Chapter 27
Executor
Clare Voss lived in a narrow gray house at the end of a terrace in Eastgate, three streets from the dry cleaner's where Priya Raman had grown up, and when I knocked on her door at half past nine on Saturday morning, she opened it before my knuckles had left the wood.
She had been waiting. I saw that at once. She stood in the doorway in a gray cardigan and jeans, barefoot, with her hair loose on her shoulders and a dish towel in one hand, and her face, which I had last seen at the rail of a courtroom twisted with grief, was pale and perfectly composed. There were dark rings under her eyes. She looked at me for a long moment without surprise.
"You took your time," said Clare.
"I'm sorry."
"No, you're not. You were frightened. It's all right. So was I." She stepped back. "Come in. Maya's at her father's until Monday. I've made tea."
It was a small, warm, cluttered house, full of the rich soft disorder of a child. A bicycle leaned in the hall. A row of tiny wellington boots stood on a rack. The kitchen was at the back, down three steps, and its walls were covered, from the dado to the ceiling, with paintings: crooked houses, round-headed people, a very large orange sun with a smile, a purple dog. On the refrigerator, under a magnet shaped like a strawberry, hung a drawing of a castle with four turrets and a flag. Someone had written under it, in careful capitals, FOR AUNTIE ELLIE'S CAKE.
I looked at it a little too long.
"She made that in September," said Clare. "Before." She poured tea into two mugs, and set one in front of me, and sat across the kitchen table, with her hands wrapped round her own. "I haven't taken it down. I keep thinking I should. It's the only thing in the house that's still waiting for something."
I sat. Rain had begun again, a soft, steady, vertical rain, and it ran down the kitchen window in long gray lines. A clock ticked on the wall. It was a plastic one, in the shape of a cat, with a tail that swung.
"You sent me the video," I said.
She did not answer at once. She looked at her hands, at the pale ring on her third finger where a ring had been, and then at the window. She did not deny it.
"Yes."
She told it in a low, even voice, with her eyes on the rain. I did not interrupt. I had not come to cross-examine her. I had come, I think, as one comes to a confessional, to be told something I already knew.
In the first week of October, she said, Eleanor had come to her house in the evening, without warning, with a thick brown envelope in her handbag. She had sat at this table. She had been very quiet. She had said, Clare, I need you to keep something for me. And she had laid the envelope on the wood, and said that inside it there was a key, and a note, and a set of instructions, and that she was not to open it unless something happened.
"Unless something happens," said Clare. "I said, What's going to happen, El? And she said, I don't know. That's the point." She turned the mug a quarter turn. "I thought she meant a car accident. I thought, she's depressed. I told her she should see someone. She laughed, and kissed me, and said she'd think about it."
"What was in the envelope?"
"I didn't open it for six months."
I looked at her.
"I couldn't. After. I put it in a drawer and I couldn't touch it. I said to myself, If I open it, she's really dead." A thin, ragged smile. "I'm told that's a common thing. It was a Tuesday in April, after the verdict, that I took it out. I'd been sitting here for three days. Maya was at school. I held it in my hands and thought, You've got nothing left to lose."
She was silent for some seconds. The cat's tail went from side to side on the wall.
"There was a letter. Three pages. In her writing. It said that she was frightened, and that she hoped she was being foolish. It said that she had found something at the Foundation and that she was going to tell Victor and that she didn't know what he'd do. It said that if she was hurt, if anyone suggested an accident, or an intruder, or anything that didn't sound right, I was not to trust the police." Clare's voice dropped. "She named a man. A sergeant. She'd seen him at a dinner, with Victor, in the spring. She said, I can't prove anything. I only know that when I looked at him I felt cold."
"Dunleavy."
"No." She shook her head. "A different one. A name I'd never heard. Sergeant Ellis, from the evidence unit. Brandon Voss's supervisor." She looked up. "That's why I said, in the cemetery, that I'd know where to send it. I had no idea where. I'd only a letter that said not to send it anywhere."
