The Sister (24 page)

I open my fist sharply, decisively, last night’s new persona coming to the fore. The range of movement in my knuckles is impressive now. It’s good to exercise arthritic joints, keep them loose so they don’t seize up. I look at Vivien’s door through the gap between my fingers.

“Okay,” I say gently.

I
LEAVE THE LANDING
, go downstairs and open the front door. I have been forced, for what seems like the first time in my entire life, to make an active decision, a choice. A choice that will have an irreversible impact on the future.

I give myself time for one deep breath of honeysuckle, then close the front door, loudly, so Vivien will hear it upstairs. I go into the library, open the drinks cabinet and find the black tin of potassium cyanide, KCN, behind a sticky bottle of vermouth, where I hid it last night. I’m half surprised to find it there, to have confirmation of my actions during the moonlit hours. I reach to the shelf above for a glass and measure in half a teaspoon of the powder, snapping closed the lid and replacing it behind the vermouth. I suppose this is what is meant by premeditated—the calm and considered preparation of death. But I feel released, unshackled. For the first time ever I am not only in control of my life, I am taking control of the future. For once I am causing an event to happen. Yet at the same time another force is thrusting me forward, an overwhelming one that, to my surprise, makes each action follow the last as if I am paralyzed and looking down on myself with horror.

I am impassive and incurious as I continue. It’s the scientist in me, I know. You learn early on, as a scientist, not to trust your feelings and to rise above any unqualified instinct or emotion. All calculations must be backed up with undeniable evidence and absolute qualified conclusions.

It feels no different from making the tea, an everyday practical occurrence. Murder. I take no pleasure in it, yet feel no shame, no anxiety. But this time there is no pretending that I am leaving it up to chance. I accept fully what I am doing. This time it is
no
different from loading a gun and shooting someone between the eyes, or cracking a lead weight across their skull, and rather than being appalled by myself, I’m feeling strangely empowered, released from the forces that I have, so far, allowed to dictate my life. This time it is me, it is
my
will. I am in control.

I think I’m in control and yet, perhaps, I have no choice. I cannot help the way the events of my life and those of the past three days have worked on my inherent and coded characteristics to bring me to this unpleasant outcome. As you must know, once a domino is pushed, the motion is started and, as long as the others are lined up one after another with the correct spacing, there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them. It is the consequence of my lifetime experiences on the character that I was given. From that viewpoint, it cannot be called premeditated. It is as strictly governed as a mathematical equation. It is the result of

me
+
Vivi falling off the bell tower
+
taunting at school
+
Maud’s sherry drinking
+
the existence of poison in the house…

I feel like the caterpillar that we
think
is making a choice when he eats or pupates but, in actual fact, is not. He’s completely ruled by molecular forms of influence acting on the base components of a moth. Likewise, perhaps I have become a killer through circumstances acting on my biological makeup. Which means, of course, that none of this is my fault and that it’s all out of my hands.

I like to think that, for once, I am in control of my actions, but I also like to know that I am not.

I
CARRY THE GLASS
to the front door. Once again I open and close the door loudly, as if I’ve just returned to the house. Then I go to the kitchen and turn on the tap. The cold water pipes start up their chorus of banging and thudding, shaking awake the rest of the house. I fill the glass halfway with water, swirling it gently to dissolve the poison, and I am reminded of the faint aroma it releases, a bitter tinge of almond. I carry it through the hall, past Jake the pig, up the stairs, past the huge stained-glass window, slow and steady, missing the second from last stair, which squeaks, and reach the landing.

I stop at the top as an image of Vivien’s coffin passes me, carried by unknown men in black, helping her on her last journey down these stairs and out of Bulburrow. It is a final call for caution, to make sure that this is how I really want to change the future. But I am now certain I have no choice: I am the puppet of myself.

I step aside to make way for the procession and continue across the landing, through the double doors and onto Vivien’s landing. I’m concentrating, blocking out everything but the Method that the palm of my hand has helped me to devise. It is so easy. Thank you, Maud. After all, it was she who had taught me how to substitute for my lack of natural strength, she who had taught me how to believe in myself. What would she say, do you suppose, one daughter killing the other? Is she looking at me now from her heaven and taking full responsibility for my actions, as she always did?

