‘I need you to convince me that you’re really his sister.’
Liv felt exhaustion settling upon her. She didn’t want to get into her entire life story right now, not the way she was feeling, but she also wanted to know what had happened to her brother. ‘I only found out the truth myself after my father died.’ The things she had discovered eight years ago began to surface, things she usually kept locked away. ‘I had some pretty fierce identity issues on the boil. I’d never really been sure where I fitted. I know most kids go through a stage of thinking that they aren’t really part of their family, but I had a completely different name from my dad and my brother. I never knew my mother. I asked Dad about it one time, but it just made him go quiet and withdrawn. Later that night I heard him crying. In my over-imaginative teenage state I assumed it was because I’d picked the scab off some shameful family secret. I never asked him again.
‘When he died, my grief, or sense of loss, or whatever you want to call it, seemed to settle on this one unanswered question. I fixated on it. I felt like I’d not only lost my father but any chance of finding out who I really was.’
‘But you did find out,’ Arkadian said.
‘Yes,’ Liv replied. ‘Yes, I did.’
She took a deep breath and sank back into her past.
‘I’d just started my freshman year at Columbia. I was a journalism major. My first big assignment was a three-thousand-word investigative piece on a subject of my choice. I decided to kill two birds with one stone. Dig into the big family secret. I caught a Greyhound to West Virginia, to the place where my brother and I were born. It was one of those towns that could be listed under ‘Americana’ in the dictionary. One long main street. Stores with awnings stretching out over the sidewalk – most of them closed. It was called Paradise. Paradise, West Virginia. The Founding Fathers clearly had high hopes.
‘The summer we were born my mom and dad had been travelling all over, chasing work where they could find it. They were organic horticulturalists, ahead of their time in many ways. Mostly they ended up working regular gardening jobs, a few municipal positions here, some farm labouring there, anything to earn enough money to tide them over for when the babies came. They checked in whenever they were passing some local medical facility, but I think taking blood pressure and listening in to check on two little heartbeats was about as far as it went in those days. They didn’t have ultrasound scans. Mom and Dad had no idea there was anything wrong – until it was too late.
‘The “hospital” I was born in was a medical centre at the edge of town. When I went back it was standing in the shadow of a huge WalMart, which was no doubt responsible for all the empty stores on Main Street. It was one of those rural facilities whose main function is either to patch people up and ship ’em back out with a jar full of aspirin, or refer them on to proper hospitals. It was rudimentary enough when I found it, so God knows what it was like when Mom and Dad fetched up there.
‘I got chatting to the nurse at reception, explained what I was doing and what I was looking for. She showed me a storeroom stacked high with boxes of old medical records. It was a mess. Took me an hour just to find a box from the right year. Inside, the documents were all mixed up. I went through it and dug out the birth records and read through them. Mine wasn’t there, so I wrote down the names of all the staff who’d been around back then and convinced the receptionist to put me in touch with one of them, a nurse who’d worked at the centre in the eighties – Mrs Kintner. She’d been retired a few years but still lived locally. I went to see her. We sat on her porch drinking lemonade. She remembered my mother. Said she was beautiful. Said she’d fought for two days to give birth to us. They couldn’t see what the problem was until they took us out “the sunroof” as she described it – emergency C-section.’
She rose slowly from her chair.
‘I was born Sam Newton,’ she said, in a voice barely louder than a whisper. ‘My brother’s name was Sam Newton. We were born at the same time, on the same day, to the same parents. We’re twins.’ She turned to her right and pulled her shirt from the waistband of her jeans. ‘But not ordinary twins.’
She lifted her shirt.
Arkadian saw a scar, white against her pale skin. A crucifix lying on its side. Identical to the one he’d found on the monk’s body.
‘Lots of brothers and sisters are described as being joined at the hip,’ Liv said. ‘We really were. Or joined at the side, at least. Our three lower ribs were fused. It’s what the supermarket tabloids luridly describe as Siamese twins. More accurately, we were what’s known as omphalopagus twins, where two infants are joined at the chest. Sometimes they also share major organs, like the liver. We just shared bone.’
Liv lowered her shirt and sank back on to her seat.
‘Nurse Kintner said it caused quite a stir. There’d never been a case of fused twins being different genders before, so the doctors got quite excited. Then, when my mother worsened, and so did we, they started to panic. She’d lost so much blood trying to give birth to us, suffered so much internal damage delivering an awkward-shaped double baby, that she never regained consciousness. I suppose they realized that they, or the hospital at least, were responsible, so they hushed everything up. She died eight days after we were born – the same day Samuel and I were surgically separated. It was only then that they discovered only one birth certificate had been issued. They quickly issued a new one for me, giving the date of our separation as my birth date. I suppose, technically, it was the day I became an individual. It was my father’s idea to name me in Mother’s memory. Liv Adamsen was her maiden name, the name of the girl he’d fallen in love with and married. That’s why he never wanted to talk about it.’
Arkadian took in the new information. Held it up against what he already knew, searching for any questions it still hadn’t answered. ‘How come your grandmother’s name was different from your mother’s?’
‘Very old Norwegian tradition. Granny always preferred the old ways. All children used to adopt their father’s name. Granny’s father was Hans, so she was called Hansen, which weirdly means “son of Hans”. My mother’s father was Adam, so she was Adamsen. Tracing family trees is a bitch if you’re Scandinavian.’ She looked down at the newspaper. Samuel’s face stared back at her. ‘You said you wanted to show me something that might help explain my brother’s death,’ she said. ‘What is it?’
She watched Arkadian’s hand tap uncertainly on the blue folder. He had softened towards her, but was still guarded.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I’m just as keen to find out what happened to him as you are. So you can either trust me or not, it’s up to you. But if you’re still worried about what I do for a living, then I’ll sign any gagging order you care to throw at me.’
Arkadian’s hand stopped drumming the file. He got up and left the room, leaving the folder behind.
Liv stared at it, fighting the urge to grab it and look inside while the Inspector was out of the room. He returned moments later with a pen and the Homicide unit’s standard non-disclosure agreement. She signed it and he checked the signature against a faxed copy of her passport. Then he opened the folder and slid a six-by-four glossy across the table.
The photo showed Samuel’s washed body lying on the examination table, the bright lights making the dark network of scars upon it stand out clear and grotesque on his pale skin.
Liv stared at it, dumbfounded. ‘Who did this to him?’
‘We don’t know.’
‘But you must’ve spoken to the people who knew him. Didn’t they know anything? Didn’t they say if he’d been acting strangely – or seemed depressed about something?’
Arkadian shook his head. ‘The only person we’ve managed to speak to is you. Your brother fell from the top of the Citadel. We assume he had been living inside it for some years, seeing as there’s no evidence of him living elsewhere in the city. How long did you say he was missing?’
‘Eight