At first reading, her interview revealed nothing except perhaps a sense of her numbness at the time. She had obviously been mumbling and incoherent—more than once she was asked to speak up or repeat what she had just said. There were several “ums” and sentences that trailed away.
So far, Tabitha hadn’t written a single note. But then, rereading the transcript more slowly, she came to a question that didn’t make sense to her. “Why were you anxious to prevent Mr. Kane from going into the backyard?” (The solicitor had told her to say “no comment.”)
She rubbed her face with both hands, trying to clear her thoughts, then leafed through the sheets of paper until she found Andy’s statement, which she skimmed through until she came across the sentence: “Tabitha called out to me when I was opening the back door. She told me not to go out there. She seemed anxious.”
Tabitha laid down the paper. Her heart was thumping with an irregular beat. It was like a heavy object inside her chest, slamming from side to side. She had no memory of saying that to Andy, none at all. She closed her eyes and forced herself back to that dark afternoon. She remembered him coming to the house, but vaguely, as if the details had been erased and all that was left were dark, blurry outlines. She had been lying on the sofa, half awake, listening to the sound of sleety rain falling and trying to push away the thoughts that kept seething into her mind. He had knocked and she had at first ignored him, but finally struggled to her feet when he knocked more insistently. He had brought the weather into the house with him; his long dark hair was plastered to his skull, his face was streaked with rain and his heavy jacket sodden. She remembered him stamping his boots on the doormat.
She thought that he had asked her if she was all right, and then he had talked about the work they were going to do tomorrow. But she couldn’t recall what he had actually said; everything had felt an enormous effort that day. She had sat back down on the sofa, and he had opened the back door that led to the yard and the outhouse and the wind had sliced through the room like a knife. Had she tried to stop him from going out there? Her mind was blank; it made no sense. But why would he invent such a thing? She turned to the back of her notebook, wrote “Tasks” in her neat cursive script, underlined it, then wrote underneath: “Ask Andy to visit.” Her hand was beginning to cramp with the cold.
She read through the vicar’s statement in which she mentioned seeing Tabitha at two-thirty in the afternoon. Apparently Mel was coming out of the shop where she’d just bought a newspaper and she had talked to Tabitha about the tens of thousands of passengers stranded at Gatwick Airport because of a reported drone. According to her, Tabitha had been in a distressed and very agitated state. Tabitha wrote down the time.
There was a brief statement from Rob, the farmer up the road who was always walking around the village, sometimes with his whippet dog, and a sullen expression on his broad, fleshy face. He said he had been in front of Tabitha when she had gone to buy milk in the morning and apparently she had turned to him and said that Stuart was a bastard. She turned to the back of her book and wrote: “Rob Coombe?” Then she wrote “Bastard?” She didn’t think that was a word she used much.
None of this felt right to her. Not Andy’s account, nor Mel’s, nor Rob’s, nor Pauline Leavitt’s from yesterday. She was reading about a stranger who had her name and her face, but who she didn’t recognize.
She came to Laura Rees’s statement. For all sorts of reasons, Tabitha had avoided thinking about her, but now she made herself. She realized with a jolt of shame that she had never paid any attention to Laura or thought of her outside of her marriage to Stuart. She had been the wife in the background of his active, busy life, not a woman with her own internal life and her own story. She was a woman who did not seem to want to be noticed; perhaps made a determined effort not to be. She was of indeterminate middle age, wore sensible, rather shapeless clothes in dark colors, had her hair cut into a neat helmet, was invariably polite but wore an inscrutable expression on her face. She kept herself to herself, as they put it in the village. Shona had told Tabitha that Terry had said that Laura had been a bit wild before she married Stuart, but Tabitha had no idea if that was true. It was the kind of thing Terry came out with to liven up the day. She would lean happily across the counter, lower her voice, and offer up tidbits of gossip. She had recently told Andy, who had told Tabitha, that Mel the vicar had taken a shine to Dr. Mallon. Tabitha wondered what Terry said about her.
She read Laura’s statement carefully. Nothing leaped out from it. She jotted down times that were mentioned: she had last seen her husband at 9:30 A.M., when she had driven out of the village in order to go to a house viewing, and she had returned about half past three in the afternoon—leaving the estate agent’s earlier than usual because their son Luke was expected home for Christmas that day. That was the gist of it.
Owen Mallon, the GP with a practice in town, said he had seen Tabitha in the morning when he was out for his run. It was his morning off and he always went for a long run then. It seemed to Tabitha that she
