Chapter 69: Under Review
“I logged it,” he said. “At four minutes past two this morning, in the day book, in my own hand.”
I did not understand him for about three seconds.
“You wrote down that you opened the safe.”
“Safe opened, 02:04. Archive drive two of two. EC-2 review. M. Ruiz. Closed 04:06.”
I asked him why in God’s name he had done that.
“Because that book is the only reason anybody in that house has ever believed a word I say.”
“Nine years. Every gate, every delivery, every alarm, every time that safe is opened.”
“If I keep it for nine years and skip one line on the night it matters, then it was never a record. It was a habit.”
“They’ll see it at seven o’clock.”
“Mr. Foyle opens that office at ten to seven and reads the book with his coat on. He has done it every working day since I have known him.”
Then he said the thing that has stayed with me longer than anything else anybody said that autumn.
“If I hadn’t written it, they’d have found it on Monday off the workstation audit anyway.”
“And then it wouldn’t just be a man who looked at a drive. It would be a man who looked at a drive and lied about it.”
“One of those you can survive.”
He left at ten to seven and went up the drive to open an office and be found out.
I did not go back to bed.
I sat with eleven pages and my column and I copied the whole of both onto a fresh sheet in ink.
The telephone in the coach house rang at nine minutes past eight and it was him, from the gatehouse,
and he had four minutes.
Mr. Foyle had read the book at 06:52
and telephoned Ellis Trask’s office at 07:10.
A man from a firm was on the property by five to eight.
Not a lawyer. The kind of person a firm sends first.
Marco had been asked to account for his access and had done it in one sentence, standing up, without a note.
“I reviewed footage from the interior archive relating to dates on which the child had breathing episodes.”
They asked him at whose request.
“I told them I’d formed my own view about something and gone and looked.”
I said that was not true.
“It’s true enough to be said out loud and it doesn’t put your name in a room I can’t control.”
“Marco.”
“You’ll say it if you’re asked under oath. You will not volunteer it to a man in a suit at eight in the morning.”
“Those are different things and the difference is the only thing I’ve got.”
His engagement was placed under review pending an audit of access, effective immediately.
His card was rescoped inside the hour.
Gate, grounds, garages. Not the estate office. Not the safe.
He was asked to surrender the archive drive and he told them where it was, which was where it had always been.
He was not walked off the property, and I want that written down, because it was said afterwards that he had been.
He was asked to work his shift and to expect a letter.
“How bad is it?”
“They can end it with an email,” he said. “They’ve been able to since the twenty-first of September. Today they’ve got a reason.”
I asked him what I could do.
There was a pause and then something in his voice that was almost amusement, which I had never heard from him.
“Nothing. There is nothing you can do. You’re a suspended nanny with no money.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I want you to notice that they’ve taken the drive, the safe, the office and the card off me in one hour,” he said.
“And that nobody in that building has asked me for the pages.”
I stood in a coach-house kitchen with the phone against my ear and looked at eleven sheets of paper on the table.
Handwriting. No files, no copies, no photographs.
A drive walks out of a building. A sheet of paper is a man’s handwriting.
Nobody asked for the pages because nobody thought of paper.
“Marco. They’re going to work out what you were looking at.”
“They already know what I was looking at. I told them the dates.”
“Then they know I have a corridor and a time.”
“Yes,” he said. “And that means you have got today, and I would not count on tomorrow.”
The line went quiet for a second and I could hear the gate motor behind him.
“Miss Carter. Whatever it is you have not told me about that room. If there is a thing in that house you need, go and get it this morning.”
He hung up at 08:14.
I stood there for eleven seconds and then I telephoned Wabash.