DUTY OF CARE (The Duty Bound Duet #1) - Sydney Jamesson Page 0,1
I really did, but the realisation that the one person I loved more than any other had gone and left me behind did not make any sense to me.
We had made a pact when we were kids to never be separated.
Why had Rita broken it?
A fortnight before the funeral, a member of my international investment team tore into the boardroom in Heron Tower on Canary Wharf, to tell me I had an urgent phone call that I would want to take in my office. I took my time, assuming one of my parents had been rushed to hospital—a heart attack, a fall … too damn mean to die without involving me in their medical drama.
Rita did not even come up on my radar.
A second after picking up the phone a young nurse, preparing to deliver bad news, cleared her throat and said in a half whisper, “I’m so sorry…”
She only had simple details, the most shocking of which was that Rita was dead.
It was suicide.
I assumed I had misheard. I’d only spoken to Rita a couple of days before and detected no signs of depression or unhappiness. We even talked about booking a holiday. She was in her first teaching post and was enjoying her new school, for God’s sake.
“Are you sure you have the right person?” I questioned, disbelieving that Rita could even contemplate such a thing. “My sister is Rita Derbyshire, she’s at work, she’s…”
There was no mistake. She had left instructions that in the event of her death, I should be contacted first as her next of kin.
I swivelled around in my chair, casting an eye over the calendar—January tenth, eleven thirty. I made a mental note of the time, the very minute I became aware that her life had ended and mine had ceased to exist in the way it had before that moment.
I turned a few more degrees clockwise and from thirty floors up looked out over London. Life was going on as normal: an airplane was flying overhead, leaving a frayed white ribbon across a blue sky; traffic was moving like glistening chess pieces, people the size of millipedes were scuttling around on a white canvas. They had no knowledge of the catastrophe that had befallen my sister and, as a consequence—me.
How could they?
Why would they care that a bright-as-a-button, Oxford graduate had ended her life just when it seemed to be getting started? The most loving little sister I had raised was dead.
I pursed my lips, raised my chin and glowered. Why was the sun still shining? Shouldn’t the Almighty have frozen time, stopped traffic; marked the occasion with storm clouds, torn the heavens apart with forked lightening, roaring thunder…?
Rita was dead!
That devastating news hit me with the force of a sledgehammer: first to the head, and then to the heart. I knew instantly that I was irreparably damaged, the way you do after a fall from a great height; you hope there are no serious injuries but expect to be concussed and scarred, at the very least. My injuries were more permanent than that.
I was heartbroken.
I slid from my office chair, fell to my knees and wept uncontrollably.
That was over a month ago. Back then I saw no reason for Rita to take her precious life.
Now, I know why she did what she did.
And I know who was to blame.
DECEMBER 1997
TRAUMATISED AFTER THE DEATH of their mother, two broken-hearted little girls joined twenty-two other homeless waifs and strays at the Summerville Children’s Residence. The place regularly featured in the local press, and even had its own website. It was impressive to look at— from a distance.
The Victorian architrave framing a striking entrance was more suited to nobility than a collection of ne'er-do-wells; a decorative balustrade offering a warm welcome impressed the occasional visitor but, behind the façade, the building bore the tell-tale marks of a century’s worth of mismanagement and neglect.
Look beyond the polished veneer and you would be privy to draughty, overcrowded rooms; Belfast sinks filled with tepid water, and a kitchen … more of a Victorian scullery really, furnished with outdated appliances and cracked crockery.
Take an even closer look and you would see a creaking collection of abandoned rooms and damp cellars, accessible only from a single set of steps that no one dared to descend; a place where tales of ghosts and white sheeted spectres grew legs and arms and became real to imaginative children; tight-lipped orphans looking out of windows smeared with frosty breath.