On Tuesday afternoon a bag of dog muck came through my letterbox, and whoever sent it hadn't even tied the bag, which I thought showed a real lack of commitment.
I came down at two in the tunic I'd been arrested in, because I'd slept in it, and Owen was on his knees on the hall mat in my yellow Marigolds with a bucket and the Dettol, scrubbing, with his head turned right away from it as if it might go off.
"Don't look," he said.
"I've had my hands in worse."
"Not on your own mat, you haven't." He sat back on his heels. He looked as if he hadn't been to bed, and he hadn't. He'd been up and down the stairs since we got in, the third one going every time. "They've changed the locks up there. Gareth texted. Rosie's doing his nights, and a nurse comes in for the doses."
"Who's doing his mouth?"
Owen didn't know. Nobody ever knows who's doing the mouth. It's the first thing that goes.
My mother came at three with a pan of mince and her old phone in a sandwich bag, because the police had mine in a sandwich bag of their own, and she said it was only fair. It had a crack across the screen like the map of a motorway and a picture of Auntie Maureen on a pedalo as the background.
"Don't touch my Candy Crush," she said. "I'm on four hundred and something. I've been stuck since Easter. Who's done your mat? I'll find out. I'll stand outside the Co-op with the spoon. Have you eaten? You've not eaten. Owen, has she eaten? Look at him, he's been scrubbing, give him some mince. Come and stay at mine, Kit. Come tonight. I'll put the electric blanket on."
"I'm stopping here, Mum."
"Then I'm stopping here."
"You've got dinners at half eleven."
She stood in my kitchen with the pan in both hands, and then she put the pan on the hob and the vape in her mouth and said, "Ring me on the house phone. Every hour. I'll be sat by it," and she kissed me so hard on the forehead that I had a mark.
I didn't ring her every hour. I sat at the kitchen table with her phone and my cast and the mince going cold, and I found the noticeboard, because you do. Somebody had seen a police car coming down the lane at High Royd at ten o'clock at night. Somebody's cousin worked at Calderbank. There were two hundred comments, and I read the first nine, and then I turned the phone over and made a list on the back of a gas bill instead, because when I've decided something I need my hand busy.
One, Frank. Two, Sharma. Three, the nursing council, whose number I'd have to look up, because nobody in the history of nursing has ever rung them on purpose.
I'd say it to his face first. Then I'd say it to everyone else before anyone else could say it for me.
Number one had a new lock on it.
At ten o'clock at night somebody knocked, and I went to the door with the mop, in case it was more dog.
It was Rosie, in her hood, with her mascara gone and her dad's car running on the double yellows behind her, a Range Rover the size of my kitchen with the driver's seat pulled all the way forward.
"He wants you," she said. "Dad's in Leeds. Don't talk to me. I'm only driving you."
Behind me on the stairs, Owen stopped.
"I'll come," he said.
"He said just her," said Rosie, to the step.
So I got my coat, and my mother's phone, and Owen stood at the bottom of the stairs with his hand on the newel post and watched me do my zip one-handed and didn't help, the only time he's ever not helped.
"Don't wait up," I said.
"I'll wait up," said Owen.
Rosie drove that car as if it were a hired boat, both hands, and she didn't say a single word for four miles, which for Rosie is a medical event. She took the lane in first. My car was still in the yard where I'd left it on Monday, with a Rotary leaflet under the wiper. At the back door she had a new key on a ring with a plastic daisy, and she put it in the lock and then didn't turn it.
"Grandad told me to put it up," she said. "He said people should know what you'd said. I thought he was being brave."
Then she turned the key.
I wiped my feet.
The kitchen was dark except for the light over the cooker. The do-not-resuscitate form was where it always was, under the lighthouse. On the dresser, between the fruit bowl and the bread bin, there was a clean square on the wood where the box had sat for a fortnight, and Rosie went past it without looking and sat down at the table with her phone, and her face went blue in the light of it.
