The Second Sister. Claire Kendal
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looks out at me like a once-beautiful witch who is sickening under a curse. Those jewel eyes, losing their brightness. That pale skin and long black hair. It’s only the little pit by your left brow that isn’t there.
I see you everywhere.
If I really had eyes like yours, I wouldn’t be about to ask a question that you are going to hate. I would already know the answer. But here it is. What would you do if the police wanted to talk to you? Because I need to follow where you lead.
Just forming these words makes me see what to do. The police ask their questions and I am supposed to give them the answers they are hoping to hear. I am almost sorry for them, with their innocent faith that they can capture you on an official form, kept to a page or at most a few.
We wish to seek the whole truth, they say. You are a key witness, they say. We are concerned for your welfare, they say. We need to obtain the best evidence, they say. We will deal appropriately with the information you provide, they say. You can trust us, they say. The success of any subsequent prosecution will depend on accuracy and detail, they say. Other lives may be at stake, they say.
Am I supposed to be impressed? Flattered? Grateful? Scared? Intimidated? All of the above is my guess. So I will allow them to think that they have had their desired effect, as they take their careful notes and talk their tick-box talk in the calm and reassuring style that they have obviously rehearsed.
I will read the notes over to confirm their accuracy. I will appear to cooperate. I will sign the witness statement they prepare for me. I will date it too, with their help, because I have lost track of time a little, lately. Still, these motions are easy to go through. They do not matter.
What matters is that I am quietly writing my own witness statement, my own way, day after day. Compelled not by them but by you. That is what this is, and I am pretending that you are asking the questions and I am telling it all to you. I am writing down the things you want to know. The real things.
I will say this, though, Miranda, in my one concession to police speak. What follows comes from my personal knowledge of what I saw, heard and felt. I, Ella Allegra Brooke, believe that the facts in this witness statement are true. This is your story, but it is mine too, and I am our best witness. Maybe I do have eyes like yours, after all.
There is one more important thing I must tell you before I begin and it is this. It is that you mustn’t worry. Because I haven’t forgotten the confidentiality clause and I never will. You have taught me too well. What goes in this statement stays in this statement. It is for you alone. I am the sister of the sister and you are part of me. Wherever you are, I always will be. All my love, Melanie.
There is no visible sign that anything is out of place. But there is something wrong in the air, a mist of scent so faint I may be imagining it.
‘I was wondering,’ Luke says.
‘Wondering what?’ I am scanning every inch of our little clearing in the woods.
‘Why are so many fairy tales about sisters saving their brothers? All the ones you told me last week were.’
He is right. ‘Hansel and Gretel’. ‘The Seven Ravens’. ‘The Twelve Brothers’. Our mother seemed to know hundreds of them.
‘We should write a different story,’ I say.
‘I want one with a sister who saves her sister.’
I touch his cheek. ‘So do I.’
He marches straight into the centre of our clearing, dispersing any scent that might have lingered here.
This is where you and I used to make our own private house, playing together inside of walls made of tree trunks. We would eat the picnic lunches that Mum would bring out to us. We would plait each other’s hair and tickle each other’s backs.
When I think of your back, I see the milky skin beneath the tips of my fingers, my touch as light as a butterfly kiss. But this snapshot from our childhood disappears. Instead, I imagine your shoulder blade, and a flower drawn in blood. I hear you screaming. You are in a room below ground and I cannot get to you.
I blink several times in this weak autumn sun and remind myself of where I am and who I am with and that I cannot know that this is what happened.
I hear your voice. Even after ten years your words are with me. Find a different picture, you say. Remember the things that are real. This is what you used to tell me when I was scared that there was a monster underneath my bed.
I look around our clearing. This, I tell myself, is real. This is where Ted and I used to lie on a carpet of grass on summer days when we were children, holding hands and looking up through the gaps in the treetop roof. There would be snippets of blue sky and white cloud, and a pink snow of cherry blossom.
Your son is the most real thing of all. He bends down to scoop up a handful of papery leaves. ‘Hold your hands out,’ he says. When I do, he showers my palms with deep red. ‘Fire leaves,’ he says.
I shut out the flower made of blood. I manage to smile.
He cups a light orange pile. ‘Sun leaves,’ he says, throwing them high into the air and letting them rain upon us.
He finds green leaves, too. ‘Spring leaves,’ he says.
I lean over to choose some yellow leaves from our cherry tree, then offer them to Luke. ‘What do you call these?’
‘Summer leaves.’ This is when he blurts it out. ‘I want to live with you, Auntie Ella.’
I stare into Luke’s clear blue eyes, which are exactly like yours. When I zero in on them I can almost fool myself that you are here. And it hits me again. I imagine your eyes, wide open in pain and fear, your lashes wet with tears.
For the last few years, my waking nightmares about you have mostly been dormant. It took me so long to be able to control them. But a spate of fresh headlines last week shattered the defences I’d built.
Unsolved Case – New Link Discovered Between Evil Jason Thorne and Missing Miranda.
Eight years ago, when Thorne was arrested for torturing and killing three women, there was speculation that you were one of his victims. We begged the police for information. They would neither confirm nor deny the rumours, just as they refused to comment on the stories about what he did to the women. Perhaps we were too eager to interpret this as a signal that the stories were empty tabloid air. We were desperate to know what happened, but we didn’t want it to be Jason Thorne.
Dad spoke to the police again a few days ago, prompted by the fresh headlines. Once more they would neither confirm nor deny. Once more, Mum and Dad grabbed at anything which would let them believe that there was never any connection between you and Thorne. But I think they are only pretending to believe this to keep me calm, and their strategy isn’t working.
The possibility that Thorne took you seems much more real this time round. Journalists are now claiming that there is telephone evidence of contact between the two of you. They are also saying that Thorne communicated with his victims before stalking and snatching them. If these things are true, the police must have known all along, but they have never admitted any of it.
‘Don’t you want me?’ Luke says.
Thoughts of Jason Thorne have no business anywhere near your son.
‘Luke,’ I start to say.
He hears that something is wrong, though I reassure myself that he cannot guess what it really is.