What the Attachment Proves

At nine, Lena had her phone in one hand and the note from her diary in front of her. The woman at her insurer's office asked for her policy number. She had every number ready except that one. As she searched a folder, she could hear the patience of someone who encountered this sort of mistake all day.

‘Tell me what's happened first,’ the woman said. ‘Then we'll work out how to record the notification.’

Lena looked at her questions. Every one began with the misuse of her name. She turned the sheet over and started with the commission, her arrangement with Eva and the final check she had failed to make.

The woman asked whether anyone had made a complaint or a claim for damages. Lena said she had corrected her report, that payment was being withheld, and that she did not know what consequences tenants had faced because of the new export. She did not want to wait until someone asked her for money before notifying them.

‘You don't have to,’ the woman said. ‘I'll record what you know now. This doesn't constitute a decision on cover or liability. Send us your terms of engagement as well. And don't agree to compensation or accept responsibility before you've taken advice.’

Lena wrote that last sentence down. The woman explained which documents they needed for an initial assessment. She did not ask for the residents' files; Lena did not have to name everyone she had spoken to in this notification. They needed her own work, the discrepancy and the responses to her correction.

By the end of the call she had a reference number, not a clean bill of health. Even so, she felt less hurried. Someone else would read the terms. She need not have worked out, on a Sunday evening, how to undo the misuse of a report with a neatly worded clause.

At the industrial unit, an envelope lay on her chair. The manager had printed a notice about renewing her lease because she had not responded last time. He had written a question on it: will you know by Friday? Lena put it beside her keyboard. Her answer did not depend entirely on Noordhuis, but while she pretended their payment would arrive tomorrow, she was already spending the money she needed to keep the room over the summer.

The withheld payment was two thousand eight hundred and sixty euros, excluding VAT. It covered several visits under the commission, not just Sofie's house. Then there was the follow-up work, for which she would no longer be recording any hours. She opened her calendar and removed the days set aside in June. Empty boxes appeared where yesterday she had seen income she could count on.

She wanted to ring two other clients straight away. First she had to send the insurer the documents and prepare for her appointment with Anouk. It was hard to do things in the right order when each step cost money she could not yet put a figure to.

At half past ten she was back at the table with the glass of water. Anouk had received the files. A colleague would carry out a technical examination of the original message and attachments; that had not been completed over the weekend. Before it went any further, she wanted to go through the differences in content with Lena.

‘We don't need to pretend we're doing the computer examination here,’ she said. ‘You can explain what you recorded and where it appears. We'll have the provenance examined separately.’

Lena had brought her laptop but left it closed until Anouk asked her to open the photographs herself. The folder held the pictures of the damage in the order she had taken them. Alongside it she had saved the relevant export, without changing its name or contents.

They started with the first page. Her original described an occupied house. The work she recommended would not necessarily require its occupants to leave. In the later version, vacancy was stated at the top as a given. At first it looked like a discrepancy an administrator might explain; then it became clear that the limits of her inspection had vanished too.

‘If you only read this version,’ Anouk asked, ‘what would you think you'd inspected?’

Lena kept her hands beside the laptop. ‘More than I was able to see. There are conclusions here that don't follow from my visit. And they're presented as established defects.’

‘Could a colleague add those?’

‘If they carried out their own inspection and took responsibility for recording it. Then I'd need to know whose findings were whose. This document makes no distinction. My name and initials cover the whole thing.’

Anouk asked whether Lena had ever agreed to Eva changing the substance of a report. Lena explained their working arrangement. Eva assembled attachments, checked addresses and details, and made sure the final documents went to the right place. Occasionally she had tidied up an unclear sentence. She had never made a resident disappear from a house when Lena had spoken to them there herself.

‘Was that set out anywhere?’

‘Not separately for each job. I trusted her to ring if there was a question about the content.’

Anouk let her finish. Lena could hear that trust now as a description of a system with no checks left once her attention was elsewhere.

A narrow strip of curtain showed in the photograph of the back wall. Lena could still point out the little red repair. She had not photographed it because it was a repair; it happened to be at the edge of the picture she had taken to show the join between wall and window frame. That was precisely the edge cropped out of the export.

‘There's nothing inherently wrong with cropping it,’ she said. ‘Sometimes you cut out a personal item before including a damage photograph. But you can't then pretend the original shows something different.’

‘What does this show, in your view?’

‘The damaged area. The things around it. One photograph can't prove someone's lived there for years. I can explain what I found, though, and that she was there herself.’

Anouk compared the cropped picture with the other screen. She asked Lena to point out the original file on the list she had supplied. No conclusion was added simply because a red thread in a curtain had been visible on both visits. Lena realised she had been expecting one. She wanted to hold on to every small thing she recognised as something no one could deny.

