I interrupted him, angry that he dared tell me about you when he didn’t know you. “Have you ever watched someone die from cystic fibrosis?” I asked. He shook his head, and was going to say something, but I headed him off. “We watched our brother struggling to breathe and we couldn’t help him. He tried so hard to live, but he drowned in his own fluid and there was nothing we could do. When you’ve watched someone you love fight for life, that hard, you value it too highly to ever throw it away.”
“As I said, in normal circumstances, I’m sure—”
“In any circumstances.”
My emotional assault had not dented his certainty. I would have to convince him with logic: muscular, masculine argument. “Surely there must be a connection to the threatening phone calls she was getting?”
“Her psychiatrist told us that they were most likely all in her head.”
I was astonished. “What?”
“He’s told us that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.”
“The phone calls were delusional and my sister was mad? Is that it now?”
“Beatrice—”
“You told me before that she was suffering from postpartum depression. Why has that suddenly changed to psychosis?”
Against my hectoring anger, his tone was so measured. “From the evidence, that seems now to be the most probable.”
“But Amias said the phone calls were real, when he reported her missing, didn’t he?”
“But he was never actually there when she got one of the phone calls.”
I thought about telling him that your phone was unplugged when I arrived. But that didn’t prove anything. The calls could still have been delusional.
“Tess’s psychiatrist has told us that symptoms of postpartum psychosis include delusions and paranoia,” DS Finborough continued. “Sadly, many of the women suffering also have thoughts of harming themselves, and tragically some actually do.”
“But Tess didn’t.”
“A knife was found next to her body, Beatrice.”
“You think she carried a knife now?”
“It was a kitchen one. And it had her fingerprints on it.”
“What kind of kitchen knife?”
I’m not sure why I asked, maybe some dimly remembered seminar on the questioner taking authority. There was a moment of hesitation before he replied, “A Sabatier five-inch boning knife.”
But I only heard the word Sabatier, maybe because it distracted me from the ugly violence of the rest of the description. Or maybe the word Sabatier struck me because it was so absurd to think you would own one.
“Tess couldn’t possibly have afforded a Sabatier knife.”
Was this conversation degenerating into farce? Bathos?
“Maybe she got it from a friend,” suggested DS Finborough. “Or it was a gift from someone.”
“She would have told me.”
Sympathy tempered his look of disbelief. I wanted to make him understand that we shared the details of our lives, because they were the threads that braided us so closely together. And you would have been certain to tell me about a Sabatier knife, because it would have had the rare value of being a detail in your life that tied directly into mine—our lives sharing top-end kitchenware.
“We told each other the little things. That’s what made us so close, I think, all the small things, and she’d have known I’d want to hear about a Sabatier knife.”
No, I know, it didn’t sound convincing.
DS Finborough’s voice was sympathetic but firm, and I briefly wondered if, like parents, the police believed in setting parameters. “I understand how hard this must be for you to accept. And I understand why you need to blame someone for her death, but—”
I interrupted with my certainty about you. “I’ve known her since she was born. I know her better than anyone else possibly could. And she would never have killed herself.”
He looked at me with compassion; he didn’t like doing this. “You didn’t know when her baby died, did you?”
I couldn’t answer him, winded by his punch to a part of me already bruised and fragile. He’d told me once before, indirectly, that we weren’t close, but then it came with the upside that you had run off somewhere without telling me. Not being close had meant you were still alive. But this time there was no huge payoff.
“She bought airmail stamps, just before she died, didn’t she? From the post office on Exhibition Road. So she must have written to me.”
“Has a letter from her arrived?”
I’d asked a neighbor to go in and check the apartment daily. I’d phoned our local post office in New York and demanded they search. But there was nothing, and it would surely have arrived by now.
“Maybe she meant to write to me but was prevented.”
I heard how weak it sounded. DS Finborough was looking at me with sympathy.
“I think Tess was going through hell after her baby died,” he said. “And it isn’t a place anyone could join her. Even you.”
I went through to the kitchen, “stropping off,” as Mum used to call it, but it wasn’t a strop, more of an absolute physical denial of what he was saying. A few minutes later I heard the front door shut. They didn’t know that words could seep through your badly fitting windows.
PC Vernon’s voice was quiet. “Wasn’t that a little…?” She trailed off, or maybe I just couldn’t hear.
Then DS Finborough’s voice, sounding sad, I thought. “The sooner she accepts the truth, the sooner she’ll realize she’s not to blame.”
But I knew the truth, as I know it now: we love each other; we are close; you would never have ended your own life.
A minute or so later, PC Vernon came back down the steps, carrying your knapsack.
“I’m sorry, Beatrice. I meant to give you this.”
I opened the knapsack. Inside was just your wallet with your library card, your travel card and your student ID card—membership badges of a society with libraries and public transport and colleges for studying art, not a society in which a twenty-one-year-old can be murdered in a derelict toilets building and left for five days before being dismissed as a suicide case.
I tore open the lining, but there was no letter to me trapped inside.
PC Vernon sat on the sofa next to me. “There’s this too.” She took a photograph out of a board-backed envelope, sandwiched between more cardboard. I was touched by her care, as I had been by the way she’d packed your clothes for the reconstruction. “It’s a photo of her baby. We found it in her coat pocket.”
I took the Polaroid from her, uncomprehending. “But her baby died.”
PC Vernon nodded—as a mother she had more understanding. “Then maybe a photo was even more important to her.”
To start with, all I looked at in the photo were your arms as you held the baby, your uncut wrists. The photo didn’t show your face, and I didn’t dare imagine it. I still don’t.
I looked at him. His eyes were closed, as if asleep. His eyebrows were just a pencil line of down, barely formed and impossibly perfect, nothing crude or cruel or ugly in the world had ever been seen by his face. He was beautiful, Tess. Faultless.
I have the photo with me now. I carry it all the time.
PC Vernon wiped her tears so that they wouldn’t drop onto the photo. She had no edge around her compassion. I wondered if someone as open would be able to stay as a policewoman. I was trying to think of something other than your baby, other than you as you held him.
As soon as I’ve told Mr. Wright about the Polaroid, I abruptly stand up and say I need to go to the loo. I get to the ladies’ room, tears running as soon as the door closes behind me. There’s a woman at the basins, maybe a secretary, or lawyer. Whoever she is, she’s discreet enough not to comment on my tears, but gives a little half smile as she leaves, a gesture of some kind of solidarity. There’s more for me to tell you, but not Mr. Wright, so as I sit in here and have a weep for Xavier, I’ll tell you the next part.