Read Online Sister: A Novel by Rosamund Lupton - Free Book Online Page A

why you were murdered. I could start at the end, give you the answer, the final page, but you’d ask a question which would lead back a few pages, then another, all the way to where we are now. So I’ll tell you one step at a time, as I found out myself, with no reflecting hindsight.

    ‘A policeman I hadn’t met before asked me to identify her.’
    I have told Mr Wright what I have told you, minus deals with the devil and the other non-essential detours from my statement.
    ‘What time was this?’ he asks and his voice is kind, as it has been throughout this interview, but I can’t answer him. The day you were found time went demented; a minute lasted half a day, an hour went past in seconds. Like a children’s storybook, I flew in and out of weeks and through the years; second star to the right and straight on to a morning that would never arrive. I was in a Dali painting of drooping clocks, a Mad Hatter’s tea-party time. No wonder Auden said, ‘Stop all the clocks’; it was a desperate grab for sanity.
    ‘I don’t know what time it was,’ I reply. I decide to chance a little of my truth. ‘Time didn’t mean anything to me any more. Usually time alters and affects everything, but when someone you love dies time cannot change that, no amount of time will ever change that, so time stops having any meaning.’
    When I saw your strand of hair I knew that grief is love turned into an eternal missing. A little too much for Mr Wright, I agree, but I want him to know more about the reality of your death. It can’t be contained in hours or days or minutes. Remember those 1930s coffee spoons, each one like a melted sweet? That’s how I’d been living my life, in tiny measured doses. But your death was a vast sea and I was sinking. Did you know that an ocean can be seven miles deep? No sun can penetrate that far down. In the total darkness only misshapen, unrecognisable creatures survive; mutant emotions that I never even knew existed until you died.
    ‘Shall we break there?’ Mr Wright asks and for a moment I wonder if I’ve voiced my thoughts out loud and he’s worried I’m a crazy woman. I’m pretty sure I managed to keep my thoughts under wraps and he’s being considerate. But I don’t want to have to revisit this day again. ‘I’d rather finish.’ He stiffens, almost imperceptibly, and I sense he is bracing himself. I hadn’t considered this would be difficult for him. It was hard for the Ancient Mariner to tell his tale, but hard too for the poor wedding guest forced to listen. He nods and I continue.
    ‘The police had brought Mum to London but she couldn’t face identifying Tess, so I went to the police morgue on my own. A police sergeant was with me. He was in his late fifties. I can’t remember his name. He was very kind to me.’

    As we went into the morgue the police sergeant held my hand and he kept holding it. We went past a room where they do post-mortems. The shiny metal surfaces, white tiles and sharp lighting made it look like a high-tech designer kitchen taken to an extreme. He led me to a room where you were. The smell of antiseptic was overwhelming. The sergeant asked me if I was ready. I never would be. I nodded. He pulled back the blanket.
    You were wearing your thick winter coat, my Christmas present to you. I’d wanted to make sure you were warm. I was stupidly glad that you were wearing it. There is no description of the colour of death, no pantone number to match your face. It was the opposite of colour; the opposite of life. I touched your still satin-shiny hair. ‘She was so beautiful.’
    The sergeant tightened his fingers around mine. ‘Yes. She is beautiful.’
    He used the present tense and I thought he hadn’t heard me properly. But I think now that he was trying to make it a little better; death hadn’t robbed you of everything yet. He was right; you were beautiful in the way that Shakespeare’s tragic heroines are beautiful. You’d become a Desdemona, an