‘The time a photograph is recorded as having been taken is one piece of information,’ Anouk said. ‘What you saw is another. If someone disputes the date, we still need your account of how the visit was arranged. That appointment can be checked.’

They moved on to the email of 7 May. Lena read the message aloud. She had asked Eva to assemble the documents; the photographs were attached, and the report made the limited scope of the inspection clear. Her final line was simply a request to finish the file. Nowhere had she authorised Eva to make a new assessment of the substance.

Still, she had written that final line. She looked at her name beneath it and remembered how quickly she had typed it. There had been three more addresses, an appointment running late, and something Jip needed that afternoon. None of that explained what had happened on 8 May. It did show how easily an instruction to get on with a job could leave room for someone else to act.

‘I didn't ask her to do anything that would justify these changes,’ she said. ‘And afterwards I didn't check whether she'd finished the job properly.’

‘Both can be true,’ Anouk said.

Lena asked whether the original attachment was not enough to connect the altered export to Eva. Anouk put her notebook beside the papers.

‘You've shown what you sent her. What she received, what she did next and what instructions she may have had from anyone else still need to be established. It's important evidence of what you wrote. It doesn't automatically answer every question about the later version.’

Lena nodded. Two documents sat side by side on her screen, her name on both. On paper there seemed to be just one missing person between them. In reality there were working arrangements, access rights and different people supplying information. She had wanted to call Eva with a conclusion already settled. That would have left very little room for the rest of their conversation.

Anouk asked about Cor. He had been in touch and would explain the work he had been commissioned to do. She did not repeat his words to Lena. So Lena went over what she herself had seen on the job sheet: 10 May, five sets, Niels as the contact. Anouk asked whether she had photographed it.

‘No. He wanted to hand it over himself.’

‘Good. Be just as precise about that limit in your account.’

‘The export lists seven sets before he makes the extra five.’

‘That's a discrepancy in the timeline. It doesn't yet tell us where all the keys came from. We need to know who entered that number and what they meant by it.’

Anouk looked at Lena's recent correction. She asked whether Noordhuis had responded, and Lena showed her the email about payment. She explained that she had asked for advice that morning. Anouk did not negotiate over the invoice or promise that a police investigation would release the money.

‘The financial side can be urgent without being something we can decide today,’ she said.

They went through the attempts to contact Sofie. There was no new message. Lena gave no possible address, no name of a friend she barely knew. She explained that Mieke had made an independent request for contact and that Ruben was also trying to reach his sister. Anouk asked her to let her know if Sofie responded, without taking charge of Sofie's account of events.

‘You can listen to her. Just be clear with us about what was said in your own conversation. She needs to be able to give a statement independently of you as well.’

As they finished, Lena asked whether she could still speak to Eva about the report. They made the boundaries clear: she could ask what had happened to her own work. She must not delete or rewrite files for Eva, or help construct an account for her. If Eva wanted to hand over documents herself, Anouk could arrange that.

Outside, Lena found a missed call from the manager of the industrial unit. She walked to a bench beside the bicycle racks and rang back. He did not ask why she had yet to reply. He just needed to know whether to advertise the room again after July.

‘I'm staying,’ she said, before she had done the sums.

He told her the annual increase was already in the letter. Lena asked him to give her until Thursday to confirm formally. Then she brought up her calendar again. She could afford the room if she used some of her reserves and stopped pretending the further work from Noordhuis was still coming. The consequence was unpleasant enough to be real without leaving her on the street.

Back at the unit, she plugged in her laptop and ate the sandwich Jip had left for her beside the bread bin. There was no affectionate message on the bag, just cheese, so she would not mix it up with Jip's lunch. She smiled and sent a message confirming their Tuesday arrangement. Then she called Eva.

Eva answered with the brief yes Lena recognised from times when she was in the middle of a document.

‘I want to talk to you tonight. About the original attachment and the export.’

‘I've told you what I did.’

‘You've told me what you didn't do. The text has changed. I want us to look at what happened between my email and the portal.’

At the other end a chair scraped. Eva asked whether the police were looking into it now too. Lena said she had handed over her own documents.

‘So you've decided it was me.’

‘I've decided that version isn't mine. I need to hear from you about what you did with it.’

Eva said she would be at her own workspace that evening. Lena could come, but she was not going to dismantle everything between jobs. Lena wrote down half past seven. She would take her own documents. The originals would stay where they were already stored.

As she hung up, a message arrived from Mieke. She did not say who wanted to call, only ask whether Lena would have a quiet moment to take a call that afternoon. Lena replied that she would be at the unit until five. She left her phone face up.