House of Correction

scrawled over by the fractures in the glass. The bus driver emerged and walked past the camera into the shop. Tabitha smiled slightly, despite everything. She remembered it now, even if it was in fragments. As she’d queued for the milk, the children had been chattering, excited. It was the last day of term—that was it. Rob Coombe had bought a packet of cigarettes. Tabitha remembered that it was different from the old days. The cigarettes weren’t just stacked behind the counter. Terry, the woman behind the counter, had to open a kind of cabinet to get them. And then there was something else? What was it? Tabitha tried to remember but it was like trying to grasp an image that always slipped away at the last second.

She wanted to follow herself into the shop. So she ejected the disc from the player and replaced it with the 8–9 A.M. disc from the interior pile. She pressed play. The interior camera, which she had never noticed before, was apparently placed at the back of the shop, almost at ceiling height, and looked toward the door. She fast-forwarded, seeing unidentified figures jerking in and out of the shop, until she reached just before eleven minutes past eight. She could see the back of Terry’s head and she could see Rob Coombe. The two girls were standing to one side. Like an actor making her entrance at the right time, Tabitha entered the shop and stood behind Rob, almost hidden by him, though it was clear that she was wearing pajama trousers under her coat. Then the bus driver came in and joined the little queue. But Tabitha’s attention was on the farmer. He looked like he was in a bad mood and was gesticulating angrily. That was what Tabitha had been trying to remember: what had it been about?

Now Rob Coombe turned so that only the back of his head showed. Tabitha briefly saw her own face, wretched with exhaustion, and behind her the driver. She watched to see if she spoke, said the words that were part of the evidence against her—but then Rob stood in front of her and she and the driver disappeared from view.

Tabitha tried to put herself back there, in her shapeless clothes and pajama bottoms, heavy with wretchedness, the sleety rain falling outside. She imagined herself saying, “Stuart Rees is such a bastard” was that how it was? Or: “That Stuart, he’s a right bastard.” Or even, “I could tell you a thing or two about Stuart Rees; what a bastard . . .” It didn’t feel right, but then nothing felt right. Or was it the farmer turning to her, his face suffused with anger, and saying, “That bastard Stuart Rees.” She held all the versions in her mind for a moment and then let them go.

Rob Coombe left with a newspaper and cigarettes; Tabitha noted the time. The two girls left, presumably to get on the bus. She herself bought milk; she saw her lips moving, her hand proffering coins, her bundled-up figure leaving; she wrote down the exact time: 08:15:09. The bus driver also bought cigarettes and some kind of chocolate bar, then he too exited. The camera looked once more at nothing.

Tabitha went back to the exterior disc, picking up at the point where she had left off. She watched the bus pull up, the driver go into the shop, then Rob Coombe leave and get in his car. She watched herself come out of the shop, clutching her small carton of milk and her head down against the hard wind. She watched herself disappear behind the bus. She watched the driver come out. She waited for about thirty seconds. Then she watched the bus leave, sliding out of view, leaving the bus stop deserted. And now the camera gazed serenely at nothing again and the branches quivered in the wind that was blowing from the sea.

She watched as a few flakes of snow fell before turning once more to sleety rain.

She watched as nothing happened, just the little counter at the top of the screen ticking past the seconds and the minutes. She inserted the fourth disk, 9–10 A.M. She thought of fast-forwarding until there was something to look at, but it was oddly hypnotic to be staring at the screen as if she were back there, back in the day that had undone her life. So she just gazed at the tarmac and the bus stop and the cliff and the leafless birch. A bird in its branches and then gone. A large cat strolling past.

At 09:29:43 a small car drove by, coming from Stuart and Tabitha’s end of Okeham. That would be Laura Rees. She jotted down the time.

At 09:39:27 a white van pulled up near to the bus stop and a man got out, thickset and with a hat pulled low over his forehead, a scarf wrapped around the lower part of his face. He went into the shop and came out carrying a paper and a bag of crisps. For a moment, Tabitha couldn’t think who he was, then she remembered: the deliveryman who had been the last person to see Stuart alive. Or at least, she corrected herself, the last person who had seen Stuart alive apart from the killer.

He got back in his van and drove off in the direction of Stuart’s house.

Tabitha waited as the little timer counted off the minutes. At 09:55:17 he was back, parking his white van in the same place and walking to the right of the camera. For a moment she was confused, then she remembered the little café to the side of the shop that people told her was crammed with people in the summer, and served scones and ice cream and coffee and walnut cake, but stood largely empty most of the winter. Perhaps he had been going in there. Something snagged in her brain and she tried to hold on to it, but it was gone.

Now she was