Chapter 104: What I Actually Saw
Before the trial I gave a statement to the Commission, and it took two hours and forty minutes.
Their regional office is above a dental practice on a ring road.
The meeting room has a whiteboard nobody has cleaned since 2019.
Beverley Ngata took it. Fifties, cardigan, a recorder on the table and a second one beside it.
She said at the start, twice, that she was not the police.
She could not promise me anything, and she could not tell me afterwards what she had done with it.
Then she said the thing that made me trust her.
“You're currently charged with an offence of violence. I'm going to write that down at the top of this statement in your own words, and you're going to tell me now, because if I find it out in June it damages everything you say today.”
So I said it. Charged, ABH, trial on the twelfth, one previous conviction, aged twenty-two, section 20.
She wrote it and read it back and asked whether that was fair.
I said it was fair.
“Right,” she said. “Tell me what you saw, and don't tell me what it means.”
That instruction is worth more than every piece of advice I was given that year.
What I saw was this.
Every Wednesday from January three years ago. Two hours. Ground floor.
A volunteer with a lanyard that said VOLUNTEER and no clinical role whatsoever.
I made tea, pushed chairs, cut nails, changed the water in flower vases.
I read to a man in room nine who could no longer hold a book.
I waited outside the clinical room while a nurse unlocked the day room cupboard.
The trolley stood in front of me and the blue wallet sat on top of it.
The charts face upward. Anybody standing there can read them.
That is not a security failure. It is a room the width of a corridor.
I have a memory for two things and only two: dates and hands.
Coaches spend eight years teaching a child to read the exact moment a grip changes. It does not switch off because you leave the sport.
Over three years I read that top chart perhaps ninety times, in five-second glances, while a door was being unlocked.
Three sets of initials recurred: D.C., P.S., and A.M.
Two of them were on the staff board in the entrance hall.
The board lists who is on duty that day, with photographs, because families like photographs.
Twenty-seven times over three years, I saw a signature by initials that the board that day said were not in the building.
I did not count them at the time. I want that on the record. Nobody stands in a corridor keeping a tally.
What I did was remember the dates, because I remember dates.
Last October I sat down with a diary and a sheet of paper and put them in a column.
Beverley Ngata stopped me there.
“How do you know the board was accurate?”
“I don't. It's a whiteboard. It's the reason I can only tell you what I saw and not what it means.”
“Good,” she said, and wrote for a while.
Then she took me through the twenty-seven dates one at a time.
Against nine of them I could give a resident's name and a drug. Against the rest, only a date and a set of initials.
Nine out of twenty-seven. Not twenty-seven out of twenty-seven.
If I had said twenty-seven she would have known I was decorating, and everything else would have gone in the bin.
At the end she asked whether I had removed any document from the building at any time.
“No.”
“Photographed one?”
“No.”
“Why not? Most people do.”
“Because I have a conviction, and a woman with my record photographing a medication chart is a woman committing an offence, and they would have used it. I knew that on the first Wednesday.”
She stopped writing and looked up.
“Say that again slowly,” she said, “and I'll take it down as your words.”
It went into the statement as my words.
It is the sentence her colleague read back to me, verbatim, in a different room eleven months later.
At the end she shook my hand at the door, which she was not obliged to do.
“I can't tell you anything,” she said. “You understand that.”
“I understand it.”
“Then I'll say one thing that isn't about your evidence. A pharmacist wrote us a very good letter. Very good letters are rarer than you would think.”
I went down the stairs past the dental practice and out onto the ring road.
It was raining again.
I had four hours before the shift and no money for a coffee.
So I walked to the library and read the sentencing guideline for actual bodily harm twice, the way you look at a scan you cannot change.
Then I went to work.