House of Correction
only ever saw Owen Mallon when he was out running. He was small and wiry with a neat beard, and he was constantly dashing through Okeham in shorts and a thin yellow top, even in winter, his eyes fixed on the horizon, his legs all muscle and the sinews in his neck standing out. She found it hard to picture him in his GP surgery in smart clothes, putting a stethoscope on people’s backs and asking them to cough.Owen Mallon said that when he met Tabitha, she was bundled up in a thick jacket and her hair was wet; he thought she looked unwell. He didn’t know the exact time, just remembered a helicopter flying over when they were speaking so he couldn’t catch what Tabitha had said.
Tabitha stood up and wandered into the workroom once more. She walked up and down, up and down, between the sewing machines, clapping her hands together to get warmth back into them. She tried to picture the village, to picture herself trudging around in it with her head down, feeling invisible but clearly not so. She could almost taste the salty air and hear the waves rolling in, and her tumbledown, gray house with its muddle of outhouses stood clear in her mind. But everything else was indistinct. She concentrated, summoning the almost-sheer cliffs standing like a wall behind it, with the stunted oaks growing impossibly out of the rock face; the sea that every day had a different voice and different face but on that day had been metal-gray and cold and grim. A narrow road snaked into Okeham, and ended a few hundred meters beyond the post office, where it circled back on itself. At the road’s end, a gravel track led to her house—and to Stuart’s. He and Laura lived in one of the larger places in the village, a symmetrical building that looked naked and exposed in the winter when the trees were bare, with large windows looking out to the sea, a front porch, a separate garage for their two cars and a garden that was mostly lawn.
Tabitha tried to picture the rest of the houses that clustered together on either side of the road. In her mind’s eye, she could see the little round-tower church of St. Peter’s, a stone’s throw from the village shop, and beside it the shabby vicarage where Mel lived. But her mind was full of holes; the village was trickling through them. She went back to her cupboard and started trying to draw a map of Okeham in her notebook but quickly ran out of space. Turning to her list of tasks, she wrote “Ask librarian/Shona/Andy for A3 sheets of paper.”
She needed to think about the case as if she weren’t involved in it. The obvious thing to start with was the timeline of the day. She turned to a fresh page and headed it “December 21, 2018.” Then, checking back to the notes she had made and leafing through the bundle of paper in front of her, she drew up a list:
6:30: Wake up. Lie there for some time (how long?). Not feeling good.
7:30 (approx): Get up. Start making porridge and tea. No milk.
8:00: Go to village shop to buy milk. See CCTV.
She looked at the image and added:
In PJ bottoms and wellies. School bus there. Meet Rob Coombe?
??? A.M.: Go for swim. Meet Dr. Mallon.
She looked at the CCTV images once more and wrote:
10:34: Stuart drives out of village in his car.
10:41: Stuart drives back again in direction of house (blocked by fallen tree).
2:30: Meet vicar.
She chewed the end of her pen. What had she been doing at two-thirty? She had no memory of leaving the house after her morning swim, though she thought she did remember a conversation with Mel about drones at Gatwick Airport; the vicar had said it was bound to be the work of eco-warriors.
3:30: Laura returns. No sign of Stuart.
In her list of tasks, she wrote: “Find out exactly when tree blocked road and when it was cleared.”
4:30: Andy arrives at house. Discovers body.
She stood up again and continued her pacing. She had no idea what time it was. The sky outside was heavy with black clouds; it was the kind of day that is never quite light. Perhaps it was lunchtime, but she didn’t feel hungry. She went into the cubicle and ate another sugar lump, then jumped up and down on the spot for a few minutes to keep warm.
Stuart had been killed after 10:41 A.M., when he had been seen in his car driving past the village shop, and before about 3:30 P.M.—the forensics made it clear that he had been dead at least an hour and probably longer by the time his body was discovered. Who had been in the village during those times, after the tree had fallen across the road and before it got cleared? That was the question. She started counting off on her fingers, but lost track and so returned to her notebook. She started a new list:
Me
Mel
Shona
Rob Coombe
Andy
Terry
Dr. Mallon
Luke???? (Under her tasks, she added: “When did Luke arrive?”)
Pauline Leavitt
Was that all? It was possible: in the summer the village filled up with tourists. Boats bobbed out at sea, visitors came to stand where Coleridge had reportedly stood, the hotel on the outskirts was open and the little café beside the shop often crammed. But in the winter the place was practically deserted. She flicked through all the sheaves of paper again and found in the police report that there had been a delivery driver who had made it into the village minutes before the tree fell. He had handed over an Amazon parcel to Stuart at 9:45 and then got stuck in Okeham until the road had been cleared, so she added him.
That made ten people so far, including herself. Six of them had seen her during the day. Four of them—Mel, Rob Coombe, Dr. Mallon and Pauline Leavitt—had said she had been agitated, or angry