Chương 3
He had admired the sentence and resented her for using it accurately.
“I am trying to protect you,” he said.
“From talking?”
“From saying something while concussed that will be repeated in court.”
She stared at him.
The monitor continued its patient beeping.
“You’re already making it a case,” she whispered.
“It is a case.”
“It happened to me.”
“Yes.”
“Then let me be the person it happened to.”
He looked down at his hands.
“All right,” he said.
Her eye drifted closed again.
After a while she whispered, “My phone.”
“The police have it.”
“No.”
“What?”
“Martin took it.”
Elias leaned forward. “When?”
“In the courtyard. Before.”
“Before Julian struck you?”
She flinched at the word.
“I don’t know.”
“Clara, did you see Martin take your phone?”
She tried to lift her splinted hand, as if she could physically push the question away.
“You said I could be the person.”
He stopped.
A nurse entered to check Clara’s pupils. Elias moved aside. The nurse dimmed the lights and asked Clara her name, the date, and where she was. Clara knew her name and the hospital. She guessed the date incorrectly by one day.
When the nurse left, Clara was asleep.
Elias went into the corridor and called Martin.
The solicitor answered on the first ring.
“Elias. Thank God. How is she?”
“Alive.”
“I’ve been beside myself.”
“Where is Clara’s phone?”
A pause.
“I’m sorry?”
“She says you took it.”
“I picked it up after she fell. I gave it to the police.”
“Which officer?”
“I couldn’t tell you. There were several.”
“Before or after I entered the courtyard?”
Martin exhaled. “You should not be interrogating me tonight.”
“Then answer without making it necessary.”
“I saw Clara arguing with Julian. Ruth was shouting from the portico. Clara dropped her phone. I retrieved it so it wouldn’t be stepped on.”
“Where was the mallet?”
“I don’t know.”
“You were standing fifteen yards from it.”
“I was looking at Clara, not cataloging the paving stones.”
“What were they arguing about?”
“Wedding money, I think.”
“You think?”
“I heard Julian accuse her of humiliating him. She said something about signatures. Then he grabbed her arm. It happened quickly.”
“Did you see him hit her?”
Another pause, longer than the first.
“I saw him raise the mallet.”
“And then?”
“I turned to call for help.”
“You turned away?”
“For perhaps a second.”
“Convenient.”
Martin’s voice changed. It lost its concern and became professionally cool.
“You are frightened. I understand that. But you need to be careful.”
“Is that advice?”
“It is friendship.”
“We have never been friends.”
“That would have surprised your father.”
“My father mistook proximity for loyalty.”
“And you mistake suspicion for insight.”
Elias ended the call.
He stood in the corridor holding the phone long after the screen went dark.
At ten minutes past midnight, Diane arrived wearing a navy travel coat over clothes chosen for a dinner she had never attended. Her gray-blond hair was pulled into a loose knot. She saw Elias outside Clara’s room and stopped several feet away.
He had once known every expression that crossed her face. During the last years of their marriage, he had known only the expressions she allowed him to see.
“What did you do?” she asked.
The question struck him with the force of old habit.
“I wasn’t there.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
He almost told her not to begin. Instead, he opened the door.
Diane went to the bed and touched Clara’s uninjured cheek with two fingers. Clara stirred but did not wake.
For several minutes neither parent spoke.
Then Diane noticed the faint smear of dried blood at the edge of Clara’s hairline. She sat down hard in the chair Elias had been using.
“Julian did this?”
“He appears to have.”
“Appears?”
“Clara said he wasn’t alone.”
Diane looked up.
Elias told her about the portico, Martin, Ruth, and the missing phone.
When he finished, Diane rubbed her palms together as though they were cold.
“I never liked Martin,” she said.
“You never said that.”
“I said it constantly.”
“You said he was oily.”
“Yes.”
“That is not a legal assessment.”
“It wasn’t meant to be. It was a human one.”
He looked through the interior window at the nurses’ station.
“You also disliked Julian,” he said.
“I disliked how hard Clara worked to make him comfortable.”
“She loved him.”
“Those are not contradictory.”
Diane rose and adjusted the blanket near Clara’s feet, though it did not need adjusting.
“Did you know he had debts?” she asked.
Elias turned.
“What debts?”
“Julian.”
“I understood he had investments.”
“He had gambling losses.”
“Who told you?”
“Clara, in March.”
“And you did not tell me?”
“She asked me not to.”
“That was irresponsible.”
“She was twenty-seven, not fourteen.”
“He had access to her finances.”
“They weren’t married.”
“They were preparing to be.”
Diane faced him. “This is why she didn’t tell you.”
“Because I would have intervened?”
“Because you would have taken over.”
“And perhaps prevented this.”
The sentence entered the room and remained there.
Diane’s face tightened, but she did not raise her voice.
“You don’t get to make her injuries proof that you were right to control her.”
“I did not say that.”
“You almost never say the cruelest part aloud. You leave it sitting there and let everyone else hear it.”
Clara made a soft sound in her sleep.
Both of them went silent.
At two in the morning, Diane persuaded Elias to go home and change. He refused twice before recognizing that his refusal had become performative. He drove himself to Ashcombe because he could not tolerate another person in the car.
May you like
The estate stood beyond a limestone wall and a line of old sycamores, its windows dark except for the security lights above the service entrance. Police tape still crossed the courtyard. A patrol officer remained in a vehicle near the gate to preserve the scene until the evidence team finished at daylight.
Elias entered through the kitchen.
