Chapter 89: What the Sheet Said
Priya drove four hundred yards, stopped in a lay-by outside a garden centre, and put a pad on the steering wheel.
“Now,” she said. “Before you talk to me. Write it.”
I wrote it with the engine off and my coat still on.
I had six seconds of reading and I got seven lines out of it.
I have not added a word to those seven lines from that day to this.
Heading: WILLOW BANK GROUND FLOOR. WEEK ENDING 21 MARCH. Seven day columns. Three shift rows.
Early, late, night.
Full names, printed. Not initials.
K. HYDE, in the Tuesday and Friday early boxes, and nowhere else in that week.
A. JOYCE, in the night row, Sunday to Wednesday, ten till eight.
No T. DEAKIN anywhere on the sheet.
Then I put the pad down and my hands started, which they had not done inside the building.
Priya waited it out. She is good at that.
She looked straight ahead at a display of bark chippings and let me get on with it.
“Say what it means,” she said afterwards. “Carefully.”
“Karen Hyde was not rostered on Wednesdays in March.”
“And?”
“And Adrian Joyce was rostered nights on Wednesdays, which means he was in the building at four in the morning and not at ten past two in the afternoon.”
“And Deakin?”
“Deakin isn't on the rota at all. Which fits him leaving. Which I already believed.”
“Now the honest bit,” Priya said. “What does the sheet not tell you?”
I made myself do it.
“It doesn't tell me who signed anything.”
“Go on.”
“It doesn't tell me what was in the boxes in March. I did not see a chart in March. I did not touch one, and I never will.”
“Right.”
“It tells me one thing only. That the two people whose initials I saw over and over on Wednesday afternoons for three years are not people who work Wednesday afternoons.”
“That's it,” she said. “That is the whole of what we have, and it is more than we had at two o'clock.”
She sent it to Gail Rooney that night.
Nine lines, with the week ending date, the three full names, and one sentence saying how the information had been obtained.
That last sentence was Priya's insistence and I argued with her about it for twenty minutes.
Two visitors signed the visitors' book at 14:12 and left at 14:23. The rota was displayed on the medication trolley in a public corridor. Nothing was touched, removed or photographed.
“They'll know you went in,” I said.
“They will know I went in lawfully and wrote it down the same afternoon,” she said. “Which is the difference between a witness and a problem.”
Rooney replied at eight the next morning. Two lines.
Thank you. This has been added to the record.
Nothing else. No question, no next step, no timescale.
Priya printed it and dated the corner in pen, the way she dates everything now.
I went home and did not sleep.
Some time after two in the morning I stopped being able to hold the corridor in my head without also holding room nine in it.
A made bed and a stripped chair. A stranger's photographs on the sill.
She's not on this corridor now.
I had cut that woman's fingernails once a fortnight for three years. She had a way of holding her hand out flat, palm down, fingers spread, like someone showing off a ring.
At half past four in the morning I picked up my phone and answered a message that was four days old.
Yes. Where.
Julian replied at seven forty.
Which meant he had been awake too, or that he sleeps with the phone on the pillow now, which would be new.
He named a café on Cathedral Street with a car park behind it, at eleven, on the Saturday.
I told my solicitor because I have never been able to do the other thing.
There was a silence on the line of the kind she did not usually permit herself.
“He is a prosecution witness,” she said.
“He is also my husband.”
“Both of those things are true and only one of them is going to be in front of a judge in October,” she said. “You do not discuss the incident. You do not discuss your case. You do not discuss the offer. If he raises any of it, you stand up and you leave, and you do not finish your coffee.”
“And if he raises something else?”
“Such as?”
I had the sentence ready and I did not say it.
That is the moment. If I had said it out loud on that phone call she would have told me not to, and I would have listened, because I always listened to her.
I said, “Nothing.”
She said, “Eleven o'clock, and text me when you leave.”