The Rota

Mr Pym unlocked Court Three at twenty to five with a key on a lanyard, held the door for her, and said, “Most people are disappointed. They expect it to be bigger.”

It was not bigger. Esther stood inside the door and did what she did in any room she would have to work in: she measured it.

Twelve paces, perhaps fourteen, from the door to the judge’s bench, which was raised and panelled and had a crest over it and a clock beside the crest. The clock said sixteen thirty-eight. Her watch said sixteen forty. On the left, two rows of benches for the jury, six and six, blue upholstery gone shiny at the front edge where twelve people at a time had sat forward. Counsel’s row, facing the bench, with little lecterns and a water jug at each end. The press bench. The public gallery above, empty, the seats tipped up.

And on the right, at the back, behind glass, the dock.

She had known there would be a dock. She had not known it would be so near.

“The witness box,” said Mr Pym, and walked her to it.

He was seventy at least, in a cardigan with leather buttons and a Witness Service badge on a ribbon. He had been doing this for eleven years, he said, since he retired from the building society; before that, forty-one years of other people’s mortgages. He said it with pride and she liked him at once.

The box was a small panelled pen with a step up, a ledge, a microphone on a stalk, a glass and a jug, a card with the words of the oath on it in large type, and a chair she would not be allowed to sit on unless the judge said so. She stepped up into it. It put her a foot higher than the room.

From the box she could see the jury benches side-on. She could see the bench, and the clock. And if she turned her head to the right, not far, she could see into the dock: three chairs behind the glass, and the door at the back of it that led down, and the ledge where a man could put his hands.

“Most people look at the floor,” said Mr Pym. “You’re allowed to look at the jury.”

“And the dock?”

“You’re allowed to look wherever you like, Ms Mayhew. It’s you giving the evidence.”

She looked at the dock. She looked at the chair on the left, which was where she would have put the principal defendant, if she had been arranging the room to be read.

At the back of the court, beside the door, Aled stood with his hands loose in front of him and his back not quite to the wall. He was not looking at her. He was looking at the side door behind the jury benches, and the door behind the bench, and the public gallery stairs, in turn, in the order he had agreed with himself years ago. He had come in last and would leave first, and he had placed himself at the one point in the room from which he could see every way in, and anyone who came into Court Three now would have taken him for a man waiting for his wife to finish in the ladies’.

She knew where he was without looking. She noticed that. She put it away.

· · ·Scene break

“The screen’s still there if you want it,” said Kofi.

He had come in behind them, late, with his tie loose and his coat over his arm and the face of a man whose weekend had not happened. Kofi Asante was forty and looked it on Mondays. He had been beside her for twenty-two months, across a hundred tables, and she had seen him angry once and tired every day.

“I know,” she said.

“A curtain round the box. You’d see the judge and the jury and counsel. You wouldn’t see the dock, and he wouldn’t see you.” He put his coat down on the press bench. “Nobody would think less of it. Half my witnesses have it. It doesn’t cost us anything with the jury, the judge tells them it’s routine.”

“I know, Kofi.”

“I’m asking again because you said no at Christmas and things have changed since Christmas.”

They had. There was a photograph of her in lane three in an evidence bag in a building she was not allowed to name. There had been a car at the bottom of a track three nights running. She was standing in a witness box in an empty court at twenty to five on a Monday because tonight, at midnight, she was going to be moved somewhere else in the dark.

She looked at the dock again. The chair on the left.

“No,” she said. “Thank you. I want to see him when I say it.”

Kofi looked at her a long moment and then nodded, once, the way he nodded at a schedule that reconciled.

“Right,” he said. “I’ll tell the Crown. Again.”

“Tell them I’m sure.”

“I’ll tell them you’re you.”

Mr Pym, who had been looking discreetly at the ceiling, showed her where she would come in, from the witness suite along the corridor, and where the usher would stand, and how the oath would go; and she did not listen as well as she should have, because she was standing in the box counting the steps between it and the dock. Nine. Nine of hers, and a pane of glass.

On the way out she passed Aled at the door. He opened it for her. He had heard every word of it, and none of it was evidence, and he looked at her as she went past as though she had done something difficult well.

· · ·Scene break

They moved her at midnight.

She had packed in forty minutes, the holdall and a bag for life with the notebooks and her statement in it, and the envelope from the windowsill with four receipts in it now: the café, the reservoir car park, and two from the village shop that Imran had brought back with the change. She had pushed the kitchen chairs in. She had not gone to the front window.

Two cars. Jas driving the first, Aled beside her, Esther in the back with the holdall; Imran behind. No lights for the length of the track. Then lanes, then a main road, then a lay-by with a shut burger van and a lorry asleep at the far end, where a third car was waiting with its engine running and a man in it she never saw the face of, who got out as they got in and drove Jas’s car away after Imran’s. The change took under a minute. The holdall went from one boot to another. Aled stood between her and the road while she walked the six yards between cars, and did not touch her, and said “Mind the kerb” at the kerb.

Then more dark, and a motorway, and a long time of it. She did not count the turns. She sat and watched the side of his face in the dashboard light and thought about the thing she had filed on Sunday afternoon, and took it out, and looked at it again.

· · ·Scene break

The flat was over a bakery that had shut.

