Signing for Someone Else

At the police station reception desk, Eva was trying to show her driving licence before the receptionist had finished asking her name. The card was already between her fingers. Lena noticed that she had cut the nails on one hand and left the others long.

‘Brink,’ Eva said. ‘I have an appointment with Ms van Dalen.’

She didn’t look at Lena. Outside, by the row of bicycle stands along the building, they had greeted each other with a nod. Eva had come by bus. Her car was at home, she’d said, though Lena hadn’t understood why she needed to mention it. Since Monday, almost every ordinary remark between them had carried a second message that Lena no longer wanted to work out for her.

The receptionist pointed to four chairs beside a table of magazines. Eva chose the one nearest the door to the corridor and put her bag on her lap.

‘I haven’t forgotten anything,’ she said.

Lena slid her own folder under her chair. ‘They’ll ask you in there.’

‘The old laptop’s on it too.’

‘On what?’

‘The list. I’ve written down what I worked on and which email account I used. Not just what I printed out.’

Lena could picture the laptop: a grey thing Eva closed with her hand still resting on the lid, its charger always plugged into an extension lead at an angle. There had been legitimate jobs on it. A sagging balcony. A school with poor ventilation. A tenant who hadn’t understood until the wall was repaired that he wouldn’t need a bucket under the leak next winter. This one week hadn’t turned all their past work into fraud. That scarcely made Eva any easier to look at.

‘Good,’ Lena said.

Eva tucked in her upper lip. ‘I replaced that text myself. That’s what I’m going to tell them. I’m not going to pretend there was a problem with the software.’

‘That sounds sensible.’

‘You don’t have to speak to me like that.’

‘Like what?’

Eva looked at the magazines. One lay open at a recipe, a brown coffee stain covering the ingredients. ‘Like I’m a contractor who hasn’t handed in his paperwork.’

Lena held her bag strap in both hands. She still had questions for Eva. Had she seen the red patch on the curtain as she cropped the photograph? Had she typed vacant without pausing, without taking her hands off the keyboard? Whatever Eva answered would go round in Lena’s head again that evening. This wasn’t the place to ask. Perhaps there wasn’t a place outside it either.

‘I don’t know how to talk to you yet,’ she said.

Eva nodded slowly. They let the silence stay.

When Anouk opened the door, she asked Eva to come with her. Lena could wait a little longer; their appointments were consecutive, not joint. Eva stood, gripping the handles of her bag until the leather creaked.

‘My lawyer will be a bit late,’ she said.

‘Then we’ll wait for her,’ Anouk said. ‘We’ll go through what you’ve brought first. We’ll discuss your involvement after that.’

Lena saw Eva’s shoulders drop. She too had been uneasy about their coming here together. Now someone would sit beside Eva who was there for Eva alone. Lena stayed outside the interview room, where she belonged.

A man came into the waiting area with a wallet he had found. He wanted to go and unlock his bicycle again because he thought he’d left it half across the pavement. The receptionist said it was probably fine, but he went back out anyway. Lena checked her phone. Jip had sent a photograph of two pieces of bread on a board, a knife stuck across the last slice.

The bread won.

Lena started to reply that she didn’t need to use the knife to prove her arm could do everything again. She deleted it. She typed: Leave it for now. Ask your dad later. Then: What time are you working today?

Half four. Dad’s picking me up. We’ve sorted it.

Lena wrote that that was fine. She put her phone away before she could add another arrangement.

Her own appointment was in a smaller room, without Eva. There was only a notepad and a glass of water on the table. Anouk began with the cycle bridge. Lena explained where her bag had been that afternoon and what she remembered of the van. Again she said she hadn’t seen the face clearly enough to identify anyone.

‘Stick to that,’ Anouk said. ‘Even if someone suggests a name.’

‘I don’t want it left out.’

‘Not knowing who it was doesn’t make the attack any less real.’

Lena pulled the glass towards her. Over the past few days she had repeatedly felt that not seeing more was a failure, another mistake she shouldn’t have made. Now she nodded and left it at what she knew.

They went through the documents she had supplied: her email of 7 May, the original report, the later version she had obtained from the portal. Anouk named each by its date and subject. Lena answered her questions and corrected one filename. On a printout, someone had written schadeopname as a single word; her own attachment name had a hyphen. She wasn’t trying to make anything of the difference. She pointed it out because she’d been asked to check the list.

‘Eva will be explaining things I didn’t know when I made my first report,’ she said. ‘Does that mean I need to redo my statement?’

‘You can add what you’ve learned since. We record when you knew something and who told you. Don’t change the earlier statement to make it all fit neatly from the beginning.’

Anouk turned the paper towards her. Lena read the summary. It said she hadn’t checked the final exported version herself. Her eyes stayed on that sentence longer than on the others.

‘That’s right,’ she said.

‘Anything you’d like to add?’

