Sister

song thrushes. There used to be a nightingale too.”

As he told me about the dawn chorus, I knew that I would find the person who had murdered you.

“Did you know that a single nightingale can sing up to three hundred love songs?”

That was my single-minded, focused destination; there was no more time for the detour of a guilt trip.

“A musician slowed down the skylark’s song and found it’s close to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.”

I owed it to you, even more than before, to win you some kind of justice.

As Amias continued telling me about the musical miracles within the dawn chorus, I wondered if he knew how comforting I found it, and thought that he probably did. He was letting me think, but not on my own, and was giving me a soothing score to bleak emotion. In the darkness I tried to hear a bird singing, but there was nothing. And in the silence and the dark it was hard to imagine a bright spring dawn filled with birdsong.

As soon as it was 9 a.m. I picked up the phone and dialed the police station.

“DS Finborough, please. It’s Beatrice Hemming.”

Todd, still half asleep, looked at me bemused and irritated. “What are you doing, darling?”

“I’m entitled to a copy of the postmortem report. There was a whole load of paperwork that PC Vernon gave me, and there was a leaflet about it.” I had been too passive, too accepting of information I had been given.

“Darling, you’ll just be wasting everyone’s time.”

I noted that Todd didn’t say “it’s a waste of time,” but that I was wasting somebody else’s time, somebody he didn’t even know. Todd is always conscious of when he’s being a nuisance. I used to be too.

“The day before she died, she called me every hour, and God knows how many more times on my mobile. That same day she asked Amias to look after her spare key because she was too afraid to leave it under the pot.”

“Maybe she’d just started bothering about basic security.”

“No, he told me it was after she’d got one of those calls. The day she was murdered, she phoned me at ten o’clock, which must be when she got home from her psychiatrist. And then every half hour until one-thirty, when she must have left to go to the post office and to meet Simon in Hyde Park.”

“Darling—”

“She told her psychiatrist she was afraid. And Simon said she wanted round-the-clock protection, that she was ‘terrified witless’ and that she saw someone following her into the park.”

“So she said, but she was suffering from puerperal—”

DS Finborough came on the line, interrupting us. I told him about your many calls to my office and apartment.

“That must make you feel pretty terrible. Responsible even.”

I was surprised by the kindness in his voice, though I don’t know why. He’d always been kind to me. “I’m sure this isn’t much consolation,” he continued, “but from what her psychiatrist has told us, I think that she would have gone ahead anyway, even if you had been able to talk to her on the phone.”

“Gone ahead?”

“I think that the phone calls were most likely cries for help. But that doesn’t mean anyone could have helped her, even her close family.”

“She needed help because she was being threatened.”

“She felt like that, certainly. But in the light of all the other facts, the phone calls don’t change our opinion that she committed suicide.”

“I would like to see a copy of the postmortem report.”

“Are you sure you want to put yourself through that? I have given you the basic findings and—”

“I have every right to read the report.”

“Of course. But I’m worried you’re going to find it very distressing.”

“That should be my decision, don’t you think?”

Besides, I had seen your body being taken out of a derelict toilets building in a body bag and after that experience I thought I would find “distressing” a relatively easy adjective to live with. Reluctantly, DS Finborough said he’d ask the coroner’s office to send me a copy.

As I put down the phone I saw Todd looking at me. “What exactly are you hoping to achieve here?” And in the words “exactly” and “here” I heard the pettiness of our relationship. We had been united by superficial tendrils of the small and the mundane, but the enormous fact of your death was ripping each fragile connection. I said I had to go to St. Anne’s, relieved to have an excuse to leave the flat and an argument I wasn’t yet ready to have.

Mr. Wright turns to a box file in front of him, one of many bulky files, all numbered with some code I have yet to crack, but marked in large scruffy handwriting “Beatrice Hemming.”

I like the personal touch of the scruffy writing alongside the numbers; it makes me think of all the people behind the scenes in the production of justice. Someone wrote my name on the files; maybe it’s the same person who will type up the tape that is whirring in the background somewhere like a massive mosquito.

“What did you think of DS Finborough at this point?” asks Mr. Wright.

“That he was intelligent and kind. And my frustration was that I could understand why Tess’s phone calls to me could be interpreted as ‘cries for help.’ ”