Rosamund Lupton - Sister

“And me? Surely you’re not going to stage my suicide, the way you staged Tess’s? Frame me for my own murder like you did my sister? Because if it happens twice, the police are bound to be suspicious.”

“Staged? You make it sound so thought out. I didn’t plan it—I told you that. You can see that because of my mistakes, can’t you? My research and my trial I planned in meticulous detail, but not this. I was forced into doing this. I even paid them, for God’s sake, not stopping to think that it might look suspicious. And I never thought they might talk to each other.”

“So why did you pay them?”

“It was just kindness, that’s all. I just wanted to make sure they had a decent diet, so the developing fetuses had the optimum conditions. It was meant to be spent on food, not bloody clothes.”

I didn’t dare ask him if there were others or how many. I didn’t want to die with that knowledge. But there were some things I needed to know.

“What made you choose Tess? Because she was single? Poor?”

“And Catholic. Catholic women are far less likely to terminate when they know there’s a problem with their baby.”

“Hattie is Catholic?”

“Millions of Filipinos are Catholic. Hattie Sim put it on her form—no father’s name, mind you, but her religion.”

“Did her baby have cystic fibrosis?”

“Yes. Whenever I could, I treated the cystic fibrosis and tested my gene out too. But there weren’t enough babies who fitted all the criteria.”

“Like Xavier?”

He was silent.

“Did Tess find out about your trial? Is that why you killed her?”

He hesitated a moment. His tone was close to self-pitying; I think that he genuinely hoped I would understand.

“There was another consequence that I hadn’t foreseen. My gene got into the mother’s ovaries. It means there is the same genetic change in every egg, and if the women have more babies, the babies will have the same problem with their lungs.

“Logistically I couldn’t expect to be there for the next baby, or the next. People move away. Eventually someone would discover what was going on. That’s why Hattie had to have a hysterectomy. But Tess’s labor was too quick. She arrived at the hospital with the baby’s head already engaged. There wasn’t time to do a caesarean, let alone an emergency hysterectomy.”

You hadn’t found out anything at all.

He killed you because your body was living evidence against him.

A round us people are starting to leave the park, the grass turning from green to gray, the air cooling into evening. My bones ache with cold and I focus on the warmth of Mr. Wright’s hand, holding mine.

“I asked him what made him do it, suggested it was money. He was furious, told me his motives weren’t avaricious. Impure. He said he wouldn’t be able to sell a gene that hadn’t had a legal trial. Fame wasn’t motivating him either. He couldn’t publish his results.”

“So did he tell you the reason?”

“Yes.”

I’ll tell you what he said out here, in this gray-green park in the cool fresh air. Neither of us need to return to that building to hear him.

“He said that science has the power that religion once claimed, but it’s real and provable, not superstition and cant. He said that miracles don’t happen in fifteenth-century churches but in research labs and hospitals. He said the dead are brought back to life in intensive care units; the lame walk again after hip replacements; the blind see again because of laser surgery. He told me that in the new millennium there are new deities with real, provable powers and that the deities are scientists who are improving what it is to be human. He said that his gene would one day safely get into the gene pool, and that would mean who we are as humans would be irrevocably changed for the better.”

His overweening hubris was huge and naked and shocking.

H e was shining his flashlight in my face and I couldn’t see him. I was still trying to move but my body had been too drugged by the spiked tea to respond to my brain’s screamed commands for action.

“You followed her into the park that day?”

I dreaded hearing it, but I needed to know how you died.

“When the boy left, she sat on a bench and started writing a letter, in the snow. Extraordinary thing to do, don’t you think?”

He looked at me, waiting for my response, as if this were a regular conversation, and I realized I would be the first and last person to whom he’d tell his story. Our story.

“I waited awhile, to make sure the boy wasn’t coming back. Ten minutes maybe. She was relieved when she saw me; I told you that, didn’t I? She smiled. We had a good rapport. I’d brought a Thermos of hot chocolate and gave her a cup.”

T he gray park is darkening now into soft pansy purples and blacks.

“He told me that the hot chocolate was full of dissolved sedative. After he’d drugged her, he pulled her into the toilets building.”

I feel overwhelmed by exhaustion and my words are sluggish. I imagine them inching along, slow, ugly words.

“Then he cut her.”

I’ll tell you what he said; you have the right to know, although it will be painful for you. No, painful is the wrong word entirely. Even the memory of his voice makes me so afraid that I am five years old alone in the dark with a murderer bashing down the door and no one to help me.

“It’s easy for a doctor to cut. Not at first. The first time a doctor cuts into skin, it feels a violation. The skin, the largest human organ, covering the entire body unbroken, and you deliberately harm it. But after the first time, it no longer feels an abuse because you know that it’s to enable a surgical procedure. Cutting is no longer violent or violating but the necessary step to healing.”

Mr. Wright tightens his warm fingers around mine. My legs are turning numb now.

I could hear my heart beating fast and hard against the concrete, the only part of my body that was alert as I looked at him. And then, astonishingly, I saw him put the knife into the inside pocket of his jacket.

Optimism heated my numbed body.

He helped me sit up.

He told me that he wasn’t going to cut me because an overdose is less suspicious than a knife.

I can’t use his actual words. I just can’t.

He said he had already given me enough sedative in the tea to make it impossible for me to struggle or escape. And that now he was going to give me a fatal dose. He assured me that it would be peaceful and painless, and it was the false kindness of his words that made them so unbearable, because it was himself he was comforting.

He said he’d brought his own sedatives but didn’t need to use them.

He took a bottle out of his pocket, the sleeping pills Todd had brought with him from the States, prescribed for me by my doctor. He must have found them in the bathroom cupboard. Like the bicycle chain and the flashlight and the knife, the bottle of sleeping pills showed his detailed planning, and I understood why premeditated murder is so much worse than spontaneous killing; he had been evil for far longer than the time it would actually take to kill me.

T he dusk has brought the chill of darkness. They’re shutting the gates now, the last of the teenagers are packing up to go. The children will already be at home for baths and bedtime, but Mr. Wright and I remain, not finished yet. For some reason, they haven’t made us leave. Maybe they didn’t notice us here. And I’m grateful because I need to keep going. I need to reach the end.