Chapter 42: Agency Staff
Thornhill Event Staffing supplied four people to Fenwold on the twenty-fifth.
Pike had their names in two days. A company that supplies staff keeps a booking sheet, and a booking sheet is not privileged.
Nobody had spoken to any of the four. Not the police. Not the state.
The canvass sheets in the bundle list twenty-two witnesses. The staff are not on it.
Ruth said one sentence about that and then never said it again.
“They took statements from everybody at the table and from nobody who was standing up.”
Milena Kovac is twenty-four. She has worked four hundred functions in six years.
She met us on the seventeenth of March in a back room at the agency, on her break, still in the shirt.
Here is why she matters, and why nobody saw her coming.
Thornhill has an incident policy. Any incident during a booking must be reported in writing within twenty-four hours, for insurance.
It exists because a server once dropped glasses and a client tried to bill the agency.
Milena filed hers at fourteen minutes past two in the morning on the twenty-sixth, from her phone, on a night bus.
Four hours after it happened. Eleven hours before Damon gave his first account in a hospital corridor.
It is the earliest written record of that evening by anybody who was in the room.
She read it to us from her phone. Pike recorded it with her permission.
“Incident during booking ref TH4471, Fenwold, 25 Dec.”
“At approx 21:40 a male guest told a female member of the household that she should serve the next course from her knees.”
“Several guests laughed. I thought it was a joke.”
“She knelt down on the floor and served four plates from that position.”
“I was holding the tray she was taking the plates from. About six feet.”
“The male guest then took hold of the front of her dress at the neck with one hand and pulled her upward off the floor.”
“She took his arm and he went over onto his back.”
“I did not drop anything. No damage to agency property.”
“Reporting for insurance as per policy.”
There is a line at the bottom of that form for further comments. She had used it.
“I have worked four hundred of these. I have never once seen anybody made to kneel.”
Nobody said anything for a while.
Then Ruth said, “At the moment he took hold of her dress, was she on her knees or on her feet?”
“On her knees. She was coming up because he was pulling her up. She was not standing.”
Ruth wrote four words on her pad and turned it round so that I could read them.
She was not standing.
On the twenty-fourth of February, under oath, my husband was asked where I was.
He said: My wife was standing at that point. She was serving.
That is true. At the moment of the throw I was on my feet, because he had pulled me onto them.
Every word of it is true. I had been on my knees eleven seconds earlier in front of twenty-two people, and he did not say so.
Ruth asked Milena whether she would sign a statement.
She said yes before Ruth had finished the sentence.
Pike said the family is well known here and agency work is a small world.
Milena said, “I know.”
He said she should take a week.
She said, “I've thought about it since the twenty-sixth of December. Nobody rang me. I waited.”
She had waited eighty-one days for somebody to ring her.
That is the part I still cannot look at for very long.
A woman six feet from me made a written record at two in the morning, and nobody asked her one question for eighty-one days, because she was holding a tray.
Her statement runs to two pages. Signed on the nineteenth of March, served on the state on the twentieth.
Ruth said it does three things. I asked her to say them slowly so I could write them down.
One. It is contemporaneous. It was made before anybody had a reason to shape it.
Two. It puts the kneeling into the case as a fact, not background, because it is part of the same incident.
Three. It gives us a witness with no relationship to anybody involved.
Then she said the fourth thing, which she did not count.
“And now, at trial, I get to ask your husband why he chose the word standing.”
I took the bus back and sat in the laundromat until my shift.
I want to record something about myself that is not flattering.
For three years I told myself nobody had seen. That it happened in a room where everybody had agreed not to look.
That was not true. Twenty-six people saw it. Twenty-two of them were eating.
The one who wrote it down was being paid nine dollars an hour to hold a tray at my shoulder.