The Woman Who Stayed

The woman with the shopping bag was called Ria Visser. Lena only found that out when she reached her front door. Two little screws held the nameplate in place, but one had worked loose. The V sat lower than the other letters.

Lena rang and waited. A shadow moved in the hall beyond the frosted glass. Ria peered through the small window beside the door, then opened it as far as the security latch allowed.

‘You were over the road yesterday.’

‘Yes. I wondered if we could have a quick word. If you'd rather not, I won't trouble you.’

Ria studied Lena's face. She had taken off her coat and was wearing an apron with a dark stain across the middle.

‘Are you from the housing association?’

‘No. I've done work for them through a client. But my own office is on Vlasstraat.’

‘So you say.’

‘That's why I've brought a card. You can check before you tell me anything.’

Lena slipped it through the gap. Ria took it as though it were still wet. She examined the front, turned it over and carried it to a table Lena could see from the hall. The security latch stayed between them. Lena waited on the doorstep. Across the road, a boy came out of a house carrying a bin bag that dripped from the bottom.

After a few minutes, Ria slid back the latch.

‘I could ring the number,’ she said.

‘You could.’

‘But you'd be the one answering. That wouldn't tell me much, would it?’

She opened the door and let Lena in. A pan of soup stood on the hob. On the worktop lay a little heap of chopped leek. Half an onion sat unused, cut side down on a saucer. Ria dropped a spoon into a mug and shut the kitchen door, though they were both standing beside it.

‘I don't want to get involved,’ she said.

‘I understand.’

‘Everyone understands. Until you've said something.’

Lena stayed on her feet. She explained her visit on 6 May and why she had stopped yesterday's inspection. She mentioned the incorrect departure date. She did not bring up Henk straight away. The woman who had watched her come out of an empty house yesterday need not suddenly feel she had agreed to a police interview in her own kitchen.

Ria pointed to a chair. ‘So you're saying that, according to some piece of paper, the house was already empty when you went there.’

‘Yes.’

‘You don't need me for that. You saw Sofie yourself.’

‘I did. I want to find out how the discrepancy happened. And I'm trying to get in touch with Sofie without asking people to hand over her details.’

‘I've got her number.’

‘Would you let her know I'd like to ask her something? You don't have to give me the number.’

Ria looked at the card on the table. ‘She isn't answering.’

‘How long has that been going on?’

‘A few days.’

She pulled out a chair and perched on the edge. In the room behind Lena, a clock ticked, one that was still going. Too many plants crowded the window. Two large leaves overlapped on the sill.

‘I spoke to her last Tuesday,’ Ria said. ‘She had her bag. She was coming home from work. At her front door, I mean, not here. I asked if she still wanted the purple plant. It doesn't get enough light on this side.’

‘Tuesday the twelfth?’

Ria narrowed her eyes. ‘I do my shopping on Tuesdays. I think so. No, hang on. I went on Wednesday last week. My Tuesday appointment had been moved.’

She got up, took a calendar from the side of the fridge and laid it on the table. A name had been crossed out beside the twelfth. Below it, in smaller writing, was the word shopping.

‘It was Wednesday,’ she said. ‘The thirteenth. I went to my sister's afterwards. Sofie said she was home earlier than usual.’

Lena had not picked up her pen. She did not want Ria to cling to a time simply because somebody had started writing it down.

‘Are you certain about that, or is it an estimate?’

‘I'm certain I saw her standing there. I had to check which day it was. Write that down too, that I checked my calendar.’

‘May I make some notes?’

‘Yes. But I want to read them.’

Ria watched her write the few lines. They changed home early to finished her shift. Those were the words Sofie had used, Ria said. Better to put it that way, then.

Lena asked whether a removal van had come afterwards.

‘There are so many vans round here now. Maintenance, they say. Then you walk past a roof that's leaking just as badly as ever.’

‘There was no sign of any repairs to the house opposite yesterday.’

‘So she was right.’

‘Who?’

‘Sofie. She said she didn't understand how the place could be so bad she had to leave, when nobody ever came to fix it.’

Ria took the spoon from the mug, looked at the soup and put it back. She had said very little, yet Lena could see what an effort it already felt, and how much would remain after she left. Not work for Lena. Work for Ria herself, living with her decision to tell somebody what Sofie had said.

‘Did she show you a letter?’ Lena asked.

‘No. She didn't want to talk much about it. Sometimes she brought bread, and we just talked about bread. How early she had to get up. How the bags never all lined up properly. That sort of thing.’

