At the sound of the entry pad clicking at the door behind her, Tabby abandoned the cutting and closed the folder. She replaced it on the table and put the coins back in the bowl. The chime of metal hitting ceramic rang out as she turned in greeting.
‘All right, Emmie?’
Emmie’s eyes moved from the folder to Tabby, who lowered her face to conceal her embarrassment, pretending to leaf through a tourist brochure about boat trips.
‘I thought you didn’t finish till six?’ Tabby said.
‘No, five,’ Emmie said.
Tabby was certain she’d said six. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea. You look tired.’
She felt her face burn with shame. Had she learned nothing from Emmie’s forgiveness that day in May when she’d been discovered uninvited and asleep in the back bedroom? What kind of a person had she allowed herself to become? Had she really just thought that self-indulgent nonsense about being an all-seeing spirit? What she was doing was cowardly and wrong and if she couldn’t stop snooping of her own accord then she needed professional help. She was becoming as self-absorbed as the terrible woman described in the article she’d just read.
She managed to compose herself while the kettle boiled, aware that Emmie was straightening the few bits and pieces on the table, including the folder. It was not like her to straighten, Tabby thought, especially not on the same day that Tabby had cleaned the house. As they drank their tea at the table, the folder placed disconcertingly, accusingly, between their mugs, she imagined herself saying bluntly, ‘Who is this Sylvie Woodhall?’ or merely, ‘What’s in the folder, Emmie?’, but even inside her head her tone sounded false and devious, her prurience plain to see. Instead, she avoided acknowledging it at all, led conversation in the direction of the beach house in La Couarde from which Emmie had come. The out-going holidaymakers had had small children and there’d been damage to the door of a kitchen cupboard and the shower curtain had been torn from its rail. It had taken her an age to vacuum up all the sand in the grouting of the floor tiles and they’d obviously taken the bath towels to the beach: they were stained with seaweed and God knew what else.
‘So what have you been doing this afternoon?’ Emmie asked.
‘Oh, not much. I read a bit, gave this place a once-over. I was thinking I might go for a swim now if the tide’s in.’
‘I didn’t notice.’ Emmie did not swim or walk or window-shop, she did not even like to go to the supermarket, happy to accept Tabby’s offer to run errands on her behalf. She did not like to do anything that brought her into contact with other people, particularly now high season was in its swing. Tabby wondered sometimes if she had a fear of crowds.
As she chattered on, Tabby became aware of a distracted air about her friend, the sense that Emmie was unusually excited. Several times she glanced down at the folder and then up towards Tabby, almost as if daring her to ask about it, inviting her to.
Should she?
The tension was excruciating, exactly the conditions that caused Tabby’s imagination to make its wilder leaps and bounds. It struck her that the circumstances this evening were strikingly similar to the previous time: the folder in the centre of the table, other items cleared out of sight as if the stage had been set, Emmie off the premises or safely upstairs. It could not be mere coincidence, could it, that on both occasions Emmie had reappeared at exactly the moment Tabby was sneaking a look? And now she came to think of it, Emmie had not minded her seeing the photograph, had she? She’d enjoyed looking at it with her.
Had she, then, either consciously or subconsciously,
wanted
Tabby to open the folder? Had she told her the wrong time in order to discover her looking and engineer a conversation about its contents?
But why on earth would she need to do that?
The answer was she wouldn’t, of course. There was no reason whatsoever for her to lay traps like that or to approach subjects in such an oblique way. She could simply introduce it directly into the conversation. I’ll wait for her to say something, Tabby thought. Until then I’ll mind my own business.
But, historically, this was not a conviction to last very long. She knew already she would go to bed that night longing to know who Sylvie Woodhall was, who she had been in Emmie’s life.
Emily
In the end, the period between the accident and the inquest was six and a half months: exceptionally concise, I was told, and yet an agonising stretch to a woman measuring the time since she’d last seen the man she loved not in months or days, but in hours, in minutes. In breaths drawn.
