Chapter 106: The One Who Talked
She had a pushchair with her, which is not a thing you bring to a conversation you intend to keep short.
The boy was asleep. He was two and a half, in a hat with ears on it.
“I'm not supposed to be talking to you,” she said.
“That makes two of us. Mine's a bail condition.”
“Mine's a contract.”
We stood under the light by the bike racks. A wet car park, and a woman of twenty-three with a sleeping child.
“I gave them a statement,” she said. “Three weeks ago. Four hours.”
I did not say anything, because the correct response to that sentence is to let the person finish it.
“They came back a second time,” she said. “The first time I said everything was fine. Everybody said everything was fine.”
“What changed?”
“They asked me about Bill.”
Bill Trewin. Seventy-nine. Room twenty-one. Parkinson's for eleven years.
I read to him on Wednesdays. Westerns, mostly. He chose them.
His tablets are timed. Not roughly timed. Timed. Six thirty, ten thirty, two thirty, six thirty, ten.
If they come late, he freezes. If they come late for weeks, he stops walking, and once he stops walking he does not start again.
“I told them he got his at the round,” Anisa said. “Whenever the round was. Sometimes half eight, sometimes half nine.”
“And on the chart?”
“On the chart it was six thirty. Every day. Six thirty.”
“Who signed it?”
“Whoever was doing the meds. Sometimes it was already signed when I got there.”
She said the word already the way you say a word you have been carrying.
“Paul used to sign the whole round before he did it,” she said. “So it looked done. Then he did it. Only sometimes he didn't get to the end.”
Paul Sherborne. Deputy manager. P.S.
“Did you tell anybody at the time?”
“I told Denise. In the first month. She said I was new and I'd learn how a floor works.”
“And then?”
“And then I learned how a floor works.”
She said it without bitterness, which was worse.
I want to be exact about my part in this, because people have since described it in ways that flatter me.
I did not persuade Anisa Fenwick to do anything. I never asked her. I saw her twice in eleven months and both times she started the conversation.
What my statement did was give the inspectors twenty-seven dates and three sets of initials.
That let them walk into a building already knowing which fortnight of the rota to compare against which chart.
It meant that when they sat down with a care assistant on the second visit, they asked about Bill by name, and they asked at the right time of day, and she understood that they already knew.
That is the whole of my contribution. It is a set of dates handed to people who could do something with them.
I was a woman on bail with a conviction for violence.
On my own, I was a liability to my own information.
Anisa is the one who talked. Everything after her is a consequence of her, and she had more to lose than I did.
Within three weeks of her statement, four other people gave theirs.
Two care assistants, a kitchen supervisor who had nothing to do with medication and a great deal to say about staffing, and an agency nurse who had worked six shifts and refused a seventh.
That is what always happens, apparently. Beverley Ngata told me later it is the most reliable pattern in her job.
Nobody talks. Nobody talks. Nobody talks. Then one person talks and within a month you have five statements and a manager on gardening leave.
“What happens to me now?” Anisa said.
“I don't know. I genuinely don't. I'm the last person who can advise you.”
“They said something about protected disclosure.”
“Then get that in writing and put it somewhere that isn't your work locker.”
She laughed for the first time. It was not a good laugh but it was hers.
The boy woke up and complained about the light and she turned the pushchair.
“He liked you,” she said. “Bill. He used to say you were the only one who didn't talk to him like he was deaf.”
“He's not deaf. He's slow to get the words out. There's a difference and it takes four seconds to learn.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Four seconds.”
She went off across the car park with the pushchair wheels hissing on the wet.
Denise Corrigan was suspended on the ninth of June.
She was not sacked. She was suspended, and then she resigned, which is different and matters to a pension.
Paul Sherborne was referred to the nursing regulator on the same day and stopped working with an interim order eleven days later.
I found out about both of them from a local news website, in the break room, standing up, on a phone with a cracked screen.