Sister

“And then?” asks Mr. Wright, needing to prompt me now to make sure I remember all of it. But we’re nearly finished.

“He switched off my phone and put it near the door where I couldn’t reach it. Then he took a scarf of mine out of his pocket—he must have taken it from the flat. He tied it around my mouth, gagging me.”

As he gagged me, panicking thoughts filled my head, one bashing into the other, a six-lane highway of thoughts, all happening simultaneously, backing up, bumper to bumper, unable to get out, and I thought that some would be released simply by screaming, others by crying, others if I was held. Most of my thoughts had become primal and physical. I hadn’t known before that it’s our bodies that think most powerfully, and that was why it was so cruel to be gagged. It wasn’t because I couldn’t shout for help—who’d hear me in an empty building in the middle of a deserted park? It was because I couldn’t scream or sob or moan.

“Then his pager went off. He phoned the hospital on his mobile and said that he’d be on his way. I suppose it would have looked too suspicious not to go.”

I hear myself catch my breath in the darkness.

“Beatrice?”

“I worried that Kasia was in labor and that was why he was leaving.”

Mr. Wright’s hand feels solid in the darkness. I am reassured by the definition of his knuckles in my soft palm.

“He checked the gag and the ties around my wrists and legs. He told me that he’d come back and remove them later, so that nothing would look suspicious when I was found. He still didn’t know I’d spat out so many of the pills. But I knew that if I was still alive when he came back, he’d use the knife, as he did on Tess.”

“If you were still alive?”

“I wasn’t sure how many pills I’d swallowed, or how much sedative had dissolved in my saliva—if it was enough to kill me.”

I try to just focus on Mr. Wright’s hand holding mine.

“He left. Minutes later my pager went off. He’d turned off my phone, but he didn’t know about the pager. I tried to persuade myself that Kasia was paging me for something trivial. After all, her baby wasn’t due for another three weeks.”

Yes, like you.

Mr. Wright strokes my fingers, and the gentleness of it makes me want to cry.

“And then?” he asks.

“He’d taken the flashlight with him. I’d never been in such total darkness.”

I was alone in the black. Pitch black. Pitch that is made from tar.

The blackness smelled rotten, putrid with fear. It smothered my face, going into my mouth and nose, and I was drowning and I thought of you on holiday in Skye, coming out of the sea, spluttering and pink cheeked— “I’m okay! Just seawater going up the wrong way!”—and I took a breath. The blackness choked my lungs.

I saw the darkness move—a monstrous, living thing, filling the building and out into the night beyond, no skin of sky to contain it. I felt it dragging me with it into a void of infinite fear—away from light, life, love, hope.

I thought of Mum in her rustling silk dressing gown, smelling of face cream, coming toward our beds, but the memory of her was padlocked into childhood and couldn’t lighten the darkness.

I wait for Mr. Wright to prompt me further. But there is no further to go. We have finally arrived at the end.

It’s finished now.

I try to move my hands, but they are bound tightly together with a tie. The fingers of my right hand are tightly clasped around my left. I wonder if it’s because I am right-handed that my right hand has taken the role of comforter.

I am alone in the pitch black, lying on a concrete floor.

My mouth is as dry as parchment. The harsh cold concrete has seeped into my body, numbing me through to the bone.

I begin a letter to you, my beloved younger sister. I pretend it’s Sunday evening, my safest time, and that I’m surrounded by press all wanting to tell our story.

Dearest Tess,

I’d do anything to be with you, right now, right this moment, so I could hold your hand, look at your face, listen to your voice. How can touching and seeing and hearing—all those sensory receptors and optic nerves and vibrating eardrums—be substituted by a letter? But we’ve managed to use words as go-betweens before, haven’t we?

I think back to boarding school and the first letter you ever sent me, the one with invisible ink, and that ever since kindness has smelled of lemons.

And as I think of you and talk to you, I can breathe again.

23

Hours must have passed, so he will surely be back soon. I don’t know how much sedative I swallowed, but all through this night I have felt a torpor of exhaustion sucking the warmth from my body and the clarity from my brain. I think I have slipped in and out of consciousness; in total darkness how could I tell? But if so, in my unnatural forced sleep I was still talking to you and maybe that was when my imaginings became peculiarly vivid.

Now I feel wide awake, all senses tense, buzzing and jittery; it must be adrenaline, a fight-or-flight hormone that’s powerful enough to restart a heart after a cardiac arrest, surely powerful enough to startle me into