Recovery

I did not watch them take Ben away.

Shah arrived with another officer. There were questions, movements between rooms, a request for me to wait in the hall. Nobody raised their voice. I was grateful for that on Kit’s behalf, and then angry that I had room to be grateful for anything.

Tamsin sat beside me on the stairs. Her knee touched mine.

“Did you hear?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“All of it?”

“Enough.”

Louise stayed in the garden with Kit until Shah said they could go. My niece came in to fetch her coat and asked whether her dad was coming too.

“Not now,” Louise said.

“Is he in trouble?”

“Yes.”

Kit looked at me, waiting for the adult whose job was to make the answer nicer.

I crouched so we were level.

“Your mum’s taking you home. You’re safe with her. None of this is because of you.”

“I didn’t think it was,” she said.

“Good.”

I kissed the top of her head. She smelled of school and the sugary drink cooling on the kitchen counter.

After they left, Shah asked me to describe the conversation. I did. Then I did it again more slowly, separating what Ben had said from what I had thought he meant.

By evening I was exhausted by verbs.

He said. I asked. He shook his head.

I had spent years making myself a minor character in that house. Now every sentence required me to be present.

They found human remains beneath the washhouse floor the next day. Shah told me before anything was announced publicly. She was careful about identification. I was grateful for the care, although the distinction between knowing and being told had ceased to mean much to me.

For several weeks, the house belonged to people in protective clothing. I returned once to collect clothes with permission and an officer beside me. The kitchen table was covered. A section of floor had been lifted beyond the green door.

I didn’t go nearer.

A drawing Kit had made was still attached to the fridge with a magnet. Four people, a dog we had never owned, a yellow sun with rays along one side. Ben had been drawn tallest. Mother had been drawn with wings.

I took it down and folded it with the picture facing in.

The formal confirmation came later. So did information I had no desire to know and needed to hear anyway. There were limits to what the years had left them able to establish. There were things the physical evidence could not tell us about the hours after Evie fell.

Ben’s accounts changed. First he had hardly touched her. Then she had moved towards him. Then he had been trying to stop her from falling. Shah did not recite every version to me. Some I learned months later, in rooms where other people were being paid to listen.

One thing did not change. He had not called for help.

At night I thought about the distance between the washhouse and the telephone. Twenty-three steps, if you took the corner closely. I knew because I had walked that route so often as a child, carrying washing in a basket too large for me to see over.

For a while I counted the steps in my dreams.