Chapter 54: The Morning Room
Nine o’clock, Monday the twenty-sixth of October. Eight people and a jug of water on a tray.
They put me in the chair with its back to the window.
Victor Blackwood at the end, hands flat on the table. Ellis Trask on his right, two files, a fountain pen he never used.
Detective Ferreira in the second chair from the fireplace, coat still on.
Marina Kessler at the far side, in gray, with a laptop.
Beside her Serena Montigue, who did not look at me and did not speak once in fifty minutes.
She had not spoken to me since the fourth of October. She never would again.
Constance came in at four minutes past nine with a second tray.
She apologized for being late and put a cup at my elbow before she put one at her son’s.
Ellis Trask opened by saying what it was not. Not a hearing, not an interview, not a disciplinary meeting. Then he asked me to put my position, courteously, and sat back.
I did it in nine minutes. I had rehearsed it eleven times and I did not stumble.
The route: four things by mouth. The window: eleven minutes on a landing, in another woman’s handwriting.
And the photograph, which I put on the table face up, because hiding it would be worse.
Marina Kessler asked one question, pleasantly.
“Miss Carter, on which floor of this house did you take that photograph?”
“The east wing. Second floor. The tenth of October.”
“And what were you doing on that floor?”
“Collecting towels. And then opening a cabinet that was not mine, which nobody had asked me to do.”
“Thank you,” she said, and typed for eleven seconds, and never mentioned it again. She did not need to.
Then Constance put her cup down.
“Oh, my dear,” she said. “That’s mine.”
She was warm about it, in a way I have never got out of my ear.
She took a pharmacy printout out of her handbag, folded twice, without having to look for it.
Fifty count, filled the third of September. A line above it from January. One from the January before that.
“For my back, since 2019. Dr. Ingrid put me on it and I have never got off it.”
“I sleep in the east wing when Victor has people in the house, so I keep it in that bathroom.”
She reached over and put her hand flat on my wrist for about a second.
“You must have had such a fright when you saw it.”
Nobody in that room raised a voice. Nobody has ever raised a voice in that room.
Then Kessler turned the laptop round for the two dates.
Twenty-fourth of July. A hotel folio in Lake Forest. Checked in 23:41, checked out 07:02.
Fifth of August. A valet ticket, a receipt timed 23:58, a photograph taken in Naperville.
Two of my nineteen. My two longest durations. Sixty-four seconds and sixty-eight.
Serena Montigue was not in that building on either night.
I said my case had never been that she was in the room.
“Your case,” Kessler said, “is that a hand carried a bottle up a staircase.”
“A hand is attached to a person. On those two nights it was not hers.”
Then Ellis Trask said Dr. Moreno was on the line, and Mr. Foyle set the handset on the table.
“Miss Carter. Did you do the arithmetic I asked you for on Friday?”
I said no.
“Then I did it on Saturday. I have the nineteen intervals from bottle to onset.”
Three hours eleven. Five hours forty. Four hours two. Six hours four. Three hours twenty-eight. Nineteen of them, the shortest three hours eleven and the longest six hours four.
“Mean four hours thirty-seven. There is no interval. There is a scatter of nearly three hours.” “If the vehicle were the evening bottle, that number would be constant. It is the least constant number in this document.”
Somebody moved a cup.
“Miss Carter. Say it, please.”
I said the route was wrong.
“Say the rest.”
“It does not go in by mouth.”
“Thank you,” he said, and he was the only person in that room who had done any work.
Victor Blackwood looked at the table and said the only thing he said all morning.
“Is my son all right?”
Dr. Moreno said the study was consented and that he could not answer that question yet. Victor nodded as though he had been given an answer.
Constance walked me as far as the hall and said she would speak to him about my hours.
Detective Ferreira caught me on the gravel with her keys already in her hand.
“I spent Friday evening and half of Saturday on a bottle in a bathroom.” “I put your name in front of a sergeant. That is not a thing I get to do twice in a month.”
I said I was sorry. “Don’t ever bring me a theory again,” she said. “Bring me a thing.”
At 09:58 I signed the contact book, and the pen went through the paper on the C of Carter.