Chapter 68: Three Minutes Forty-One
The first thing he made me do was the clock, and he made me do it before he would let me put the two sheets together.
“Every recorder in the world is wrong,” he said. “Mine’s wrong. Yours was wrong. The question is by how much and in which direction.”
At ten to six he went back up the drive and I stood in the courtyard with his phone in my hand.
He walked into the east corridor at a time we had agreed to the second and clapped once, hard, under the dome.
The camera does not record sound. It records four frames a second, and a man’s hands come together in one of them.
The frame it happened in is stamped 05:55:41.
The time on his phone, which takes the network time, was 05:52:00.
The DVR runs three minutes and forty-one seconds fast.
Then he did the part I would not have thought of.
The system was serviced on the twelfth of February and the clock was set to network time, and there is a work sheet with a signature on it.
From the twelfth of February to the thirtieth of October is eight and a half months.
Three minutes forty-one seconds gained over eight and a half months is about twenty-six seconds a month.
So the error is not the same in March as it is in September, and if you subtract three minutes forty-one from a March timestamp you are wrong by three minutes.
He did it month by month. Twenty-six seconds in March. Fifty-two in April. And so on down the page.
I checked his arithmetic twice and he checked mine, and neither of us found anything, which I have always regarded as unlikely and never been able to fault.
The residual is under four minutes for every date in the set.
Four minutes. That is the accuracy of everything I am about to write down and I have never once claimed better.
Then we put the two sheets side by side on the table at ten past six in the morning.
His column: the corrected time at which she goes out of frame at the right-hand edge.
My column: onset, from my log, written six months earlier by a woman with a stopwatch and no idea what she was writing.
Eleventh of March. Out of frame 23:52. Onset 02:41.
Twenty-sixth of March. 23:14. Onset 01:55.
Ninth of April. 23:38. Onset 02:20.
Thirtieth of April. 23:28. Onset 02:12.
Second of May. 00:19. Onset 03:04.
Twelfth of May. 22:41. Onset 01:20.
Twenty-first of June. 23:47. Onset 02:33.
Fourth of July. 00:11. Onset 02:58.
Eleventh of August. 22:36. Onset 01:20.
Nineteenth of August. 00:26. Onset 03:11.
Second of September. 23:19. Onset 02:04.
I did the subtractions in pencil in the margin, eleven of them, and my hand was steady, which surprised me.
Two hours forty-nine. Two hours forty-one. Two hours forty-two. Two hours forty-four.
Two hours forty-five. Two hours thirty-nine. Two hours forty-six. Two hours forty-seven.
Two hours forty-four. Two hours forty-five. Two hours forty-five.
The shortest is two hours thirty-nine. The longest is two hours forty-nine.
Eleven numbers inside a band ten minutes wide.
I want the comparison written down here, in the same chapter, because it is the whole of my case.
Four days earlier, in the morning room, a doctor had read out nineteen intervals between a bottle and an onset.
Three hours eleven to six hours four. A scatter of nearly three hours.
That is what a wrong answer looks like.
Ten minutes across eleven nights is what the other thing looks like.
The onset times themselves run from twenty past one to eleven minutes past three, which is a spread of an hour and fifty-one minutes.
They only stop being scattered when you stop measuring them from midnight and start measuring them from her.
I put the pencil down and sat back and neither of us said anything for a while.
Then Marco turned over the two June pages.
Fifth of June. A person comes into frame at 23:55 corrected, walks the corridor, goes out at the right-hand edge.
And comes back into frame two point one seconds later, from the same direction, without stopping.
Seventh of June, 23:41. The same. Straight through and straight back. No pause.
No forty seconds. No ninety seconds. Nothing out of sight at all.
I had given him those two dates because on both of them the tank was in the scullery with citric acid in it, and I had scrubbed it myself.
No episode on either night. Both of them nights when the child’s father was out of the state.
She walked the corridor. There was nothing in that room to stop at.
I told him what the June dates were then, at twenty to seven in the morning, because he had earned it four times over.
He listened, and then he sat for a while with both hands flat on the table.
“Miss Carter,” he said, “I need to go and open the estate office at seven, and I want you to hear me say something first.”