‘She works at a bread factory.’

‘Yes. She doesn't bake it herself. Everyone assumes that. Most of it goes along on conveyor belts. But sometimes she'd bring something nobody would buy any more. Nothing wrong with it.’

Lena added work to her notes. She was not trying to reconstruct Sofie's shifts; that would require a different reason and permission. It gave the woman in the empty house a little more substance than a recorded departure date. Lena had asked about her job during the inspection and only half taken in the answer. The size of a damp patch had mattered more at the time.

‘Cor told me Henk Roos used to help her with letters,’ she said.

Ria leant back. ‘You've been to see Cor as well.’

‘About the extra keys. He told me Henk had died. I hardly knew him.’

‘No.’

It was a short answer, but not an unkind one. Ria found a corner of her apron and rolled it between two fingers.

‘Did you know him well?’

‘Fourteen years over the road. You get to know someone. Not everything about them. Henk did like you to think things mattered as much as he did. If a bin was in the wrong place, the whole street had to hear about it.’

‘And Sofie?’

‘She was glad of him. He could read a letter with you without making you feel stupid. Usually, anyway. He liked things done properly the first time, too. He could be quite difficult about that.’

Ria smiled, almost shyly, at having said something unkind about a dead man. Then her face settled again.

‘He was busy round the back on Thursday evening. I heard voices. From my garden. Not what they were saying.’

‘Who was he with?’

‘I don't know. I didn't see any faces. I'd gone to get my bin ready, then remembered they weren't collecting it the next day. So I went back in. It wasn't until Friday morning that I saw someone outside the house opposite.’

‘Have you told the police?’

‘They came round. Yes.’

Now she pointed the spoon at Lena's notebook. ‘You don't need to write all that down again. I've told them. That's all I know. I can't turn it into anything more just because someone wants more.’

Lena put her pen down. ‘That's exactly right.’

‘I don't know about right.’

They sat for a while. Outside, the bin lorry did come past: a clang against a metal edge, then the scrape of wheels. Ria had apparently meant to put her bin out on the wrong day, then got it out in time after all. That was how everyday things went. You adjusted them without remembering every correction.

‘Would you like some soup in a minute?’ she asked.

‘I don't want to keep you.’

‘You're here now.’

She got up and put two smaller pans on the hob, as though the first were too full to pour from. Following Ria's directions, Lena took bowls from the cupboard. Five matched; two had a different rim. She chose the plain ones. Ria put some soup and half a spoonful of cream into each.

As they ate, she asked whether Lena had inspected other houses round here. Lena mentioned a few jobs and explained that she mostly worked for buyers, sometimes for landlords, but did not allocate homes or decide who was a tenant.

‘You do write things they use to make those decisions,’ Ria said.

Lena put down her spoon. ‘They can. That's why what I write has to be right.’

‘And what they say you've written.’

‘Yes.’

Ria held her gaze a moment longer. ‘Then you'll have to do something about it.’

After they had eaten, Lena let Ria read her notes. Ria did not want a photograph of her calendar ending up in a company's file. She wrote the date herself beneath the two lines and added her name. Lena explained that she was only confirming the memory as recorded, not agreeing to any conclusions Lena might draw from it.

Ria picked up her phone. She typed slowly, reading out the message she wanted to send: Sofie, Lena Wouters, who came to look at the leak, would like to ask you something about her report. Her number's on the card. Shall I send it?

‘That's fine,’ Lena said.

‘I'll do that, then. It's up to her after that.’

She did not give Lena the number. Lena had no need to see it.

As she left, Lena looked at the house across the road. The curtain with the little red patch was still at the back window, out of sight from here. At the front, a roller blind had been wound up slightly askew. Beside the elder tree was a partly used stack of new bricks. On the path beyond, two closed doors faced each other: a shed door and the door to the extension at number 16.

Ria came to the doorway. ‘If you're going round the back, the bit nearest the street is a shared path. But don't go into anyone's garden. You've no business there.’

Lena nodded and walked to the gap between the houses. She stopped at the entrance to the path. An old concrete step jutted out in front of the extension door. It had no handrail. Beyond it lay a few paving stones that had sunk to different levels.

She did not need to act out a fall to see it was an awkward place. Cor had never said a fall was impossible. She had to remember that. The empty house, the keys and that step were not yet a story she was entitled to piece together. People lived in the gaps between them. Ria had shown her one: a woman coming home from her shift on 13 May.