Sister

his flat, but it then seemed so probable.

“What are you doing here, just barging in?”

“Your door was open. I need to ask you some more questions.”

“I didn’t give her money. I tried once but she wouldn’t take it.” He sounded affronted and therefore credible.

“So do you know who did give her the money?”

“No idea.”

“Was she sleepy that day in the park?”

“Jesus. What is this?”

“I just want to know if she was sleepy when you met her?”

“No. If anything, she was jumpy.”

So he’d given you the sedative later, after Simon had left you.

“Was she hallucinating?” I asked.

“I thought you didn’t believe that she had postpartum psychosis?” he taunted.

“Was she?”

“You mean apart from seeing a nonexistent man in the bushes?”

I didn’t reply. His voice was ugly with irony. “No, apart from that she seemed completely normal.”

“They found sedatives and PCP in her blood. It’s also called wack, angel dust—”

He interrupted, his response immediate and with conviction. “No. That’s wrong. Tess was a puritan tight arse about drugs.”

“But you take them, don’t you?”

“So?”

“So maybe you wanted to give her something to feel better, a drink? With something in it that you thought would help?”

“I didn’t spike her drink. I didn’t give her money. And I want you to leave now, before this gets out of hand.” He was trying to imitate a man with more authority, his father maybe.

I went into the hall and passed an open doorway to a bedroom. I caught sight of a photo of you on the wall, your hair loose down your back. I went into the bedroom to look at it. It was clearly Simon’s room, his clothes neatly folded, his jackets on wooden coat hangers, an obsessively tidy room.

There was a banner in meticulous calligraphy along one wall: The Female of the Species. Underneath it were photos of you, scores of them, stuck on the walls with drawing pins. In all of them your back was to the camera. Suddenly Simon was close to me, studying my face.

“You knew I was in love with her.”

But these pictures made me think of Bequia islanders who believe a photograph is the theft of a soul. Simon’s tone was boastful. “They’re for my final year portfolio. I chose reportage photography of a single subject. My tutor thinks it’s the most original and exciting project of the year’s group.”

Why hadn’t he taken any of your face?

He must have guessed my thoughts. “I didn’t want the project to be about a particular person, so I made sure she had no identity. I wanted her to be an everywoman.”

Or was it so he could watch you, follow you, unobserved?

Simon’s tone was still smug. “ ‘The female of the species’ is the opening of a poem. The next line is ‘more deadly than the male.’ ”

My mouth felt tinder dry and my words sparked with anger. “The poem is about mothers protecting their young. That’s why the female is more deadly than the male. She has more courage. It’s men whom Kipling brands as cowards. ‘At war with conscience.’ ”

Simon was taken aback because I knew the Kipling poem, probably any poem, for that matter, and maybe you are too. But I did read English at Cambridge, remember? I was once an arty kind of person. Though being truthful, it was my scientific analysis of structure that got me through rather than insights into meaning.

I took a photo of you off the wall, then another and another. Simon tried to stop me, but I carried on until there were no photos of you on his wall, until he couldn’t look at you again. Then I left his flat, taking the photographs, with Simon furiously protesting that he needed them for his end-of-year assessment, that I was a thief and something else that I didn’t hear because I’d slammed the door shut behind me.

As I drove home with the photos on my lap, I wondered how many times Simon had followed you to take photos of you. Did he follow you after you left him in the park that day? I stopped the car and studied the photos. They were all of your back view, with the scenery changing from summer to autumn to winter, and your clothes from T-shirt to jacket to thick coat. He must have been following you for months. But I couldn’t find a photo of you in a snowy park.

I remembered that for Bequia islanders a photo can be made part of a voodoo doll and cursed, that a photo is considered as potent as having the victim’s hair or blood.

When I arrived home, I saw a new kettle in its box in the kitchen and heard Todd in the bedroom. I went in to see him trying to break one of your “psychotic” paintings, but the canvas was sturdy and not giving way.

“What on earth are you doing?”