No Complete Account

The folder on the counter did not hold the version Hester wanted. It contained three floor plans, an old delivery note and her contract. The visitor list was in her own bag. She had put it there herself less than an hour ago. She took it out and laid the two key lists beside it. Searching was easier than deciding whom she wanted at which door on Saturday.

Robin came in with a small parcel under her arm. She had freed up an afternoon after the dismantling work had overrun, and said so at once, as though otherwise Hester would send her off to a real client again. The parcel held fixings for the prints, not new material from her mother.

'Has Else been to the police?' Hester asked.

'They collected the letter. She's got a receipt and a name. She said I could tell you.'

'Good.'

'So the original isn't something that can be left lying round here now.'

Hester nodded. She could hear Else's irritation in those last words. Robin put a bag of clips on the counter and looked into the hall. She saw the panels, the space left for visitors and the stairs under the ordinary work lights.

'It looks like a birthday party where someone forgot to invite half the guests,' she said.

'We're still setting up.'

'That's not what I mean.'

Hester wanted to tell her what had happened since that morning. She could not speak for someone else's conscience again, so she only said Jasper had made an appointment to give his own account. She had recorded what he had told her in her own note. Robin immediately asked whether he had admitted anything.

'He says he didn't see the fall.'

'I knew that.'

'There are things about what happened afterwards that he needs to describe in his own words.'

Robin put her hands in her coat pockets. 'So now you're keeping things back too.'

The accusation hit exactly where Hester was vulnerable. She wanted to put every word on the table at once, so she would not be grouped with her mother. She thought of Jasper asking her to stay while he made his call, not to tell everyone afterwards on his behalf.

'He's arranged to speak to Ellen,' she said. 'I don't want to get ahead of him. I'm not asking you to trust him.'

'I'm asking what happened to my mother.'

'I still don't know.'

Robin went into the hall and stopped before the first panel. She read the three lines beneath the river backdrop, her face so close to the paper that Hester briefly thought there was a printing error. Then she saw Robin holding her hand beside the name. She did not touch the print.

'She was two years younger than I am now,' she said.

Hester had done the sum before, but not with Robin beside the work. The age had always been a fact, not a life she could compare. Robin had hired her own van for her first big job, had bought a second-hand machine, knew the price of wall paint. Brecht had tried to rent a space with a two-year-old child.

'It doesn't fit how everyone talks about her,' Robin went on. 'As if she's always going to be the difficult girl from the group.'

'No.'

'But you're still going to put that group on show on Sunday. With a programme round them.'

Hester pulled two chairs away from the table. She did not want to listen to Robin while she stood like a visitor before a panel. Robin remained standing. Hester sat alone.

'There won't be a group portrait,' she said. 'No pretending everyone's talked it through. I wanted to discuss with you what's left of Sunday.'

'Nothing.'

Hester looked up. 'You don't want anything?'

'Not this. Not an afternoon of people handing each other cake so they can say afterwards that they were there. If they want to tell the truth, they can go to Ellen.'

'I agree. But not everyone who walks through the door has an account of that night. Some people want to see the work. We need to be clear for them.'

'Clear means it's cancelled.'

'Someone put that up yesterday without authority.'

'So because someone did it the wrong way, we can't do it the right way now?'

Hester leaned back. Robin had a point. The cancellation had not been wrong because cancelling was always wrong; it was wrong because someone had taken over a decision that belonged to others. Hester had to be careful she did not impose precisely the same outcome out of defiance.

Her phone rang. She looked at the screen, said it was Ellen and asked Robin if she could take it. Robin nodded towards the foyer. Hester went there, leaving the door open. She wanted to hide nothing, but Robin was entitled to a few minutes when no one was studying her face.

Ellen wanted to confirm one detail in Hester's own statement. Had she actually seen Merel come into the kitchen, or only noticed her standing there? Hester said she had seen her come in. She described what she was certain of: the door, Merel's face, her own position. She left out Merel's exact words at the time, because she was no longer sure of them.

'I need to keep making that distinction,' she said.

'Yes. Even if someone else seems more certain in the meantime.'

Hester wanted to ask whether Jasper had been in yet. She did not. Instead she said the notice on the door was troubling her and she feared the old group was forming a shared story too quickly.

'Then you don't have to take part,' Ellen said. 'We speak to people separately. I can't tell you what anyone else has said or how it relates to other information.'

'I understand.'

'And if you hear something yourself, note when and from whom. Don't rehearse together until it all sounds the same.'

