The List

Esther asked DC Rashid at half past nine whether she could walk to the end of the garden, and DC Rashid, who was pleasant and very young-looking for thirty-something and had brought her a newspaper without being asked, said, “Best ask Aled.”

So she went back into the kitchen and did not ask Aled. She sat down at the table with her notebook instead and opened it at a clean page.

She used the same notebooks she had used for eleven years: black, stitched, feint-ruled, a hundred and ninety-two pages, bought three at a time from a stationer in Bath who had started keeping them for her. She had filled forty-one. The forty-second had been in her coat when she got into the car on Monday night, and it was nearly empty, and it had never had a list like this in it.

She wrote it the way she would have written a schedule, because that was the only way she knew how to make a thing stop being a feeling.

Where I sleep.

Which windows I may stand at.

Whether I go out.

When, where to, and with whom.

Who I ring.

Who rings me, and whether I am told they did.

Whether I see my mother.

Who comes into the house.

Who has the keys.

What I am told about where I am.

Whether I may walk to the end of the garden.

She counted. Eleven items. She looked at the column where, in a schedule, the name of the responsible party would go, and she wrote the same two initials eleven times, and underlined the total, and felt worse than she had expected to, and better.

· · ·Scene break

He came in at ten to ten from his round of the outside. She heard the back door, then the handle twice. He took his coat off, which he did not always do, and saw the notebook, and saw her face, and did not go to the counter.

“Would you read something?” she said.

“If it’s not your evidence.”

“It isn’t. It’s you.”

She turned the notebook round and pushed it across the table, and he looked at it without picking it up, standing, his hands at his sides. She watched him read it. He read the way she did, she thought, all of it, and then the top again. When he got to the column of initials his face did not change at all, which was how she knew it had landed.

“Do you know what that makes you?” she said.

“Yes.”

He said it at once. She had been ready for him to argue, to tell her it was for her own good, to say the word protection the way her old senior partner used to say prudence, as if the word settled it. She had spent the last hour building her case against that. He didn’t give her the chance to use it.

“In any other kitchen,” he said, “a man who decided all that for a woman is somebody she’d want to be careful of. The only thing that makes it different here is the reason. And you only have my word for the reason.”

She had not expected him to say it better than she would have. It annoyed her, and she found she was not only annoyed.

“Protection’s voluntary,” she said.

“It is.”

“It’s voluntary in the way that getting off a boat is voluntary.” She put her finger on the list. “I can leave. You’d let me. And then I’d be standing on a pavement at the top of a hill with a photograph of myself in lane three. So every one of these is yours, and I can’t take any of them back without taking all of them, and I’m not going to do that. I’m not stupid.”

“No.”

“So I want terms.”

He looked at the list for a while longer. Then he did something she had not seen him do in two days: he came to the table, and put his hand flat on the page.

He did not sit. He stood and leaned there, one hand on the list, as if he were keeping it from blowing away.

“Go on,” he said.

· · ·Scene break

Terms had been her idea, but when it came to it she found she had only one.

“Every decision comes with its reason,” she said. “You already do it. I’ve noticed. I want it to stop being a habit of yours and be a right of mine. If you decide something about me, you tell me why, and if you can’t tell me why, you tell me that you can’t.”

“Yes.”

“That’s it? Yes?”

“It’s a good term.” His hand did not move. “Here’s one for you, if you’ll have it. Anything I decide that isn’t about your safety, you can refuse. Just say no. You don’t owe me the reason.”

“And who decides what’s about safety?”

“I do.” He held her eyes on that; he did not dress it up. “That’s the part I can’t give you. But if you tell me something isn’t, I’ll tell you why I think it is, and if I can’t, it isn’t.”

She considered that. It was, she thought, the first contract she had ever been offered where the other party had written in his own weakness.

“The garden,” she said. “The end of it. Imran told me to ask you.”

“To the hedge, any time you like. Not the gate. The gate’s where the lane can see you.”

“That’s a reason.”

“It is.”

“Then I’ll keep off the gate.” She pulled a breath through her teeth. “Thursday. I’d like to go out. Anywhere. Somewhere with a horizon.”

He thought. She watched him do it: the eyes going to the window, the lane, some map in his head she was not allowed to see.

“There’s a reservoir half an hour off,” he said. “Midday, a weekday, in February, there’ll be nobody on it but anglers and dogs. Two cars. An hour. I’ll say where we’re going when we’re in the car and not before.”

“Why not before?”

“Because then it’s in this room, and this room’s got a phone in it and a woman who remembers everything.”

She laughed. She had not meant to. He looked, briefly, as though it had pleased him and he had decided not to let that be seen either.

Then he turned the notebook over.

The back of the page was blank. He took a pen from his shirt pocket, a cheap black biro with the end chewed flat, which surprised her; she would not have put him down as a man who chewed anything. He wrote a number on it. Eleven digits, in upright figures that she could have read across a room.

“That’s Inspector Adair,” he said. “Her direct line, not the unit. She answers it herself.”

“Why are you giving me that?”

“Because if I ever make you feel you can’t say no to me,” he said, “you ring it. About anything. And you don’t have to tell her why. You don’t have to tell me you’ve done it. I’ll be moved, and somebody else will come, and nobody will ask you a single question you don’t want to answer.” He put the pen back in his pocket and his hand back on the paper. “That’s the other term. It’s the one I’d want, if I were you.”

