Chapter 86: Eleven Days of Nothing
Nobody tells you that the worst part of reporting something is the eleven days afterwards.
You have imagined sirens. What you get is your own inbox.
I checked it forty times a day.
I know that because I started counting on the third day, the way you count anything you are ashamed of.
Nothing from the county.
Nothing from the regulator.
On day six Priya rang the duty line with her reference number and got a different woman and a slightly different tone.
The concern had been received.
The concern had been screened. A decision had been made.
They could not tell her what the decision was.
The information related to third parties. There is a framework about that, and the framework is not stupid. It is simply not built for the person on the phone.
“So it might be sitting on someone's desk,” Priya said afterwards, on my stairs, still in her coat.
“Or it might have been closed.”
“Or it might have gone to the police. They don't tell you that either.”
We sat on the stairs because the flat was cold and the stairwell has a radiator on the landing.
“This is the part that breaks people,” she said. “In my job I see it twice a month.”
“Somebody does the right thing, hears nothing, and decides they imagined it.”
“Did we do enough?”
“We did what we could do. There is no version where two women with a notebook cause an inspection on a Tuesday.”
On day eight the regulator's website updated its page for Willow Bank.
I found it at the library and my hands went cold on the mouse.
It had updated the telephone number.
The twenty-eighth of February came.
My solicitor asked Pell for an extension of fourteen days, in the standard language, expecting to be squeezed.
He gave it in fifty minutes.
“That's interesting,” she said, on the phone, in the voice she used when she meant it was more than interesting.
“He was in a hurry a week ago.”
“He was. Deadlines that evaporate on request were never deadlines. Somebody has told him to keep the line open and not to force it.”
“Why?”
“I don't know. Possibly because their own house is busy.”
That was the closest she came, in that whole period, to saying out loud what I had told her about the corridor.
She never once repeated it back to me. She would not put it in a letter.
She kept a wall between the criminal file and the other thing, and it turned out later that she was right about that as well.
On day ten I nearly signed.
I want to put that down properly, because it is the truest thing in this part of the story.
It was a Tuesday night.
I had come back from the club with my shoulder aching and nothing in the fridge but eggs. There was a letter about my deposit.
The driers ran past ten for the first time all winter, so the floor hummed while I ate.
I got the nineteen pages out and turned to the last page, which is a signature block with my name typed under a line in a font I have hated ever since.
I found a pen in the drawer.
Blue biro, from a hotel neither I nor anybody I know has ever stayed in.
I put the tip of it on the line.
It made a small blue dot, which is still there, because I still have the pages.
Here is what was in my head, and none of it was noble.
That I could sleep. That there would be no trial in the autumn.
That I could stop reading letters. That I could get work, because you cannot get work when there is a date in October you have to explain.
That I am thirty-four and I have already lost one whole life to eleven days in a hospital and I did not want to lose the second one to eleven pages.
I wrote the first stroke of the N.
Then I stopped, and I sat there with the pen touching the paper, and the thing that stopped me was not conscience.
It was arithmetic again.
Twenty-seven doors.
Nineteen to the bend, eight after.
I could not get the number to be smaller and I could not get it to be somebody else's.
I put the cap back on the pen and put the pages in the drawer and went and stood in the shower until the water went cold, which at Ferris Street takes about four minutes.
The next morning I wrote the date and the time on the pad, and what I had nearly done, because everything gets a copy and a date.
And on day eleven, at eight minutes past nine, Priya rang me from a car park before work.
They had called her back.