"I'll be here," she said. "I'm not listening."
He'd gone smaller since Monday. They do, at the end, all at once, as if somebody's let a bit of air out of them in the night. He was on his back on the pillows with the oxygen looped over his ears and the crossword on the floor where it had slid, and his hands on the blanket looked too big for him, as if he'd borrowed them. The pump was in its holster, locked, with a key I didn't have any more. It said what it was meant to say. I read it twice anyway.
"Nurse," he said, without opening his eyes.
"Frank."
"You've been arrested."
"Released under investigation. It's like being arrested, only they send you home to wait."
"That's most of life," said Frank.
His mouth was a disgrace. Nobody had done it since I had. The lips had gone to paper and the tongue had a coat on it, and I got a sponge out of my bag, because I'd brought my bag, because I always bring my bag, and a cup of water from the kitchen, and I did it. Round the gums, the cheeks, the roof, the tongue, and the balm on after with my little finger, and my hand was quite steady, and the whole time my heart was going like a dog in a car.
Then I put the sponge down on the saucer, and I sat on the edge of the bed, which you don't, and I said it.
"I was your wife's nurse."
His eyes opened.
"Calder Valley, the agency. Four nights in Harrogate. She asked me for the lot, Frank. In October. She got hold of my wrist and asked me, and I laughed. And on the last night I gave her a dose at one and I left the key in the box, and I sat down in the chair, and I think I gave it her. I don't remember doing it. I think I did. I'm going to tell them. The police and the nursing council and anybody else who's got a form."
The oxygen hissed. On the mantelpiece the carriage clock ticked very loudly.
"You didn't," said Frank.
He had to stop. He got his breath at the top of his chest, where it was living now, in little sips.
"You were asleep." Another sip. "In the chair. With your mouth open."
"Frank."
"I came in at half three."
I had my good hand on the blanket. I don't know when I'd put it there.
"I did it," said Frank. "I put it through the pump. What was in the box." His eyes were on the ceiling. "She asked me, love."
I couldn't say anything.
"She asked you," said Frank. "And she asked me."
"She asked you."
"Every night. That month." He turned his head on the pillow, slowly, until he was looking at me. "Let it lie. For Rosie."
The pillow had slid. It does, with a man his size, it goes out from under the shoulders a bit at a time and then the neck's at a bad angle and they wake up with a head like a brick. So I got up and leaned across him to pull it, as I'd done a hundred times in that room, with my face by his neck and my good arm under his shoulders.
Somebody had washed him that morning, Rosie or the hospice, with the yellow soap off the dish by the sink. It was on his neck, and in the pillowslip, old and clean and a bit like a shaving brush.
And it wasn't the parlour.
It was a bay window with the curtains open on a crescent, and the cold coming off the glass, and my head on the wing of a deep chair. It was dark. And it was this, over the bed, leaning, this exact smell, him, a foot from my face. And a snap, like a knuckle going.
I got the pillow straight. I put his head down on it. I pulled the blanket up to his chest and folded the top over a hand's width, the hospital way, and smoothed it.
"I sat with her after," said Frank. "Till it got light. You didn't stir."
"Why didn't you wake me?"
He thought about it.
"You looked as if you'd earned it," said Frank.
I sat down in the chair. My legs did it.
"Nine years," I said.
"Yes."
"Nine years I've thought it was me."
"I know, love." His hand moved on the blanket, an inch towards me, and stopped. "I'd like Rosie to think well of me. It's the last thing I'd like."
I cried then. Not the tap kind. The other kind, the kind with no noise in it, where it just runs out of you and you let it because you haven't got a free hand. He watched me do it. He didn't give me his handkerchief this time. He hadn't the arm for it.
When I could, I got up and did his heels, because they needed doing, and his hands, which were cold, and I rubbed some cream into them one finger at a time, and I didn't promise him anything. He didn't ask me to again. By one he was asleep with his mouth open, and I stood at the end of the bed and watched the blanket go up and down, and counted it.
