Chapter 24: The Silver I Polished That Afternoon
They came at twenty-three minutes past eleven.
Two of them, a man and a woman, in a car that came up the lane without lights on the roof, because it was Christmas night in a village and there was no hurry about it.
The shingle told the house they were there. It tells you everything, that yard.
I heard the doors, and the two of them crossing, and I thought, with total clarity: he is heavier and he is on the left.
Twelve years. It does not switch off.
I was still measuring people at the moment they arrived to arrest me.
Margot met them at the front door, in the hall, with the fire going and the holly on the barometer.
I stayed where I was, standing on the boards, because I had not been told I could go anywhere, and because I had spent three years not going anywhere I had not been told about.
I could hear it through the door in pieces.
Her voice, level, giving the account. A radio.
Damon's voice saying it was fine, twice, and then a longer stretch of him talking that was not fine at all.
Nobody called me.
I want that on the record, because it says something about that house that a woman stood alone in a dining room for eleven minutes waiting to be sent for.
Then the door opened and the woman came in.
She was about my age.
She had a Christmas dinner behind her too, I imagine.
She said, “Nadia Ashford?”
I said, “Volkov. I kept it.”
She said, “Can you tell me what happened?”
And I said the only sentence I had prepared in twelve years, which was: “I'd like to speak to a solicitor.”
She said that was fine.
She was, and I will say this for as long as I am asked, entirely decent about all of it.
She asked me if there was anybody in the house who was injured and I said I did not believe so.
She asked me to turn round.
That is the phrase.
Not the caution, which came after and which I could recite in my sleep.
Turn round.
I turned round and put my hands behind my back, which was where they had already been for twenty-six minutes.
The dining room I was facing had thirty-one pieces of silver on it.
The two candelabra, seven branches each, nine of the candles out and the rest going down into the sockets.
Four salvers. The soup ladle. The rose bowl.
The christening cup nobody had used in sixty years.
I had done all of it that afternoon, at the kitchen table, on newspaper, with a bristle brush for the chasing and four minutes for the interval, from half past one until ten past five.
There was nothing cloudy in the hollows.
I had checked every piece against the window light before I laid the table.
The cuffs went on at the back and they were cold and they were on about forty minutes in total, which I am told is standard, and which I would not have thought about except that they went on over the calluses at the base of my left thumb.
Everything in that room I had touched that day.
The napkins, pressed not folded. The chairs I had driven into town for twice.
The glass birds on the lower branches of a tree in the next room, because I was the one who could reach without the steps.
The floor I was standing on, which I had knelt on for forty-one minutes at about half past nine, and which I could have described to a surveyor.
They took me out through the hall.
The drawing room door was shut.
Behind it there were about eighteen people being very quiet.
Aimee was on the bottom step of the stairs with her coat on and she said, out loud, in front of two police officers, “She never did anything.”
The woman officer said, “All right, love,” not unkindly.
Frances Price was standing by the front door with her handbag and she said, “I'll come. Tell them I'll come.”
Julian was not in the hall.
Margot was.
She was standing by the barometer with her hands folded, and as I came past she said, “This is very sad.”
And then, to the officers, in the voice you use to a caterer: “You'll want the address for the hospital.”
Nobody had been to hospital. Nobody went to hospital.
The cold outside was enormous.
There were stars over the yard and my breath went straight up.
I got into the back of the car with my hands behind my back, which takes a technique, and I had it, because I had done it once before at twenty-two.
The last thing I saw of that house was the hall window, lit, with the fire in it.
Three years. Twelve times. Two seconds.