How to Kill Your Family(101)

Anyway, I came to your office. I’m sure that probably sounds frightfully creepy but I felt more nervous than you’d have been had you known! I waited around from 5 p.m. one Friday, suspecting that PR girls, like us City boys, knock off early for drinks. A gaggle of women came out at 5.15, forming a human chain as they swept down the street. You came out at 5.32. I knew it was you straight away, you looked like me. Well maybe that’s not very fair to you. My nose has been broken twice in rugby scrums and I’ve got hands the size of dinner plates according to my mum. But I just knew your face. It was like I’d seen it before a million times. You’re petite and have much darker colouring than me, and you’ve got eyes a shade of green that neither me nor my sisters share. Mine are a slate grey, which I’ve always rather liked. But you were undeniably the right Grace Bernard. I almost ran across the road to say hello, like the duffer I am, but I restrained myself. Difficult to make an introduction like that on the street!

I don’t know what I wanted from you back then. Perhaps just to see you in the flesh? I think I had a deep need for information. Not knowing about my parentage had shaken me up, and I firmly believe that knowledge is power. Knowing everything about you would help me be more in control, something I’d not really felt since Christopher died. So I followed you. I’m not proud of that, by the way. It’s not nice for men to tail women around. I felt grubby really. You sat on the Tube across from me, gazing over my shoulder at nothing very much. I tried not to stare at your face for too long, but I took in as much as I could. Black trousers, a cropped leather jacket, and a weird fluffy top that I assume was fashiony. Chunky buckled loafers which I imagine you wore to make men like me feel intimidated, and it worked. I walked behind you from the station to your flat, and gazed up to the first floor as the light went on. Then I had a stern word with myself and went home. Madness really. I’m a man who doesn’t even go to North London for a hot date.

I couldn’t leave it there. I wanted to. But over the next few weeks I found myself walking down your road every spare moment I got, hoping to catch you on your way out. Seeing if you’d lead me somewhere that would tell me more about who you were. A couple of times I saw you go out running, which meant I had to wear trainers just in case. Once I followed you to a local café where you ordered a ridiculously specific coffee. Not a big socialiser, are you, Grace? One visitor in two weeks – a man who looked a lot like the teenager in the local paper.

I was getting sort of bored of it all by then. I was ready to stop following you around and weighing up whether I should send you an email explaining who I was. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to open Pandora’s box really. But it was surely saner than skulking around, not learning anything about you. Then one evening flipped everything on its head. And if I’d ever assumed that you were a bit dull Grace, I never would again.

You went to a pub and had drinks with a fairly motley crew. A young guy who looked like a total hippy cliché. An old man, and a plain-looking girl who wasn’t his daughter but definitely wasn’t his girlfriend. You didn’t seem like you were too attached to the hippy either. But you spent most of the evening talking to him. I nursed my pint and tried to sit near enough to pick up the conversation. Not that it was worth hearing. Newts, Grace? I really wondered about how you’d turned out when I heard that passionate discussion about amphibians.

You left alone, shortly followed by the crusty, and I was intrigued. When you wandered down the road and went into a wildlife centre, I was completely bemused, but followed your lead and jumped the fence a few minutes after you’d gone in. I began to suspect that you were looking for a place to be alone with the chap, and I worried that I might catch you both in flagrante, as it were – something a brother should never see a sister engaged in. So I stayed well away as you both went down to the deck by the water. Not quite near enough to hear what was said, but transfixed all the same. Something odd happened where he held a match to your foot, but I couldn’t make out much in the dark. And then, just as my legs started to seize up from crouching and I started to think about whether I could order an Uber to a remote wildlife centre, you pushed him into the water. I stood up in shock, Grace. You looked round quickly but I was protected by the dark. I didn’t know what to do. My brain was screaming at me to rush to the water and pull the fellow out, but my legs didn’t move. It all seemed so utterly mad. You were sharing a bottle of wine with this harmless-looking man, and then you were killing him. Why? As you tidied up around you (impressively calmly when I think back to it), I dialled 999 but I didn’t press call. I told myself I would when you left, but by the time you actually did, my mind was calmer and I knew I couldn’t. How to explain what I was doing? Ah yes, officer, it’s all fairly simple, I was following my sister (who doesn’t know she’s my sister) and I lurked behind this lovely bush while she drowned a fellow. Then I watched as she washed up some mugs and hopped into a cab. That would never do. However good my intentions, I’d be dragged into a sordid story and Lottie and the girls would be marked by it too. Whatever you’d done was your business. But it did make me realise that perhaps the vague notion I’d had about forging a relationship with you was doomed to fail. You can’t be too close with a woman who goes around pushing people into ponds really, whatever the blood ties.

Simon let me know who you killed two days later. Less whisky and regret this time around, he obviously wasn’t that fond of his nephew. But it was still a shock. An accident, he said. Andrew was troubled and had tried to seek a new life, but he was always floundering. The family were keeping it as private as possible, and I knew that the potential scandal was the reason for such privacy. That only made me feel like I’d made the right choice to stay schtum.