the smell of her banished my fears, and I wished she’d been with you too.
I hugged her tightly, trying to make myself sound believable.
“She wouldn’t have known anything about it, I promise, nothing at all. He put a sedative into her drink, so she’d have fallen asleep. She wouldn’t have been afraid. She died peacefully.”
I had learned finally, like you, to put love before truth.
We carried on through the greenhouse, looking at plants, and Mum seemed a little soothed by them.
“So you won’t be staying much longer then,” she said. “As you’ll know soon.”
I was hurt that she could think I could leave her again, after this.
“No. I’m going to stay, for good. Amias has said I can stay in the flat, pretty much rent free I think.”
My decision wasn’t entirely selfless. I’d decided to train as an architect. Actually, I needn’t put that in the past tense; it’s what I still want to do when the trial is over. I’m not sure whether they’ll take me, or how I’ll fund it and look after Kasia and her baby at the same time, but I want to try. I know my mathematical brain, obsessed with detail, will do the structural side well. And I’ll search myself for something of your creative ability. Who knows? Maybe it’s lying dormant somewhere, an unread code for artistic talent wrapped tightly in a coiled chromosome waiting for the right conditions to spring into life.
My phone signaled and I saw a text from William wanting to meet, urgently. I texted back the address of the flat. I felt sick with anticipation.
“You have to go?” asked Mum.
“In a little while, yes. I’m sorry.”
She stroked my hair. “You still haven’t had a haircut.”
“I know.”
She smiled at me, still stroking my hair. “You look so like her.”
22
When I arrived home, William was waiting for me at the bottom of the steps. He looked up at me, his face was white, his usual open expression pinched hard with anxiety.
“I’ve found out who’s in charge of the cystic fibrosis trial at St. Anne’s. Can I come in? I don’t think we should be…”
His normally measured voice was rushed and uneven. I opened the door and he followed me inside.
There was a moment before he spoke. I heard Granny’s clock tick twice into the silence.
“It’s Hugo Nichols.”
Before I could ask any questions, William turned to me, his voice still quick, pacing now.
“The CF trial at St. Anne’s has been hijacked,” I replied. “To test out another gene.”
“My God. How did you find that out?”
“Professor Rosen.”
“And he’s going to the police?”
“No.”
There was a moment before he spoke. “So it’ll be up to me then. To tell them about Hugo. I’d hoped it would be someone else.”
“It’s hardly telling tales, is it?”
“No. It’s not. I’m sorry.”
But I still couldn’t make sense of it. “Why would a psychiatrist run a genetic therapy trial?”
“He was a research fellow at Imperial. Before he became a hospital doctor. I told you that, didn’t I?”
I nodded.
“His research was in genetics,” continued William.
“You never said.”
“I never thought—my God—I just never thought it was relevant.”
“That was unfair of me. I’m sorry.”
I remembered William telling me that Dr. Nichols was rumored to have been brilliant and “destined for greatness,” but I’d thought the rumor must be wrong, believing instead my own opinion that he was scruffily hopeless. Remembering my view of Dr. Nichols, I realized that I’d dismissed him as a suspect not only because I’d thought him too hopeless to be violent, nor even because I’d thought he had no motive, but because of my entrenched belief that he was fundamentally decent.
William sat down, his face strained, his hands drumming the arms of the sofa. “I spoke to him about his research once, years ago now. He told me about a gene he’d discovered and that a company had bought it from him.”
“Do you know which company?”
“No. I’m not sure he even said. It was a long time ago. But I do remember some of what he said because he was so passionate, so different from how he usually is.” William was pacing again now, his movements jerky and angry. “He told me it had been his life’s ambition, actually no, he said it was his life’s purpose, to get his gene into humans. He said he wanted to leave his fingerprint on the future.”
“Fingerprint on the future?” I echoed, repelled, thinking of your future being cut from you.
William thought I didn’t understand. “It meant he wanted to get his gene into the germ cells so it would be passed to future generations. He said he wanted to ‘improve what it is to be human.’ But although the animal tests went well, he wasn’t allowed to test his gene on humans. He was told it was genetic enhancement and it’s illegal to use that in people.”
“What was ‘his’ gene?” I asked.
“He said it increases IQ.”
William said that he hadn’t believed him because it would have been such an extraordinary and astonishing achievement, and he was so young, and something else but I wasn’t really listening. Instead I remembered my visit to Chrom-Med.
I remembered that IQ was measured by fear.
“I thought he had to have been making most of it up,” continued William. “Or at least embellishing it a hell of a lot. I mean, if his research really was that glittering, why on earth leave it to go into humdrum hospital medicine? But he must have become a hospital doctor deliberately, waiting all this time for the opportunity to test out his gene in humans.”
I went into the garden as if I needed more literal space to accommodate the hugeness of these facts. I didn’t want to be alone with them and was glad when William joined me.
“He must have destroyed Tess’s notes,” William said. “And then fabricated the real reason why the babies died, so that their deaths couldn’t be connected to the trial. And somehow he managed to get away with it. Christ, it makes you talk like, I don’t know, somebody else, somebody off the telly or something. This is Hugo I’m talking about for God’s sake. A man I thought I knew. Liked.”
