Chapter 94: Margot Does Not Panic
My solicitor wrote to Pell the same evening.
Four paragraphs, no adjectives, setting out the time, the level, the door, and the four minutes.
At the end, one sentence requiring that the car park operator be put on notice to preserve the footage, with the date and the camera position specified.
She sent a copy to the operator herself, by email, at eleven o'clock at night, and copied it to me so that I would have the timestamp.
“That is the whole job,” she said the next morning. “Everyone thinks this work is arguing. It is preservation.”
Pell replied within a day.
His client had been in the car park on business. His client had encountered me by chance.
His client had no recollection of any conversation of the kind described, and considered the letter to be an escalation.
He used the word escalation twice.
He also said that his client would not be making any complaint arising from the encounter, which was the only genuinely informative line in it.
“Read that again,” my solicitor said.
“He isn't reporting it.”
“He has just told you that he watched the footage before he wrote to me.”
Two days later a second letter arrived, from a different firm.
Bigger. Older.
Three names on the letterhead, and an address with a square in it.
Acting for Mrs. Margot Ashford, personally, and for the holding company.
It was one and a half pages.
It was the most frightening document I received in the whole of that year, and there was not one aggressive word in it.
It said that Mrs. Ashford had been made aware of concerns relating to medicines management at Willow Bank.
It said that she took such matters with the utmost seriousness.
It said that she had, on advice, instructed an independent pharmacy consultancy to carry out a full review of medication administration records at all four homes.
And that the review had commenced on Monday.
Monday. Two days after Julian rang his mother.
It said that the provider's statutory notification obligations were being complied with.
And it said that Mrs. Ashford would welcome the opportunity to meet, informally and without prejudice, at a neutral venue, at my convenience.
I read it three times in the launderette flat.
Then I rang my solicitor and asked her to explain to me why my hands were cold.
“Because she is good,” she said. “Sit down and I will take it in order.”
She took it in order.
A provider that commissions its own review before a regulator arrives is a responsible provider.
A provider that notifies first is a provider that self-reported, and self-reporting changes the temperature of every single thing that comes afterwards.
A review commissioned through solicitors will be argued to be privileged, which means the family will see it and nobody else may, unless somebody fights for it.
And a review of all four homes, rather than one, buries a corridor in a county.
“So she's hiding it.”
“No,” my solicitor said. “That is the part I want you to understand, because if you get it wrong you will make bad decisions for a year. She may well be fixing it.”
“Then why does it frighten me?”
“Because fixing it and owning it are the same move for her. Whatever is wrong in that building will be corrected by people she chose, recorded in a document she commissioned, and disclosed on terms she sets.”
“And the twenty-seven?”
“May end up perfectly well looked after,” she said. “That is the horrible part.”
“She's not a monster.”
“No. She is a competent woman with money, moving fast, and she will very probably improve that home. She simply intends to be the only author of what happened in it.”
I went to the club that night because it was Tuesday and because I had nowhere to put my body.
Tobias had us doing turnover drills on the ground for an hour.
It is unglamorous work and it leaves you with mat burn on both elbows.
At the end he stood next to me while I coiled the belts.
“You are winning something,” he said.
“How can you tell.”
“You are tired in the right places.”
I did not tell him what it was. He did not ask.
In six months he had asked me one question about my life, and it had been about my shoulder.
I walked home and read the letter a fourth time.
I got to the last line, which was the one I had skipped every time.
Mrs. Ashford would welcome the opportunity to meet.
In three years that woman had never negotiated with me about anything.
She had announced. She had corrected. She had, on eleven separate evenings, indicated a place on a hardwood floor with two fingers.
A person who starts negotiating has done the arithmetic and found she is not certain of the answer.