Lena made a noise, a long, shuddering sigh. The detective was looking at his hands, now folded in front of him on the table.
“But . . . Nel was surefooted as a goat up on that cliff,” I said. “And she could handle more than a few glasses of wine. Nel could handle a bottle . . .”
He nodded. “Perhaps,” he said. “But at night, up there . . .”
“It wasn’t an accident,” Lena said sharply.
“She didn’t jump,” I snapped back.
Lena squinted at me, lip curled. “What would you know?” she asked. She turned to look at the detective. “Did you know that she lied to you? She lied about not being in contact with my mother. Mum tried to call her, like, I don’t even know how many times. She never answered, she never called back, she never—” She stopped, looking back at me. “She’s just . . . why are you even here? I don’t want you here.” She stalked out of the room, slamming the kitchen door behind her. A few moments later, her bedroom door slammed, too.
• • •
DI TOWNSEND and I sat in silence. I waited for him to ask me about the phone calls, but he said nothing; his eyes were shuttered, his face expressionless.
“Does it not strike you as odd,” I said at last, “how convinced she is that Nel did this deliberately?”
He turned to me, his head cocked to one side slightly. Still he said nothing.
“Do you not have any suspects in this investigation? I mean . . . it just doesn’t seem to me that anyone here cares that she’s dead.”
“But you do?” he said evenly.
“What sort of a question is that?” I could feel my face growing hot. I knew what was coming.
“Ms. Abbott,” he said. “Julia.”
“Jules. It’s Jules.” I was stalling, delaying the inevitable.
“Jules.” He cleared his throat. “As Lena just mentioned, although you told us that you hadn’t had any contact with your sister in years, Nel’s mobile phone records reveal that in the past three months alone, she made eleven calls to your phone.” My face hot with shame, I looked away. “Eleven calls. Why lie to us?”
(She’s always lying, you muttered darkly. Always lying. Always telling tales.)
“I didn’t lie,” I said. “I never spoke to her. It’s like Lena said: she left messages, I didn’t respond. So I didn’t lie,” I repeated. I sounded weak, wheedling, even to myself. “Look, you can’t ask me to explain this to you, because there is no way of doing so to an outsider. Nel and I had problems going back years—but that doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
“How can you know?” Townsend asked. “If you didn’t speak to her, how do you know what it had to do with?”
“I just . . . Here,” I said, holding out my mobile phone. “Take it. Listen for yourself.” My hands were trembling, and as he reached for the phone, so were his. He listened to your final message.
“Why would you not call her back?” he said, something akin to disappointment on his face. “She sounded upset, wouldn’t you say?”
“No, I . . . I don’t know. She sounded like Nel. Sometimes she was happy, sometimes she was sad, sometimes she was angry, more than once she was drunk . . . it didn’t mean anything. You don’t know her.”
“The other calls she made,” he demanded, a harder edge to his voice now. “Do you still have the messages?”
I didn’t, not all of them, but he listened to the ones I had, his hand gripping my phone so tightly his knuckles whitened. When he finished, he handed the phone back to me.
“Don’t erase those. We may need to listen to them again.” He pushed his chair back and got to his feet, and I followed him out into the hall.
At the door, he turned to face me. “I have to say,” he said, “I find it odd that you didn’t answer her. That you didn’t try to find out why she needed to speak to you so urgently.”
“I thought she just wanted attention,” I
said quietly, and he turned away.
It was only after he had closed the door behind him that I remembered. I ran out after him.
“Detective Townsend,” I called out, “there was a bracelet. My mother’s bracelet. Nel always wore it. Have you found it?”