It was on the main street of a market town, a street of stone fronts and shut shops and one lit window over a chemist’s. The bakery had a painted sign that said the name of the people who had owned it and the year they had started, and the glass of the shop was whitewashed on the inside. They went in through the yard at the back and up an outside stair.

Inside it smelled of flour. Not fresh; old flour, gone into the floorboards and the walls, faint and sweet, as if the building remembered what it had been for. The officers’ room was at the front, over the street, with the curtains drawn and a monitor already on a desk. Her room was at the back, over the yard. Between them a narrow kitchen with a strip light, a small table against the wall, two chairs, a kettle, and a window onto the yard with a blind.

Jas went into the front room with the radio and the phone and pulled the door half to, and Esther heard her say “Arrived,” and a time, and a number.

It was five to one.

“I’m staying tonight,” Aled said. “I’m on at eight and it’s not worth the drive. I’ll be on the sofa in there with Jas’s feet on the desk.” He looked at the kitchen. “You should sleep.”

“I will. I’m going to make tea first.”

“All right.”

“Will you have one?”

He hesitated. She watched him start to say however’s easiest and not say it.

“Please.”

She made it. Milk after. No sugar. Bag out quick. She put it on the counter by his hand, handle towards him, and he looked at it, and then at her, and she saw him understand that she had kept it, the one preference he had ever given her, the way she kept everything.

She sat at the table with hers. He stood at the counter with his.

Two chairs. He did not take the other one.

· · ·Scene break

“Can I show you something?” she said. “It’s not evidence.”

“Go on.”

“It’s a thing I noticed. I notice things. You’ll have noticed.”

“I have.”

“When I notice a thing that doesn’t fit, I can’t leave it. It’s not a virtue. It’s like a stone in a shoe.” She put both hands flat on the table, one each side of her mug. “So I’m going to lay it out the way I’d lay out a set of accounts, and you can tell me where I’ve gone wrong.”

He did not say anything. He did not move from the counter. But he put his mug down.

“On Monday afternoon,” she said, “there was a sheet on Inspector Adair’s desk. The duty rota for this, I think. It was upside down and I wasn’t meant to be reading it, and I read it, because it had numbers on it. Jas: nights on the eighth, ninth and tenth. You: days on those, and then nights. The eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth. Thursday to Sunday.”

She could hear Jas in the front room, on the phone still, laughing at something, low.

“You haven’t done a night,” she said. “Not one. Jas has done seven in a row, and tonight’s the eighth. She came up the track on Thursday at quarter to eight with her exam notes on the seat. She has a son of three; she told me at ten to four on Wednesday morning, when she came across to see why the kitchen light was on, and she showed me a picture of him in a yellow hat. She’s doing nights all week with a three-year-old and an exam in April.” Esther turned her mug a quarter turn. “That’s the first thing.”

“Go on,” he said quietly.

“The second thing is you. You give a reason for everything. You gave me a reason for the gate. You gave me a reason for my mother. You gave me a reason for parking facing out. On Wednesday you agreed that every decision about me would come with its reason, and I wrote it down, and you haven’t broken it once, and I’ve been checking.” She took a breath. “Who sits across the yard from me at night is a decision about me. And that’s the one you haven’t given a reason for.”

The strip light hummed. Down in the yard something dripped from a gutter onto something metal.

“When I found the flats,” she said, “it wasn’t the cash that did it. People pay rent in cash. It was that it was round, and regular, and it never missed. A real tenant misses. A real tenant is late in August because of a holiday and pays double in September. When a thing is perfect and it shouldn’t be, there’s always a reason, and the reason is always the thing somebody doesn’t want to say.” She stopped. “I asked to see flat fourteen. That’s all I’m doing. I’m asking to see it.”

“Esther.”

“You don’t have to answer. That’s in the terms as well. You can tell me you can’t tell me.”

He looked at her for what felt like a long time. She had watched him give questions the time they needed since the pavement in Totterdown, and she had never seen him take this long. His face did not change. His hands did. They went still on the counter, the way they had gone still on the list.

She knew, she thought, what she wanted him to say. She had known since Sunday afternoon, when he had told her all three and stood at the counter and let her look at him. She had not let herself put it in words, because a thing in words was a thing you had to account for. She had only filed it, the way she filed everything, and told herself it was a stone in a shoe.

He did not lie to principals. She knew that about him as surely as she knew his tea.

“Because I’d like to be on them,” he said.

She did not move. She did not trust anything she might do.

He did not give her time to do it. He went on at once, in the same level voice, the voice he had used on the pavement to tell her about the eleven minutes; as if the most important thing now was that she should have all of it and have it straight.

“That’s not a reason to be on them. It’s the reason not to be. An officer who wants to be on the night shift because of who’s asleep in the house has stopped being an officer, whatever he does next. I knew it on Thursday. I gave the nights to Jas so that it wouldn’t touch you. That was right, as far as it went. It didn’t go far enough.” He looked at the mug on the counter and not at her. “My judgement about you isn’t clean. That’s my own account of it and nobody else’s. And when that’s true, there’s a rule. I report it. I tell my inspector, and she decides what happens to me, and I don’t get to decide it for her.”

“When?” said Esther. It was the only word she could find, and it came out plain.

He looked at her then.

“Seven o’clock,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’d rather you heard it from me first.”