Beth had chosen a table away from the café window. Her phone lay face down beside a folder, and she had ordered breakfast rather than the coffee she usually allowed herself when nervous.
“I don’t want to do this hungry,” she said.
I ordered toast and sat opposite her.
She began with what the police already had. In the first week after Martin’s death, she had supplied the messages she’d retained and answered questions about them. Nothing she showed me was a newly discovered recording hidden in a drawer. The difference was what she had noticed while checking the accommodation paperwork for Priya.
“He sent this after I left,” she said, turning the screen towards me.
The message was short.
Enjoy living on sandwiches after nine. Some freedom.
I remembered the guesthouse kitchen that closed at nine, and Beth describing a life organised around someone else’s kettle.
“You thought he meant your late work?”
“Yes. He always mocked the catering arrangements. Cold sandwiches, no proper dinner, clients who expected everything. I thought it was more of that.”
She opened a second message from the same exchange. It referred to the station end of town and having to drag her cases upstairs.
“I told them he might be trying to make me think he knew where I was. He’d done that before. But I hadn’t put the three details beside the guesthouse information.”
She laid out a printed copy of the original room terms. Shared kitchen hours. Upstairs room. Walking directions from the station.
“This was the attachment to my funding request.”
I looked at the paper, then at the messages. They fitted the place she had abandoned more closely than the room she’d chosen.
“Could he have seen the attachment somewhere else?” I asked.
“Possibly. I can’t rule out everything. I checked what I sent him. It wasn’t in those messages.”
She had used her own account for the booking. She had not left a printed copy at the house. That was what she remembered, not proof of every route the information might have taken.
“I’ve told the officer what I’ve noticed,” she added. “They can check it against what they already have.”
Our breakfast arrived. Beth put the papers away from the plates before the waiter had to ask. She ate several mouthfuls in silence.
“I keep thinking about Celia’s answer,” she said eventually. “The new address.”
“I remember.”
“I want it to be a slip that explains everything. I know it isn’t.”
I was grateful she said that before I had to. The phrase mattered, but so did the limits of what two frightened women could decide over toast.
Beth took out another sheet. It was her cancellation confirmation, dated before she left the marriage. No charge had been made. The alternative room had already been agreed by the time Martin sent his messages.
“He was wrong,” she said.
There was wonder in it as well as anger.
“About where you were.”
“And about how much he knew.”
She had spent those first nights checking the street outside the room and wondering which ordinary sound meant he had found her. The messages had done their work even if the information behind them was stale.
“I couldn’t tell the difference between him knowing and him wanting me to think he knew.”
I watched her press a finger against the cancellation date.
“You still stayed away.”
“I nearly rang him.”
“But you didn’t.”
She nodded, then ate another piece of toast with the determination of somebody completing a small task correctly.
When we left, she asked me not to turn the morning into a theory shared with the group. She would speak to the people who needed to check the application. I could tell the police what she’d shown me if asked, and she knew I would not conceal a relevant conversation.
Outside, the café’s delivery van blocked half the pavement. We waited while the driver moved a crate.
“I used to think changing my mind was the problem,” Beth said. “He’d say I couldn’t stick to anything. Vivienne thought I was making the accommodation difficult.”
She pulled her coat shut.
“If I’d stayed with the first plan, he might have had the right place.”
Neither of us needed to imagine what would have followed. The fact that it hadn’t happened was enough.
Before she went, she sent a message requesting the record of who had received the original application.
This time, the question was not where Beth had gone.
It was who had decided Martin was entitled to know.