I stop at the top as an image of Vivien’s coffin passes me, carried by unknown men in black, helping her on her last journey down these stairs and out of Bulburrow. It is a final call for caution, to make sure that this is how I really want to change the future. But I am now certain I have no choice: I am the puppet of myself.
I step aside to make way for the procession and continue across the landing, through the double doors and onto Vivien’s landing. I’m concentrating, blocking out everything but the Method that the palm of my hand has helped me to devise. It is so easy. Thank you, Maud. After all, it was she who had taught me how to substitute for my lack of natural strength, she who had taught me how to believe in myself. What would she say, do you suppose, one daughter killing the other? Is she looking at me now from her heaven and taking full responsibility for my actions, as she always did?
As I enter the room Vivien’s clock says fourteen minutes past four. Her eyes are closed, she doesn’t know yet that I have entered. I can now see the rest of the room, which had been out of view from my listening post on the landing. It is such an onslaught of color and clutter that my eyes wander for too long on the accessories before I look at Vivien. She has hung fairy lights round the picture rail and stuck photos of herself with people I don’t recognize on the wall above her bed. A mirror has more photos jammed in its frame, and on the other side of her bed, on the floor, there are three tea-stained mugs and a dirty plate. Above this, four nails have been banged into the wall as hooks and clothes slung over them. A small dressing table is covered with a disarray of bottles—perfume, face creams and other unguents—without a hint of order to any of it. One or two items have fallen off while a tin of talc hangs over the edge on its side, having coughed some of its contents onto the floor through the holes in its lid. It taunts me, the way it lies teetering, and I am overcome with an unbearable desire to push it back on. With a great effort of will I ignore its precariousness and instead summon myself to concentrate on the matter at hand. I focus on Vivien.
Her eyes are now flickering open and shut. She is trying to keep them directed, but they race peevishly this way and that within their sockets. Her right hand is lying palm up on the bedcover, quite close to me, and when she opens and closes it, grabbing at the air, I realize it is an invitation for me to hold it. I don’t want to be part of a last-minute fingertip reconciliation, but I oblige her handhold anyway, like swallowing a mouthful of something disgusting because soon you know it will all be over.
“The doctor’s on his way,” I lie. “Eileen is waiting for him and will bring him up.” She squeezes my hand. I stare at her clock: method, results, conclusions, method, results, conclusions. Tick, tock, tick. The second hand is about to pass Go, pushing the minute hand to half past four by this clock, tick, tock, four, three, two, one, Go. It’s four-thirty in the afternoon of 27 April.
“He says you must drink some water. That’s very important, he says. It’ll make you feel better. Can you sit up?”
Vivien’s eyes are now open, not fully, but open, and she manages to shift herself a little way up the bed so that her head is more upright on her pillow. I wonder vaguely, as she gulps thankfully at the water, whether if I’d had it in me to kill the flies in Lower 5B when I was thirteen, I might not now have it in me to kill my sister at seventy.
I put the glass on the floor beside the bed. Vivien’s eyes stare blankly above her. Her lips move, drinking the air like a fish out of water, and she beats her arm on the bed, just once. I wonder, with sudden curiosity, if I’m about to feel something like a life force leaving her body as she dies, but I don’t. Her body starts to convulse, wracking violently, as if another being is trying to expel itself through her skin. I don’t mind watching her. I know she’s not feeling this. She’s already dead. But I’ll tell you something—as I watch the involuntary twitches of a poisoned body, I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t admit I find it interesting, from a purely scientific point of view, of course.
I’ll tell you more about it, if you like. Potassium cyanide is what’s called a synaptic blocker poison. It blocks the tiny electrical impulses with which our nervous system functions, at the synapses, the communication junctions between nerves. At a molecular level the poison is a compound that can fit into the same receptor sites that the synaptic messenger compounds would normally lock into, thereby inhibiting them doing their job and preventing any signals being passed along the nerves. In other words, the body is paralyzed within seconds, as long as you administer enough to block the receptor sites before the body can metabolize and excrete the poison. It’s a race between the kidneys’ toxin-removal efficiency and the potency of the poison.
Vivien is still now and I am stroking her hair because—I don’t know if you will understand this—I still love her. I love her and hate her at the same time. I even love the same parts of her that I hate, her vitality and her color, her disruption and disorder, her humor and her despair, her conceit and her narcissism, her everything that isn’t me. Now that she is dead, I can already feel the love overriding the hatred once more. Besides our moment of happiness on the porch when Vivien first came home on Friday, these are the next best few minutes I’ve had with her. She should have stayed away. Why did she come home? I wonder. I know so little about her.
I hear a car advancing up the drive and, glancing through the window, I am surprised to see it’s a police car.
Chapter 22
PC Bolt and Inspector Piggott
The policeman steps out of the car onto the drive as I walk towards him. My new self had little trouble in opening the front door, and I’m feeling far less threatened as I walk up to him than I would have felt yesterday with any other visitor. The sun catches his windscreen, dazzling me. The sky is a watery blue and I can smell honeysuckle, carried to me on the breeze.
“Vivien Morris?” he says, from afar, and I think of Vivien, her body ratcheting her life from itself. “I’m PC Bolt, from the Beaminster station. Sorry, did I get you out of bed?” he says, looking at my nightgown, then the open-toed slippers on my feet.
PC Bolt looks about nineteen. He’s standing by his car, leaning on the open door, which makes a barrier between us, like a desk.
“No,” I say, but I’m trying hard to work out how and why he’s here, how on earth he found out so quickly that I’ve poisoned my sister. For a moment I imagine he has a special insight that allows him to detect any injustices being carried out within the county.
“There’s nothing to be alarmed about,” he says, smiling. “It’s what we call a courtesy call.” My sense of relief gives way to light-headedness and I have to steady myself. I remember I’ve not eaten today. Once my routine goes, I forget to do things like eat.
“Oh, and also,” he continues flippantly, “we had a very excited telephone call from a”—he takes a flip-pad from his breast pocket and consults it—“from an Eileen Turner, who lives at Willow Cottage. She was frantic, saying you were supposed to be having tea with her this afternoon at four and as it’s now, well, long gone…”
“Is it?” I check my digital wristwatch: 4:12.
“Well, I just meant it’s past teatime and she thought something might be wrong because you didn’t turn up. I did tell her you’d most probably forgotten, but she didn’t think you would have, and she was insistent that I come and make sure myself and”—he shakes his head in a way that makes me wonder how often he’s had to mediate tea dates among the elderly—“you know what some of these old dears can be like. She didn’t want to walk up to the house herself.” He pauses, perhaps waiting for me to say something. “She made me promise her I’d pay you a visit and check that everything was all right,” he says apologetically. I don’t say anything.