Lena thought of that evening in A&E, Jip’s coat that wouldn’t go over her shoulder, the unread messages on her phone. ‘It explains why I was distracted. It doesn’t change what I should have checked.’

Anouk wrote it down without comment. When she put down her pen, she said they were trying to find Niels to speak to him. She gave no details of his diary or any further steps they were considering.

‘If he approaches you, don’t get into a discussion to help us,’ she said. ‘Keep anything he sends and report it. You don’t have to make him admit anything.’

‘I’m seeing Cor later.’

‘I have your message about that. Mr Roos’s things?’

‘Nora wants the papers that aren’t needed for the investigation back. Cor’s put them aside. I’m helping sort out the building-related documents. With her permission.’

Anouk asked for the address and expected time once more. Lena gave them. She would let her know if the appointment changed. She saved Anouk’s number again from her recent calls and asked what to do if she couldn’t reach her straight away. In immediate danger, she was to ring the emergency number. Anything else could come through the agreed channel.

Outside, Eva sat on the low wall by the bicycles, her bag beside her. A few metres away, a woman in a dark blue suit was on the phone. Eva raised a hand as Lena passed.

‘They’re keeping the computer for now,’ she said.

Lena stopped. ‘Did you manage to hand everything over?’

‘Yes. The email where he sent the new wording, too. And what I wrote back about the payment.’

The woman on the phone turned towards them. Eva saw her and stood up.

‘I’m not going to talk about it any more now.’

‘All right.’

Eva smoothed the strap of her bag. ‘I could have told you I didn’t want to do it.’

Lena nodded. She had heard the explanation about pressure already. This time Eva left it out. That was something, but it didn’t repair anything.

‘I’ve sent my own correction,’ Lena said. ‘I’ve named you where I can substantiate what you did. I won’t change it to make this seem smaller.’

Eva met her eyes. ‘I know.’

They parted without arranging to meet again. Lena went to her bicycle and did up her coat first. The front wheel had been checked and ran freely now. Her hip was still sore from the fall. She started to lift her foot over the low crossbar, stopped and decided to walk as far as the corner. There was nobody here she needed to prove her fitness to.

Back in her workroom, she set the folder on the desk she had used only between appointments for days. A plant had begun to droop. She watered it from the bottle she had brought for herself and put a second bottle on the floor beside her chair. For twenty minutes she did ordinary work: returned a client’s call about a moisture reading, checked two invoices, changed the bin bag. The work she’d put off wasn’t a threatening heap. It was people waiting for an answer.

Then she rang the person now handling her notification to her professional indemnity insurer. He had her completed form and the documents. She had written down two questions: how to record further corrections, and who could review her other joint jobs with Eva. She didn’t want new documents going round under the same filenames, or incorrect text deleted before it could be compared. Her failure to make the final check was already on the form. She needn’t keep recasting it as something other people alone had done to her.

In response to her first question, he asked about a date in her chronology. What further information had she received since sending the form? Lena explained that Eva had given her own files to the police that morning. She knew nothing of what had been said in the interview. As far as the residents’ files were concerned, she wanted to deal with the wording she had written herself and the alterations that now needed correcting. Asked whether anyone had made a specific claim for damages, she said no; there were still complaints people had said they would bring.

‘Keep all the correspondence,’ he said. ‘And don’t promise residents any sums or outcomes. We need to establish what relates to your work and what relates to other people’s.’

‘I do want to explain where my report’s been misused.’

‘And you should. Keep it factual.’

Afterwards she reread her correction. She had originally written that the file had been changed without her knowledge. True, but too easy to leave standing alone. She added that the final check on the joint job had been inadequate, and that she was reviewing her own working practices. She left the original text intact in an attachment. The addition had a new date and a reference of its own.

Two more letters followed, one to the housing association and one to the tenants’ adviser. Neither said where Sofie was staying. Lena set out which findings from 6 May were hers and which conclusions she had never drawn. She asked for both versions and the correction to be kept, rather than for the wrong version to vanish without trace. Someone would need to be able to see how the file had come about.

Before sending them she opened every attachment. She checked the first page, the conclusions, the photographs and the version reference. Then she read the covering email once more. One sentence promised more certainty than her inspection had provided. She deleted it. Only then did she send the documents and save the acknowledgement in the same folder.

The housing association replied as she was putting on her coat. Someone she hadn’t dealt with before confirmed receipt and said the files concerned would, for the time being, be assessed outside the usual project process. Nothing had been decided about the homes or compensation. Lena read the message twice, then forwarded it to Mieke with one line explaining exactly what had been confirmed.

On her desk lay an old cover sheet from another joint job. At the bottom were her neatly scanned initials. She put it in the folder for the records review. Then she took a fresh sheet and wrote down the clients she needed to ring herself that afternoon. Three names, three potentially awkward conversations. She wanted to get through the list before anyone else could once again explain on her behalf what her signature meant.