Chapter 52: Three Questions
He telephoned on Friday at ten past eight in the morning, which was not his hour, and I knew from that alone.
I took it standing in the coach-house kitchen with a pen in my hand.
“I have read it twice,” he said. “I am going to ask three questions, and I want them answered in order.”
I already knew this would be good, and I have thought about that sentence for years.
“One. What is the last thing that goes into that child by mouth in a day, and at what hour?”
“The bottle. Half past six in the evening.”
“Nothing after that.”
“Water if he wakes. He mostly doesn’t.”
“Your earliest onset is twenty past one in the morning.”
“Yes.”
“So something enters a child at eighteen thirty, does nothing at all for six hours and fifty minutes, and then does a great deal.”
I said there were slow-release preparations.
“There are. Name one you would put in a bottle of formula for a fifteen-month-old.”
I did not have one. I said I would look it up.
“Look it up. That is not a refusal. That is question one, and you have not answered it.”
“Two. If the vehicle is the evening bottle, then the onset moves when the bottle moves.”
I said I did not follow.
“You have a hundred and seventy-six days of a household ledger. That ledger tells you what time dinner was served.”
“On a night when they ate at eight, the bottle went up late. On a night when they ate at half past six, it went up early.”
“It does.”
“Then the arithmetic is on your floor and it will take you one evening. Subtract the bottle time from the onset time, nineteen times, and look at the nineteen numbers.”
“If the interval is constant, you have something enormous and I will telephone the hospital myself.”
“If the interval is scattered, your route is wrong, and I want to hear you say so out loud.”
I wrote that down word for word and underlined it, and then did not do it for two days, and I have never been able to explain that to anybody, including myself.
“Three,” he said. “Where is the daytime?”
“There isn’t one.”
“Something that suppresses a child’s breathing at two in the morning does not stop at six because the sun is up.”
“There is a morning after it. Flat, slow, heavy, sleeping through a meal.”
“He isn’t flat in the mornings.”
“He is walking. He is stacking books along a wall in a fixed order.”
“He is conducting a feud with a vacuum cleaner. That is not a child who was given a sedative twelve hours ago.”
I said perhaps the dose was small.
“Perhaps. Or it is gone by morning, in which case it has a short life, in which case it did not go in at half past six.”
That was the whole of it.
He refuted me in nine minutes, on a Friday, before his first patient, at no charge.
And I heard it as caution.
That is not his failure. He was clear, and my notes are clear.
I heard what I wanted, because there was a photograph on my phone and I had already told myself a story with a person in it.
“Now the other matter,” he said. “The second photograph.”
“It’s a bathroom in the east wing.”
“I do not care which bathroom. I care that you were on a floor you are not permitted to be on, photographing a medicine belonging to a person who has not been named in any complaint by anybody.”
“That was before the arrangements.”
“It was twelve days ago, and it will not matter that it was before the arrangements.”
“I know what it looks like.”
“You do not know, or you would not have sent it to me.”
“If you are ever asked under oath what you did on the tenth of October, you will have to say all of it.”
“I’ll say it.”
“You will say it to a woman paid four hundred dollars an hour to turn forty seconds in a bathroom into your whole character.”
I asked whether he wanted me to stop.
There was a silence of four seconds. I counted them, because that clock ticks.
“No. I want you to do question two before you do anything else at all. Not the police. Not the father. Not a lawyer. The arithmetic.”
“Say it back to me.”
“Subtract the bottle time from the onset time. Nineteen times.”
“Good. Telephone me when you have the nineteen numbers, whatever they turn out to be.”
Then he said the last thing, in a different voice, and it is the only time in two years I heard him sound tired.
“You have found a way in. You have not found a way in on your own data. Those are two different discoveries, and only one of them is yours.”
I said good night at nine in the morning, which tells you something, and put the phone down.
At half past nine I telephoned Detective Renata Ferreira instead.