Chapter 92: Level Three
The multi-storey on Nelson Street has a stairwell in the north-west corner with the floor numbers painted on the wall in white, four feet high.
Priya parked there because it is eleven pounds for the day.
She was taking me to a bank and then to the club.
She had gone up to level five to get the ticket validated at the machine that works, and I had said I would meet her at the car.
Level three. Bay ninety-four, against the wall, nose out.
I took the stairs because I always take the stairs.
The door onto level three has a wired-glass panel and a closer that has been broken for years.
It hangs open about a hand's width, and the wind comes through it.
Above that door, on the landing side, there is a dome camera in a grey housing.
I had noticed it the first time Priya parked there in January.
I notice cameras the way I notice fire doors and where bar staff keep the ice.
The landing is eight feet by six.
Then a flight of eleven steps down to a half-landing, then eleven more.
I came out of the stair door on the level and crossed towards bay ninety-four, and there was a man standing between me and the car.
I knew the shape before I knew the face.
I have known that shape since it was twenty-six and standing behind his mother's chair at my wedding.
Damon.
I stopped at eleven feet.
That was not a decision either. My feet did it, and they picked eleven feet, and eleven feet is roughly two of his steps and one of mine.
He had his hands in the pockets of a good coat and he was smiling with the bottom half of his face.
“Nadia.”
I did not answer him. I turned around and walked back to the stair door.
That is the first thing I want on the record, because of everything that was said about me afterwards. I turned around. I did not speak. I went for the exit.
He got there before me, because he was already moving and because he had planned the geometry.
He put his shoulder to the door and let it swing.
Then he stepped through onto the landing and stood there, so that the way out was behind him and the camera was above his head.
“Two minutes,” he said.
Here is what I understood in the time it took him to say those two words.
My bail says no contact, direct or indirect, with Damon Ashford.
It does not say unless he starts it.
If a security guard came through that door in the next four minutes, or if he telephoned the police himself, there would be a woman with an assault conviction standing in an enclosed concrete space with the complainant in a live prosecution.
Nobody would ever be able to unpick who had arrived first.
That is the whole of it. That is what the room was for.
I stepped out onto the landing.
I want to be clear that I did that on purpose.
I could have gone back into the car park, which was open and had two people in it forty yards away by the lift.
I went onto the landing, because of the camera.
He had put himself under it to be seen doing nothing. I put myself in front of it to be seen doing nothing.
Eight feet by six. Him at the door.
Me with the top step behind my right heel, which I did not like. A flight of stairs behind you is a bad thing to have.
So I moved.
Two small steps, left and back, along the wall with the white number three on it, until the stairs were off my line and the wall was on my shoulder.
He watched me do it and he did not understand what he was watching, and that was the only advantage I had all afternoon.
I put my hands out where they could be seen.
Not up. Out, low, away from the body, palms forward, fingers open.
I held them there for the entire time. Every second of it.
“You look well,” he said. “Better than Christmas.”
“Damon.”
“Julian says you've been telling stories.”
I said nothing.
“He says you've been telling stories about a trolley.”
The wind came through the gap in the door and moved the hem of his coat.
“That's a very serious thing to say about people who do a hard job for eleven pounds an hour,” he said.
He took a step towards me.
And I understood, finally and completely and about four months too late, why a man who could have crushed me any week for three years had always been so careful never to be alone in a room with me.
He was not afraid of what I could do.
He was afraid of what I had seen.