Chapter 91: What Julian Chose
Pell's letter arrived on the Tuesday at nine minutes past four.
My solicitor rang me before she had finished reading it.
She had never done that before and she never did it again.
“Are you sitting down.”
“I'm standing at a window.”
“Then keep standing. I am going to read you a clause, and I want you to say nothing until I finish it.”
It was a revised 9.2, in a revised draft, with the changes marked in the margin the way they do it.
The old words were still there. The eleven pages were still there. And then a new sub-clause, 9.2(d), which had not existed a fortnight before.
That I warranted that I had not made, and would not make, any report, referral, complaint or disclosure to any regulatory or statutory body concerning any Ashford Operating Entity.
And that I was not aware of any such report having been made by any other person at my instigation or with my assistance.
“Say it again,” I said. She said it again. “They know.”
“They know something,” she said. “They have used the words medication administration records twice in one letter. I want you to tell me, now, and carefully, who you have said those words to.”
I stood at the window with the phone against my ear and the wall opposite going orange because the sun was on it.
“Priya,” I said. “You. The safeguarding coordinator. And a form.”
“That's four.”
“Yes.”
“Nadia.”
“And Julian.”
There was a silence of about four seconds, which from her was a shout.
“When.”
“Saturday. The café.”
“You told me you would not discuss the case.”
“I didn't discuss the case,” I said, and heard how it sounded on the way out.
“No,” she said. “You discussed the other thing. Which I did not know you were going to do, which is why I did not tell you not to.”
I put my forehead on the window frame. “Right,” she said, after a moment, in a completely different voice. “Now we deal with it. Do not telephone him.”
I telephoned him.
I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I am not going to dress it up as anything except what it was, which was a woman on a Tuesday evening who needed to hear it in his own voice.
He answered on the second ring, which meant he had been waiting for it.
“You told them,” I said.
“I told my mother.”
Not a denial. Not a pause before it.
He had had four days to decide what he would say, and he had chosen the true thing. I have never been able to settle whether that was decency or economy.
“Julian.”
“Listen to me,” he said. “If what you told me is right, it is very serious, and serious things have to be dealt with properly.”
“Properly.”
“Properly means the company takes it seriously and looks at it and fixes it. Not a woman on bail telling a story to a council.”
“There are twenty-seven of them.”
“I know. And they are in a home that will be shut by next Christmas if this goes off in a newspaper.”
“That is not what I said.”
“And then twenty-seven people who cannot walk are moved to four different buildings in a fortnight. By strangers. In March.”
That is the thing about Julian.
Everything he says has a true sentence somewhere inside it. That is how it works, and that is how it has always worked, and it took me three years to see the shape of it.
“You had four days,” I said.
“I had four days and I thought about it for all four of them, which is more than you did.”
“And Damon?”
“Damon is my brother.”
There it was. Three words, no argument attached, offered as though it settled something.
“So is Margot handling it?”
“Mum is handling it,” he said. “She is taking advice. She has taken it seriously from the first minute, which is more than I expected, if you want the truth.”
“I want to know what happened to the woman in room nine.”
“I don't know who that is,” he said.
And that was the whole marriage, really, in one line, arriving three months too late to be any use to me.
He said something after that about wanting to help me with money.
I let him say it, and then I ended the call, and sat on the floor with my back against the bed.
I got the pad and wrote the date and the time and the words, because everything gets a copy and a date.
Then I went back through the café.
He had asked nine questions in that place, and six of them were about who knew.
And not one of them, not a single one, had been about the twenty-seven people behind the doors.
I checked the list twice.