Four

The storm that had swept up the country had left the city streets greasy, and Beryl Graham slithered a little coming up the steps to her sister’s house. She stopped, steadying herself on the iron handrail.

Beryl Graham was a small woman, with iron-grey hair. Eight years younger than her sister, she nevertheless bore a strong resemblance to Alisha, in the set of the shoulders, and in a kind of rigid smile, a smile of determination, that both habitually wore.

Beryl looked up now at Alisha’s window, trying to determine if her sister were in. A wind chime hung behind a looped blind, a slatted wood blind that Alisha could never fathom, or bother, to drop straight. Stacks of books stood on the deep window sill. Two spider plants lay drooping, dying, next to the books, their leaves heavy with dust.

Still breathing heavily from the climb, Beryl put her key in the door.

The first thing she saw as she stepped into the hall was a blue light from the back room, the thready light of the computer screen.

‘Alisha!’ she called.

She walked down to the sitting room, glancing at her watch. It was just past nine o’clock. Pushing back the closed curtains, Beryl glanced around herself, frowning. Papers were all over the floor; inadvertently, she had stepped on some. She picked them up and looked about the desk, not knowing where to put them. Alisha habitually spread projects, notes and books about her—the whole of the top of the desk was covered with them, with other sticky notes attached to the edge of the computer screen itself. Beryl peered down and looked at the screen. A message, the screensaver, was scrolling across it. She caught the last few words—in a vain shadow and disquieteth himself in vain …

The machine itself radiated heat, the fan whirring. It had obviously been switched on for hours.

‘Alisha!’ she called. ‘I’m here!’

She knew that sentence on the screen; it struck a familiar chord. She had heard it recently, at church. She stood for some seconds, trying to locate the verse. She frowned. Then she turned away from it, and walked back out into the hall.

‘Alisha!’

There was no reply. Beryl went into the kitchen, and noticed that the light was still on. She stopped, looking up at the flickering fluorescent tube, then turned it off. It was then that she saw the cups—two, each with a teaspoon of coffee, each with a spoon. But no water. Beryl put her hand against the kettle, and found it cold. In the sink were two dirty plates, crumbs, a pan with the remains of poached eggs. On the draining board stood an opened packet of biscuits. She stood for some moments, frowning at the two plates and two cups, and the unfinished preparation of the drinks.

In a vain shadow …

She knew that, she knew it.

She went back to the kitchen door.

‘Alisha?’

Standing at the bottom of the stairs, her hand resting on the wooden banister, Beryl tried to remember what Alisha had told her last week, the date that she was leaving.

‘I’m going away next week,’ her sister had said.

‘When next week?’ Beryl had asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Before I come on Thursday?’

‘Perhaps. Use your key to get in. I’ll leave your money on the fridge.’

Recalling the conversation now, Beryl went back to the kitchen and looked on the fridge. Nothing. The little brown saucer where Alisha always left the five-pound note was empty.

She took the cleaning box from under the sink, and went upstairs, preoccupied with every step.

Lights were on upstairs, too. Alisha’s bedroom curtains, at the back of the house, were drawn. A suitcase lay on the bed, half-packed. Alisha’s clothes—her heavy sweaters, walking socks—were piled both inside the case and on the bed. An unmade bed.

Beryl walked up to the case, looking at the pulled-back bedspread, the rumpled sheets and pillows, the case dumped on top, the walking shoes on top of the sweaters, dried mud from the boots all over the other clothes. The wardrobe doors stood open, and the drawers to the chest. And, on the floor, a book.

Beryl picked it up. It was a biography, something that Alisha had been reading, fitfully, for weeks. Several of the pages were torn: not quite torn through, but crumpled. Underneath it, she saw on the carpet, was a photograph, turned so that the picture faced the floor.

She put the book on the bed, and picked the photo up, and turned it over.

‘Alisha!’ she called. ‘Where are you?’

She looked down at the image. She didn’t know, quite, what she had been expecting. Sometimes, Alisha had photographs of the sites she visited. And Beryl knew that she also had, somewhere—though she hadn’t seen them for years—family albums that had belonged to their mother. Green-bound volumes with carefully preserved, tissue-separated sepia prints of nameless aunts and cousins. Holidays, with themselves as children, buttoned against gales, each holding an adult hand … but this was nothing like that.

It was a photograph of a woman, a young woman.

The focus was slightly blurred. Beryl went to the window, parted the curtains, and peered closely at the picture. Whoever it was had their back to the camera, and was bent over slightly. Caught in the act of dressing, the girl was naked. Her hand was reaching to the floor, and an item of clothing—something white—was in her fingertips. The face was hidden—the camera had centred on her body. All that could be seen was the neck, and the edge of the chin. Rounded white shoulders, the back, the line of the spine curved gracefully to one side, the broad buttocks, all with the smooth incandescent quality of youth, unlined, unscarred, unmarked.