I thought of fourteen frames of a bookshelf. I thought of a memory card that had failed. I did not say it.
"What else?"
"A key. A login. The Foundation's cloud drive, a folder she'd made in the summer, called Archive. Everything she'd found. The grant files, the transfers, the minutes, six years of it." She drew a breath. "And a note on the last page. In the same hand. If I am dead, and Victor has been charged, find out who his lawyer is. Wait until the trial is over. Whatever the verdict. Then give it to him. Not the police. Not the prosecutor. The man whose job is to doubt."
I could not move.
"The man whose job is to doubt," Clare repeated. Her mouth shook. "She'd thought it all out. She'd worked out that the police would bury it, and that a prosecutor would be afraid of it, and that the only person in the system with every reason to take it apart, to test it, to find the hole, was the lawyer on the other side. She said that a lie would not survive a defense lawyer who'd been given every reason to look." A dry sob caught in her throat. "She'd put her faith in you, Mr. Cole. Before she knew who you were."
The rain beat on the window. I had my hands flat on the table. I felt, quite distinctly, a thing that I had not felt in many years, not since a corridor in Harlow Falls: a rising, helpless, unreasoning heat behind the eyes.
The man whose job is to doubt.
I had spent nine months refusing to.
"The video was in the folder," Clare said.
"All of it."
"All of it. Four minutes and twelve seconds. I found it on the sixteenth of April, at about midnight, in this kitchen." She laid both her palms flat on the table, as if to hold it down. "I watched it twenty-six times."
"Why didn't you give it to Whitlock?"
"The man was acquitted."
"There's a statute—"
"I know about the statute. I looked. And I thought, what will Whitlock do? She'll go to the court. She'll say there's new evidence. And the police will be given the file, and the file will go through the evidence unit, and it will lose itself." She shook her head. "I've read that letter a hundred times. I didn't know whom I could trust. I only knew that my sister had told me not the police. And I'd one other instruction, and I followed it. I gave it to the man whose job was to doubt."
"After cutting it."
Her chin came up.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because the rest was her." It came out in a whisper. "Because it's Eleanor. After. She doesn't die at once. I counted. After the second time, she breathes for five breaths, and it's a sound like someone blowing through water, and her hand opens and closes on the floor, just at the edge of the picture, over and over, like she's trying to pick up something she dropped." Her voice cracked and steadied. "And then the third time. And then for three minutes, nobody turns it off. It just goes on, and on, with the lamp, and the clock ticking, and the rain on the window, and the blood coming down the glass. And I couldn't." She pressed her knuckles against her mouth. "I couldn't let strangers hear it. I couldn't let a jury, or a judge, or some man in a basement with a laptop. It's the last thing she ever did on earth. I decided that I would give you what you needed, and not the rest."
"What I needed."
"What proves it."
"Proves what?"
"That it was him." She looked at me, and for the first time her eyes were wet and bright and burning. "Don't you see? You heard it. Ellie. Only one person in the world called her that. I was her sister for thirty-nine years and I never did. Nobody did. It was his name for her. It was the thing he said when he wanted her to feel owned."
"Julian says his brother's voice can be imitated."
"Julian says."
"He does it. He's a mimic. He did their father at the funeral."
"Then he's the one who should stand in front of a jury and explain it." She was shaking now, all over, in long fine tremors, as though she had a fever. "I watched the whole thing, Mr. Cole. I know what's in it. And I'm telling you it's Victor Hale. I'm telling you I know it as I know my daughter's face."
"Then why won't you give me the rest?"
She did not answer.
The cat's tail swung on the wall, tick, tick, tick, tick. I waited. It was a thing I had learned in twelve years, that a silence, properly kept, is the most powerful question there is, and I kept it, and watched her face, and saw a muscle move at the corner of her mouth, and then another.
"Clare," I said, gently. "What's in the rest?"
"A woman. Dying."
"Who else?"
"No one."
"That isn't true."
"It is."
