Sister

“Stop calling me that.” I backed away from him.

He came closer, then pushed me hard inside.

“He shut the door behind us and put a knife against my throat.”

I break off, shaking from the adrenaline. Yes, his call to DI Haines had been faked. He probably got the idea from a daytime TV soap—they’re on all the time in the wards—I remember that from Leo’s hospital stays. Maybe it was sheer desperation. And maybe I was too distracted to notice anything very much. Mr. Wright is considerate enough not to point out my ludicrous gullibility.

The teenagers have abandoned their loud game of softball for raucous music. The office workers picnicking have been replaced by mothers with preschool children; their high, barely formed voices quickly turning from shrieks of happiness into tears and back again, a mercurial quicksilver sound. And I want the children to be louder, the laughter more raucous, the music turned up full volume. And I want the park to be crowded with barely a place to sit. And I want the sunshine to be blinding.

He closed the door of the toilets building and used the bicycle chain to fasten it shut. There had never been a bicycle, had there? Light seeped through the filthy cracked windows and was turned dirty by them, casting the gloom of a nightmare. The sounds of the park outside—children laughing and crying, music from a CD player—were muffled by the damp bricks. Yes, it’s uncanny how similar that day was to today in the park with Mr. Wright, but maybe the sounds of a park remain the same, day to day, give or take. And in that cold, cruel building I also wanted the children to be louder, the laughter more raucous, the music turned up to full volume. Maybe because if I could hear them, then there was a chance they could hear my screams; but no, it couldn’t have been that because I knew if I screamed, he would silence me with a knife. So it must have been simply that I wanted the comfort of hearing life as I died.

“You killed her, didn’t you?” I asked.

If I’d been sensible, maybe I would have given him a let-out, made out that I thought he had pushed me in there for some weird sort of sadistic sex; because once I’d accused him, was he ever going to let me go? But he was never going to. Whatever I did or said. I had wild thoughts racing through my head about how you’re meant to make friends with your kidnapper. (Where on earth did that nugget of information come from? And why did anyone think the general population would need to know such a thing?) Remarkably, I did, but I couldn’t make friends with him because he’d been my lover and there was nowhere for us to go.

“I’m not responsible for Tess’s death.”

For a moment I thought that he wasn’t, that I’d read him all wrong, that everything would play out the way I’d been so sure of, with us going to the police and Dr. Nichols being arrested. But self-deception isn’t possible with a knife and a chain on the other side of the equation.

“I didn’t want it to happen. I didn’t plan it. I’m a doctor, for God’s sake. I wasn’t meant to kill anyone. Have you any idea what it feels like? It’s a living hell.”

“So stop now with me. Please.”

He was silent. Fear pricked my skin into a hundred thousand goose bumps, a hundred thousand tiny hairs standing to upright attention as they offered their useless protection.

“You were her doctor?”

I had to keep him talking—not because I thought anyone was on the way to rescue me, but because a little longer to live, even in this building with this man, was precious.

And because I needed to know.

“Yes. I looked after her all through her pregnancy.”

You’d never mentioned his name, just said “the doctor,” and I hadn’t asked, too busy multitasking with something else.

“We had a good rapport, liked each other. I was always kind to her.”

“You delivered Xavier?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I thought of the masked man in your nightmarish paintings, dark with menace in the shadows.

“She was relieved to see me in the park that day,” William continued. “Smiled at me. I—”

I interrupted. “But she was terrified of you.”

“The man who delivered the baby, not me.”

“But she must have known it was you, surely? Even with a mask, she must have recognized your voice at least. If you’d looked after her for all her pregnancy, surely …”

He was silent. I hadn’t realized that it was possible to be more appalled by him.

“You didn’t speak to her. While she was in labor. When she gave birth. Even when her baby was dead. You didn’t speak to her.”

“I came back and comforted her, twenty minutes or so later. I’ve told you. I was always kind to her.”

So he’d taken off the mask, switching personas back into the caring man you thought he was, who I’d thought he was.

“I suggested I phone someone for her,” he continued. “And she gave me your number.”

You thought I knew. All that time, you thought I knew.