Manner of death is natural, and no recommendations are made.
6 July 1996
Something doesn’t add up. If the coroner confirmed that Catherine Louise Evans did indeed die of natural causes, why have her parents remained so secretive about her? Why hide her brief existence? Wouldn’t she be perfect fodder for Evans’s political campaign?
I can only see disjointed fragments of possibility instead of full, convincing answers. I glare at the chessboard on my desk. I prod a couple of pawns forward on both sides. I drag a black castle out of its corner and send a white knight scuttling backwards, wishing that solutions to real-life mysteries were as easy as those on my chessboard. But the answers remain elusive.
With a sigh, I turn to the iDiary on my desk. Perhaps the crazy woman might have an answer.
“What happened to her?” Gunnar rushed forward, mouth a tormented twist.
Thunder hissed outside their home. It wasn’t the magical auroral crackle they had heard during their honeymoon in Svalbard. It was a sonic boom resulting from a rapid expansion of temperature and pressure, one that epitomized everything that had gone wrong in their relationship since then.
Sigrid sobbed as she opened her fist. A baby’s bib fluttered to the floor.
—Mark Henry Evans, On Death’s Door
Chapter Twenty
Sophia
25 February 2015
Things are falling into place. I should be pleased with what I’ve managed to piece together. The coroner’s report was as pricey as hell (shame private snoops don’t come cheap). But it was worthwhile. Because it offered delicious reading. Interesting bedtime entertainment better than a fucking dildo.
So Claire Evans took an antidepressant for two weeks, even before she married Mark. Days after conceiving Catherine. I’m not surprised. Once a depressive, always a depressive. How fucking depressing. Probably unaware of her pregnancy when she first started the pills. Must have stopped taking them after realizing she’d been knocked up. By Mark, obviously. I’m sure that Mark was the father of her child.
So that’s why he married her. He wouldn’t have married a stupid Mono otherwise.
It all makes sense now.
If only I had known this earlier. I wouldn’t have made such a fool of myself that morning all those years ago. Maybe I would have chosen a blunter knife. I certainly wouldn’t have nicked his neck to make my point.
But did Claire’s pregnancy antidepressants eventually trigger Catherine’s death? Or did something more sinister occur?
Anthony Paget, MD. It’s amazing what online searches can reveal about a person these days. It didn’t take me too long to dig up a few fascinating facts about the man. An alumnus of Trinity. Just like Mark (although Paget graduated ten years before Mark’s matriculation). Director of studies in medicine at Trinity in 1994, the same year Mark became a junior research fellow in English literature. Now a leading expert in the field of SIDS, based at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg. One of Paget’s groundbreaking papers on the biomolecular pathways leading to crib death is likely to earn him the next Nobel Prize in Medicine.
How fucking illustrious.
Also the first recipient of the Walter Bushey Fellowship in 2007.
How fucking suspicious.
I’m capable of making links. Memory, if anything, gives you the ability to see the big picture. To perceive things with greater accuracy. To pick up subtle hints and cues. To understand possible connections. To put things into context. To work out how disparate things fit together. To integrate fragmented snapshots into a unified whole. To make creative linkages between the past and present. Which, in turn, leads to all sorts of interesting possibilities. Fascinating insights, even.
If two things line up, it’s a coincidence. But if three things coalesce, it’s a fucking pattern.
I can see quite a few links between Paget and Evans.
Enough to form a garish little design.
Keep digging, Sophia. Keep digging.
10 March 2015
Doctors are so fucking easy. Especially vapid male physicians. Helmut Jong was simple. But I didn’t even have to seduce Paget. I merely e-mailed Mr. Nobel-in-Waiting, asking him to meet me for coffee. Claiming to be Mrs. Jessica Livingstone, a long-lost friend from his Cambridge days who’s thinking of donating to SIDS research. An e-mail that oozed promise, sweetness, and light (I’m capable of turning on the syrup when I need to).
I’m entitled to gloat. About what I found out from little Mr. Brainiac. It made flying those 1,100 miles to Heidelberg and back worthwhile.
The sun disappeared behind the K?nigstuhl as I walked into that charming café along the banks of the Neckar River. The professor looked worse than his outdated online photographs. He was wrinkly, squat, and had lost most of his hair.
Fabulous to see you again, Anthony, I gushed. It’s been years, hasn’t it? You look amazing.
Thank you, he said. So do you.
It’s incredible how people play along in conversation. How they are so fucking trusting. Even though they have written down zero facts in their diaries about you.
We spent the next five minutes exchanging pleasantries. Before I blasted my first salvo of the evening.
Do you have any facts on Mark Henry Evans? I asked. Nonchalantly, as if we were discussing the lovely Heidelberg weather.
Ah, nodded the professor. I first met Mark Evans when he was a Trinity undergraduate. That was years ago. He’s now a famous novelist hoping to be South Cambridgeshire’s next MP.
Shame about baby Catherine, I said, deciding to be reckless.
So you know about her, he mumbled. Eyes darting away from me, as if he were guilty of something.
Course I do, I said, deciding to improvise. My diary says that Claire Evans and I used to be close friends, I added. Bosom buddies, even. Until I got married and moved away from Cambridge. I held Claire’s hand as she sobbed at Catherine’s funeral. Claire also confided in me about what really happened to Catherine. It wasn’t what it seemed, was it?
What are you getting at? the professor shot back with a tremor in his voice.
Aha, I thought. So the man’s hiding a juicy little nugget or two.
I’m making the point that you were instrumental in concealing the truth, I said, struggling to hide the glee on my face. That little business over the Prozac was merely a smoke screen, wasn’t it? For what really happened to the daughter of Mark and Claire Evans?
Are you trying to blackmail me? The professor gulped, face sapped of color.
Blackmail. Such a lovely, evocative word. A word that oozed all sorts of delicious possibilities. If the professor wrote in his report that the infant died of SIDS, it was probably not the case.