Celia came to my house on Tuesday afternoon. I had agreed to twenty minutes before I collected Poppy from school, and she arrived with nothing to return, no parcel and no reason to pretend the visit concerned something else.
“I want you to hear it properly,” she said.
We sat in the kitchen. I reminded her that I would pass on relevant information, not keep a private version of the evening on her behalf.
“I know.”
She placed her phone face down on the table.
According to her account, Martin had been angry about the documents and the incomplete information she had given him. They argued in the main room. She said she stepped into the entrance passage to collect herself, without leaving the building.
“When you asked before whether I’d left and come back, I meant I hadn’t gone out of the hall.”
I remembered her shaking her head in this same kitchen. Now she was making a distinction that had not been clear then.
“All right. What are you saying happened next?”
She said she heard a noise, went back and found Martin on the floor. She had not seen anyone strike him. She did not know how he had been injured.
I let her finish without offering a possibility.
“I knelt down. I put my hand against him. That’s why there could be blood on my sleeve.”
She looked at the cuff of the cardigan she wore now, then folded both hands in her lap.
“I got something from the first-aid box. A cloth. A pad, really. The big white one. I put it under his head.”
“From a packet?”
“Yes. I opened it.”
“And left it there?”
“Yes.”
Her answer came quickly, with the firmness missing from other parts of the account.
I did not know what had been found at the scene. I could record what she said she had done. Those were different things.
“Then I panicked,” she continued. “I thought if they found me there, with the money and what he’d been saying, nobody would listen.”
“So you left without calling?”
She nodded.
“Did you ask anybody else to call?”
“No.”
The kitchen clock ticked between us. I could hear a lorry reversing somewhere beyond the garden wall.
“I know how that sounds,” she said.
“I don’t know what happened. I know you’re describing somebody who needed help.”
Tears gathered, but she kept speaking. She had returned to Vivienne’s, tried to look ordinary and told herself somebody would find him. Each sentence made the next harder to hear.
“You knew the hall would be checked?”
“I thought George would come.”
I did not ask her to calculate how long that would take. I did not want to turn the account into a rehearsal for questions somebody else might ask.
“Have you told the police these details about the passage and the pad?”
“Yes.”
“Then they’ll compare them with what they know.”
She watched my hand move towards the notebook beside the telephone.
“Write down that I tried to help him.”
“I’ll write down what you’ve told me.”
“All of it. Not just the part about leaving.”
I opened the notebook. She waited until I had written the words about the pad before she picked up her phone.
She stood, thanked me and left before I had finished the sentence I was writing.
After Celia left, I recorded her account of staying inside the building, opening a previously unopened packet and leaving the pad under Martin’s head, then contacted the police. I had witnessed none of those actions and left the physical evidence for investigators to check.
At the school gate, Poppy asked whether I had brought the permission slip. I gave it to her teacher while she ran to catch up with a friend.
For a moment, the ordinary efficiency of handing a piece of paper to the right person steadied me.
Then I remembered Celia’s certainty about the white pad.
For the first time, her story contained something she said she had left behind.