Beryl stared at it. It was not an old picture. Sunlight lay in the room around the girl, touching the furniture in the background. The chest by the end of the bed, the carved footboard of the bed itself, the pattern of the carpet at the girl’s feet … Beryl’s eyes wandered momentarily to the floor under her own shoes. The same carpet, the same bed.

She dropped the image as if it were hot, then stood staring at it where it lay next to Alisha’s clothes.

Downstairs, there was a sudden knock at the door.

Three heavy knocks, repeated.

Beryl went back to the landing, bent down and looked at the glass panel in the door. She breathed heavily, alarmed and ashamed by the discovery of the photograph, feeling as if she had intruded on something nameless and faintly unclean. Unconsciously, she wiped the fingers that had held the photograph against her skirt.

Downstairs, she could see two figures through the door. The imprint of a fist, knuckles, on the glass, where a hand was resting. It knocked again.

‘All right,’ she called. ‘All right.’ She went downstairs with difficulty, wincing at the steps and the little arthritic needles of complaint in both knees. Two men were on the doorstep. One showed an identification wallet.

‘Miss Graham?’

‘Yes.’

They looked at each other.

‘Not Alisha Graham?’

‘No, no,’ she said. ‘That’s my sister. This is her house. I’m Beryl Graham.’

‘I see,’ said the first. ‘May we come in?’

They sat in the living room, among Alisha’s dusty books and plants, on the hard chairs upholstered in red moquette that Beryl had never wanted, that Alisha had taken from their father’s house.

Beryl knotted her hands in her lap. She felt disorientated—not by the mess in the house, for that was perfectly Alisha—but by the persistent puzzle still rattling in her head: the lights, the drawn curtains, the lines of smooth flesh on a stranger’s back. The words on the screen. She closed her eyes for a second against the two bland faces opposite her, one man standing, the other sitting. She tried to push the day back into its ordinary groove: cleaning Alisha’s bathroom, wiping dust from sills, hoovering her carpets, trying not to touch Alisha’s papers or books. Or the plants on the sill in this room. She opened her eyes, and stared towards the window. She never touched those plants. She hated spider plants. They were so sharp to the eye.

‘Miss Graham,’ one of the men said.

Unforgiving chairs, these. A memory of their father, cold in his last house, cold to the last, clung to the very fabric.

She tried to bring herself back to the room, the point at issue. Alisha’s car, they had said. And two women in it …

‘She can’t have gone,’ Beryl heard herself say. ‘Her clothes are upstairs. Her suitcase. How can she be in Dorset? She’s only out somewhere. For a while. She left her computer on, dishes in the sink, everything.’

They handed her a piece of paper, a slippery paper with a colour photograph imprinted on it.

Just for a moment, Beryl’s mind sprang back to the other photograph upstairs, and the unmade bed. She forced herself to concentrate on the picture in her palm.

‘This was faxed to us this morning,’ the man said.

It was Alisha, her eyes only half open. Her head was resting on a car seat, the faint outline of a house behind her, out of the car’s window. Two or three strands of hair were blurred, as if the wind had lifted them.

‘Is this your sister?’ one of the men asked.

‘Yes,’ Beryl said.

There was a silence, a silence in which she could hear, very faintly, the sibilant murmur of the computer.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ the standing man asked.

‘She has left all her dinner things in the sink,’ Beryl said.

He went out. She heard him filling the kettle.

‘What happened to her?’ she asked.

He took the photograph back. ‘She was found this morning, in a car.’

‘But what happened to her?’

‘I’m afraid she has died.’

Beryl drew herself up. ‘I can see she has died,’ she told him. ‘That’s not what I meant.’

He looked surprised. ‘There’s an examination being carried out,’ he said.

‘On her?’

‘Yes.’

‘I see,’ she said. She smoothed her skirt, her hair. ‘I cannot bear people beating around the bush,’ she said.

The tea was brought in. They sat drinking for a moment.

‘Two women?’ Beryl asked, finally.

‘Yes.’

‘Who was the other one?’ she asked.

‘We don’t know.’

‘Is she alive?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you don’t know who she is?’

‘No,’ they replied.

‘Was it an accident, in the car?’

‘No.’

‘She was just … found?’

‘The car pulled up at a house during the night,’ they told her.

‘Whose house?’ she asked.

They paused, exchanged a glance. ‘Do you know a woman called Anna Miles?’

‘No.’

‘Did your sister?’

‘I don’t know. She had a lot of friends she didn’t introduce me to. People at her work. And she wrote to a lot of people.’

