Chapter 90: Nine Questions
The café on Cathedral Street has a step down at the door that catches everybody, and a long bench along the left wall, and eleven tables.
I got there at ten forty and took the end of the bench, back to the wall, with a sightline to both doors.
I am not able to do otherwise. I have stopped apologising for it.
He came in at eleven exactly, and three years of marriage had not prepared me for how little room he takes up.
Julian is six foot one and he goes through a room like a man crossing a wet floor that someone else has mopped.
He had brought my post in a paper bag from a shop.
Bank, dentist, and a wedding invitation from a woman I trained with when we were both nineteen.
“You look well,” he said.
“I'm not.”
“No,” he said. “Sorry. That was a thing to say.”
We got two coffees and he paid, and I let him, and I noticed that I let him.
He asked about the flat and I said it was fine. He asked about money and I said it was fine.
He asked whether I needed anything and I said no.
All three answers were false. He knew. Neither of us did anything about it.
Then he said, “I'm not allowed to talk about the case.”
“Neither am I.”
“Right.” And that was the wall. We sat on either side of it for a while and drank coffee, and the machine went off behind the counter twice.
I had decided in the night that I would not raise it.
I want that understood. I did not go there to tell him.
I went because a man I had been married to for three years had sent me three words with no full stop, and my body had gone towards it.
What did it was a question.
He turned his cup round on the saucer and said, “What did you actually do there? At Willow Bank. On Wednesdays.”
I put my hands flat on my thighs under the table.
Nobody had ever asked me that.
Not once, in three years. Not Margot, who asked about everything. Not the woman at my own wedding who asked what I did with my days.
Three years of Wednesdays and one man asks a plain question in a café, and I found out in about a second and a half exactly how much I had wanted to be asked.
So I told him.
The chairs. The lounge.
Doreen's fingernails, once a fortnight, and how she held her hand out flat with the fingers spread.
The corridor with no seam in it, laid in one piece so a wheel runs clean from the hall to the fire door. Twenty-seven doors. Nineteen to the bend and eight after.
And then, because a hand had arrived at my collarbone and I did not step back, I told him the rest.
The trolley. The folders. The grid.
Three sets of initials. The rota in its plastic wallet.
I did not tell him about the report. I want to be exact, because this matters later. I never said the word safeguarding and I never said the name Rooney.
He listened all the way through without once interrupting.
He is genuinely good at that. I had always taken it for kindness.
Then he asked questions.
He asked whether I was certain about the initials.
He asked whether anybody else had ever seen the charts open.
He asked whether I had ever mentioned it to anyone at the home.
He asked whether I had said any of this to my solicitor.
He asked whether I had told Priya.
He asked how well I knew Priya, and how long I had known her, and what she did for a living, and where.
He asked whether anything had been written down.
He asked whether I had been back to the building.
He asked, last, whether anyone official had been told.
I lied about that one, and only that one, and I have never once regretted it in the years since.
He did not write anything down. He did not take his phone out. He sat with his hands round a cold cup and looked at the table between us.
“This is very serious,” he said.
“Yes.”
“If it's right.”
“Yes.”
“Let me think,” he said.
He put on his coat. At the door he turned round and came back two steps, and stood at what I measured later, on the bus, at about three feet.
“You should have told me years ago,” he said.
I said, “You never asked.”
Then he went out and up the step and past the window without looking in, and I sat there for eleven minutes with a paper bag of post on the bench beside me.
Nine questions.
Six of them were about who.