Chapter 63: The Second to the Sixth
Constance Blackwood was at the courtyard door at half past five with a coat over her arm and no reason to be there.
She had walked out to say goodnight to somebody and had taken the long way, which is a thing she does.
“Lily. You look better than you did on Monday.”
I said I was sleeping in a warmer room, which was true and was not an answer.
She asked about my sister in Milwaukee by name
and about my father’s prescription, and she remembered the name of the prescription.
Then she gave me the news, warmly, in the tone of a woman handing over something nice.
“Victor’s back from Houston on Sunday the first.
And he isn’t going anywhere at all until the ninth.”
“He’s told me he means to be here for the whole of that study. He was rather proud of himself about it.”
“Which will be a comfort to you, dear. I know you worry about the nights he isn’t here.”
She patted my arm and went back in, and she had not raised her voice, and she never has.
I did not do the arithmetic in the courtyard.
I did it in the coach house with the door shut.
The study is the second to the sixth of November.
Five consecutive nights.
Victor Blackwood is in that house on the first, the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh and the eighth.
So all five nights of the recording fall inside the longest continuous stretch he has spent at home since March.
Seventeen of my nineteen occurred on nights when he was not in the building.
Sixty-one nights out of a hundred and seventy-six, he was away.
Thirty-five percent.
And somebody has picked five consecutive nights out of the other sixty-five percent.
I want to be careful here, because being careful is the only thing that has ever survived contact with these people.
There is nothing wrong with those dates. There is a father who wants to be at home while his son is being monitored.
It is the most natural sentence in the world and I could not argue with a single word of it.
It is also, if you have my table, the five best nights in November to be measured on.
I telephoned Dr. Moreno at seven and he already knew,
because Ellis Trask’s office had confirmed the dates that afternoon.
“I asked for at least two and two,” he said. “I have been given five of one.”
“Will you refuse to run it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because a machine that samples a child every two seconds for five nights is still the best thing anybody in this has done for him.”
“And if it comes back clean?”
“Then it is clean, for five nights, in November, with his father asleep down the corridor. And I will write exactly that.”
I asked whether he thought the dates had been chosen.
The pause was longer than four seconds this time.
“That is not a question I can answer,” he said, “and it is not a question you can afford to ask out loud.”
“Somebody chose them.”
“Somebody proposed them and a lawyer agreed them and a father was pleased about them.
That is three people and no offense.”
I said that if the trace came back clean, that would be the end.
“It would be a finding,” he said. “Findings are not endings. But I am not going to tell you it will help you.”
Then he asked what I intended to do, and I told him, and I heard him put his pen down.
“You want the travel record.”
“I want to know when that man was in that house and when he was not, from a document that is not a cook’s notebook.”
“Roz Achebe’s books have been perfectly good until this afternoon.”
“Roz Achebe’s books are in Mr. Foyle’s office and Roz Achebe is sixty-two with a pension in that building.”
He did not argue with that.
“There is a gate on that property,” I said.
“Every car that goes through it is logged, and it has been logged for nine years.”
“And the man who keeps that log has a mortgage.”
“Yes.”
“Then you are about to ask a person to do something that could cost him his living,” he said, “and you should not do that in a way that lets you pretend afterwards that you did not know.”
I said I knew exactly what I was asking.
“Then say it to him in those words,” he said, “and let him answer it.”
I went out at nine and stood in the courtyard for a while in the cold.
Then I walked six hundred meters down a gravel drive to a lit window I had not gone near since September.