As I enter the room Vivien’s clock says fourteen minutes past four. Her eyes are closed, she doesn’t know yet that I have entered. I can now see the rest of the room, which had been out of view from my listening post on the landing. It is such an onslaught of color and clutter that my eyes wander for too long on the accessories before I look at Vivien. She has hung fairy lights round the picture rail and stuck photos of herself with people I don’t recognize on the wall above her bed. A mirror has more photos jammed in its frame, and on the other side of her bed, on the floor, there are three tea-stained mugs and a dirty plate. Above this, four nails have been banged into the wall as hooks and clothes slung over them. A small dressing table is covered with a disarray of bottles—perfume, face creams and other unguents—without a hint of order to any of it. One or two items have fallen off while a tin of talc hangs over the edge on its side, having coughed some of its contents onto the floor through the holes in its lid. It taunts me, the way it lies teetering, and I am overcome with an unbearable desire to push it back on. With a great effort of will I ignore its precariousness and instead summon myself to concentrate on the matter at hand. I focus on Vivien.

Her eyes are now flickering open and shut. She is trying to keep them directed, but they race peevishly this way and that within their sockets. Her right hand is lying palm up on the bedcover, quite close to me, and when she opens and closes it, grabbing at the air, I realize it is an invitation for me to hold it. I don’t want to be part of a last-minute fingertip reconciliation, but I oblige her handhold anyway, like swallowing a mouthful of something disgusting because soon you know it will all be over.

“The doctor’s on his way,” I lie. “Eileen is waiting for him and will bring him up.” She squeezes my hand. I stare at her clock: method, results, conclusions, method, results, conclusions.
Tick, tock, tick.
The second hand is about to pass Go, pushing the minute hand to half past four by this clock,
tick, tock,
four, three, two, one,
Go.
It’s four-thirty in the afternoon of 27 April.

“He says you must drink some water. That’s very important, he says. It’ll make you feel better. Can you sit up?”

Vivien’s eyes are now open, not fully, but open, and she manages to shift herself a little way up the bed so that her head is more upright on her pillow. I wonder vaguely, as she gulps thankfully at the water, whether if I’d had it in me to kill the flies in Lower 5B when I was thirteen, I might not now have it in me to kill my sister at seventy.

I put the glass on the floor beside the bed. Vivien’s eyes stare blankly above her. Her lips move, drinking the air like a fish out of water, and she beats her arm on the bed, just once. I wonder, with sudden curiosity, if I’m about to feel something like a life force leaving her body as she dies, but I don’t. Her body starts to convulse, wracking violently, as if another being is trying to expel itself through her skin. I don’t mind watching her. I know she’s not feeling this. She’s already dead. But I’ll tell you something—as I watch the involuntary twitches of a poisoned body, I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t admit I find it interesting, from a purely scientific point of view, of course.

I’ll tell you more about it, if you like. Potassium cyanide is what’s called a synaptic blocker poison. It blocks the tiny electrical impulses with which our nervous system functions, at the synapses, the communication junctions between nerves. At a molecular level the poison is a compound that can fit into the same receptor sites that the synaptic messenger compounds would normally lock into, thereby inhibiting them doing their job and preventing any signals being passed along the nerves. In other words, the body is paralyzed within seconds, as long as you administer enough to block the receptor sites before the body can metabolize and excrete the poison. It’s a race between the kidneys’ toxin-removal efficiency and the potency of the poison.

Vivien is still now and I am stroking her hair because—I don’t know if you will understand this—I still love her. I love her and hate her at the same time. I even love the same parts of her that I hate, her vitality and her color, her disruption and disorder, her humor and her despair, her conceit and her narcissism, her everything that isn’t me. Now that she is dead, I can already feel the love overriding the hatred once more. Besides our moment of happiness on the porch when Vivien first came home on Friday, these are the next best few minutes I’ve had with her. She should have stayed away. Why
did
she come home? I wonder. I know so little about her.

