Chapter 60: Twelve Years of Looking
We met in a café on Dell Street on the Sunday, because neither of us wanted to be in a room with a bed in it.
It had six tables, a glass case of pastries under a strip light, and a floor still wet by the door.
I sat where I could see the door. Priya sat with her back to it, noticed me noticing, and did not offer to swap.
She had a notebook.
Not the one she had torn the page out of.
A newer one, A5, elastic band round it.
“You want to know what I did for twelve years,” she said. “I'll tell you, but it's boring. Nobody expects that. It was mostly boring.”
She opened it flat.
“For the first six weeks I thought somebody would ring me.”
“I gave my name and my address to a policeman at the ambulance.
“I spelled it.
“He wrote it on a pad.”
“Nobody rang.
“I rang them.
“They asked for a crime reference number and I gave them the one off a card and it was the wrong sort of number.”
“That was six days in. By six days in, you have started to sound like a person with a story.”
She turned a page.
“In March I found out from a girl at work whose cousin knew his wife. She said, oh, that one, they got someone. She pleaded. It was all done in one morning.”
“Done.
“That was the word.
“It was all done.”
“I hadn't been asked one question and it was done.”
She went to the magistrates' court on Barrow Street and asked at a window.
“The woman was kind. She looked for twenty minutes. It hadn't gone through there, or if it had there was nothing left to look at.”
“There's no trial, you see. That's what I didn't understand for years. If somebody says they did it, there's nothing to watch. There's no day where anybody stands up and describes what happened.”
“A guilty plea is a door closing very quietly.”
She meant that to land, and it landed.
“So I had a description. A young woman, tall, grey coat, hair tied back. And a movement.”
“So I went to judo clubs.”
“Nineteen of them, in the end. Over about five years.”
“I'd wait until the class finished and I'd ask whoever looked in charge. I'd say, I'm trying to find a woman who did this.”
“And then I'd try to show them. In a cardigan, in a doorway, to a stranger.”
She made a small movement with her right arm at the table, about ten centimetres of it, and stopped.
“A man at a club in Dunstable watched me do it and said, that's a hip throw, love, that's the first thing anybody learns, that's four thousand women in this county.”
“He wasn't being cruel. He was being accurate. And then he asked me to leave, because a woman asking about someone who hurt someone is a woman you don't want in your club.”
“Four thousand women in this county. I remember thinking, well, I'll do four thousand then.”
She wrote to the police three times. She made a subject access request that took eleven months and came back with her own name redacted.
She paid ninety pounds to a man who advertised as a tracing agent and who asked her for a name.
“I never had a name.
“That was the whole of it.
“In twelve years I never once had a name.”
“My mother got ill in the fifth year and I did nothing for four years.
“I want that on the record too.
“I stopped.”
“I was married in the sixth year and not in the tenth. That's not all this. But it's some of it.”
“You get to be a person with a thing. People hear it in your voice after a while.”
I asked the only question I asked in that café.
“How did you know it was me? From a photograph. After twelve years.”
She pushed the notebook across, and inside the elastic band was the page from The Ledger, folded to the picture.
“I didn't know your face,” she said. “I've never known your face. It was dark and you were behind him and then you were running.”
She put a finger on the photograph, on the fourth step from the bottom.
“Your right shoulder sits lower than your left.”
“When you turned your back on him on Farrow Street, that was the shape. That's what I've had in my head for twelve years. A woman with one shoulder down.”
“I've looked at nine hundred photographs of judo players. Squad pictures. Club websites. Nobody stands like that.”
“Then a local paper prints a woman coming down some steps in the rain.”
She took the notebook back and put the elastic round it.
“I was sure in about a second. It took me nine days to find out where you lived.”