The result came that afternoon. Mercer told Nora the blood sampled in the garden room matched her reference sample. Nora was at the showroom counter, checking the showroom accounts.
She did not ask whether Mercer was sure. It would have been insulting to them both.
“You'll understand why we need to speak more formally now,” Mercer said. “That result concerns the garden-room sample. The kitchen floor appears to have been scrubbed with a bleach cleaner. We've sampled there too; that work is still continuing. Do you know who cleaned it?”
“No,” Nora said. She remembered walking through the kitchen before anything happened. She hadn't been there afterwards.
She looked toward the wall Cal had finished. “Am I being arrested?”
“I'd like you to attend for interview. You can have legal advice. We'll explain your rights and what we need to ask about.”
The arrangement was made. Nora told Cal only that she was going to speak to the police. He offered to take her. She said she'd already arranged transport, which wasn't true until she booked it after ending the call.
At the station, the solicitor spoke with her privately before the interview. He had a quiet voice and a pen which wouldn't write until he tried it on a scrap of paper. The small difficulty comforted her more than his first questions did.
“They think you've deliberately misled them about being at the house,” he said.
Nora looked at his pen. “I was frightened.”
“What were you frightened of?”
“I'd been hurt. My brother took me to hospital. A woman turned up saying she'd killed me.”
“But you knew the woman.”
“Yes.”
“And were you at that house?”
She wanted a way to answer which gave him something to defend without giving away the room she had stolen for herself.
“Yes.”
He let the word settle. He did not say it solved anything.
“Then don't keep repeating something which is untrue. I need to understand why you've done that.”
She could have told him. It was private, and he had explained his role. That made refusing harder to justify even to herself. She told him about the injury, about Iris staying, about the argument without naming the bag. He asked what the argument concerned. Nora said money. When he asked whose money, she said she didn't want to discuss it yet.
He leaned back, studying her without impatience.
“I can't give you useful advice about a version you know is incomplete.”
“I don't want to make it worse.”
“Then we need to be careful about what you say. Not inventive.”
She heard Cal's voice in the last word, though the solicitor had none of his warmth or urgency. Two men telling her to be careful, and only one of them asking for the whole thing.
They went through the choices and consequences as far as she would let him. She felt childish, withholding what mattered while asking somebody to tell her how not to be frightened by it. He did not pretend he could.
In the interview room Mercer sat across from her with another officer. Nora's solicitor sat beside her. There was a caution, the explanation that she was attending voluntarily, the clear sense that voluntary did not make any of this casual. Nora listened. She had no difficulty understanding the words; it was the future contained in them she kept trying to avoid.
Mercer began with the result.
“I understand you're now saying you were at Wren House.”
Nora looked at the solicitor, then back.
“Yes.”
“Why did you say you hadn't been?”
“I didn't want to involve my brother.”
“In what?”
“He was helping me.”
“Helping you do what?”
Nora's arm throbbed. She adjusted its position on her lap and wished she hadn't, because pain would look like another answer she hoped they would accept.
“I'd gone with him. To collect things.”
“What things?”
“Materials.”
“Whose materials?”
She stopped. The solicitor asked to speak to her privately, and for a little while she was spared the table. It didn't improve the account. He told her he could not endorse answers she was improvising. She agreed she wouldn't keep building the story, then went back in with less than the truth.
There were questions she declined to answer. The words sounded ugly in her own mouth, repeated in the room where she had hoped to appear cooperative. Mercer remained measured. She didn't congratulate Nora for admitting the address, or behave as if a source match meant they could now name a murder victim.
“Ms Keene described a dispute,” she said. “She described you falling through the glazed door after she pushed you. Is that how you were injured?”
Nora knew the solicitor beside her could hear the answer before she gave it. He'd heard her say an argument without the bag. She wished she had trusted him with the rest.
“I was cut by the glass.”
“After she pushed you?”
“Yes.”
“Was your brother in the room?”
“Not then.”
“Where was he?”
“Outside. I think.”
“And when did you next see him?”
Nora gave the part she could remember: his face above her, pressure on the wound, the journey to hospital in pieces. She was precise about what she didn't know. She could be precise, she discovered, when accuracy did not immediately threaten the room she wanted.
Mercer asked what happened to Iris. Nora said she left. She was asked whether she'd spoken to her afterwards. No. Whether Cal had. Nora looked at the solicitor.
“I don't know.”
It was the first answer she had given to that question without accepting her brother's evasion as fact.
They asked about Dominic, the visit, who had permission to take what from the house. Nora gave no useful explanation. The interview ended without the larger story being hers again. She had corrected her location, accepted the cause of the injury and made it harder for Cal's accident account to remain intact. She had not rescued anything by admitting only what they could already test.
The solicitor spoke to her again before she left. He gave her a number, asked her to use it if the police sought another interview and told her to think carefully about the account she'd held back. Nora folded his card into the same pocket as Mercer's.
Outside, she had six messages from Cal.
The last said I'll come and get you.
She rang him.
“I'm going home.”
“What happened?”
“The blood's mine.”
Silence. A vehicle moved behind him, or he was inside one; she couldn't tell.
“It would be,” he said.
“They know I was there.”
“What did you say?”
“That I was there.”
“Nora.”
“They know.”
He breathed sharply. She waited for him to say she'd ruined it, made things worse, ignored the man who had saved her. Instead he asked if she had somebody with her.
“No.”
“Let me take you home.”
His voice was gentle. In his van she'd have to answer him all the way home. Nora checked the booking on her own phone.
“I've booked a car.”
“Cancel it.”
“No.”
There was a pause, long enough for her to feel the refusal become something they would remember.
“Ring when you get in,” he said.
She agreed. In the back of the car, Nora touched the folded cards through her coat pocket. She had gone to the police and left them still asking what the three of them had done at Wren House. Iris knew. Iris could tell her what she'd already said, what she'd refused to say, what Cal had kept between them.
Nora opened the old messages. This time the small space beneath the last reply did not look empty. It looked like a way in.