Page 109 of Child's Play

‘So, what exactly are you’re saying?’

‘That in my opinion this tee-shirt has never been worn at all.’

Seventy-Eight

By the time two fresh coffees arrived the restaurant had emptied.

‘So, the TV show?’ Kim prompted, having paid the required toll fee for the information.

‘Inspector, do you realise that you can love and hate a person at the same time?’

‘Your father?’ Kim asked.

‘That would have been so easy, wouldn’t it? But no.’

‘Go on,’ Kim said.

‘Until I was four years old I was enough. My achievements were neither remarkable nor delayed. I was average, I was normal. I was enough. But Belinda changed all that. Belinda’s brilliance changed all our lives. My father was convinced that with enough work, enough hours studying that I could be just as brilliant.

‘Every day for years we were dressed the same like two little performing dolls. We woke to exist in our tiny world of just each other and study. It was an existence not a life. We were set against each other for our father’s approval and even affection. Belinda craved it even more than I did. The attention was like a drug to her. She couldn’t get enough. At night, we would crawl into our beds exhausted and silent, unable to bond like normal siblings as we were each other’s competition.’

She shook her head as her mind travelled back to that time.

Kim remained silent.

‘After the TV show my father retreated from us both completely. Belinda had proven she was human. Just one mistake and she was tarnished. Life didn’t change regarding the study but my father employed a private tutor. Belinda couldn’t cope with my father’s withdrawal. She had monopolised his attention since she was four years old. But he wasn’t interested any more. He had cancelled our trip to the Olympiad and—’

‘The Olympiad?’

‘The International Mathematical Olympiad, where 100 countries send 6 students. They have to solve six problems without calculators. Belinda didn’t want to go anyway, but after my father withdrew his attention and affection she tried all the harder to get it back. But nothing worked. After what he saw as a very public humiliation he became indifferent. And she never stopped trying to win him back. The more she tried the more he retreated.

‘When her two degrees failed to impress him she turned to more negative forms of attention.’

‘Sex?’ Kim asked.

‘And drugs in her twenties and thirties. She needed the attention whether positive or negative; it was all she’d ever known, and she couldn’t exist without it.’

‘But what about you?’ Kim asked. ‘Was there no point at which you could break free?’

‘I tried. I moved away for a few months before our parents died. With no one to give her the attention she needed she relapsed back on to the drugs. I was called to the hospital when she almost overdosed and that’s when I knew I couldn’t leave her again.’

‘You were there to protect her from herself?’

Veronica nodded. ‘I tried to.’

‘And you hated her coming here, to this event?’

‘In case it just brought it all back and she relapsed again.’

Kim finally began to understand better the relationship that had existed between the two of them.

Living that cloistered life had forged bonds between the sisters that only they would understand, despite being set against each other on a daily basis by their own father who had dressed them up and then paraded them and exhibited them for money and fame.

Kim could finally understand the complex web of bitterness and love that had bound the sisters for ever.

‘Being a child genius is hard, Inspector, but being a sibling is no picnic either. We both lost our childhoods in one way or another.’

Kim could imagine.