I’d been talking in that alien language since your body was found. I understood the realization that your previous vocabulary can’t describe what is happening to you now.
I looked at the little patch of earth where Mum and I had decided to plant the winter-flowering clematis for you.
“But someone else must have been part of this?” I said. “He can’t have been with Tess when she had her baby.”
“All doctors do six months obstetrics as part of their training. Hugo would know how to deliver a baby.”
“But surely someone would have noticed? A psychiatrist delivering a baby, surely someone…?”
“The labor ward is heaving with people and we’re desperately understaffed. If you see a white coat in a room, you’re just grateful and move on to the next potential calamity. Many of the doctors are temps and sixty percent of our midwives are too, so they don’t know who’s who.” He turned to me, his expression harsh with anxiety. “And he was wearing a mask, Bee, remember?”
“But surely someone…”
William took my hand. “We’re all so bloody busy. And we trust one another because it’s just too exhausting and too much hassle to do anything else, and we’re naive enough to think our colleagues are there for the same purpose as we are—to be treating people and trying to make them well.”
His body was taut and his hands were clenched tightly around mine. “He had me fooled too. I thought he was a friend.”
Despite the warm sun and the woolen picnic rug, I am shivering.
“I realized that he’d been perfectly positioned all along,” I say. “Who better than a psychiatrist to drive someone mad? To force someone into suicide? And I had only his word about what really happened at their session.”
“You thought he actually tried to force Tess into taking her life?”
“Yes. And then when she didn’t—even though she was being mentally tortured to a sadistic degree—then he murdered her.”
I thought it no wonder that Dr. Nichols had been so adamant about his failure to diagnose puerperal psychosis—loss of professional face was a small price to pay next to murder.
Mr. Wright glances at a note I remember him making much earlier. “You said that Dr. Nichols wasn’t among the people you suspected of playing Tess the lullabies?”
“No. As I said, I didn’t think he had a motive.” I pause a moment. “And because I’d thought he was a hopeless but decent man who had owned up to a terrible mistake.”
I am still shivering. Mr. Wright takes off his jacket and puts it around my shoulders.
“I thought Tess must have found out about his hijacking the CF trial and that’s why he murdered her. Everything fitted into place.”
“Fitted into place” sounds so neat, a piece completing the jigsaw picture and proving satisfying rather than metal grinding into metal, blood spilling rust colored onto the ground.
We stood in silence in your tiny back garden and I saw that the green shoots had grown a good few centimeters along the once-dead twigs, and that there were now tiny buds, everything alive and growing, the tight buds containing the open-petaled flowers of summer.
“We’d better phone the police,” said William. “Shall I do it or you?”
“You’re probably more credible. No history of crying wolf or getting hysterical.”
“Okay. What’s the policeman’s name?”
“Detective Inspector Haines. If you can’t get him, ask for Detective Sergeant Finborough.”
He picked up his mobile. “This is going to be bloody hard.” Then he dialed the number as I gave it to him, and asked for DI Haines.
As William spoke to DI Haines, telling him everything he had told me, I wanted to yell at Dr. Nichols. I wanted to hit him, blow after blow; I wanted to kill him, actually, and the sensation was oddly liberating. At last my rage had a target and it was a release to give way to it—finally throwing the grenade you’ve been holding for so long, pin out, that’s been threatening to destroy you, and you’re freed of th
e burden and tension as you hurl it.
William hung up. “He’s asked us to go down to the police station but wants us to give him an hour to get the top brass in.”
“You mean he’s asked you to go.”
“I’m sorry, Bee, coming in at the last minute, the Americans at the end of the war and all that.”
“But if we’re being honest, they’re the reason we won.”
“I think both of us should go. And I’m glad we have a little time to ourselves first.”
He reached over to my face and stroked a strand of hair away from my eyes.
He kissed me.
I hesitated. Could I step off my mountainside—or that moral tightrope you had me on?
I turned and walked into the flat.
He followed me and I turned and kissed him back. And I was grabbing the moment as hard as I could and living it to the full because who knew when it would be taken away? If all your death has taught me, it is that the present is too precious to waste. I finally understood the sacrament of the present moment, because it’s all we have.
He undressed me and I shed my old self. All of me exposed. The wedding ring was no longer hanging around his neck, his chest bare. And as my cool skin felt the warmth of him on me, my safety ropes fell away.
Mr. Wright produces a bottle of wine from a carrier bag, with two plastic cups from the water dispenser at the CPS offices, and I think how like him it is to be so thoughtful and organized. He pours me a cup and I drink it straight down, which is probably not sensible. He doesn’t comment on this, just as he didn’t comment on my having sex with William, and I like him so much for not being judgmental.
We lay in your bed together, the low rays of early-spring sunshine coming in through the basement window. I leaned against him and drank the tea he’d made for me, trying to make it last as long as possible, still feeling the warmth of his skin against mine, knowing that we would have to get out of bed, reenter the world again; and I thought of Donne chastising the busy old fool of a sun for making him leave his lover and marveled that his poetry now applied to me.
For a moment the wine has boosted me a little, I can feel it warming my body.