I WAS IN the kitchen when the doorbell rang. I glanced out of the window and saw the detective, Townsend, standing on the front steps, looking up at the windows. Lena got to the door before I did. She opened up for him and said, ‘Hi, Sean.’
Townsend stepped into the house, brushing past her skinny body as he did, noticing (he must have noticed) her denim cutoffs, the Rolling Stones T-shirt with the tongue sticking out. He held out his hand to me and I took it. His palm was dry but his skin had an unhealthy sheen to it and there were greyish circles under his eyes. Lena watched him from beneath lowered lids. She raised her fingers to her mouth and chewed on a nail.
I showed him into the kitchen and Lena followed. The detective and I sat down at the table, while Lena leaned against the counter. She crossed one ankle over the other, then shifted her body and crossed them again.
Townsend didn’t look. He coughed, rubbed one hand against his wrist. ‘The post-mortem has been completed,’ he said in a soft voice. He glanced at Lena and back at me. ‘Nel was killed by the impact. There’s no indication that anyone else was involved. There was some alcohol in her blood.’ His voice grew softer still. ‘Enough to impair her judgement. To make her unsteady on her feet.’
Lena made a noise, a long, shuddering sigh. The detective was looking at his hands, now folded in front of him on the table.
‘But … Nel was sure-footed as a goat up on that cliff,’ I said. ‘And she could handle more than a few glasses of wine. Nel could handle a bottle …’
He nodded. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But at night, up there …’
‘It wasn’t an accident,’ Lena said sharply.
‘She didn’t jump,’ I snapped back.
Lena squinted at me, lip curled. ‘What would you know?’ she asked. She turned to look at the detective. ‘Did you know that she lied to you? She lied about not being in contact with my mother. Mum tried to call her, like, I don’t even know how many times. She never answered, she never called back, she never—’ She stopped, looking back at me. ‘She’s just … why are you even here? I don’t want you here.’ She stalked out of the room, slamming the kitchen door behind her. A few moments later, her bedroom door slammed too.
DI Townsend and I sat in silence. I waited for him to ask me about the phone calls, but he said nothing; his eyes were shuttered, his face expressionless.
‘Does it not strike you as odd,’ I said at last, ‘how convinced she is that Nel did this deliberately?’
He turned to me, his head cocked to one side slightly. Still he said nothing.
‘Do you not have any suspects in this investigation? I mean … it just doesn’t seem to me that anyone here cares that she’s dead.’
‘But you do?’ he said evenly.
‘What sort of a question is that?’ I could feel my face growing hot. I knew what was coming.
‘Ms Abbott,’ he said. ‘Julia.’
‘Jules. It’s Jules.’ I was stalling, delaying the inevitable.
‘Jules.’ He cleared his throat. ‘As Lena just mentioned, although you told us that you hadn’t had any contact with your sister in years, Nel’s mobile phone records reveal that in the past three months alone, she made eleven calls to your phone.’ My face hot with shame, I looked away. ‘Eleven calls. Why lie to us?’
(She’s always lying, you muttered darkly. Always lying. Always telling tales.)
‘I didn’t lie,’ I said. ‘I never spoke to her. It’s like Lena said: she left messages, I didn’t respond. So I didn’t lie,’ I repeated. I sounded weak, wheedling, even to myself. ‘Look, you can’t ask me to explain this to you, because there is no way of doing so to an outsider. Nel and I had problems going back years – but that doesn’t have anything to do with this.’
‘How can you know?’ Townsend asked. ‘If you didn’t speak to her, how do you know what it had to do with?’
‘I just … Here,’ I said, holding out my mobile phone. ‘Take it. Listen for yourself.’ My hands were trembling and, as he reached for the phone, so were his. He listened to your final message.
‘Why would you not call her back?’ he said, something akin to disappointment on his face. ‘She sounded upset, wouldn’t you say?’
‘No, I … I don’t know. She sounded like Nel. Sometimes she was happy, sometimes she was sad, sometimes she was angry, more than once she was drunk … it didn’t mean anything. You don’t know her.’
‘The other calls she made,’ he demanded, a harder edge to his voice now. ‘Do you still have the messages?’
I didn’t, not all of them, but he listened to the ones I had, his hand gripping my phone so tightly his knuckles whitened. When he finished, he handed the phone back to me.
‘Don’t erase those. We may need to listen to them again.’ He pushed his chair back and got to his feet, and I followed him out into the hall.
At the door, he turned to face me. ‘I have to say,’ he said, ‘I find it odd that you didn’t answer her. That you didn’t try to find out why she needed to speak to you so urgently.’
‘I thought she just wanted attention,’ I said quietly and he turned away.
It was only after he had closed the door behind him that I remembered. I ran out after him.
‘Detective Townsend,’ I called out, ‘there was a bracelet. My mother’s bracelet. Nel always wore it. Have you found it?’
He shook his head, turning again to look at me. ‘We’ve found nothing, no. Lena told DS Morgan that while Nel did wear it often, it wasn’t something she had on every day. Although,’ he went on, dipping his head, ‘I suppose you couldn’t have known that.’ With a glance up at the house, he climbed into his car and backed slowly out of the driveway.
Jules
SO SOMEHOW, THIS has ended up being my fault. You really are something, Nel. You are gone, possibly killed, and everyone is pointing the finger at me. I wasn’t even here! I felt petulant, reduced to my teenage self. I wanted to scream at them, How is this my fault?
After the detective left, I stomped back into the house, catching sight of myself in the hallway mirror as I did, and I was surprised to see you looking back at me (older, not so pretty, but still you). Something snagged in my chest. I went into the kitchen and cried. If I failed you, I need to know how. I may not have loved you, but I can’t have you abandoned like this, dismissed. I want to know if someone hurt you and why; I want them to pay. I want to lay all this to rest so that maybe you can stop whispering in my ear about how you didn’t jump, didn’t jump, didn’t jump. I believe you, all right? And (whisper it), I want to know that I am safe. I want to know that no one is coming for me. I want to know that the child I am to take under my wing is just that – a blameless child – not something else. Not something dangerous.
I kept seeing the way Lena looked at DI Townsend, the tone of her voice when she called him by his first name (his first name?), the way he looked at her. I wondered whether what she’d told them about the bracelet was true. It rang false, to me, because you’d been so quick to claim it, to make it yours. It was possible, I supposed, that you only insisted on taking it because you knew how much I wanted it. When you found it amongst Mum’s things and slipped it on to your wrist, I complained to Dad (yes, telling tales again). I asked, Why should she have it? Why not? you replied. I’m the eldest. And when he was gone, you smiled as you admired it on your wrist. It suits me, you said. Don’t you think it suits me? Pinching a layer of fat on my forearm. I doubt it would fit around your chubby little arm.