On Friday morning, the crescent had acquired a silence that required considerable effort.
People still left for work. Children still needed school. But conversations lowered when someone approached, and the dog walkers took a longer route past the hall.
Tom took Poppy. I stayed at home waiting for a call, trying to decide whether being available was different from doing nothing.
At ten, an officer arranged a time to go through my account in more detail. I rang Marianne and explained why I could not work my usual hours. She told me to stop apologising before I had finished my first apology.
The interview happened that afternoon. A room, a table, a jug of water. Nothing resembled the urgent fragments of the night before.
I had written down what I remembered before coming. I said so, and explained that I had used my own messages to check dates.
“Have you discussed the sequence with anyone else?”
“Not in detail. Vivienne said she’d meant we were together. I told her each of us should explain what we saw.”
I heard how disloyal that sounded when removed from the kitchen.
The officer wrote it down without reacting.
We went through the evening from the beginning. Arriving early. Helen’s receipts. The others coming in. Beth’s cancelled arrangement. Celia leaving for the bookshop.
“You saw her leave?”
“Yes.”
“And return?”
“No. I saw her in the room later.”
“At the time of your husband’s message?”
“That’s when I can place it. I don’t know whether she’d been there for a minute or ten.”
The questions were patient, but patience did not make them comfortable. I kept discovering the limits of my attention.
I had expected, foolishly, that a clear conscience would make me a clear witness. Instead I couldn’t remember whether Beth had carried the tray or the teapot on our first trip out of the kitchen. I remembered the conversation about expensive-looking entrances. I remembered laughing. The exact objects in our hands had not seemed worth keeping.
“Would it help if I drew the rooms?” I asked.
“If it helps you explain where you were.”
I sketched a rectangle for the kitchen and another for the sitting room. The hallway joined them. On paper it looked absurdly simple. In the house, people had moved through it while I was looking elsewhere.
I left several spaces blank. The officer did not fill them for me. When I tried to say where Priya must have been, he asked whether I’d actually seen her there. I changed the sentence. It was an uncomfortable kind of accuracy, but I began to understand why it mattered.
“Were you in the kitchen throughout that interval?”
“No. We brought the tea through. I went back for milk.”
“Who is we?”
“Beth and me.”
I looked at the cup of water in front of me.
Every ordinary word had become a place where an error might hide. We. Later. Everyone. I had used them all my life to save time.
When asked about Martin’s visits, I gave the dates again. I repeated what I remembered him saying and marked the parts I could not quote exactly.
“What impression did he give you?”
“That he expected me to answer questions about Beth.”
“Did he threaten you?”
“No.”
It mattered to say that plainly. Disliking him did not entitle me to improve the facts.
The officer asked about the box. Work materials, I explained. I had returned them. No, I had not kept a copy of everything inside. Yes, Beth could describe them better than I could.
By the end, I felt as if somebody had shaken my memories and let the loose pieces fall onto the table.
I was given a chance to check what had been recorded. A reference to Thursday initially made it sound as though Martin’s first visit had happened on the night he died. I pointed it out. It was corrected.
No one seemed annoyed.
Outside, I called Tom. He asked whether I wanted collecting. I said I would walk part of the way and get the bus. I wanted movement that had no question attached to it.
Near the station, I met Priya leaving the chemist.
“You look how I feel,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Not a compliment.”
We stood with a careful distance between us, both apparently afraid of saying the wrong thing.
“Did they ask you—” she began, then stopped.
“Probably best not to compare,” I said.
“Yes.”
She looked down at her prescription bag.
“I hate that this makes having a cup of tea feel suspicious.”
“We can talk about something else.”
“Can we?”
We tried. Her son’s football boots. The cost of printer ink. My library shift. For five minutes, we managed ordinary friendship around a thing neither of us knew how to carry.
At home, a message from Vivienne waited.
I hope you explained that none of us meant to mislead anyone.
I read it while standing beside the cupboard where Beth’s box had been.
Then I typed, I explained what I saw and what I said.
Before sending, I removed Sorry from the beginning.