I hear a car advancing up the drive and, glancing through the window, I am surprised to see it’s a police car.

CHAPTER
22

PC Bolt and Inspector Piggott

T
HE POLICEMAN STEPS OUT
of the car onto the drive as I walk towards him. My new self had little trouble in opening the front door, and I’m feeling far less threatened as I walk up to him than I would have felt yesterday with any other visitor. The sun catches his windscreen, dazzling me. The sky is a watery blue and I can smell honeysuckle, carried to me on the breeze.

“Vivien Morris?” he says, from afar, and I think of Vivien, her body ratcheting her life from itself. “I’m PC Bolt, from the Beaminster station. Sorry, did I get you out of bed?” he says, looking at my nightgown, then the open-toed slippers on my feet.

PC Bolt looks about nineteen. He’s standing by his car, leaning on the open door, which makes a barrier between us, like a desk.

“No,” I say, but I’m trying hard to work out how and why he’s here, how on earth he found out so quickly that I’ve poisoned my sister. For a moment I imagine he has a special insight that allows him to detect any injustices being carried out within the county.

“There’s nothing to be alarmed about,” he says, smiling. “It’s what we call a courtesy call.” My sense of relief gives way to light-headedness and I have to steady myself. I remember I’ve not eaten today. Once my routine goes, I forget to do things like eat.

“Oh, and also,” he continues flippantly, “we had a very excited telephone call from a”—he takes a flip-pad from his breast pocket and consults it—“from an Eileen Turner, who lives at Willow Cottage. She was frantic, saying you were supposed to be having tea with her this afternoon at four and as it’s now, well,
long
gone…”

“Is it?” I check my digital wristwatch: 4:12.

“Well, I just meant it’s past teatime and she thought something might be wrong because you didn’t turn up. I did tell her you’d most probably forgotten, but she didn’t think you would have, and she was insistent that I come and make sure myself and”—he shakes his head in a way that makes me wonder how often he’s had to mediate tea dates among the elderly—“you know what some of these old dears can be like. She didn’t want to walk up to the house herself.” He pauses, perhaps waiting for me to say something. “She made me promise her I’d pay you a visit and check that everything was all right,” he says apologetically. I don’t say anything.

“Well, I’ll pop into Eileen’s on my way back to the station and let her know, then, shall I? Do you want me to tell her you’ll be calling in later…or not?”

I nod. “Was that a ‘not’ or not a ‘not’?” He laughs.

I nod again.

“Well, then…” He coughs and plants one foot inside the car as if to go. Then he glances up at the towering house, the turrets and the gargoyles that seem to hold the bricks together around the crenellations. “Great place,” he says. “Fascinating.” He pauses. I think I see him shiver.

“Well, have a good evening, madam.”

“What time did you say it was?” I ask quickly, quite forgetting that a minute ago I wanted him to go away as quickly as possible, quite forgetting for a moment that Vivien is upstairs, dead. Murdered, in fact.

“Well”—he flicks over his wrist—“it’s just gone seven.”

“
Is
it?” I’m unable to hide my astonishment. “I make it twelve minutes past
four.
” He laughs as if I’ve made a joke. It’s such a shock that I can’t say anything more. I can’t think straight.

“Well, there you go,” he starts, as if he’s solved a case. “That will explain the confusion….” But I’m not listening. I’m appalled. The tops of the limes along the drive are swaying…. I had thought that at most I’d be out by eleven minutes.
Not three hours.
I’m watching his mouth. His lips are wet and full and form their words with large slow ovals so that I can clearly see the pink gums inside. Nothing feels real. I have a rush of dizziness. The limes look as if they’re about to uproot and topple.

That’s it.

T
WO MEN ARE
peering down at me. One is PC Bolt, I remember, and the other, whom I don’t recognize, is shining a bright torch into my eye. There’s a sharp throbbing pain at the back of my head. I can hear a woman’s voice and a lot of other people talking and walking about outside the room. Soon I realize I am on my bed in my room and the previous events come back to me. I remember being on the drive, PC Bolt telling me how out of time I was, and then I must have fainted. I have no idea how long ago that would have been.

