Sister

with love. A selfish person can still love someone else, can’t they? Even when they’ve hurt them and let them down. I, of all people, should understand that.

Mum was silent as they put earth over your coffin.

An explosion in space makes no sound at all.

Mum’s silent screaming is in my head as I reach the CPS offices. It’s Monday and crowded with people. When I get in the packed lift I start fretting, as I always do, that it will get stuck and my mobile won’t get a signal, so Kasia will be unable to contact me if she goes into labor. As soon as I arrive at the third floor, I check for messages: none. I also check my pager. Only Kasia has that number. Overkill, yes, but like a recent convert to Catholicism, my conversion to being thoughtful is going to be done absolutely properly, with rosary beads and incense sticks, a pager and a special ring tone on my phone reserved for her. I don’t have the security of being born a considerate person. I’ve learned that, at least. I can’t treat it casually as part of my intrinsic makeup. And yes, maybe my anxiety about Kasia is a way of rerouting my thoughts for a while onto someone who is alive. I need the memento vitae.

I go into Mr. Wright’s office. He doesn’t smile at me this morning, maybe because he knows that today we have to start with your funeral; or maybe the flicker of a romance I thought I felt at the weekend has been doused by what I am telling him. My witness statement, with its central topic of murder, is hardly a love sonnet. I bet Amias’s birds don’t sing to one another of such things.

He’s closed the venetian blinds against the bright spring sunshine and the somber lighting seems appropriate for talking about your funeral. Today I will try not to mention my physical infirmities; as I said, I have no right to complain, not when your body is broken, beyond repair, buried in the ground.

I tell Mr. Wright about your funeral, sticking to facts, not feelings.

“Although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, her funeral gave me two important new leads,” I say, omitting the soul-suffocating torture of watching your coffin being covered with earth. “The first was that I understood why Emilio Codi, if he had murdered Tess, would have waited until after Xavier was born.”

Mr. Wright doesn’t have a clue where I’m going with this, but I think you do.

“I’d always known Emilio had a motive,” I continue. “His affair with Tess jeopardized his marriage and his job. True, his wife hadn’t left him when she found out, but he couldn’t have known that. But if it was him, and he killed to protect his marriage and career, why not do it when Tess refused to have an abortion?”

Mr. Wright nods, and I think he’s intrigued.

“I’d also remembered that it was Emilio Codi who had phoned the police after the reconstruction and told them that Tess had already had her baby. It meant, I thought, that he must have either seen her or spoken to her afterward. Emilio had already made a formal complaint about me to the police, so I had to be careful, make sure he couldn’t tell them I was pestering him. I phoned him and asked if he still wanted his paintings of Tess. He was clearly angry with me, but wanted them all the same.”

Emilio seemed too large for your flat, his masculinity and rage swamping it. He had unwrapped each of the nude paintings—to check I hadn’t damaged them? Applied fig leaves? Or simply to look at your body again? His voice was ugly with anger.

“There was no need for my wife to know about Tess, the cystic fibrosis, any of it. Now she’s getting herself tested as a carrier of CF and so am I.”

“That’s sensible of her. But you are clearly a carrier; otherwise Xavier couldn’t have had it. Both parents need to be carriers for a baby to have it.”

“I know that. The genetic counselors rammed it into us. But I may not be the father.”

I was stunned by him. He shrugged. “She wasn’t hung up about sex. She could easily have had other lovers.”

“She would have told you. And me. She wasn’t a liar.”

He was silent because he knew it was true.

“It was you who phoned the police to say she’d had Xavier, wasn’t it?” I asked.

“I thought it was the right thing to do.”

I wanted to challenge him. He had never done “the right thing.” But that wasn’t why I was questioning him. “So she must have told you that Xavier had died?”

He was silent.

“Was it a phone call or face-to-face?”

He picked up his paintings of you and turned to leave. But I stood in front of the doorway.

“She wanted you to own up to Xavier, didn’t she?”

“You need to get this straight. When she told me she was pregnant, I made it crystal clear where I stood about the baby. I told her that I wouldn’t help her or the baby in any way. I wasn’t going to be a father to it. And she didn’t make a fuss about that. She even said that the baby would be better off without me.”

“Yes. But what about when Xavier died?”

He put down the paintings. I thought for a moment he was going to push me out of the way so he could leave. But he made an absurdly theatrical gesture of surrender, ugly in its childishness.

“You’re right. Hands up. She threatened to expose me.”

“You mean she wanted you to say that you were Xavier’s father?”

“Same thing.”