morning to say that he’d meet me.”
“
“He needs to know about the drugs.”
“The police will already know about them, darling.”
“They can’t know.” Because if they did, surely everything would have changed.
Todd added bourbons to the custard creams on the plate, arranging them in two neat yellow and brown rows, his annoyance expressed through the symmetry of biscuits. “Yes. They can. And they will have reached exactly the same conclusion as me.”
He turned away, taking the boiling pan of water off the hob. Last night he had been silent when I told him about the drugs, asking instead why I hadn’t told him the real purpose of meeting Christina.
“I can’t believe your sister didn’t even own a kettle.”
The doorbell rang.
Todd greeted DS Finborough then left to collect Mum. The plan was for Mum and I to pack up your things together. I think he hoped that packing away your belongings would force me to find closure. Yes, I know, an American word, but I don’t know the English equivalent—“facing facts” Mum would call it, I suppose.
DS Finborough sat on your sofa, politely eating a bourbon, as I recounted what Christina had told me.
“We already know about the sedative and PCP.”
I was startled. Todd had been right, after all. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought you and your mother had enough to deal with. I didn’t want to add what I thought would be unnecessary distress. And the drugs simply confirmed our belief that Tess took her own life.”
“You think she
“There was no evidence of any force. And taking a sedative is frequently used by people intent on committing suicide.”
“But it wasn’t enough to kill her, was it?”
“No, but maybe Tess didn’t know that. After all, she hadn’t tried anything like this in the past, had she?”
“No. She hadn’t. And she didn’t this time either. She must have been tricked into taking it.” I tried to shake the self-possessed compassion on his face. “Don’t you see? He drugged her with the sedative so that he could kill her without a struggle. That’s why her body had no marks.”
But I hadn’t dislodged his expression or opinion.
“Or she simply took an overdose that wasn’t quite big enough.”
I was nine years old in a comprehension class being guided firmly by a caring teacher to draw the correct answers from the text in front of us.
“What about the PCP?” I asked, thinking there was no answer that DS Finborough could possibly have for that drug being in your body.
“I spoke to an inspector in Narcotics,” replied DS Finborough. “He told me that dealers have been disguising it and selling it in place of LSD for years. There’s a whole list of aliases for it: hog, ozone, wack, angel dust. Tess’s dealer probably—”
I interrupted. “You think Tess had a ‘dealer’?”
“I’m sorry. I meant the person who gave or sold the PCP to her. He or she would not have told Tess what she was actually getting. I also spoke to Tess’s psychiatrist, Dr. Nichols, and—”
I interrupted. “Tess wouldn’t have touched drugs, whatever they were. She loathed them. Even at school, when her friends were smoking and trying joints, she refused to have anything to do with it. She saw her health as a gift she’d been given, when Leo hadn’t, and she had no right to destroy it.”
DS Finborough paused a moment, as if genuinely considering my point of view.
“But she was hardly a schoolgirl anymore, with a schoolgirl’s anxieties, was she? I’m not saying she wanted to use drugs, or ever had before, but I do think it would be totally understandable if she wanted to escape from her grief.” I remembered him saying that after having Xavier you were in hell, a place where no one could join you. Even me. And I thought of my craving for the sleeping pills, for a few hours respite from grief.
But I hadn’t taken one.
“Did you know that you can smoke PCP?” I asked. “Or snort it or inject it or you can just simply swallow it? Someone could have slipped it into her drink without her even realizing it.”
“Beatrice—”
“Dr. Nichols was wrong about why she was having hallucinations. They weren’t from puerperal psychosis at all.”
“No. But as I was trying to tell you, I did speak to Dr. Nichols about the PCP. He said that although the cause of the hallucinations has clearly changed, her state of mind would be the same. And, sadly, the outcome. Apparently, it’s not at all unusual for people on PCP to self-mutilate or to kill themselves. The inspector in Narcotics said much the same.” I tried to interrupt but he kept going to his logical finale. “All the factual arrows are still pointing the same way.”
“And the coroner believed this? That someone with no history whatsoever of taking drugs, had voluntarily taken a powerful hallucinogenic? He didn’t even question that?”
