I was a terrible witness. I want to get that out of the way.
You'd think you'd go into a police station and tell it straight, beginning, middle, end, like they do on the telly, with your hands folded. I went into Sallowford police station and the man on the desk said, "What's it regarding?" and I said, "Murder," and then, "Mine," and then, "Not yet," and he took me through to a little room with a box of tissues on the table that someone had already pulled one out of and left sticking up, like a flag.
Detective Constable Anita Sharma came in with two teas and a notebook. She was mid-forties, in a cardigan the colour of porridge, with reading glasses on a chain and a face that had been kind for so long it had set that way. She opened the notebook to a clean page and smoothed it flat with the side of her hand.
"Kit," she said. "Is it Kit? Take your time, Kit."
So I took my time. I took all of it. I told her about the lane and the car sitting down in the mud, and she wrote that down. I told her about the fig rolls. I told her about four o'clock and the glasses going into the pyjama pocket and the crow on the line and the pillow, and when I got to the pillow I said, "I didn't do anything with it," very fast, and she said, "No," and wrote something down, and I've wondered since what it was.
Then she asked whether there was anything else, anything at all, and something in me went, oh, she wants more, give her more.
"There's a silver Audi," I said. "On my street. Three mornings running. A bald man with a big neck. My lodger's seen him. He does a lot of sitting."
She wrote down silver Audi.
"And I've got three parking tickets," I said. "From outside the hospice. Council ones. Final notice and everything. And I'm not paying them, because I was at a death every single time, and you can't move your car when somebody's dying, can you, you can't say excuse me, Mrs Thing, hold that breath, I'm on a meter."
"I'm not sure that's—"
"I'm just saying, if anybody wants me dead, it's the council."
She wrote that down too. She wrote everything down. I told her my car was called the Biscuit and she wrote down Biscuit. I told her my dad died in two thousand and fifteen in a bookie's in Halifax with the only winning slip he ever had in his hand, eleven pounds forty, and I don't know why, except that she'd put her pen down for a second and I couldn't stand the quiet.
"Kit," she said, very gently. "I'm going to be honest with you, because I think you'd rather. At the moment, I haven't got a crime."
"He's paid a man to kill me."
"He's said he has." She held up her hand before I could go. "And I believe he said it. I do. But there's no name. There's no money I can find. There's no man. There's a very poorly gentleman who said something awful to you at four in the morning." She turned her tea round by the handle. "It's a crime if he did it. It's a joke if he says it's a joke."
"It wasn't a joke."
"Then I'll go and ask him. This afternoon. Two o'clock." She tore a card out of the back of her notebook, an actual card with a crest on it, and wrote her mobile on the back in biro and gave it to me. "I'm logging this as an incident, with a safeguarding note against your name and his. That means if anything happens, anything at all, it's on the system. I write everything down. That's the job. Is there somewhere you can stay tonight, Kit?"
"I've got a lodger," I said.
"That's not quite what I asked."
I put the card in my phone case, behind the phone, where I keep my bus pass and the photo of my mum in a sombrero. I said thank you. She was the kindest person I'd met all week, and she was going to drive up that lane at two o'clock and drink his tea.
Owen drove me home and made me a hot water bottle and put me to bed in the daytime like I was poorly, and I lay there in my uniform under the duvet with the hot water bottle on my stomach and I lasted forty minutes.
Two o'clock, she'd go up, and he'd be lovely, and she'd come away with nothing, because he'd give her nothing, because he'd given me nothing. Unless somebody got there first and leaned on him. Unless somebody walked in at quarter to two and said, Frank, this is your last chance, there's a policewoman coming up that lane, give me a name now and I'll tell her you were confused, I'll tell her it was the morphine, I'll be on your side.
It was a brilliant plan. I thought so.
The car started first time for the second time in her life, which should've told me something. It was raining again. The lane was worse in the daytime, because you could see it. I left her at the bottom in a gateway and walked up, and I let myself in at the back with the keysafe, like Rosie had shown me, and stood dripping in the kitchen with my heart going.
The house was warm and smelled of Dettol and soup. And from the parlour, across the hall, there were voices.
His, slow and dry, with the oxygen hiss under it. And a man's, louder. The ironed-jeans man. Gareth.
I hadn't planned for Gareth. I hadn't planned for anything, if I'm honest; I'd planned for the bit where I said my line and Frank cracked and gave me a name, and I'd planned for the bit after, where I rang Detective Constable Sharma from the skylight and said, Anita, I've done your job for you. I had not planned for his son, who already thought I was a waste of a day rate, standing between me and his dad.
Then tyres in the yard. A car door. Footsteps on the flags, coming to the back.
The pantry at High Royd is the size of a phone box and it was right behind me, and I was in it with the door pulled to before I'd thought anything at all.
It was black dark, then not, because there was a little grille up high in the wall it shared with the parlour, for air, from when it was a larder, and light came through it in stripes, and so did everything else. It smelled of apples and cold stone and, faintly, mouse. There were shelves on three sides, jars and tins and a bag of self-raising flour at exactly face height, and I stood with my cheek against that bag for eleven minutes and listened to an eighty-two-year-old man with a tube up his nose take Detective Constable Sharma apart.
He didn't do it like a man doing it. He did it like a grandad.
"Come in, come in. Gareth, a chair for the officer. Not that one, it's got a leg. Sit down, love, you'll have been on your feet all day."
"Thank you, Mister Ashdown. I'll try not to keep you long."
"Keep me as long as you like. I've nowhere to be." The oxygen hissed. "Is it Sharma? I had a driver called Sharma. Bradford lad. Best reverser I ever had, he could put an artic through the eye of a needle."
"Bradford's my family," she said, and I could hear her smile.
"Is it? Are they all well?"
