Chapter 71: Friday Morning
There was frost on the courtyard and my hands would not get warm.
Constance Blackwood was in the small hall by the side door at ten to nine with an armful of flowers.
“Lily. Your hands are blue. Come in properly and shut that door.”
I said I needed four minutes with Mr. Blackwood.
“He’s on a call until half past. It’s the Houston people, and he’ll be no use to anybody until it’s finished.”
She said it kindly. She was entirely right about him. She has never once been wrong about her son.
She put a coffee into my hands that I had not asked for and could not put down without rudeness.
Then she asked about my sister in Milwaukee, and the nine-year-old, and my father.
She asked what the pharmacy charged for his prescription and was shocked by the number, genuinely.
Eleven minutes.
I have counted them many times since and the count does not change anything.
She did not stop me. There was no door and no refusal and nothing anybody could ever write down.
She was gracious, and she was interested, and she never raised her voice. She never has.
At nine minutes past nine Serena Montigue came out of the morning room and crossed the hall to the stairs.
Gray suit. Phone in her left hand. She did not look at me and she did not look at Constance.
Roz was in the kitchen doorway with a tray of cups and had stopped moving.
I put the coffee down on the hall table.
Then I said it to her back, in an ordinary voice, in a hall with three other people in it.
“On the fifth of June and the seventh of June you walked down that corridor and you did not stop.”
She was three steps up.
She stopped.
She did not turn around.
She stood on the third step with her hand on the rail for about four seconds. I counted them. There is a clock in that hall.
Then she went on up at exactly the same speed and did not look back.
She did not ask me what I meant.
I have thought for years about which of those two facts is the fact, and I still do not know.
She had not spoken to me since the fourth of October and she never did again.
Roz came across with the tray and put it down and said four words without moving her mouth much.
“You want to be careful.”
Constance was arranging flowers on the hall table and did not appear to have heard anything at all.
Victor Blackwood came through at twenty-six minutes past nine with his phone in his hand.
I got him in the passage between the estate office and the gun room, where I had ambushed him five weeks earlier.
I did it again, deliberately, for the same reason, and I have never been ashamed of it.
“Four minutes.”
He stopped and put the phone in his pocket, which was more than I expected.
I did it exactly as I had been told. No corridor, no camera, no word for what I thought.
There is a humidifier in your son’s room. It has been running eleven hours a night since before March.
I would like a sample of the water out of it. Five milliliters, into a sealed pot, this morning.
Dr. Moreno is faxing a written request to this house. Two people sign. It takes four minutes.
He asked two questions and both were good, and I want that in the record because I have been hard on him elsewhere.
“Is that machine on any list of things the doctor has already looked at?”
“No. Nobody has ever looked at it. It is a humidifier.”
“And if it’s nothing?”
“Then it is nothing, and it is one line in his report, and I will never mention it again.”
He looked at the wall for about six seconds.
“All right,” he said.
I want that written down on its own line, because he said it, and because it was the only time.
“All right. I’ll speak to Ellis at ten and we’ll do it properly. Two witnesses and a form, and the doctor’s request in writing.”
“It has to be this morning.”
“It will be this morning. It’s twenty to ten.”
“Mr. Blackwood, please. Now. It takes four minutes and a jug.”
Then he said the sentence, and he was not being cruel, and I have never been able to say he was wrong.
“Lily. I have signed everything you have ever put in front of me. I signed the consent on the sixteenth.”
“I am not going to be hurried into doing the one thing you have asked me for badly.”
He looked at his watch.
“Ten o’clock,” he said, and went through into the estate office, and shut the door like a man going to do something.
The white van had come through the gate at nine twenty-two.
It had been on the gravel the whole time I was in that passage, eleven meters away, behind a wall.