I wanted to be as honest as I could, so I told Judy about how I had constructed the charts, how I had cross-referenced them and how, this morning, I had wrapped them up in a giant folder and lugged them into the police station. I had been taken into an interview room and then I had unwrapped them in front of the startled gaze of the young detective. I had taken him through the most important details while he had consulted his own pretty skimpy file.
‘I knew I wasn’t going to convince them,’ I told Judy finally. ‘What was it that someone said? In order to understand me, you have to agree with me. For the police, the most important aspect of the case is that it’s closed and a line has been drawn under it. They don’t care about truth; it’s a matter of statistics. If they reopened the case and solved it, their statistics would look the same as they do now, except that they would have done a great deal more work.’
Judy looked at her watch.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Am I boring you?’
‘I was going to say that our time is up,’ she said. ‘I make it a rule to be very strict about that. I find it’s helpful if the participants know that the time is limited. But just this once I’m going to continue for a few minutes. What did the detective say?’
‘He said lots of things, all negative. He looked carefully at my charts and then he called for another detective to come and look at them as well, but I think that wasn’t because he found them interesting or convincing. It’s more likely that he thought it was all so bizarre that someone else needed to witness it so they wouldn’t think he was making it up when he told them about it in the pub later. What he said was the sort of thing that people have been saying all along. Namely, that I haven’t proved Greg and Milena weren’t having an affair. I’ve just proved they weren’t on those particular days. And then he said that maybe they weren’t having an affair, and if they weren’t he hoped that would be of some comfort to me.
‘We had a bit of an animated discussion about that. I said I hadn’t even found evidence that they knew each other. He said if it came to that, they didn’t even have to have known each other. They might have met for the first time that day. He might have given her a lift for no reason at all. I tried to point out that there was a problem with that: there was a note from Milena to Greg, which I had found in Greg’s possession, about a sexual encounter on a day when they couldn’t – absolutely couldn’t – have had one. Didn’t he think that was a problem?’
‘What was his response?’ asked Judy.
‘You’re a psychologist,’ I said.
‘Actually I’m a psychiatrist.’
‘It’s the same thing.’
‘Well…’
‘You must know that when people have adopted a position in a controversy, if they encounter evidence that contradicts it, that just entrenches them more strongly in the view they already hold. He had no answer to that. Well, no real answer. He just said every case had aspects to it that didn’t fit together and it was never possible to dot every i and cross every t. He saw no reason to reopen the case and he might even have said something about my needing to get a life or some cliché like that. He made it painfully clear that he didn’t want to see any more of me or my theory. So I gathered up my charts and left, and now I’m here telling you about it and I don’t expect you to be any more sympathetic than Detective Inspector Carter was.’
‘There’s one thing I don’t understand,’ said Judy.
‘What’s that?’
‘How did you compile the chart about Milena?’ said Judy. ‘I can understand how you could reconstruct the movements of your husband, but how could you do it for someone you didn’t know?’
I cursed myself silently. Lying was so much harder than telling the truth because the truth fitted together automatically. ‘It wasn’t exactly a chart,’ I said in desperation. ‘I had bits of information from here and there.’
Judy leaned towards me and her face took on a shrewd expression. ‘Ellie, are there things you’re not telling me?’
‘Not relevant things,’ I said, with an uneasy sense that, as I spoke, my nose ought to have been growing like Pinocchio’s.
There was a silence during which Judy looked at her watch again.
‘I should probably go,’ I said.
‘What would you say if you were sitting where I’m sitting listening to you?’
‘I’d probably think I was mad,’ I said. ‘But, then, when I’ve heard a tape of myself speaking I’ve always hated my voice. It sounds different from the inside. In the end, I don’t really care about convincing other people. I knew the police wouldn’t be interested, but I felt I had a responsibility as a citizen to tell them what I’d discovered. I need to know the truth. It’s as simple as that. As long as I know, I don’t care what else happens.’
‘Ellie, I once had a patient, a woman, and her child was ill with cancer and after a time she died. There was a suggestion that the early signs of the disease might have been missed by the doctors. The father became obsessed with this while his child was still alive. He started a campaign and took legal action, and he fought the case for years. I think it may still be going through the courts even. He took early retirement from his job. The case became his job, really. I was never quite sure of the rights and wrongs of it but the result was that the time he should have spent with his child, when time was precious, and later mourning after her death, was spent going to meetings, filing files and writing letters. He kept telling his wife he wanted something good to come out of their child’s experience, but to the wife it just felt as if he was avoiding facing up to what had happened and living through it. He kept busy so he wouldn’t have to stop and think and feel.’
‘His efforts might have changed procedures so that other children were saved,’ I said. ‘And you wanted him to give it up just so that he and his wife could feel better. Anyway, I’m not like that man. I don’t have a dying child to nurse. I don’t have a partner I might be neglecting. The only way I could neglect my husband now would be to allow people to have the wrong idea about him when he’s dead and can’t speak for himself.’
‘If you believe that, why are you here?’ asked Judy. ‘You know I’m not a policeman. I’m not someone who can evaluate evidence or discuss the legalities. I’m a person who helps people heal. So they don’t have to go out into the world and do things, they don’t have to set things right or revenge themselves on their enemies. They simply give themselves permission to be normal.’
‘That’s why I came,’ I said. ‘It’s like a reminder. You’re a reminder to me that there’s another way of living. It’s like someone who’s incredibly depressed trying to remind themselves that there will be a time in the future when things don’t look as they do now. There’ll come a time when I’ll buy shoes and meet people for drinks and flirt and be a good friend again…’
‘You make being normal sound frivolous.’
‘I don’t mean to. What I mean is that coming here is like looking through a window at a garden I’d love to go into and that maybe I will some day. But for the moment I’m not giving myself permission to be normal, quite the opposite. I’m giving myself permission to be abnormal. I’m going to stick with my charts and my conspiracy theories and I’m not going to play the part of the grieving widow who’s accepting and passive and basically invisible.’
Judy shook her head. ‘It doesn’t work like that,’ she said. ‘These aren’t just roles you can choose between. You can’t put off healing as if it were a foreign holiday.’
I thought for the moment. ‘Maybe I’m on holiday now,’ I said. ‘A holiday from being normal and nice and what everybody wants me to be.’