Chapter 47: Decorative
On the twenty-eighth of April, Ruth gave me four hours that she did not have.
We sat in a conference room with a whiteboard somebody had not cleaned. A word left in red in the top corner, from somebody else's case. I looked at it for four hours.
The first two hours were about whether I would give evidence.
I had assumed I would. Of course I would. I am the only person alive who knows what happened.
Ruth put it in front of me in about ninety seconds and then let me sit in it.
“If you don't testify, the jury never hears the word kneel come out of your mouth.”
“And if I do?”
“If you testify, you put your character in issue, and the state gets to bring in the conviction.”
“They'll bring it in anyway.”
“No. If you stay off the stand, I fight to keep it out, and I have a fair chance. If you go on, it comes in.”
So there it is again, twelve years later. I can speak, and the price of speaking is the thing that makes the speaking useless.
Or I can be silent, and be a large woman at a defence table who says nothing.
“Which do you recommend?”
“I'll tell you on the ninth,” she said, and wrote the ninth on the top of the page.
The second two hours are the ones I want written down.
She had Milena's statement, the photographs from Elin Marsh, and the eleven dates, and she was working out what she was allowed to touch.
Then she said, with no change in her voice at all: “Tell me about your husband and the door frame.”
I had not told her. It was on page nineteen, and she had read two pages and handed the pad back.
“It's on page nineteen.”
“I read page nineteen. Tell me out loud.”
So I told her, and it took about four minutes, and here it is.
In our house there is a door frame between hall and kitchen. Painted softwood. Square edge. A good ledge, three quarters of an inch.
For two years I went down at night when I could not sleep, and hung from it.
Dead hang first. Both hands. Thirty seconds, to open the front of the shoulder up.
Then pull-ups. Chin over the ledge. Slow down, four seconds, because the down is where the work is.
I could not do them properly on the right, so most were left, with the right for balance.
On the fourteenth of March, two years ago, at about two in the morning, I did twenty-two.
Eleven and eleven, alternating, which is the only way I could get to twenty-two.
“Why twenty-two?”
“Because at eighteen I could do twenty-five, and I wanted to know what was left.”
Julian came out at the top of the stairs about halfway through and stood there.
He did not say one word. I let go, came down, we looked at each other, and he went back to bed.
Two days later a joiner came at eight in the morning and fitted a strip of moulding along the top of that frame.
Three inches deep. Ogee profile. Painted to match by the afternoon.
There is no ledge any more. There is nowhere on that frame to put four fingers.
I asked Julian about it that evening and he said it finished the doorway off.
He said the word decorative. I have not been able to get rid of that word since.
Ruth listened to all of it without writing anything, which is not like her.
Then she said, “Why did you not tell me this in January?”
And I gave her the answer I believed completely, and still half believe.
“Because it isn't evidence of anything. He put a piece of wood on a door frame.”
She was quiet. “He removed the only thing in that house that was yours, two days after he found out you still had it.”
“He did it while I was out of the house,” I said. “But yes.”
“And you have never mentioned it to anybody in three years.”
“No.”
“Do you understand that is the most frightening sentence anybody has said to me this year?”
I did not know what to do with that, so I did not do anything with it. Then she went practical, which is her way of ending a thing.
“Do you have a receipt for the joiner?”
“No. It went through the estate. Everything goes through the estate.”
“Do you know the name?”
“There was a van. Green. Vanderlin Joinery.”
She wrote that down. Vanderlin Joinery, in capitals, and underlined. It is the only thing she wrote in two hours.
Then she asked the last question of the afternoon, and I did not understand why she was asking it.
“How many did you do, that night?”
“Twenty-two. I have not been able to do one since.”
“Which arm?”
“Eleven and eleven.”
She wrote that down too.