“The Serpentine Gallery is closed until April; you couldn’t have met Tess there.”
He just shrugged, apparently unconcerned.
“Why did you lie?” I asked.
“I just liked the idea, that’s all,” he replied. “It made our meeting sound like a date. The Serpentine Gallery is the kind of place Tess would choose for a date.”
“But it wasn’t a date, was it?”
“Does it really matter now if I rewrite our history a little? Make it something I want it to be? Put a little fantasy in? There’s no harm in that.”
I wanted to yell at him, but nothing would be served but the brief instant gratification of expressed rage.
“So why did you meet her in the park? It must have been freezing out.”
“It was Tess who wanted to go to the park. Said she needed to be outside. Told me she was going crazy stuck indoors.”
“ ‘Crazy’? She used that word?”
I’ve never heard you say it. Although you talk nineteen to the dozen, you choose words carefully, and you’re patriotically English about vocabulary, berating me for my Americanisms.
Simon picked up a velvet bag from a mirrored-glass cabinet. “Maybe she said she was claustrophobic. I don’t remember.” That sounded more likely.
“Did she give a reason for wanting to see you?” I asked.
He fussed around with Rizla rolling papers, not replying.
“Simon …?”
“She just wanted to spend time with me. Jesus, is that so hard for you to understand?”
“How did you find out she was dead?” I asked. “Did a friend tell you? Did they tell you about the slashes to the insides of her arms?”
I wanted to tip him into tears, because I know that tears dissolve into wet saltiness the defenses around what we want to keep private.
“Were you told she’d been there for five nights, all alone, in a stinking foul toilets building?”
Tears were welling up in his eyes, his voice quieter than usual. “That day you found me outside her flat. I waited, just round the corner, till you left. Then followed you on my bike.”
I dimly remembered the sound of a motorbike revving as I left for Hyde Park. I hadn’t taken any notice of it after that.
“I waited, for hours, outside the park gates. It was snowing,” continued Simon. “I was already frozen, remember? I saw you come out with that policewoman. I saw a blacked-out van. No one would tell me anything. I wasn’t family.”
His tears were flowing now; he made no effort to stop them. I found him repellent, like his art.
“Later that evening it was on the local news,” he continued. “Just a short item, barely two minutes, about a young woman who had been found dead in a Hyde Park toilet. They showed the student picture of her. That’s how I discovered she was dead.”
He had to blow his nose and wipe his eyes, and I judged it the right time to confront him.
“So why did she really want to meet you?”
“She said she was frightened and wanted me to help her.”
The tears had worked, as I knew they would, since that first night at boarding school when I broke down and admitted to my house mistress that it wasn’t home and Mum I missed, but Dad.
“Did she tell you why she was frightened?” I asked.
“She said she’d been getting weird phone calls.”
“Did she tell you who it was?”
He shook his head. And I suddenly wondered if his tears were genuine or like the proverbial crocodile’s, ruthless and without remorse.
“Why do you think she chose you, Simon? Why not one of her other friends?” I asked.
He had dried his tears now, closing up. “We were very close.”
Maybe he saw my skepticism, because his tone became angrily wounded. “It’s easier for you—you’re her sister, you have a right to mourn her. People expect you to be in pieces. But I can’t even say she was my girlfriend.”
“She didn’t phone you, did she?” I asked.
He was silent.
“She would never have exploited your feelings for her.”
He tried to light his joint, but his fingers were trembling and he couldn’t get his lighter to work.
“What really happened?”
“I’d called her loads of times, but that ancient answering machine was always switched on, or the line was engaged. But this time she answered it. She said she needed to get out of the flat. I suggested the park and she agreed. I didn’t know that the Serpentine Gallery was shut. I’d hoped we could go there. When we met up in the
