Chapter 61: Who I Could Tell
On Tuesday night I wrote out every person I could tell and what would happen in the ninety seconds afterwards.
I did it in a list because a list can be finished, and I needed something that could be finished.
Victor Blackwood. He would listen properly. He asks good questions.
He would then say that he had instructed Ellis.
Ellis Trask would have it in a file by lunchtime and the file would go to the family office.
Mr. Foyle would raise a work order, because that is what a house manager does with a fault in an appliance.
The unit would be cleaned, descaled and probably replaced, correctly, by a contractor, with a signature.
Nobody would have done one thing wrong and there would be no tank.
Corinne Devlin. Licensed, careful, and employed by an agency that is employed by that family.
She would be obliged to report a concern to her clinical lead within the day,
and her clinical lead would telephone the house manager.
Same ending. Faster.
Constance Blackwood. She would be lovely about it,
and she would tell Victor, because she tells Victor everything.
Marina Kessler. Not a person I can tell anything. She is the reason I have a list.
Roz Achebe.
I sat and looked at that name for a long time.
Roz would not tell a soul. I have never doubted that for one hour, then or since.
But Roz is in that kitchen at six every morning and the books go down to the estate office at six every night.
She has twenty-eight years in that building and a pension in it, and she is sixty-two.
If it ever came out that she had known, the sentence that would be said about her is that she was part of it.
I have watched what this house does to people who knew things and did not say them.
So the answer for Roz was no, and it is the only entry on that list that cost me anything to write.
Detective Ferreira. Told. Nothing further available.
Dr. Moreno. Told. Under instruction from him not to widen it.
That left one name and I wrote it last and put a question mark beside it.
At nine I telephoned Karin Doyle at the two-attorney office on Wells
and she took the call at home.
Eleven minutes, free, for the second time, and she did not once mention that it was the second time.
I told her I had found a mark inside an appliance in a room a child sleeps in.
“Stop,” she said. “Say what you have. Not what it means.”
“A band of residue in a water tank, at the level of a previous fill, that does not look like limescale.”
“Good. Now never write it more strongly than that in any document you ever produce.”
“Do not use the word poison. Do not use the word substance.
You do not have a substance. You have a mark.”
I asked her who could lawfully get water out of that tank.
“Whoever owns the tank. Whoever owns the house. Or a court.”
“Then it is the father.”
“It is the father, and the father is going to ask his lawyer, and his lawyer acts for the family.”
“So the moment I ask, it is over.”
“The moment you ask, it is very likely over,” she said. “That is not a reason not to ask. It is a reason to ask on a day when asking is worth what it costs.”
I asked her how I would know which day that was.
“You’ll know, because you’ll have something in your hand that makes the answer matter within an hour rather than within a month.”
Then she asked what I actually wanted
and I told her the truth, which was five milliliters of water.
“Then get somebody with authority to want the same five milliliters for their own reasons,” she said. “That’s the whole trick and it isn’t a legal one.”
I thanked her and asked whether I could pay her something.
“Send me twenty dollars when you are working again,” she said, and hung up.
I never did, because when I was working again I could not find the office, and I have never got that off my conscience.
At half past ten I walked over to the kitchen with the excuse of returning a tin.
Roz was doing the proving basket with her sleeves pushed up.
I stood there for about a minute with a tin in my hand and did not say any of it.
“Still not telling me,” she said, without turning round.
“Still not.”
“Good,” she said. “Come back when it’s mine to carry.”
I counted the names on the list on the walk back. There were eleven of them.
And the correct answer, in every single case, on the twenty-seventh of October, was nobody.