‘Why was that?’

‘Work,’ Beryl said. ‘They wrote about her books, or because they had a problem and wanted her advice. You can see letters on her desk. Always that kind of thing. And she was on this computer, this internet.’

‘E-mail.’

‘I have no idea,’ Beryl retorted.

‘She was an expert in her field?’

‘Industrial history.’

‘So she might have known Anna Miles through that?’

‘She knew dozens of people, hundreds of people. Go to her desk. There are folders underneath it, folders in the drawers, on the couch, on the floor.’

The man opposite her put down his cup. ‘Did she have a particular friend? A younger woman, eighteen, nineteen?’

Beryl paused. The feeling of intimate intrusion returned. She knotted her hands in her lap. ‘She was a lecturer,’ she replied. ‘Ask at the university. She knew a lot of girls of that age.’

‘A blonde girl, long hair.’

Beryl sat regarding them for some seconds, torn between providing some kind of privacy for her sister, and a long-harboured resentment at her exclusion from Alisha’s world. From the parties at the university, and the summer courses. From Alisha’s aura of significance, reputation, respect.

At last, with great deliberation and at tortuously slow speed, Beryl climbed the stairs again and took the two policemen to the bedroom. The photograph was still lying on the floor, where she had let it drop.

‘You can’t see her face,’ she said. ‘But she’s young, I should think.’

They made no move to pick it up.

‘When did you last see your sister?’

‘Last week,’ she told them. ‘A week today.’

‘Was there a girl here then?’

‘No.’

‘Have you spoken to her since then?’

‘No.’

‘But girls have been here before,’ they said.

‘Students,’ she admitted.

‘Girls would stay here?’

‘I don’t know.’ They looked steadily at her. She returned the gaze. ‘It’s her business,’ she said.

They were looking at the room.

‘She was interrupted,’ one said. ‘Packing.’

Beryl started to move forward. Her arm was gently caught.

‘I think we ought to call someone in to see this,’ he said.

Beryl looked him in the eye. ‘You never told me what happened to her,’ she said.

‘I don’t know what happened,’ he said.

‘She was as fit as a flea.’

‘We shan’t know until tomorrow. Or perhaps later today.’

‘She was a walker, a hill walker,’ Beryl insisted. ‘She could walk twenty miles a day. She was examined only last month for her health insurance. Fit as a flea.’ Beryl looked down at her own hands, which ached fiercely. She thought of the inhaler she sometimes had to use. She thought of mortality, of the dangerous, threatening ripples of ill health that dogged old age. But not Alisha’s old age. Beryl had thought all her life that her sister would live to a hundred—infallible, intransigent, inflexible. Always the fitter child, the stronger child. Never the one to catch a cold, or any of the miserable baby illnesses that had kept her, Beryl, sick in bed for weeks at a time. Alisha had always been the unfazed teenager, the careless one, the unhindered one. The faster one, the cleverer one. Untouched by weakness. Yet now she was dead, and her weaker sister was alive, standing in her bedroom, discussing her, a photograph of her dead face folded in this stranger’s pocket.

Beryl felt curious. A touch of tasteless triumph, a breath of vengeful freedom.

Then, a thought suddenly struck her, a realization.

‘Do you know your Bible?’ she asked.

‘I’m sorry?’

Beryl almost stumbled going down the stairs again, leading the way. The three of them went into the back room. The computer sat humming, the screen blue, the white message slowly scrolling across it.

… himself in vain … Lord let me know mine end and the number of my days, for man walketh in a vain shadow and disquieteth himself in vain …

Feeling faint, Beryl sat down heavily on the nearest chair. ‘Alisha wouldn’t say that at all,’ she told them. ‘I’ve heard that twice in the last year, but Alisha wouldn’t know it. I couldn’t think where it was from. Now I know. Now I remember. She hated the church. She didn’t believe.’

‘Walketh in a vain shadow,’ the man repeated. ‘What is that?’

Beryl gave him a tepid smile. ‘Alisha liked facts,’ she said. ‘Not stories. And everything said in a church was fiction. She told me that. A hundred times.’

‘But what is it?’ asked the second man.

‘Don’t you see? She wouldn’t have put it on.’

‘On the computer?’

‘On there, on anywhere. She wouldn’t have put it on,’ Beryl insisted. ‘She couldn’t bear religion in any shape or form.’

‘And this is a quotation, from the Bible?’

‘Yes,’ Beryl said, sighing. ‘It’s Psalm 39.’

The message flickered, the screen blanked. Then the screensaver reappeared, smoothly rolling from left to right. ‘Psalm 39,’ Beryl repeated quietly, almost to herself. ‘They read it sometimes at funerals.’