The date was to be the week beginning the 6th of February. Helpful Gwen said that while most road traffic collision inquiries could be completed in a single day, the coroner was to consider all three deaths in the same hearing and therefore this one might run into several days, even a full week. I would only need to be there for the Wednesday-afternoon session in which I was to be questioned, though of course it was a public hearing and I was welcome to attend every session if I chose. She was fairly confident that proceedings would not run ahead of schedule, though they might possibly run behind. She asked me if I had any questions.
I had just one, the only one that mattered to me: ‘Will Arthur Woodhall be there?’
She said yes, he was a witness himself and she understood that he would be attending in person.
‘Throughout the whole thing or just when he’s being questioned?’
‘I would imagine he would want to come for the full hearing. This is an opportunity for family to ask their questions.’
‘You mean he’s allowed to ask the police questions of his own?’
‘Yes, and also the pathologist and any of the witnesses.’
Any of the witnesses? That included me. I felt nauseous.
‘This is all in the guide I sent you,’ Gwen said. Her resources of patience were limitless. She was the only person during this period to neither ignore nor become agitated by my wilder emotions, treating them as commonplace. ‘He may not need to ask anything, of course. He may have asked for copies of witness statements in advance.’
‘Can you do that? Can I get copies as well?’
‘No, I’m afraid they’re only for family members. And the coroner may not always agree to give them.’
She must have heard the moan of despair that escaped from me then, because she said, very firmly, ‘Remember, they can’t accuse you of anything, Emily. The reason the inquest is being held in the first place is because the case is not going to trial; no criminal charges have been brought against anyone. The idea is not to apportion blame to witnesses.’ She’d said this several times now, which only alerted me to the fact that blame
would
be apportioned; not formally, not by the coroner, but in the room that day.
I didn’t tell Charlotte the real reason for my day off. Though my attendance record had improved lately, my misery for the most part better-concealed, the warning I’d received after that disastrous phone call to Arthur’s clinic and my unauthorised absence that day had not been forgotten by either of us. Pre-empting objection, I requested unpaid leave rather than holiday and told her the date could not be negotiated.
The solemnity in my voice must have caught her ear because she asked, a little irritably, ‘Doing anything interesting?’
‘No, just personal stuff.’
A frown crossed her face before clearing in remorse. ‘Oh, Emily, your father – I keep forgetting! Is there any improvement?’
‘A little. He beat the pneumonia, which is good news, though he’s still in the hospital. But this is nothing to do with that.’ Certain that lying on my part had ill-willed the onset of pneumonia in the first place, I no longer used Dad to excuse the effects of my Arthur-related desolation. ‘I hope you don’t mind but I’m not allowed to talk about it.’
I regretted this comment because she looked immediately horrified. ‘Oh God, it’s not jury service, is it? There’s no way I can pay you
and
a replacement for weeks on end! Do everything you can not to be selected, OK? Pretend you’re psychologically unstable or something.’
Pretend?
I sighed. ‘Don’t worry, it’s not jury service.’
‘Well, it’s obviously
something
awful, because you look as if you’re about to burst into tears.’ She looked closely at me then, and her compassion was genuine, I judged. She probably now suspected a medical matter of my own, an abortion or something else better kept to oneself. Oddly, I found her sympathy harder than the previous intolerance; it gave me a bleak feeling to realise just how estranged we’d become (‘I keep forgetting’ – forgetting that my father was
dying
!). It had once mattered to me to impress her, to win her approval and friendship – I remembered how we’d laughed together about Matt and his friends, discussed their arrested emotional development – and yet I’d isolated myself without a second thought, my only concern to protecting my relationship with Arthur. In altered friendships like this with her, I was the one at fault; I had recast her as someone to deceive, not to confide in. I had only myself to blame.
But it was too late now. I could not bring myself to tell her about the affair, the inquest, my guilty connection to the loss of three lives. It had grown too big to explain and therefore had to remain hidden for ever.