At the door I stopped.
"Frank. Is there a man? Really?"
He didn't open his eyes.
"Go home, love," said Frank. "Mind the lane."
Rosie was asleep at the kitchen table with her cheek on her phone. I put her hood up over her head, which woke her, and she said, "Is he okay?" and I said he was asleep, and she said, "Your car's still here, Dad was going to have it towed," and put her face back down. I drove home in second gear the whole way, because second's the one I can reach with my left elbow, and the engine screamed at me down the bypass like my mother at a bus.
It was ten to three when I got in. The kitchen light was on, and Owen was at the table in his coat with his van keys in front of him on the oilcloth, lined up square with the edge.
"You waited up."
"I said."
He got up and put the kettle on, and I sat down where I'd been sitting all afternoon, with the mince pan still on the hob and the list on the back of the gas bill, and he made the tea and brought it over and put it down. On the envelope. Where it always went.
His eyes went to the gas bill beside it, and the list on the back, and he read it upside down to the end.
Then he picked the mug up again.
He put the mug on the oilcloth beside it. He pushed the envelope across the table to me with two fingers, the long brown one with the window and the red letters along the top and my mug ring through the K.
"Open your post, Kit," said Owen. "It's been there longer than I have."
I opened it with my teeth. You'd be surprised how many things you can do with your teeth when you've only got one hand. There were two sheets, folded in three, on thick paper with a crest at the top that wasn't the police and wasn't the council.
Dear Ms Mulvaney. The Harlow Review is a statutory inquiry, chaired by Dr Ruth Harlow, into the keeping of controlled-drug records at Calder Valley Nursing between two thousand and fourteen and two thousand and nineteen. Among the deaths the Review is examining is that of Mrs Ellen Hirst, also known as Ashdown, on the twentieth of November two thousand and seventeen, after which six ampoules of morphine were recorded as unaccounted for. You are named in the records as the attending nurse. The Review asks that you give evidence. You should be aware that Mr F. Ashdown has been given notice to attend and give evidence at his home on Wednesday the second of December. It was dated the sixth of October.
I read it twice. Then I put it down flat on the table and smoothed it with the side of my hand, as Sharma had smoothed her notebook.
Six.
Owen didn't say anything. He was standing, with his hands round his mug.
I got my mother's phone out. I found Rosie's post, which I could have found in the dark by then, the empty stairs and my torch on its side at the bottom, and four hundred shares, and two thousand now, and I laid the phone down on the oilcloth next to the letter, the two of them side by side, as if they'd been introduced.
"He asked me if she wrote it all down," I said.
"Who?"
"Frank. The night I went back. That policewoman, he said. Did she write it all down? And I said every word, in capitals." I laughed, and it came out wrong, and I stopped. "And he said good."
So I told him. I told him all of it, in the wrong order, as it had come to me in the bath, Ellen and October and the key in the lock and half past three, and she asked me, and she asked him, and let it lie, for Rosie. I said I could smell him. I said it twice. Owen listened to the whole of it with his mug in both hands and didn't drink any, and when I'd finished he put the mug down very carefully, the handle turned out, as if it might go over.
"The second," he said. "That's a week today."
"He'll not see it," I said. "He'll not see Sunday."
"No."
"Or he's covering for his boy. Gareth was in that house. Gareth had a key and a temper and a row with her at eleven o'clock, and I was asleep, Owen. I don't know anything. I was asleep."
He came round the table. I stood up, because I didn't know what else to do with myself, and I was talking into his coat before I knew I'd started.
"There's no man," I said. "There never was. He's eighty-two and he's frightened of a woman in Leeds with a letter."
Owen put his arms round me. He held on, hard, with his chin on the top of my head and the zip of his coat against my cheek. He smelled of the cold, as if he'd been standing out in it.
Over his shoulder the letter lay on the table the right way up, in the light from the cooker hood, with a brown ring across my name and Wednesday the second of December in the middle of it.