And she told him. She told him her mother was in a home in Bradford, a good one, by the park, but she didn't always know Anita now, some days she thought she was her sister. And Frank said that must be very hard, and said it in a voice I'd never heard out of him, and then he asked had she had her flu jab, because they were saying on the radio it was going to be a bad one. Then she laughed, a proper laugh, the sort you can't help, and I stood in the dark with my face on the flour and thought, he's made her laugh, I've been with him twelve hours and he's barely made me laugh, he's done her in four minutes.
Twice I nearly came out. Once when he said my name, Kit, like a sweet he was unwrapping. And once when a jar on the top shelf ticked, like glass does in the cold, and I thought it was the mouse and very nearly took the shelf down with me. I had my hand on the latch. I had my whole speech ready. Detective Constable, he is lying to you with his flu jab. Then I thought about how it would look, a woman coming out of a cupboard at a policewoman with a speech, and I took my hand off the latch and put it back on the flour.
Then she asked him. Kindly, and plainly, she asked whether he'd said to his night nurse in the early hours of that morning that he had paid somebody to kill her.
There was a long pause, with oxygen in it.
"I said something," said Frank. "I think I must have. I don't remember the words." Another pause. "She's a lovely girl. Very good with her hands. But I'll tell you something about the night, Detective Constable, that you'll know yourself from your line of work. The dark gets into night nurses round about four in the morning. That's the job, love. They're on their own with it. And I'm an old man with a tumour and a sense of humour, and I'm told the two don't mix." The pillows creaked. "I'd hate for that poor girl to get into trouble over an old man's joke."
Her pen stopped. The same pen that had written down silver Audi and eleven pounds forty.
I pressed my cheek into that bag of flour so hard it went soft against my face, and a seam gave, and flour went down the inside of my collar like sand.
"Gareth," Frank said. "Get the officer a fig roll. They're in the pantry."
You know when you're in a lift and it drops a bit, just a bit, and your stomach doesn't go with it?
Footsteps across the hall. The kitchen. The pantry door opened, and the light came in, and there was Gareth Ashdown in his ironed jeans and his gilet, with his hand out for the fig rolls, and there was me, with flour down one side of my face and in my eyebrow and all down the front of my uniform, holding a split bag of self-raising against my chest like a baby I'd been asked to mind.
We looked at each other.
"Hiya," I said.
He didn't say anything to me. He turned his head and shouted, "Dad. She's in the pantry."
And then there was a chair scraping, and Detective Constable Sharma was in the kitchen doorway with her notebook, looking at me, and her face did nothing. It just stayed kind.
"Oh, Kit," she said.
"I came to help," I said.
From the parlour, very faint, under the hiss of the oxygen, Frank said, "Is that my nurse? Tell her she's left the flour open."
Gareth walked me to the back door with his hand not quite on my elbow. He said I was trespassing. He said I was unhinged. He said, "You're not family. You're an invoice," which was so good I nearly asked him if he'd been saving it. Then he said he'd be ringing my agency, and I said, "Ring them, they'll tell you I'm brilliant," and he shut the door on me, and I stood on the step in the rain with flour turning to paste on my face.
At six o'clock Carol from the agency rang.
I was in my kitchen at the table with a coffee, and Owen was at the cooker doing something with mince, and when my phone went with CAROL on it he turned the gas down without being asked and went out into the yard to put the bins out, which didn't need doing. That's Owen.
"Kathleen," said Carol.
Nobody calls me Kathleen. My mother calls me Kathleen when she's found something in my bag. My nan called me Kathleen at my christening and never again.
"Hiya, Carol."
"Kathleen, I've had a call from the family." She had her reading-it-off-a-screen voice on. "And I've had a call from the police, as a courtesy. And I'd like to be clear that this isn't a disciplinary. This is about your wellbeing. We've got concerns about your wellbeing."
"My wellbeing's fine. My wellbeing's never been better. He told me he's paid a man to—"
"So, in light of those concerns, and in light of a complaint from the family about an incident on the premises this afternoon, I'm suspending you from shifts pending a review. With immediate effect. That's for your own—"
"Wellbeing."
"Yes."
"Carol, I'm two months behind on the rent."
"There's a helpline," said Carol, "on the intranet," and I said a word to Carol I won't repeat, and she said she'd make a note of that as well, and she did, you could hear her doing it.
I put the phone face down on the table.
Owen came in from the bins and washed his hands and stirred the mince and didn't ask me anything, and I loved him for it. He put a plate down in front of me. I didn't eat it. I put my coffee down instead, on the brown envelope that had been on that table since the start of October, because it was nearest, and because a coffee needs to go on something.
It was one of those long ones, the kind with a window in, PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL along the top in red, franked from somewhere in London, with Ms K. Mulvaney showing through the window. Owen wiped round it every morning. I'd watched him do it. He wiped round it like it was an ornament.
"You going to open that one day?" Owen said.
"I don't open those," I said. "They only want money."
My mug left a ring on it, a brown one, right across the K.
I sat there. The mince went cold. Owen washed up around me, very quietly, like I was asleep. Then my phone went again, buzzing across the table, and I let it buzz, because it'd be Carol again, or the council, or my mum, who'd have heard, because my mum always hears. It stopped. It went again. Owen picked it up and looked at it and held it out.
"It's a Rosie," he said.
I took it.
"Kit?" She sounded like she'd been running, or crying, or both. "Oh my God, Kit, hiya, sorry, I know you're probably, I know my dad's been, I'm so sorry about my dad. Listen. Listen, are you listening?"
"I'm listening."
"It's Grandad. He won't settle. The agency says they're sending a man tonight, and Grandad says he'll send him home. He won't have anybody." She took a big breath. "He's asking for you, Kit. He says he'll pay you himself."