Chapter 44: Harkness
The packet arrived at Ruth's office on the ninth of April, by courier, on the twentieth day of the twenty-one.
Eleven documents, a covering letter of two paragraphs, and a privilege log with six entries on it.
A privilege log has four columns. Date. Description. Author. Basis of claim. You are not given the documents. You are given the list, and the list has to be accurate, because it is filed with the court.
Entries one, two, three, five and six are letters between Margot Ashford and her solicitors. Their descriptions run to one line each and say advice re: family matter. They are properly privileged and we will never see them.
Entry four is not a letter. The only reason we ever saw it is that somebody had to write one honest line in a column.
Entry four reads: Invoice, third-party supplier, dated 12 April, seven years ago. No claim of privilege. Produced.
It is two pages of white paper, stapled once in the top left corner, and the staple had been through it before, because there are two holes.
I am going to set it down exactly as it is, line for line, because it does not need anything from me.
HARKNESS VETTING SERVICES LIMITED
Unit 3, Calderbank Works, Preston Road
Licensed investigations. Registration 418-2205-91
INVOICE NUMBER HV-2211-0416
DATE OF INVOICE: 12 April
CLIENT: Mrs M. E. Ashford, Fenwold, Fenwold Lane
ENGAGEMENT REFERENCE: HV/PM/0416
MATTER: Pre-marital enquiry
SUBJECT: VOLKOV, Nadia Antonovna. Date of birth as supplied by client.
SCOPE OF ENGAGEMENT AS INSTRUCTED BY CLIENT:
1. Criminal records search, national, including spent and unspent convictions
2. Court listings and reported judgments, ten years
3. Civil litigation, county court judgments, enforcement action
4. Employment verification, ten years
5. Open source and media search
6. Financial standing: bankruptcy, insolvency arrangements, adverse credit
REPORT: Findings summary, fourteen pages, delivered by hand 9 May. Two bound copies.
NOTE: No electronic transmission of findings, at client's express request.
PROFESSIONAL FEE: 2,850.00
DISBURSEMENTS: 214.60
TOTAL DUE: 3,064.60
TERMS: 14 days from date of invoice.
Stamped across the foot of page two, in the box marked for office use: PAID 19 MAY. CHEQUE.
Now the dates, which is all there is, and which I have checked against the marriage certificate.
Instructed on or before the twelfth of April.
Report delivered by hand on the ninth of May. Fourteen pages. Two bound copies. Nothing sent by email.
Paid on the nineteenth of May, by cheque, ten days after delivery.
I was married on the fourteenth of September, in a registry office, with eleven guests.
That is four months and five days between a bound report being carried into that house and me walking into it in a dress.
The first time I was asked to kneel was the second of November, seven weeks after the wedding.
It was about a place setting. A fish knife laid on the wrong side of a plate at a lunch for nine people.
I remember thinking, at the time, down on the floor, that this was an old family thing, and that old families have things.
I never asked anybody how old. You do not audit a house you have just been let into.
In three years at that table I did not once see another human being kneel on that floor. I would have remembered. I remember the dates of my own.
Not a cousin. Not a child. Not Damon, who is late for everything.
I had assumed there was a history to it, the way you assume a house has foundations, because it is standing up.
Line one of the scope. Criminal records search, national, including spent and unspent convictions.
Nobody commissions that line by accident. It costs extra. Ruth rang the firm the following week and asked what a standard pre-marital enquiry costs. Nine hundred.
Ruth read the whole thing twice and did not say anything for about a minute and a half. I watched the second hand on the clock above her filing cabinet, because I did not want to watch her face.
Then she said, “Do you want a minute?”
“No.”
“Do you want some water?”
“No.”
I asked her the only question I had, which was whether it helped.
She looked at the page for a while.
“Not yet,” she said.
I sat in that chair with the wobble in it and did the arithmetic, because that is what I do instead of the other thing.
Eleven kneelings in three years, and a twelfth on the twenty-fifth of December.
Twelve times on an oak floor, and the first of them seven weeks after a woman in that house paid three thousand and sixty-four dollars to establish exactly what I could not afford to do about it.
At the foot of the second page, below the total, there is a line printed on every invoice that company sends out.
It says: Thank you for your instruction. We look forward to being of assistance again.