Corrections

Detective Shah had a paper cup of tea and a cough she kept apologising for. I had expected someone younger than me, perhaps because the policeman who took my first statement had seemed so old. Shah was about my age. Her shoes were wet.

We met at the station on Thursday morning. I brought the coat, the photograph, the note from the pocket and Mother’s envelope. I had put them in separate clean bags, which Shah thanked me for without saying whether I had done the right thing.

Before we began, I asked what would happen to me.

“For making the statement?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t promise you an outcome. I need to understand what happened. We should talk about how this account is taken, and your options.”

We did. She was patient, but she did not offer to make my part smaller.

When we eventually began, I told her about staying at Tamsin’s. About Mother’s call on Saturday morning. About going home to find our father sitting at the kitchen table, furious with a girl who had already been gone for a day.

“What did your mother actually say?”

I looked at the closed notebook in front of me. I had written things down in the car so I wouldn’t become confused. Now the words looked like another prepared version.

“She said Evie had left us. She said Dad was terribly upset. She said the police wouldn’t understand what she’d been like.”

“What who had been like?”

“Evie.”

“In what way?”

“She’d been angry.”

“About something specific?”

“Yes. Probably. I didn’t ask.”

Shah waited.

“Being angry in our house was usually treated as the problem,” I said. “What you were angry about didn’t matter much.”

“And the account of seeing her leave?”

“Mother said someone needed to have seen it. Otherwise the police would think Dad had done something. I said I hadn’t. She said I knew Evie had gone, so what difference did it make?”

“Did your father speak to you about it?”

“Not directly.”

“What does that mean?”

“He said we had to stop making things worse for Mum.”

I could hear him. His voice was intact in a way Evie’s no longer was. Sometimes I had to play an old birthday video to remember how she sounded. Our father I could summon without effort.

Shah asked about the arguments. The last few weeks. Evie’s work at the garden centre. Her friends. Her bank account.

I knew very little. I had considered her adult and myself nearly adult, which meant neither of us was interested in the other’s advice. She was saving to leave. I resented her for it. I had thought we were in the house together.

“Did she have debts?” Shah asked.

“Not that I know.”

“And your brother?”

I looked at her.

“Why?”

“You mentioned that things were difficult for him.”

So I had.

“Some. I don’t know how much.”

“Would your sister have helped him?”

“Not by then.”

“Why not?”

I remembered a conversation outside the bathroom. Evie holding a bank envelope. Ben telling her not to be dramatic. I had been waiting to use the mirror and wished they would both get out of the way.

“She said once he’d used her name for something. I don’t know what. I thought it was a family argument.”

“What made it a family argument?”

I had no answer.

Afterwards, Shah showed me a copy of the statement I had signed eighteen years before. My handwriting looked rounder than I remembered. I had put a small, careful loop on the capital A.

She appeared calm and was carrying a dark holdall.

I didn’t remember the holdall. It must have been Mother’s invention. At seventeen I would have said bag.

“We’re going to revisit the original accounts,” Shah said. “We’ll need to speak to your brother. And Tamsin, and her mother.”

I nodded.

“The photograph changes the timeline. It doesn’t, by itself, tell us what happened afterwards.”

“I know.”

“There’s something else I want you to be careful about. You know now that part of the old account was false. Don’t let that make every new explanation feel certain.”

She gave me a number and asked me to call if I found anything else. When I mentioned the work at the cellar, she asked for the contractor’s details and told me not to move anything there.

Outside, I sat in my car with both hands on the steering wheel. I wasn’t crying. I wanted to be. Crying would have occupied some part of me.

Ben called twice. I didn’t answer.

On the third call he left a message.

“Anna, they’ve been in touch. Ring me before you say anything else. Please. There are things you don’t understand.”

I listened to it again.

Then I sent it to Shah.