Before anything was played, the officer asked how long I had known Celia and how often I had heard her speak.
I gave the dates as accurately as I could. Meetings, telephone calls, conversations in kitchens and cafés. We had not been friends for years. Repetition had made her voice familiar quickly, but that was not the same as long acquaintance.
“And Martin?”
Fewer conversations. I described those too.
I was asked what I already knew about the recording. David had told me he had supplied an original message to the police. I had not listened to it with him or received a copy. I knew about the disputed supplier paperwork from what he had explained at the library.
The officer recorded that before proceeding. I was glad to have the context visible. I could not pretend to be someone who had arrived knowing nothing.
The section played was brief. A man’s voice spoke close to the microphone, referring to a copy of an invoice. Behind him, a woman said, “That isn’t the one I gave you.”
There was a scrape and another fragment, less clear. Then the sound stopped.
I kept looking at the small speaker.
“What can you tell us?”
“The woman’s voice sounds like Celia to me.”
I described the cadence I recognised, then qualified it. The recording was short. The voice was further from the device. I could say I recognised a resemblance and believed it was her; I could not turn familiarity into scientific certainty.
“And the man?”
“I believe that’s Martin. I’ve heard him less often.”
We went through what I could actually hear, separately from whom I thought I recognised. I did not fill the indistinct fragment with a sentence that would make the situation clearer.
Only after my answers had been recorded did the officer ask whether I could place Celia at twenty twenty-four.
“No. The photograph was twelve minutes later.”
She told me twenty twenty-four was the time recorded for the message. I thought of Vivienne’s notebook: back by twenty past. Four minutes before a voice I believed was Celia’s had disputed an invoice at the hall.
“The notebook isn’t my time,” I said.
“I understand. I’m asking about yours.”
I had nothing to add. The officer kept the recording; I left with no copy.
When we finished, I felt less triumphant than sick.
Martin had been alive in a room, talking about paperwork. The sound had no knowledge of what followed. I did, incompletely, and could not separate the ordinary voice from the death I knew was coming.
Outside, I walked past the bus stop before realising I needed it. I turned back and sat down.
The admission that Celia had been at the hall was not new. Nor did the excerpt tell me who had attacked Martin. It connected a familiar voice to the discussion of documents. Its place in the larger evidence was not mine to decide.
Still, hearing it was different from reading a date in somebody else’s account.
I rang Tom and asked whether he could make supper. He had planned to anyway, which I had forgotten. He asked whether I wanted to be collected.
“The bus is coming. I’ll be home soon.”
I didn’t tell him the words from the recording. He did not need them to understand that I was shaken.
At home, Poppy was making a paper chain. She wanted a link in every colour, including brown, which Tom considered an underused festive choice.
I sat beside her and held the ends while she glued them. The chain grew slowly across the table. Each link needed a few seconds of pressure before it would hold.
“You can’t rush it,” she told me.
“I’m discovering that.”
Later, Celia messaged. She wanted to speak the following day, somewhere private enough to explain the pressure Martin had put her under. I agreed to meet at the café, but made clear I could not offer secrecy about information relevant to the investigation.
She answered that she had already told the police. I gave her a time and said I had an hour.
Before bed, I made a note of the day’s appointment without trying to reproduce the recording from repeated mental playback. The official account of what I had said was where it belonged. My notebook needed only the contact and the fact that I had not discussed the material with the group.
Then I shut it.
The woman’s sentence remained in my mind, stripped of any tone I could honestly use as a verdict.
There had been a document in that room that mattered to somebody.
Tomorrow, Celia wanted to tell me why.