Celia came to my door on Wednesday carrying the navy raincoat I had lent her one wet afternoon. I had forgotten it was missing.
“Clean and dry,” she said. “Unlike when you gave it to me.”
The joke landed awkwardly. I took the coat and stepped aside when she asked whether she could come in.
Poppy was at an art club. Tom would collect her. For once the house was quiet at an hour when I could appreciate it.
Celia sat at the kitchen table without removing her scarf. I made tea, then waited. Returning a coat did not require this expression.
“They’ve taken some of my clothes,” she said.
I put down the milk.
“The police?”
“Things I wore that Thursday. I suppose you knew that would happen.”
“No.”
She examined the chipped edge of her mug.
“Andrew keeps asking when I’ll get them back. As if I’m concerned about a cardigan.”
I had no information about what investigators had collected or what any examination might show. I told her so when she asked what I thought it meant.
“It means they want to check them,” I said. “I can’t tell you anything beyond that.”
“There may be something on them.”
The refrigerator clicked into silence.
“What sort of something?”
She pulled the scarf away from her neck.
“Blood.”
I remained standing beside the counter. She looked at the empty chair opposite her until I sat down.
“I touched him,” she said.
“Martin?”
“Who else would I mean?”
The sharpness vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
“Sorry. I’m not sleeping.”
I kept my hands around my mug. The heat gave them somewhere to be.
“When you spoke to me on Saturday, you said you met him. You didn’t say he was injured.”
“I couldn’t.”
“But you’re saying it now.”
“Because I don’t want you hearing something and deciding what it means before I’ve had a chance.”
Outside, a delivery driver knocked at the wrong house and carried a box back to his van. The little mistake seemed absurdly enviable.
“What happened?” I asked.
Celia looked past me at Poppy’s paintings drying on the shelf.
“I found him hurt. I tried to help. I got frightened.”
“You’d been talking to him before that?”
“Yes.”
“Did you leave and come back?”
She shook her head, then put a hand to her forehead.
“I can’t do this again. I’ve been through it.”
I did not supply a sequence for her. There were ways her sentences might fit together and ways they might not. None could be chosen honestly by watching her cry.
“Then you don’t have to tell me the details,” I said. “But I need to be clear that you’ve now told me you touched him when he was injured.”
“You make everything sound recorded.”
“A man died, Celia.”
She covered her mouth. For a moment I thought she might be sick. I moved the bin closer and opened the window.
She waved the bin away.
“Please don’t look at me like that.”
I hadn’t known what my face was doing. I looked down at the table until she could breathe evenly.
After a while she asked for water. I gave her a glass and sat again. Whatever she had done or not done, she was shaking in my kitchen. I could bring water without making a judgement about the contents of her account.
“Have you told your solicitor what you’ve told me?” I asked.
She nodded.
“And the police?”
“They know I tried to help.”
That was her description of what they knew. I would have to keep it separate from anything an officer actually told me.
Her phone vibrated. Andrew wanted to know whether she needed picking up. She typed a reply with both thumbs, slowly.
“He thinks I ought to stay indoors.”
“Do you want him to collect you?”
“No. I can walk.”
She stood, gathered her bag and glanced at the raincoat hanging over my chair.
“I should have returned that ages ago.”
“It’s all right.”
I regretted the words as soon as I said them. She looked almost grateful, as though I had offered more than forgiveness for a borrowed coat.
After she left, I wrote down the conversation. I included my questions and her answers, including the part where she had declined to explain the sequence. Then I passed the relevant information to the police contact.
Tom came home with Poppy and a clay hedgehog. Its spines occupied an entire plate.
“Where can we put this?” he asked.
I cleared a space beside the paintings.
Only then did I notice that Celia hadn’t drunk her tea. Across its surface, the milk had settled into a pale skin.