She had a sudden, terrifying, vertiginous idea. She could jot down the exhibit number of this knife. She could peel the label off, hide it, swallow it, whatever. Then she could move the knife across the room and hide it with the evidence of one of the other cases. She would call for it during the case. She could claim that it was crucial evidence for her defense. And it would be missing or it would be found but without the label.
“What kind of a case is this?” she imagined herself saying. “If they’ve done this, then what other mistakes have been made?”
Would that sow enough confusion? Would it be enough to create reasonable doubt? She carefully put the knife back on the shelf and almost smiled to herself. Lucky she was an honest woman.
She looked along the shelf and saw the scraps of her outhouse neatly bagged up: a couple of ceramic tiles, a small tin of paint, a small stick that had been used for stirring paint, an old chisel, a bare tennis ball, a double-plug adaptor, a metal bolt. On the ground were larger objects, also wrapped in plastic sheeting, which gave them a sinister, morbid appearance, corpses made of some rolled-up chicken wire, a Christmas tree base. Slightly surreally, there was some plastic sheeting that was itself wrapped in plastic sheeting. Her old paint-spattered stepladder was leaning against the wall.
She felt suddenly disheartened. It was just rubbish, the stuff of her life, the clutter that everyone has at the back of a shed, in a loft or a spare room or by the side of the house, the stuff they mean to get rid of and never quite get around to.
But now they were evidence. Would some of them be produced in court as evidence against her? Presumably some had blood on them and that’s why they were here. There had been so much blood around.
There were the objects that would be used by the prosecution. Was there anything that would be any use to the defense? A lawyer or a police officer might know. She didn’t have any idea where to begin.
With a feeling of utter pointlessness, she opened a new page of her notebook and began to write a list of everything that was there, along with the exhibit numbers. When she had finished, she noticed a bin bag she had overlooked. She looked into it and saw clothes, the sort you might take to a charity shop, except that these were also wrapped in plastic. She tipped them onto the floor and then saw the dark stains and recognized them with a lurch. These were the clothes and the trainers she had been wearing when the body was found. On top of everything else that had happened, she had been taken to one side by a female officer and made to take them all off. Even her underwear.
She wrote a list of them in her notebook.
The list filled two pages. She looked at it. It all seemed meaningless. She decided she needed to be more thorough. She looked at the knives one by one. Each of them had a maker’s name on it. She wrote them down. Perhaps one of them wasn’t actually hers. She would check. The chisel didn’t have a maker’s name. She looked at the plastic sheeting within the plastic sheeting. It was spattered and smeared with blood. There was a paper label on it saying “Reynolds Brown” and a long serial number. She copied it all down.
She looked at the two tins of paint. Umber. Clay. She didn’t recognize them although presumably she had chosen them. She wrote them down along with the brand names.
Was that it? She stepped back and contemplated them as a whole. The sight made her feel somehow blank and nauseous at the same time. It was like those few hours of her day, which hadn’t mattered to her while she was living through them and now she was trying to retrieve them minute by minute. And there were these scraps from her shed, these bits and pieces on the edge of her life, which had been individually wrapped in plastic and kept in the dark.
She had a painful sense that somewhere among them, there, right in front of her, was something that could be of help, if only she could see what it was.
But she couldn’t.
She turned to Mary Guy.
“I guess we can call another cab now,” she said.
Forty-Five
The letter was very short and written by hand, a spidery and barely legible scrawl with no address and no date.
It’s late and I’m pretty stoned so I probably shouldn’t be writing this and anyway I probably won’t send it, but here goes. You keep asking why I came back at Christmas after so long away. I’ll tell you why. I came back to tell Mum to leave him. I never got why she stayed until I talked to you, but now I see she was his victim just as much as me, or you, or anyone. We were all his fucking victims.
We didn’t kill him. But I wish Mum had left before he died. I wish she had told him she was done with him and wiped the smile off his face and I wish I’d been there to see that.
Something was heavily scratched through here and though Tabitha lifted the letter up to the light she couldn’t make out the words.
It was probably you, anyway. Everyone thinks so. That inspector was certain. But I wanted to say that I don’t blame you if you did kill him and I’m
