I did try to argue with him, but I might as well have been playing the triangle on the edge of the M4. I know, one of your sayings, but remembering it comforted me a little as he shouted me down. And as he patronized me, not listening to me, I saw how scruffy my clothes were and that my hair needed cutting and I was no longer polite, or respectful of his authority, and it was no wonder he didn’t pay attention to me. I didn’t used to pay attention to people like me either.
As DS Finborough escorted me out of the police station, I turned to him. “He didn’t listen to a word I said.”
DS Finborough was clearly embarrassed. “It’s the accusation you made about Emilio Codi. And Simon Greenly.”
“So it’s because I’ve cried wolf too often?”
He smiled. “And with such conviction. It doesn’t help that Emilio Codi made a formal complaint against you and that Simon Greenly is the son of a cabinet minister.”
“But surely he must be able to see that something’s wrong?”
“Once he has arrived at a conclusion, backed up by facts and logic, it’s hard to dissuade him. Unless there are heavier counterbalancing facts.”
I thought DS Finborough was too decent and professional to publicly criticize his boss.
“And you?”
He paused a moment, as if unsure whether to tell me. “We’ve had the forensic results back on the Sabatier knife. It was brand-new. And it had never been used before.”
“She couldn’t have afforded Sabatier.”
“I agree—it doesn’t fit when she didn’t even own a kettle or a toaster.”
So the last time he’d been in the flat, when he’d come to talk about the postmortem results, he’d noticed. It hadn’t just been, as I’d thought at the time, a compassionate visit. I was grateful to him for being first a policeman. I worked up the courage to ask my question.
“So do you now believe that she was murdered?”
There was a moment while my question was static in the silence between us.
“I think there’s a query.”
“Are you going to answer your ‘query’?”
“I’ll try. That’s the best I can offer.”
Mr. Wright is concentrating intently on what I am telling him, his body bent toward mine, his eyes responding—not a passive but an active participant in the tale and I realize how seldom people are fully listened to.
“When I left the police station, I went straight to Kasia’s flat. I needed her and Mitch to be tested for the CF gene. If either of them tested negative, then the police would have to act.”
Kasia’s dingy sitting room had become damper since my last visit. A one-bar electric fire didn’t stand a chance against the coldly seeping concrete walls. The thin fabric of the Indian throw at the closed window flapped in the draft around the window frame. Three weeks had passed since I’d last seen her, and she was nearly eight months pregnant now. She looked bewildered.
“But I don’t understand, Beatrice.”
Again I wished someone wouldn’t use the intimacy of my name, this time because, coward that I was, I didn’t want to be close to her as I distressed her. I put on my corporate distancing voice as I spelled it out, “Both parents have to carry the cystic fibrosis gene for the baby to be born with cystic fibrosis.”
“Yes. They tell me in clinic.”
“Xavier’s father doesn’t carry the gene. So Xavier couldn’t have had cystic fibrosis.”
“Xavier not ill?”
“No.”
Mitch came in from the bathroom. He must have been eavesdropping. “For fuck’s sake, she just lied about who she had sex with.”
Without the plaster dust his face was handsome, but the contrast between his finely sculpted face and muscular tattooed body was oddly menacing.
“She had no embarrassment about having sex,” I said. “If she’d been having sex with someone else as well, she would have told me. There was no reason for her to lie. I really think you should get tested, Mitch.”
Using his name was a mistake. Instead of sounding friendly, I sounded like a primary schoolteacher. Kasia was still looking bemused. “I have cystic fibrosis gene. I test plus for that.”
“Yes. But maybe Mitch is negative, maybe he isn’t a carrier and—”
“Yeah right,” he interrupted, sarcasm biting. “The doctors are wrong and you know best?” He looked at me as if he hated me; perhaps he did. “Your sister lied about who the father was,” he said. “And who’d blame her? With you looking down your nose at her. Patronizing bitch.”
I hoped he was being verbally aggressive for Kasia’s sake, that he was trying to prove that your baby did have cystic fibrosis, as their baby had had cystic fibrosis, that the treatment wasn’t a con. And the only way for that to be true was for you to be a liar and me an uptight, patronizing bitch. But he was enjoying his verbal attack too much for it to be for a kinder reason.
“Truth is, she probably fucked so many men she had no idea who the father was.”
Kasia’s voice was quiet but clear. “No. Tess not like that.”
I remembered how she’d said you were her friend, the simplicity of her loyalty. The glance he gave her was spiked with anger but she continued, “Beatrice is right.” As she spoke, she stood up and I knew as I watched that reflexive movement that he had hit her in the past, that she’d instinctively stood up to avoid him.
The silence in the room met the damp coldness in the walls, and as it continued I wanted the heat of a row, for words to be fighting, rather than the fear that it would be fought later with physical brutality. Kasia motioned me to the door and I went with her.
We walked down the stained sharp-edged concrete steps. Neither of us said anything. As she turned to go back, I took hold of her arm. “Come and stay with me.”
Her hand moved to her bump, and she didn’t meet my eye. “I can’t.”
“Please, Kasia.”
I startled myself. The most I’d ever given of myself before was my signature on a check to a worthy cause, but now I was asking her to stay and really hoping that she would. It was the hope that startled me. She turned away from me and walked back up the stained concrete steps toward the cold, damp flat and whatever waited for her there.
As I walked home, I wondered if she’d told you why she once loved Mitch. I was sure that she must have, that she wasn’t the kind of person who had sex without love. I thought how William’s wedding ring was a sign that he was taken, spoken for, but that the small gold crucifix Kasia wore around her neck wasn’t about ownership or promises; it was a no-trespassing sign unless you have love and kindness for the wearer. And I was furious that Mitch was ignoring it. Because he did ignore it, violently.
At just after midnight, the doorbell rang and I hurried to answer it, hoping that it would be Kasia. When I saw her standing on the doorstep, I didn’t see her tarty clothes and cheap hair color, only the bruises on her face and the welts on her arms.
That first night we shared the bed. She snored like a steam train and I remembered you telling me that pregnancy could make you snore. I liked the sound. I had spent night after night awake, listening to my grief, my sobbing the only sound in the room, my heart screaming as it rhythmically thumped into the mattress, and her snoring was an everyday sound, innocent and annoyingly soothing. That night I slept deeply for the first time since you’d died.