I hear a soft voice. “Miss Stone? Can you hear me? It’s PC Bolt.” I look at him. “Are you Miss Virginia Stone?” I nod. “Right, I didn’t realize you were
the sister,
” he says.

“What’s the time?” I ask.

“Just relax,” says the other man. “Please don’t try to talk.”

“What’s the time?” I ask again.

“It’s all right. I’m a doctor and you’re going to be fine,” he says, raising his voice, assuming I’m a bit deaf. This is torturous.

“I’d just like to know what time it is, please, Doctor,” I say once more, but this time in a taut, stifled voice that’s not attached to my throat. I have my eyes shut tight to expel the frustration.

“It’s about eight o’clock,” the doctor says nonchalantly, without consulting any sort of timepiece.

Now I look at PC Bolt in despair, as if he, out of the two of them, might just understand. “Constable, please tell me the exact time. I need to know,” I beseech him.

He studies his watch for a suitably long time. “It’s ten minutes past eight.”

I had been straining my neck without realizing it, and now I let my head fall back onto the pillow and relax.

Fifteen minutes later I am sitting up on my bed. A mug (which I don’t recognize) of tea is steaming on my bedside table, which I want but can’t bring myself to drink, as I didn’t make it. Besides, it’s too milky. Now a different, much older policeman is in the room with me, standing by my bed. “Would you like some tea?” he asks, gesturing to the mug.

“No, thank you.”

“I’m Inspector Piggott.”

Inspector Piggott goes into the bathroom without a word and comes back fifty seconds later (I’m looking at my bedside clock while he is away). He hands me a glass of water.

“Drink this,” he orders. “It’ll make you feel better.”

“What is it?” I look inside the glass, which reminds me that I’d said the same thing to Vivien only this afternoon. My God! I’d completely forgotten. Vivien!

“Water,” he says. Oh, Lord, does he know about Vivien? Has he smelt her yet?

I take a sip and hand it back.

“I hope you’ll understand what I’m about to tell you,” he says, loudly and clearly. “Look, I’m very sorry, I’ve got some rather alarming news.” He places the glass on the table.

As you can imagine I’ve had rather too much alarming news recently and I’m not sure I’m up to it. I feel a little frail and my head hurts. The anticipation is unbearable.

“Your sister, Vivien. I’m afraid she’s dead.”

Is that it? I think, and I’m very thankful Inspector Piggott’s news isn’t in the least bit alarming.

“Oh dear,” I muster in reply, because he’s looking at me, waiting for one.

“Yes, earlier this afternoon, we think,” he continues, loud and slow. “Did you happen to see her today?” he asks casually.

“Yes,” I reply and then I say, “Actually, no,” and, to tell you the truth, I’m completely confused. I’m trying to give him the right answer rather than the real answer.

“Don’t worry, Miss Stone. You’ve had a little knock to your head and I think everything will become clear in a while. We’re taking her away now so we can look into the specific cause of death,” he adds, sitting on the edge of my bed, rather as if he’s settling into a long bedtime story. I can feel the heat rising to my face and I can’t stop it. I’m not used to strangers sitting on my bed. “Do you know if she was ill,” he asks, “or taking any medication?”

“No. I don’t.”

Inspector Piggott waits while PC Bolt and the doctor leave the room. When they’ve gone he sighs heavily and rubs his brow with the tips of his fingers as if he’s trying to rub out the lines he has there. “I know this is a lot for you to take in right now but I’ll be frank. We’ve come across something in the glass by your sister’s bed and, well, we think it might be cyanide. It has a very distinct smell.”

Suddenly my mouth is extraordinarily dry. I know that almond smell well.

“Cyanide,” I repeat, because again, I know some sort of response is required.

“Miss Stone, do you have any idea where the cyanide could have come from?” Wasn’t he going to ask me why I killed her? Now, that would have been a tricky question. Where the cyanide came from was easy.

“We’ve got
plenty
of cyanide here,” I say.

Inspector Piggott looks down at me, surprised. “Have you? What on earth for?”

