I checked that there was no one around, then climbed over the yellow and black ribbon. I didn’t think it strange then that there was no police officer. PC Vernon has since told me that a police officer always has to be present at a crime scene. They have to stand by that cordon, come what may, in all weather. She says she gets desperate for the loo. It’s this, she’s told me, that will end her career as a policewoman rather than being too empathetic. Yes, I’m procrastinating.
I went inside. I don’t need to describe to you what it looked like. Whatever state you were in, you’d have noticed your surroundings in detail. Your eyes are an artist’s eyes and I wish that the last place you’d seen hadn’t been stained and vile and ugly. I went into a cubicle and saw bloodstains on the concrete floor and splatters of blood on the peeling walls. I vomited into a basin, before realizing it wasn’t attached to any drain. I knew that no one would willingly choose to go into that place. No one would choose to die there.
I tried not to think of your being there for five nights, all alone. I tried to cling to my Chagall image of your leaving your body, but I couldn’t be sure of the time frame. Did you leave your body, as I so fervently hoped, the moment you died? Or maybe it was later, when you were found, when your body was seen by someone other than your murderer. Or was it in the morgue when the police sergeant pulled back the blanket and I identified you—did grief release you?
I walked out of the foul-smelling, vile building and breathed in the cold till it hurt my lungs, grateful for the white iced air. The bouquets made sense to me now. Decent people were trying to fight evil with flowers, the good fighting under the pennants of bouquets. I remembered the road to Dunblane lined with soft toys. I had not understood before why anyone would think a family whose child had been shot would want a teddy. But now I did; against the sound of gunshots, a thousand compassionate soft toys muffled a little their reverberating horror. “Mankind isn’t like this,” the offerings say, “we are not like this. The world isn’t only this way.”
I started reading the cards. Some of them were illegible, soaked with snow, the ink melting into the sodden paper. I recognized Kasia’s name—she’d left a teddy with “Xavier” in large childish writing, the dot of the i a heart, crosses to show kisses, circles for hugs. The snob in me flinched at her bad taste, but I was also touched and felt guilty for my snobbishness. I resolved to look up her phone number when I got home and thank her for her thoughtfulness.
I gathered up the legible cards to take away with me—no one else would want to read them but Mum and me. As I put them into my pockets, I saw a middle-aged man with a Labrador a little distance away, his dog on a tight leash. He was carrying a bunch of chrysanthemums. I remembered him from the afternoon you were found, watching the police activity; the dog was straining to get away then too. He was hesitating, maybe waiting for me to go before he laid his flowers. I went up to him. He was wearing a tweed hat and a Barbour jacket, a country squire who should be out on his estate not in a London park.
“Were you a friend of Tess’s?” I asked.
“No. I didn’t even know her name till it was on the television,” he replied. “We just used to wave, that’s all. When you pass someone quite frequently, you start to form some kind of connection. Just a small one of course, more like recognition.” He blew his nose. “I’ve really no right to be upset, absurd I know. How about you, did you know her?”
“Yes.”
No matter what DS Finborough said, I knew you. The Country Squire hesitated, unsure of the etiquette of keeping up a conversation by floral tributes. “That policeman’s gone then? He said the cordon will be going down soon, now that it’s not a crime scene.”
Of course it wasn’t a crime scene, not when the police had decided you’d committed suicide. The Country Squire seemed to be hoping for a reaction; he prodded a little further.
“Well you knew her, so you probably know what’s going on better than I do.”
Perhaps he was enjoying having a chat about this. The sensation of tears pricking isn’t unpleasant. Terror and tragedy at enough removes are titillating, exciting even, to have a little connection to grief and tragedy that isn’t yours. He could tell people, and no doubt did, that he was involved a little in all this, a bit player in the drama.
“I am her sister.”
Yes, I used the present tense. You being dead didn’t stop me being your sister; our relationship didn’t go into the past—otherwise I wouldn’t be grieving now, present tense. The squire looked appalled. I think he hoped I was at a decent emotional remove too.
I walked away.
The snow, which had been falling randomly in soft flakes, became denser and angrier. I saw that the children’s snowman was disappearing, engorged with new snow. I decided to go out of a different park exit, the memory of how I felt leaving the previous time too raw to be walked over again.
As I neared the Serpentine Gallery, the blizzard became fiercer, suffocating trees and grass with white. Soon your flowers and Xavier’s bears would be covered, turned invisible. My feet were numb, my gloveless hand aching with cold. The vomiting had left me with a foul taste in my mouth. I thought I’d go into the Serpentine Gallery to see if they had a café with water. But as I approached the building, I saw it was in darkness, the doors chained. A notice on the window said the gallery was not opening again until April. Simon could not have met you there. He was the last person to see you alive and he’d lied. His lie played over in my head, like tinnitus, the only sound not muffled by the falling snow.
I walked along Chepstow Road back to your flat, holding on my mobile for DS Finborough, my pockets stuffed with the cards from teddies and bouquets. From a distance, I saw Todd outside, pacing in short anxious strides. Mum had already taken the train home. He followed me into the flat, relief mutating his anxiety into annoyance. “I tried to phone you, but you’ve been engaged.”
“Simon lied about meeting Tess at the Serpentine Gallery. I have to tell DS Finborough.”
Todd’s reaction, or rather lack of it, should have prepared me for DS Finborough’s. But just then DS Finborough came on the line. I told him about Simon.
He sounded patient, gentle even. “Maybe Simon was just trying to look good.”
“By lying?”
“By saying they met at a gallery.” I could hardly believe DS Finborough was making excuses for him. “We did talk to Simon, when we knew he’d been with her that day,” he continued. “And there’s no reason to think that he had any involvement in her death.”
“But he lied about where they were.”
“Beatrice, I think you should try to—”
I flipped through the clichés I imagined he was about to use: I should try to “move on,” “put it behind me,” even with a little flourish of clauses “accept the truth and get on with my life.” I interrupted before any of these clichés took verbal form.
“You’ve seen the place where she died, haven’t you?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Do you think anyone would choose to die there?”
“I don’t think it was a matter of choice.”
For a moment I thought he had started to believe me, then realized he was blaming mental illness for your murder. Like an obsessive compulsive who has no choice but to repeat the same task a hundred times, a woman with postpartum psychosis gets swept along by her mental tide of madness to inevitable self-destruction. A young woman with friends, family, talent and beauty who is found dead arouses suspicion. Even if her baby has died, there’s still a question mark about the end of her life. But throw psychosis into the list of life-affirming adjectives and you take away the question mark; you give a mental alibi to the killer, framing the victim for her own murder.