“Do you know that she’s dead?” I asked, and the words sounded ridiculous—an over-the-top stagy piece of dialogue that I didn’t know how to deliver. Then I remembered your colorless face.
“Yes. I saw it on the local news. A terrible, terrible tragedy.” His default voice mode was charm, however inappropriate, and I thought that to charm can also mean to entrap. “I just came to get my things. I know it seems like indecent haste—”
I interrupted him, “Do you know who I am?”
“A friend, I presume.”
“Her sister.”
“I’m sorry. I’m intruding.”
He couldn’t hide the adrenaline in his voice. He started to walk toward the door, but I blocked his path.
“Did you kill her?”
I know, pretty blunt, but then this wasn’t a carefully crafted Agatha Christie moment.
“You’re obviously very upset—” he replied, but I cut him off.
“You tried to make her have an abortion. Did you want her out of the way too?”
He put down what he was carrying and I saw that they were canvases. “You’re not being rational, and that’s understandable, but—”
“Get out! Get the fuck out!”
I yelled my ugly grief at him, yelling over and over, still yelling when he’d gone. Amias came hurrying in through the open front door, bleary from sleep. “I heard shouting.” In the silence he looked at my face. He knew without my saying anything. His body caved and then he turned away, not wanting me to witness his grief.
The phone rang and I let the answering machine get it. “Hi, it’s Tess.”
For a moment the rules of reality had been broken, you were alive. I grabbed the receiver.
“Darling? Are you there?” asked Todd. What I had heard earlier was, of course, just your answering machine greeting. “Beatrice? Have you picked up?”
“She was found in a public lavatory. She’d been there for five days. All alone.”
There was a pause, the information not squaring with his predicted scenario. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Todd was my safety rope. That was why I’d chosen him. Whatever happened, I’d have him to hold on to.
I looked at the pile of canvases Emilio had left behind. They were all nudes of you. You’ve never had my shyness that way. He must have painted them. In each of the paintings your face was turned away.
“The next morning you went to DS Finborough with your concerns?” Mr. Wright asks.
“Yes. He said that Emilio collecting his paintings was extremely insensitive, but not necessarily anything more than that. He told me the coroner would be asking for a postmortem and we should wait for the results before making any accusations or reaching any conclusions.”
His language was so measured, so controlled. It infuriated me. Maybe in my volatile state I was jealous of his balance.
“I thought that DS Finborough would at least ask Emilio what he was doing the day she was killed. He told me that until the results of the postmortem were available, they wouldn’t know when Tess had died.”
Miss Crush Secretary comes in with mineral water and I am glad of the interruption. Oddly dehydrated, I gulp down the water and notice first her pearly pink nail varnish and then a wedding ring on her finger. Why was it that I had checked only Mr. Wright’s left hand yesterday? I feel sad for Mrs. Crush Secretary, who, while not in any danger of imminent sexual betrayal, is emotionally cuckolded 9:00 to 5:30 on a daily basis. Mr. Wright smiles at her. “Thanks, Stephanie.” His smile is innocent of any overtone, but its very openness is alluring and can be misinterpreted. I wait for her to leave.
“So I went to see Emilio Codi myself.”
I go back into that precipitous past, my grip a little firmer because of nail varnish and wedding rings.
I left the police station, anger sparking through exhaustion. DS Finborough had said that they didn’t yet know when you had died, but I knew. It was Thursday. You left Simon by the Lido in Hyde Park on that day as he’d said, but you never got out of the park. Nothing else made any sense.
I phoned your art college and a secretary with a German accent tartly told me Emilio was sorting out course work at home. But when I told her I was your sister, she sweetened and gave me his address.
As I drove there I remembered our conversation about where Emilio lives.
“I’ve no idea. We only meet at the college or at my flat.”
“So what’s he trying to hide?”
“It just doesn’t crop up, that’s all.”
“I expect he lives somewhere like Hoxton. Trendily middle class, but with the chic edge of poor people around.”
“You really loathe him, don’t you?”
“With just enough graffiti to keep the urban jungle look. I reckon people like him go out at night with spray paints just so the area stays trendily tagged and doesn’t degenerate into middle-class, middle-income nappy valley.”
“What’s he done to deserve this?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps having sex with my little sister, getting her pregnant and then abnegating all responsibility.”
“You make me sound like I’m completely incompetent at running my own life.”
I let your words hang in the wire between our two phones. I could hear the chuckle in your voice. “You left out him being my tutor and abusing his position of authority.”
You never could take my seriousness seriously. Well, I found out where he lives, and it isn’t Hoxton or Brixton or any of those places where the trendy middle classes arrive once there’s a café with skinny lattes. It’s Richmond, beautiful, sensible Richmond. And his house is not a Richard Rogers type of building but a Queen Anne gem whose large front garden alone must be worth a street or two in Peckham. I walked through his impressively long front garden and knocked on his original period doorknocker.
You can’t believe I went through with it, can you? My actions seem extreme, but new raw grief strips away logic and moderation. Emilio opened the door and I thought the adjectives which apply to him are stock phrases in romantic fiction: he is devilishly handsome; he has animal magnetism; adjectives that have threat embedded in them.
“Did you kill her?” I asked. “You didn’t answer my question last time.”
He tried to close the door on me, but I held it open. I had never used physical force against a man before and I was surprisingly strong. All those meticulously kept meetings with a personal trainer had had a purpose after all.
“She told her landlord she was getting frightening phone calls. Was that you?” I asked.
Then I heard a woman’s voice in the hallway behind him, “Emilio?” His wife joined him at the doorway. I still have our e-mails about her.
From: tesshemming@hotmail.co.uk
To: Beatrice Hemming’s iPhone
Hi Bee, I asked him about her, before any of this started, and he told me that they married in haste and are at leisure together but not repenting. They enjoy each other’s company but the physical relationship between them stopped years ago. Neither of them is jealous of the other. Happy now?