Sister

Mr. Wright switches off the tape machine. “Let’s end it there.” I nod, trying to blink away the image of your long hairs in the bristles of your hairbrush.

A matronly secretary comes in and tells us that the press outside your flat has become alarming in number. Mr. Wright is solicitous, asking me if I’d like him to find me somewhere else to stay.

“No. Thank you. I want to be at home.”

I call your flat home now, if that’s okay with you. I have been living there for two months and it feels that way.

“Would you like me to give you a lift?” he asks. He must see my surprise because he smiles. “It’s no trouble. And I’m sure today has been an ordeal.”

The printed polyester tie was a present. He is a nice man.

I politely turn down his offer and he escorts me to the lift. “Your statement will take several days. I hope that’s all right?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“It’s because you were the principal investigator as well as being our principal witness.”

“Investigator” sounds too professional for what I did. The lift arrives and Mr. Wright holds the door open for me, making sure I get safely inside.

“Your testimony is going to seal our case,” he tells me, and as I go down in the crowded lift, I imagine my words being like tar, coating the hull of the prosecution boat, making it watertight.

Outside, the spring sunshine has warmed the early evening air, and by cafes white mushroom parasols sprout from hard gray pavements. The CPS offices are only a couple of streets away from St. James’s Park and I think that I will walk some of the way home.

I try to take a shortcut toward the park, but my hoped-for cut-through is a dead end. I retrace my footsteps and hear footsteps behind me, not the reassuring click-clack of high heels but the quietly threatening tread of a man. Even as I feel afraid, I am aware of the cliche of the woman being stalked by evil and try to banish it, but the footsteps continue, closer now, their heavy tread louder. Surely he will overtake me, walking on the other side, showing he means no harm. Instead, he comes closer. I can feel the chill of his breath on the back of my neck. I run, my movements jerky with fear. I reach the end of the cul-de-sac and see people walking along a crowded pavement. I join them and head for the tube, not looking round.

I tell myself that it is just not possible. He’s on remand, locked up in prison, refused bail. After the trial he’s going to go to prison for the rest of his life. I must have imagined it.

I get into a tube and risk a look around the carriage. Immediately I see a photo of you. It’s on the front page of the Evening Standard, it’s the one I took in Vermont when you visited two summers ago, the wind whirling your hair out behind you like a shining sail, your face glowing. You are arrestingly beautiful. No wonder they chose it for their front page. Inside there’s the one I took when you were six, hugging Leo. I know you had just been crying, but there’s no sign of it. Your face had pinged back to normal as soon as you smiled for me. Next to your picture is one of me that they took yesterday. My face doesn’t ping back. Fortunately, I no longer mind what I look like in photographs.

I get out at Ladbroke Grove tube station, noticing how deftly Londoners move—up stairways and through ticket barriers—without touching another person. As I reach the exit, I again feel someone too close behind me, his cold breath on my neck, the prickle of menace. I hurry away, bumping into other people in my haste, trying to tell myself that it was a draft made by the trains below.

Maybe terror and dread, once experienced, embed themselves into you even when the cause has gone, leaving behind a sleeping horror, which is too easily awakened.

I reach Chepstow Road, and am stunned by the mass of people and vehicles. There are news crews from every UK station and, from the looks of it, from most of the ones abroad too. Yesterday’s collection of press now seems a village fete that’s morphed into a frenetic theme park.

I am ten doors away from your flat when the chrysanthemums technician spots me. I brace myself, but he turns away; again his kindness takes me aback. Two doors later a reporter sees me. He starts to come toward me and then they all do. I run down the steps, make it inside, and slam the door.

Outside, sound booms fill the space like triffids; lenses of obscene length are shoved up to the glass. I pull the curtains across, but their lights are still blinding through the flimsy material. As I did yesterday, I retreat to the kitchen, but there’s no sanctuary in there. Someone is hammering on the back door and the front doorbell is buzzing. The phone stops for a second at most, then rings again. My mobile joins in the cacophony. How did they get that number? The sounds are insistent and hectoring, demanding a response. I think back to the first evening I spent in your flat. I thought then that there was nothing as lonely as a phone that didn’t ring.

At 10:20 p.m. I watched the TV reconstruction on your sofa, pulling your Indian throw over me in a futile effort to keep warm. From a distance, I really was quite a convincing you. At the end there was an appeal for information and a number to ring.

At 11:30 p.m. I picked up the phone to check that it was working. Then I panicked that in that moment of checking, someone had been trying to ring: you, or the police to tell me you’d been found.

12:30 a.m. Nothing.

1:00 a.m. I felt the surrounding quietness suffocating me.

1:30 a.m. I heard myself shout your name. Or was your name buried in the silence?

2:00 a.m. I heard something by the door. I hurried to open it but it was just a cat, the stray you’d adopted months before. The milk in the fridge was more than a week old and sour. I had nothing to stop its cries.

At 4:30 a.m. I went into your bedroom, squeezing past your easel and stacks of canvases. I cut my foot and bent down to find shards of glass. I drew back the bedroom curtains and saw a sheet of polyethylene taped over the broken windowpane. No wonder it was freezing in the flat.

I got into your bed. The polyethylene was flapping in the icy wind, the irregular inhuman noise as disturbing as the cold. Under your pillow were your pajamas. They had the same smell as your dress. I hugged them, too cold