Hester looked at the empty reception counter. A pen lay there bearing the name of an insurer that no longer existed. She asked how the delay before the call could be addressed without pretending she had seen records.

'You can tell us what you know yourselves,' Ellen said. 'We'll establish what records exist and what they can show. Someone's memory of back then and a record are different things.'

'And what if it was a very long time?'

'That still doesn't make it a medical conclusion for either of us in this phone call. I can't give you the certainty you're looking for.'

Hester had not thought she was asking for medical certainty. When she recalled her own question, she heard that she almost had. A long time was supposed to stand for something. A rescue that might or might not have been possible, another act that could take the fall's place. She said she understood.

Ellen asked whether any specific arrangements made Hester feel unsafe. She described the setting up and the closed working session on Saturday, with known staff and ordinary means of contact. Upstairs was not a public area. Ellen was not approving an event; she simply asked Hester not to treat any new threat as a disruption to her schedule. If someone was in danger, a call had to be made.

Once the call ended, Hester stayed in the foyer a moment longer. She wrote down the point they had confirmed about her own observation and put the note away.

Robin had sat on the other chair. Her parcel was open. She had placed four clips in a neat row and left the others in the bag.

'You can talk to her,' she said.

'About what I know. Not what she knows.'

'I know. I was there on Tuesday.'

Hester sat down again. 'I'm sorry. I'm explaining things you don't need explained.'

Robin pushed the bag aside a little. 'I want there to be something other than that conversation where I have to wait until someone can tell me what's allowed to be said.'

'The designs can stay here,' Hester said. 'Without us saying why she fell. We don't know that.'

'And no opening speech from Marjan.'

'No.'

Robin looked at her. 'That was quick.'

'It was already something I didn't want to keep.'

'And Fleur?'

'She has to agree to the programme and the consequences for her foundation. You don't have to make your mother available so Fleur can avoid a difficult email.'

Robin picked up the copy of a design lying on the table. She slid it above the row of clips and smoothed a curled corner. 'A few people at most. On Sunday. People who choose to look. Not a list of names proving the group's complete again.'

Hester thought about the contract, the hired equipment and the communications already sent. They were real. None of it was more important than Robin, but Hester could not make it disappear by choosing the right moral position.

'Then I'll put that proposal forward. A small, voluntary gathering, without a story about reconciliation. We still have to decide what preparation can happen on Saturday and who'll be there. I can't promise that on my own.'

'I want to finish the panels myself on Saturday. Otherwise they'll still look as if someone else put them up in a hurry.'

'You can. With an agreed team.'

'Not supervision as if I'm a child.'

'Ordinary working arrangements. For me too.'

Robin turned a clip between her fingers. She took out her phone and checked her diary. Her Friday job finished at ten in the morning. On Saturday she was available from ten. On Sunday she had to leave by the end of the afternoon, because she was working early in Leiden on Monday. Hester wrote down the times. These were the first limits Robin had put on the programme herself that were not about her loss.

Together they went through the five images. Robin did not want to show one design. There was a personal note on the back that Tessa had included in the scan. Hester removed the file from the selection. One panel would be almost empty as a result.

'We could put some text there about what isn't known any more,' she said.

'Or leave it empty.'

Hester looked at the panel and smiled. 'We could.'

Robin gathered the clips. She did not offer to finish the whole foyer, and Hester did not ask her to. As they said goodbye, she asked whether Hester had heard from Merel. She was coming that evening, Hester said, then corrected herself: she was going to Merel's, by invitation. Robin nodded. She did not ask what that would produce.

Hester sent Fleur a proposal in six short lines. No joint retrospective, no claim that the past had been overcome, visitors free to choose, names beneath the work, the existing limits on access and capacity. She added that Robin's permission to use the chosen images depended on those terms.

After Robin left, Hester's eye went to the panel that would stay empty. She still had a stack of general texts about the building's history in her bag, enough to fill the space easily. She took them out, read the first sentence and put them in the folder of discarded print material.

A short beep sounded outside. Ruben got out of his car holding the card folder. He checked his watch before walking towards her. Hester opened the front door and took the folder. There were two new prints, he said; the printer had made a spare in case someone had an accident with the tape. Then he looked into the hall.

'Is the empty panel the new schedule?'

'Part of it.'

'Saves on the carpentry.'

Hester laughed. He asked where he had left the sack truck. She pointed to the spot by the storeroom and went with him, without starting on the telephone conversation.