Chapter 41: Twenty-Two Guests
Owen Pike started ringing the guests on the ninth of January.
There were twenty-two of them and he kept the list on one sheet with a column for outcomes.
I have seen that sheet. Ruth let me read it on the tenth of March.
Six of the twenty-two are family, or work for the family, or both.
Nine did not reply to a letter or a call.
Four replied and declined. Two of those were polite and two were not.
Two said they had seen nothing, and one of them had been sitting eight feet away.
One said yes.
Hugo Renn, fifty-eight. He has supplied something to Julian's firm for eleven years. Far end of the table, window side.
Pike met him in a hotel bar on the twelfth of March. I sat at the next table, because Renn had asked to be able to see me.
That was the first thing that went wrong.
He had a whisky at three in the afternoon. He was not drunk. He is a man who has a whisky at three.
“I'll tell you what I saw,” he said. “But I'm not signing anything.”
Pike said that was fine and asked him to start at the beginning of the evening.
What he gave us took thirty-five minutes, and I am going to compress it.
He saw Damon go over. He did not see what came before, because he was talking to the woman on his left about a boat.
He heard a sound he described as a door closing on a heavy carpet, which is exactly right, and nobody else has ever described it to me.
He looked up and there was a man on the floor and a woman standing over him with her hands open.
Open. He said that twice and did not understand why Pike wrote it down.
Then he said, “She'd been on her knees earlier, hadn't she. Serving.”
Pike said, “Tell me about that.”
“It was a joke. That's how I took it. Damon said something about serving on her knees and everybody laughed.”
“Did she kneel?”
“She did, yes. She went down and did the plates. Bit odd. But she was fine about it, she wasn't upset.”
I would like you to sit with that phrase. She was fine about it.
I was fine about it because I had been fine about it eleven times, and I had three years of practice.
Pike asked how long I had been down there.
“God, I don't know. A few minutes? It was Christmas.”
Then Renn turned round and spoke to me directly, across the gap between the tables, which he had planned all along.
“Nadia. I like you. I've always liked you.”
“Thank you.”
“But you have to see it from the room. He's twenty-nine. He's a foot of nothing on you.”
“He's six one.”
“You know what I mean. Everyone in that room knew what you were.”
What I was.
Not who. What.
I said, “What was I?”
And he did the thing men of that age do when they have gone too far, which is to become jovial.
“Come on. The judo. Julian used to tell people at dinners. He was proud of it.”
That is the only new fact I got out of thirty-five minutes and three whiskies, and it is not a fact that helps me.
My husband told people at dinners. Proudly. And then a strip of moulding went onto a door frame.
Both of those things are true and I have never been able to get them into one sentence.
Pike asked him one last time whether he would sign a short statement about the kneeling.
Renn put his glass down and said no, in a completely different voice.
“I'm not getting into a family thing. Julian's a client. That's eleven years.”
He paid for his own drink. He shook Pike's hand and not mine.
In the car park Pike said, “That's the best of the twenty-two.”
“That was the best?”
“That is a man who came, who talked, and who told us you knelt. The other twenty-one are worse.”
I asked him what happens now.
“Now I go back to the list.”
We drove to Ruth's office and she put the sheet on the desk between us and looked at it for a long time.
Twenty-two names in one column and twenty-two outcomes in the other.
Then she did something I did not understand.
She drew a line under the last name and wrote a heading underneath it.
“There were twenty-two guests,” she said. “How many people were in that room?”
I shut my eyes and put myself back into it, which I can do, because I can always do that.
Twenty-two at the table. A woman with a tray at my right shoulder, and three more in black shirts at the sideboard.
“Twenty-six people,” I said. “Four of them were being paid.”