Sister: A Novel by Rosamund Lupton Page B

in.
    ‘They said they will check it out.’
    ‘How American of them.’
    Only you are allowed to tease me like that. What the policeman had actually said was, ‘I’ll look into it straight away.’
    ‘So they’re going to search Hyde Park?’ Simon asked.
    But I was trying not to think about what the policeman had meant by ‘looking into it’. I’d replaced his English euphemism with an American euphemism, bubble-wrapping the sharp reality of what his words contained.
    ‘And they’ll ring us?’ he asked.
    I am your sister. DS Finborough would ring me.
    ‘DS Finborough will let me know if there’s anything, yes,’ I replied.
    Simon sprawled on your sofa, his snow-caked boots marking your Indian throw. But I needed to ask him some questions so I hid my annoyance.
    ‘The police think she has post-natal depression. How did she seem to you?’
    He didn’t answer for a few moments and I wondered if he was trying to remember or constructing a lie. ‘She was desperate,’ he said. ‘She had to take these special pills, to stop her breast milk. She told me that was one of the worst things, still making all this food for her baby and not being able to give it to him.’
    The death of your baby started to penetrate, a little way. I’m sorry that it was taking so long. My only defence is that there wasn’t space for your baby in my worry for you.
    Something was niggling me about Simon. I pinned it down, ‘You said was .’
    He looked taken aback.
    ‘You said she was desperate?’
    For a moment I thought he looked cornered, then he recovered his composure. His voice was back to fake North London. ‘I meant when I saw her on Thursday afternoon she was desperate. How am I meant to know how she’s doing now?’
    His face no longer looked childish to me but cruel; the piercings not marks of an adolescent rebellion but of an enjoyed masochism. I had another question to ask him.
    ‘Tess told me the baby had been cured?’
    ‘Yeah, it wasn’t anything to do with the cystic fibrosis.’
    ‘Was it because he was three weeks early?’
    ‘No. She told me it was something that would have killed him even if he’d been born at the right time. Something to do with his kidneys.’
    I steeled myself. ‘Do you know why she didn’t tell me when her baby died?’
    ‘I thought she had.’ There was something triumphant in his look. ‘Did you know I was going to be godfather?’
    He left with bad grace after my polite hints had turned uncharacteristically into an outright demand.

    I waited two and a half hours for DS Finborough to phone me back, and then I phoned the police station. A policewoman told me DS Finborough was unavailable. I decided to go to Hyde Park. I was hoping that DS Finborough would be nowhere to be seen; I was hoping that he was unavailable because he was now investigating a more urgent case, yours having been relegated to a missing person who’d turn up in her own good time. I was hoping that I was wrong and he was right; that you had just taken off somewhere after the death of your baby. I locked the door and put your key under the flowerpot with the pink cyclamen in case you came home while I was out.
    As I neared Hyde Park a police car, siren wailing, overtook. The sound panicked me. I drove faster. When I got to the Lancaster Gate entrance the police car, which had overtaken me, was joining others already parked, their sirens electronic howls.
    I went into the park, soft snow falling around me. I wish I’d waited a little longer and had an hour or so more of my life first. To most people that would sound selfish, but you’ve lived with grief or, more accurately, a part of you has died with grief so you, I know, will understand.
    A distance into the park I could see police, a dozen of them or more. Police vehicles were coming towards them, driving into the park itself. Onlookers were starting to come towards the site of the activity - reality TV unboxed.

    So many footprints and tyre tracks in the