Chapter 84: I Do Not Know
My solicitor asked me for a chronology and I thought it would take an evening.
It took nine days.
Not because there was so much of it.
Because of the rule.
The rule was hers and she gave it to me in one sentence on the phone.
Write only what you would be willing to be cross-examined on for an hour.
I had never applied that test to anything in my life.
Nobody has. You would never get through a dinner.
So I bought a lined A4 pad from the newsagent for one pound forty and started at the beginning, and the first sentence took forty minutes.
Because the first thing I wanted to write was: the round was signed for by staff who were not there.
And I cannot say that.
I did not see a rota for every Wednesday. I saw a rota on the Wednesdays I attended, and I did not attend every Wednesday.
What I can say is that on every Wednesday I attended and looked, K.H. and A.J. were not listed for that day.
That is a smaller sentence. It is a duller sentence.
It is also a sentence that does not fall over when somebody leans on it.
I wrote the whole thing that way.
It was the hardest writing I have ever done, and I once wrote a letter to a man's family from a police station.
Dates where I had them.
Approximations marked as approximations.
Room numbers, which I had, because doors are a thing I count.
Descriptions of the folders.
Description of the trolley, down to the castor brake, because my solicitor said mundane detail is what makes a witness believable.
And every time I reached the edge of what I actually knew, I wrote the four words.
I do not know.
I do not know the full names of the three sets of initials.
I do not know whether the medication was in fact not administered, or whether it was administered by somebody else and signed for afterwards by a person who should not have signed for it.
I do not know whether the rota on the trolley was the current rota.
I do not know whether Doreen was accurate.
I do not know whether the residents in rooms one to twenty-seven were prescribed anything that mattered.
I do not know why T.D.'s initials continued.
I do not know what any of it was for.
When I finished I went back and counted, because that is what I do, and I had written those four words eleven times.
Eleven.
The same number as the kneelings.
I sat and looked at that for a while and then I made myself stop, because there is a kind of thinking that feels like insight and is only pattern-hunger, and I have enough to be going on with.
I typed it up at the library. Twelve hundred words.
I printed it for eighteen pence a page.
Priya read it and made two corrections, both factual, both mine.
My solicitor read it and said one word, which was good, and then a second sentence, which was: do not add anything to this without telling me.
Two other things happened in those nine days.
On the Wednesday, Pell wrote again. Two paragraphs.
He noted that the twenty-eighth was approaching and that his client remained keen to resolve matters constructively.
He used the word constructively twice. My solicitor did not answer it for four days, on purpose.
And on the Thursday night, at twenty past eleven, my phone lit up on the laminate table.
Julian.
Three words, no punctuation at the end, which is not how he writes.
Can we talk
I looked at it for a long time with my hands flat on my thighs.
I had not seen my husband since the fourth of January, in a corridor at the court.
He had stood three feet away with his coat over his arm and said nothing at all, while a man from his mother's firm spoke for him.
Three feet. I remember the distance because I remember checking it.
I did not answer that night.
I lay on the floor and did the breathing.
I looked at the crack in the ceiling shaped like a river delta.
There is a thing that happens to you when you have spent three years being the person who is wrong in every room.
Somebody sends you three words and your whole body goes towards it before your head has had a vote.
I felt that. I want to be honest that I felt it.
Then I got up, drank a glass of water, and wrote the date and the time and the exact words on the last page of the pad, under everything else, because Priya had said everything gets a copy and a date.
Everything.