I hold out my arm for him to steady me as I lift myself from the bed. A sharp pain anchors my head as I tilt up and I wish I hadn’t decided to move, but within a minute or two I am leading him slowly out of the room, turning right and crossing the landing. A young man I’ve never seen before rushes up to us and offers me a walking stick—Vivien’s, as it happens, the one she used only once to embellish her arrival.

As we approach my lookout I see Eileen Turner and PC Bolt come out through the double doors from the east wing. Eileen is sobbing and saying, “She’d only been back for three days…,” but as soon as they see us their conversation stops abruptly and their pace slows. As we walk past, the two policemen exchange glances and Eileen looks down. I must admit I have no idea if it is a quiet consolatory nod or if she’s scared to look at me. I have an odd impression that my house is crammed with people, strangers wandering all over it, getting into every crevice like a swarm of ants in a larder.

I open the door to the spiral staircase and walk extra slowly up the stairs, all at once overwhelmed by age. I can hear Eileen’s voice again, this time low and muffled, floating up intermittently from the far side of the landing. I have Vivien’s walking stick in my left hand and Piggott is still gripping my right arm at the elbow, steadying me now and again. He and I do not speak to one another. I, for one, am concentrating on my footing until, finally, we’re at the top and I’m opening the door to the attic. Two bats are disturbed as we enter and the inspector flinches in surprise as they squall and flutter into the next room. I think I hear him gag as, with his spare hand, he retrieves a handkerchief from his top pocket and holds it over his nose and mouth. I lead him to the laboratory and point, with Vivien’s stick, to the left-hand side, where the bottles are labeled with the skull and crossbones.

“Killing fluid,” I say.

“Ah,” says the inspector, muffled by the handkerchief. “Killing what?”

“Moths, mainly. That was our family…” I was going to say “living,” but at the last moment I change my mind. “Our family expertise,” I say proudly. He asks me if I could show him which ones are cyanide so I point to the different types. Mainly, I explain, there’s either sodium or potassium cyanide, NaCN or KCN, but there’s also prussic acid, which is another name for hydrogen cyanide, HCN, and that in the bottles they are all solutions but on the very top shelf are the powdered poisons in their purest form.

“Is there one missing?” He cuts across my lecture, pointing to an obvious gap along the shelf.

“Yes,” I tell him. After he’s helped himself to a couple of bottles and tins, carefully sealing them in a polythene bag, I lead him back downstairs to the hall. The house is quiet again but for the hollow tick of the longcase clock. I look slowly round the decrepit hall. It’s capacious and empty. Wallpaper is peeling badly at the top edge near the cornice where the damp has nuzzled through, but everything is as it should be, in its place. To me, it is safe again. Safe and still and workable. I can feel the entire week’s buildup of tension start to loosen and melt away. I feel happy, even.

Nearing the front door Inspector Piggott turns to me. “Miss Stone,” he says, very formally, “can you think of any reason why your sister might have wanted to take her life?”

I hadn’t thought of that. “No,” I say, and then I think that taking her own life was probably the last thing Vivien would have done.

He nods and is turning to go when I stop him. “Inspector Piggott, I just wondered…”

“Yes?” he says, turning keenly, eager for me to divulge a secret.

“Do you have the time, please?”

“The time?”

“Yes. I’d like to know what time it is.”

“Nine o’clock,” he replies.

“What,
exactly
nine?”

“Well, no, a little after.” He looks at his watch again. “Five past.” He turns to go again.

“Exactly five past?” I ask quickly. It still sounds a little general to me. He stops, turns back to me, and studies his watch carefully, filling me with confidence that he is about to give me the most accurate answer he can.

“I make it almost seven minutes past nine,” he says, eyeing me cautiously.

“Oh,
thank you,
” I say, really meaning it. “And does that, do you think, correspond with the police-station clock? I mean, do you check it against the station clock sometimes?”

He pauses. “Yes. Regularly,” he says reassuringly.

“Oh, thank you, Inspector, thank you.” I sigh. I am truly relieved. I reset both my wristwatches and close the front door after him.