Sister

“I thought she must have found out.”

DI Haines’s jowly face loomed across the table at me, his physique matching his overbearing voice. Next to him was DS Finborough.

“Which do you think more likely, Miss Hemming,” DI Haines boomed, “an established company with an international reputation, complying with myriad regulations, tests out a gene therapy on perfectly well babies or a student is mistaken about the father of her baby?”

“Tess wouldn’t have lied about the father.”

“When I last spoke to you on the phone, I asked you, courteously, to stop indiscriminately apportioning blame.”

“Yes, but—”

“On your phone message just a week ago, you put Mr. Codi and Simon Greenly at the top of your list of suspects.”

I cursed the message I’d left on DS Finborough’s phone. It showed me as emotional and unreliable, damaging any credibility I might have had.

“But now you’ve changed your mind?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“But we haven’t, Miss Hemming. There is nothing new that brings into question the coroner’s verdict of suicide. I’ll state the bald facts for you. You may not want to hear them but that does not mean they don’t exist.”

Not just a double but a triple negative. His oratory wasn’t as impressive as he believed it to be.

“An unmarried young woman,” he continued, enjoying his emphasized words, “who is an art student in London, has an illegitimate baby with cystic fibrosis. The baby is successfully treated by a new genetic therapy in utero” (I thought how proud he was of this little bit of knowledge, this smidgen of Latin thrown into his monologue), “but unfortunately it dies when it is born of an unrelated condition.” (Yes, I know—“it.”) “One of her friends, of whom she apparently had many, leaves her a tactless message on her answering machine, which drives her further down her path toward suicide.” I tried to say something but he continued, barely pausing for the breath needed to patronize me. “Suffering hallucinations from the illegal drugs she was taking, she takes a kitchen knife with her into the park.”

I noticed a look between DS Finborough and DI Haines.

“Maybe she bought the knife specially for the purpose,” snapped Haines. “Maybe she wanted it to be expensive and special. Or just sharp. I am not a psychiatrist; I cannot read a suicidal young woman’s mind.”

DS Finborough seemed to flinch away from DI Haines, his distaste for him clear.

“She went into a deserted toilets building,” continued Haines. “Either so she wouldn’t be found or because she wanted to be out of the snow; again I cannot accurately tell you her reason. Either outside in the park or in the toilets building, she took an overdose of sedatives.” (I was surprised he managed to hold back “a belt and suspenders suicide” because that was the kind of thing he was itching to say.) “She then cuts the arteries in her arms with her kitchen knife. Afterward it transpires that the father of her illegitimate baby isn’t her tutor as she’d thought but someone else, who must carry the cystic fibrosis gene.”

I did try to argue with him, but I might as well have been playing the triangle on the edge of the M4. I know, one of your sayings, but remembering it comforted me a little as he shouted me down. And as he patronized me, not listening to me, I saw how scruffy my clothes were and that my hair needed cutting and I was no longer polite, or respectful of his authority, and it was no wonder he didn’t pay attention to me. I didn’t used to pay attention to people like me either.

As DS Finborough escorted me out of the police station, I turned to him. “He didn’t listen to a word I said.”

DS Finborough was clearly embarrassed. “It’s the accusation you made about Emilio Codi. And Simon Greenly.”

“So it’s because I’ve cried wolf too often?”

He smiled. “And with such conviction. It doesn’t help that Emilio Codi made a formal complaint against you and that Simon Greenly is the son of a cabinet minister.”

“But surely he must be able to see that something’s wrong?”

“Once he has arrived at a conclusion, backed up by facts and logic, it’s hard to dissuade him. Unless there are heavier counterbalancing facts.”

I thought DS Finborough was too decent and professional to publicly criticize his boss.

“And you?”

He paused a moment, as if unsure whether to tell me. “We’ve had the forensic results back on the Sabatier knife. It was brand-new. And it had never been used before.”

“She couldn’t have afforded Sabatier.”

“I agree—it doesn’t fit when she didn’t even own a kettle or a toaster.”

So the last time he’d been in the flat, when he’d come to talk about the postmortem results, he’d noticed. It hadn’t just been, as I’d thought at the time, a compassionate visit. I was grateful to him for being first a policeman. I worked up the courage to ask my question.

“So do you now believe that she was murdered?”

There was a moment while my question was static in the silence between us.

“I think there’s a query.”