"You said nobody turns it off. But somebody did. The phone stopped recording at 9:45 and ten seconds. A phone doesn't stop of itself. Somebody lifted it." I leaned forward. "There's someone else in the room."
Her face went white and stiff, like something cast in plaster.
For a moment I thought she would hit me. She sat very upright with her hands clenched on the table and her lips drawn back from her teeth, and in her gray eyes I saw something I could only call a kind of terror, not of me, but of what she would have to say.
"There is nothing in that video," said Clare Voss, very slowly, "that changes what the part I gave you shows."
"Then give me the rest."
"No."
"Why?"
"Because if I give it to you, you'll decide because of what's in it." Her voice was hoarse. "Not because of what's right. You'll look at the thing and think, oh, it's him, or, oh, it's not. And you'll act on the picture. That's what everyone does. That's what I've done." She wiped her eyes angrily, with the back of her wrist. "I have been so sure, Mr. Cole. For four months. I've been sure of a man's guilt with a kind of rage that has kept me alive. And I need you, I need you, to be sure for a better reason. Because I don't trust mine."
I stared at her.
It was the most honest thing anyone had said to me in a year. It was also, I understood, with a sick slow lurch of the stomach, an act of extraordinary manipulation. A woman who had been given a piece of evidence by her dead sister had cut it, and timed it, and set it to arrive at the hour of her choosing in the box of the man she held responsible for the verdict. And she sat in front of me now with her hands trembling and the tears running down her face, and told me so, quite calmly, as a thing she could afford to say.
"You're asking me to take a risk," I said.
"Yes."
"With my career. My license. Everything."
"Yes."
"On the strength of a video you've edited."
"I know." Her mouth twisted. "I know exactly what I am. I learned it from you."
I stayed until the light went. She made soup. She had, I think, forgotten that it was a thing one did, and it came out thick and salty and extremely good, and we ate it in silence in the gray kitchen, under the paintings, with the rain going on and on against the glass. She told me about Eleanor. She told me about the summer they had spent in a rented cottage in Garner Falls, when Clare was nine and Eleanor fourteen, and her sister had taught her to paint a bird with three strokes, and they had been so happy that neither could remember afterwards what they had eaten. She told me that Maya had been asking, for a month, whether Auntie Ellie could see the castle from where she was.
"What did you say?"
"I said yes." She smiled, wanly. "I said she could see everything."
When I rose to go, she walked me to the door. She stood on the step with her arms folded against the cold, barefoot, in the wet gray evening, and looked at me for a long time.
"I sent you the text," she said. "The one that said did you hear what he called her. I wanted to be sure you'd played it with headphones."
"I did."
"Good." A pause. "I did not send the others."
"The others."
"I read about them. In your face." She tilted her head. "The note on the car. A message about the clocks, in March, before the trial. I don't know what you're talking about, Mr. Cole, but I know that I would never in my life have helped Victor Hale win. Not for a day. Not for an hour." Her voice was very quiet. "And I've never followed you. I haven't the money. Whoever's in that gray car is not mine."
I did not tell her I had never mentioned a gray car.
I went down the step. The rain was a thin gold in the lamplight. At the gate I turned back, and she was still standing in the door, a tall thin woman in a cardigan, with the light of the hall behind her and her hair blowing, and I thought that she looked, for an instant, so much like the woman in the silver frame that my heart gave a hard cold knock.
"Mr. Cole."
"Yes."
"If you do the right thing," said Clare Voss, "I will give you the rest."
"What is the right thing?"
She smiled, a little, with an odd kind of tenderness. "She said you'd know."
The door closed. The hall light went out. And I stood on the pavement in the dusk with the drip of the rain on my coat, and understood that I had two people in the world who knew what lay in the last three minutes and fifty-five seconds of a dead woman's life, and that neither of them would tell me, and that I had not, until that moment, once asked myself the oldest question of my trade.
I did not ask who was telling the truth. A good lawyer never does.
I asked who had the most to lose by my finding out.