Esther looked at the number. She read it, and had it, and could have written it out again with her eyes shut. That was not the point. The point was the paper.

She put her hand on the list, next to his. Not touching. The width of two fingers between them, on a page with eleven items and his initials on one side and his inspector’s number on the other.

“Agreed,” she said.

“Agreed.”

He took his hand away first. She had known he would. She left hers there a moment longer, and then tore the page out along the stitching without loosening the others, and folded it in four and put it in the back of the notebook, and put the notebook in her pocket.

“Thank you, Esther,” he said.

She noticed it. She did not say so.

· · ·Scene break

It rained all afternoon, the soft Somerset rain that did not so much fall as arrive, and they went on with the day as if they had not just rewritten it.

At one o’clock Imran made sandwiches, cheese and pickle, a stack of them on a board, and put the board on the table and took three into the annex for himself, and Esther sat down with hers and Aled took one and ate it standing at the counter.

She watched him do it.

She had been watching, she realised, since Monday. She went back over it, the way she would go back over a column of cash rent to check that every month was there. The cottage kitchen on Monday night: standing, coat on. Tuesday, all day: the tea, drunk standing; lunch at the counter; the evening, in the doorway while Jas read the log. This morning, the list: he had come to the table, and leaned on it, and not sat.

Two and a half days. Four chairs. Not once.

In a set of books she would have called that an anomaly and gone looking for the reason, because nobody did anything that consistently without one. It was not that there was no chair. It was that there were three, and he did not choose any of them.

She did not ask. She was not sure yet that she was allowed to, under their terms or anybody’s. She ate her sandwich and he ate his, a room’s width apart, and she kept the question, the way she kept the receipts.

· · ·Scene break

At about five he asked her, in the course of something else, whether she regretted it.

They had been talking about Bath. About the practice she worked for now, six people above an estate agent, insolvency and receiverships, the dull, necessary end of the work, where you went into a company after the money had gone and wrote down where it had been. She liked it more than she had expected. She said so. And he said, not looking at her, looking at the rain, “Do you regret it? Going to the police yourself?”

It was not a question about the evidence. He had put it round the edge of the evidence; she could hear him doing it, the way you would steer a car round a pothole you knew was there.

“Everybody asks me that,” she said. “The firm asked me that.”

She had not meant to tell him about the firm, and then she did, because it was hers and not the case’s. The senior partner, Graham Garside, in his office with the good chairs, three days after she had brought him the flats. How he had said the client’s affairs were not for them to characterise. How he had said, when she pushed, We don’t take a view, Esther. We give an opinion. How six weeks later there had been a letter with the words mutual agreement in it, and a sum of money, and she had kept the letter and not the money.

“So no,” she said. “I don’t regret it. I regret that it had to be me. There’s a difference.”

“There is.”

“Because I didn’t want to be the one. I wanted to be the one who was right about it. That’s not the same.” She was talking faster now; she could hear it. “And I could have been. I could have written it up and qualified the opinion and resigned from the engagement and gone home, and it would still have been true, and nobody would ever have had to hear it from me. Except that I walked those flats. Flat fourteen and four more, and every one of them empty, and afterwards, at the site meeting, he looked across the table at me and he said, Some money doesn’t—”

The kitchen door closed.

She had not seen him move. He had been at the counter, by the kettle, and now he was not; there was the door, pulled to, and the sound of his feet in the hall, not hurrying, going as far as the front room, and stopping.

She sat with the rest of it in her mouth.

Like to be counted, Miss Mayhew. Seven words in all, and her name. She had written it down at twenty to midnight in the thirty-first of the black notebooks, sitting on the edge of her bath because it was the only room in the flat with a lock. She had said it to Kofi, to the analysts, to a solicitor from the Crown who had asked her to say it three times, slowly, so that he could hear where she put the weight. She had said it to herself in the pool, one word to a length, on the mornings she couldn’t stop.

She had never once wanted to say it to someone for the sake of being heard saying it. And she had wanted to say it to him. That was what she had been doing, she understood now; that was why her voice had gone fast. She had wanted to hand it to the one person in this whole business who was not going to write it down, and see his face while she did it.

He came back after a few minutes. He knocked on the frame of the open door, which he did not need to do.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You told me you would.”

“I did.”

“That was before I knew what it would feel like.” She turned the mug on the table until the handle was at three o’clock. “It’s all right. You were right. You were quick.”

“I was out before the fourth word,” he said. “I didn’t hear it.”

“I know. I watched you go.”

He stood in the doorway, not in the room and not out of it. Behind him, the hall; behind her, the window over the garden, going dark, with the hedge she was allowed to walk to and the gate she was not.

“Thursday,” he said. “The reservoir. Still want it?”

“Yes.”

“Midday, then.”

He went to do the round of the outside. She heard the back door, the handle twice, and the rain.

She took the notebook out and unfolded the page and turned it to the back, to the number in his upright hand, and looked at it for a long time. Then she turned it face down on the table, so that the list was uppermost, and thought: there are eleven things he decides for me, and he has given me a way to take every one of them away from him. And the one thing I want to give him is the one thing he is not allowed to take.