Sister

Then he smiled, as if reassuring me as much as himself that I needn’t have such worries. “I did think about that. But the police know how you’ve been since Tess died; they already see you as a little unhinged, don’t they? And even if they don’t get it themselves, any psychiatrist will tell them that you chose this place to kill yourself. You wanted to kill yourself where your little sister had died.”

He took the cap off the bottle of sleeping pills.

“After all, if we’re being logical, who in their right mind would choose to end the life of two people in the same building?”

End the life. He was turning brutal killing into something passive, as if it was assisted euthanasia and not murder.

As he poured the pills into his cupped hand, I wondered who would question my suicide or vouch for my sane state of my mind. Dr. Nichols, at whom I had furiously sung the lullaby? Even if he thought I wasn’t suicidal at our last meeting, he would probably doubt that diagnosis, as he did with you, and blame himself for not seeing the signs. And DI Haines? He already thought I was overly emotional and irrational, and I doubted DS Finborough, even if he wanted to try, could convince him otherwise. Todd thought I was “unable to accept the facts,” and many others agreed, even if they were too kind to say so to my face. They’d think that in emotional turmoil after your death, irrational and depressed, I could easily have become suicidal. The sensible, conventional person I’d been a few months ago would never have been found dead from an overdose in this place. They would have asked questions for her but not for the person I had become.

And Mum? I’d told her I was about to find out what happened to you and I knew she would tell the police that. But I knew too that they wouldn’t believe her, or rather what I’d said to her. And I thought that after a while Mum wouldn’t believe it either, because she’d choose to bear the guilt of my suicide rather than think that I had felt a moment of this fear. And I found it unbearable to imagine her anguish when she’d have to mourn me too, with no one to comfort her.

He put the empty bottle in my coat pocket. Then he told me that the postmortem must show I swallowed the pills whole because that would make it look voluntary. I am trying to shut out his voice but it breaks in, refusing to be silenced.

“Who can make another person swallow pills against her will?”

He held a knife to my throat; in the darkness I could feel the cold edge of metal against the warmth of my skin.

“This isn’t what I am. It’s like a nightmare and I’ve turned into a stranger.”

I think he expected my pity.

He put his hand with the pills in it up to my mouth. The bottle had been full, which meant at least twelve pills. The dose was one in twenty-four hours. Any more was dangerous. I remembered reading that on the label. I knew that twelve would be more than enough to kill me. I remembered Todd telling me I should take one, but refusing because I had to stay alert; because I wasn’t allowed a few hours of drugged oblivion, however much I craved it; because I knew taking a sedative would be a cowardly reprieve that I’d want to repeat over and over again. This is what I was thinking as he pushed the pills into my mouth, my tongue uselessly trying to stop him.

Then he tipped water from a mineral water bottle into my mouth and told me to swallow.

It’s dark now, countryside black. I think of all the nocturnal creatures that are out here now the humans have gone home. I think of that storybook we had about the teddy bears coming out at night to play in the park. “There goes the bear at number three, sliding down the slide.”

“Beatrice …?”

Mr. Wright is helping me along, prompting and coaxing so I can finish this statement. His hand still holds mine, but I can hardly see his face anymore.

“Somehow I managed to wedge the pills behind my teeth and inside my cheeks, and the water went down my throat with just one, maybe two, I think. But I knew it wouldn’t be long before they all dissolved in my own saliva. I wanted to spit them out, but his flashlight was still full on my face.”

“And then?”

“He took a letter out of the inside pocket of his jacket. It was from Tess to me. It must have been the one she was writing on the park bench just before she died.”

I pause, my tears falling onto the grass, or maybe onto Mr. Wright; in the dark I can’t tell.

“He shone his flashlight on her letter so he could read it out to me. It meant that the flashlight was no longer shining on me. I had a brief opportunity, and I hung my head down toward my knees and spat out the sleeping pills onto my lap. They fell into the folds of my coat and made no sound.”

You know what you wrote to me, but it was William’s voice not yours that I heard, William’s voice telling me of your fear, your desperation, your grief. It was your murderer’s voice telling me that you walked the streets and through parks, too afraid to be in the flat, that you yelled up at the dark winter sky at a God you no longer believed in, yelling at him to give your baby back. And that you thought this was also a sign of your madness. It was your killer who told me that you couldn’t understand why I hadn’t come over, hadn’t phoned, hadn’t answered your calls. It was the man who killed you who told me that you were sure there was a good reason, and his voice as he spoke your written words violated their faith in me. But at the end of your letter your soft voice whispered to me beneath his:

“I need you, right now, right this moment, please Bee.”

Then, as now, your words pricked my face with tears.

“He put the letter back in his pocket, presumably to destroy it later. I’m not sure why he kept it or why he read it to me.”

But I think it’s because, like me with Mr. Wright earlier, his guilt was desperate for some company.

“I need you. Right now, right this moment, please Bee.”

He wanted to make me as culpable in some way as he was.