God, I had no idea.
The building that housed the coroner’s court was unprepossessing in a bland, institutional, late-twentieth-century way, the atmosphere in the lobby neutral and unpromising. Though I was not required until the 1 p.m. session, thanks to a road being blocked near the train station I arrived twenty minutes late to find the front desk unmanned. I did not have the first idea where to go for the hearing or whether I’d be admitted this late, whether I’d see Arthur for the first time in over half a year or, once again, be barred categorically from his presence. Whatever my fate, I prayed I would not create a scene.
A notice behind glass detailed the week’s proceedings:
THE
FULL
INQUEST
TOUCHING
THE
DEATHS
OF
SYLVIE
MARTHA
WOODHALL
,
ALEXANDER
ARTHUR
WOODHALL
AND
HUGO
BENEDICT
WOODHALL
. Below this was a list of witnesses, which ran to three pages and included pathologists, police officers at the scene, air ambulance staff and paramedics, three civilians listed as
Witnessed incident
, two police investigators. On the third page, amongst a group labelled
Background information
, there were three names I recognised all too well:
Nina Meeks
Emily Marr
Arthur Woodhall
Nervous emotion rose in my throat and I swallowed, making a gulping animal sound.
‘Can I help you there?’
I spun on my heels to find a stout, smiling woman with a clipboard. Suddenly too overwrought to ask if she were my ally Gwen (which did not bode well for my performance in the witness box), I managed to stammer, ‘Yes, I’m sorry I’m late, I’m a witness in the inquest of Sylvie Woodhall.’ I couldn’t bring myself to say the boys’ names too. I couldn’t admit to myself I had made any contribution to their ends.
‘I thought everyone had already gone back in.’ As she located my name on her list, I wavered between the hope that she’d say it was too late, I might as well go home again, and the exhilaration set in motion by her use of the word ‘everyone’, because it surely included Arthur. He was here, in this building, and I was finally going to be granted entry to the same room as him.
‘Not to worry, there are still a few to go before you. I’m just taking in a message for the coroner, actually, so you can slip in with me if you like?’
‘OK.’
While not having expected the Old Bailey, I was surprised that the room where the inquest was taking place was neither large nor imposing. Entering, I was met with the sight of rows and rows of backs, with only the coroner himself facing us. He was a slight, balding man of about fifty-five, seated on a raised platform, his head bent over the papers on the broad desk in front of him. Dominating the panelling behind him was the royal coat of arms. Directly in front of his desk were two rows of tables, the kind you’d see in a school or church hall, about eight places on each row, every seat taken, some by uniformed officers. I quickly identified the backs of Nina and Arthur among them, she at the front left, he on the second row to the right. Both wore dark jackets. At first I registered no reaction in myself at setting eyes on my former lover, but continued instead to piece together the elements of the room. To the lower left of the coroner sat a young woman who I took to be a clerk or stenographer, and directly in front of her was the witness box, where a male police officer now stood, a ring-bound folder open on the lectern in front of him. To the right of the tables, not far from Arthur, were seated two impassive young men with notebooks on their laps: local press, I presumed.
Behind the desks the rest of the room was filled with rows of pew-like oak seats. These were only half filled and I slipped silently into the emptiest, tucking my bag at my feet. Though a few heads had turned at the entry of the officer, who was discreetly passing a note up to the coroner, no one had noticed my arrival, and the first thing I did was take a tissue from my bag and wipe off my lipstick – the gaiety of the colour had been a bad misjudgement. Then I found a hair tie and knotted my hair into a bun at the nape of my neck. At least I was in dark clothes, I’d got that right.
I noticed in the row in front of mine a woman in her seventies: Sylvie’s mother, perhaps, or Arthur’s, a bereft grandparent. She was crying silently, her hand being squeezed by a companion of similar age. I wished I had someone, too, remembered Gwen’s offer of a support officer and wondered why I had not accepted it.