She gave herself one hour.
One hour to fall apart, to sit on the edge of her bed with her hands in her lap and let the fear move through her properly. She had learned a long time ago that fear ignored was fear that festered ,that turned into something worse, something that made decisions for you in the dark. So she sat with it,she let it be loud.
Then she stood up, washed her face, and made a list.
It was what she did. It was what she had always done. When the world became too large and too threatening, she reduced it. She broke it into pieces small enough to hold.
What do I know?
She wrote it on the back of Officer Draven's card, in small neat letters.
Daniel Voss is dead.I had his blood on my scarf. I cannot account for three hours last night. I lied to the police.
She stared at the list for a long moment. Then she turned the card over, looked at the phone number printed there, and set it face down on the table.
What do I remember?
She closed her eyes and went back carefully, the way you move through a dark room, slowly, hands out, testing each step before you commit to it.
She remembered finishing work. She worked from home, translation work, contracts and legal documents that paid well and required very little human contact. She remembered closing her laptop at half past six. She remembered opening a tin of soup she didn't particularly want and eating it standing at the counter because she hadn't bothered to sit down.
She remembered the wine. One glass, then two. A documentary on the television about deep sea creatures that she had watched without really watching, her mind drifting the way it did in the evenings when the day loosened its grip and older thoughts crept back in.
And then something shifted.
There was a sound. She was almost sure of it now, pressing hard into the memory. A sound from the corridor outside her flat. A door,Voices low, urgent, the kind that meant something was wrong even before you understood the words.
She had gone to her door. She was almost sure of that too.
Had she opened it?
The memory blurred. Smeared at the edges like ink in rain. She pressed harder and found nothing solid , just a dim impression of cold air and the particular yellow of the corridor light at night, and then nothing. A wall. The gap beginning exactly there, at the threshold of her own front door.
She opened her eyes.
I went into the corridor.
That was something. That was more than she'd had an hour ago.
She stood and walked to her front door, opened it, and stepped out into the corridor. It was empty now, quiet, smelling faintly of the coffee someone on the third floor always burned in the mornings. She looked left toward Daniel's door. Blue and white tape had been fixed across it in a neat, terrible X. A small evidence marker , a yellow plastic triangle, the number 3 printed on it sat on the floor just outside his threshold.
Number three. Which meant there were at least two others somewhere she couldn't see.
She looked down at the corridor floor. Thin grey carpet, slightly worn along the centre where feet had passed back and forth for years. She looked at it the way she imagined a detective would ,the way she had watched people look at things in films, hunting for meaning in the ordinary.
There was a faint dark smear on the carpet. Small,easy to miss. About halfway between her door and his.
Her stomach dropped.
She went back inside before anyone could see her looking.
She sat at her kitchen table and pressed her palms flat against the wood and breathed in through the nose,out through the mouth. The way her therapist had taught her, years ago in a different city, when she had needed someone to teach her how to inhabit her own body again.
Think, she told herself. Just think.
She needed to retrace the night properly. Not from memory, memory had already proved itself useless. She needed evidence. The concrete, undeniable kind. Her phone, once charged, might tell her something , location data, messages, timestamps. The bar on Colmer Street where she sometimes went alone on Tuesday evenings might have cameras. The bartender, a quiet man named Fen who always remembered her order, might remember seeing her.
And Daniel's file ,the one she didn't yet know about, the one with her photographs inside it, the one sitting in a drawer in his flat behind blue and white tape was already waiting to be found.
She didn't know about the file yet.
But she was about to start pulling on exactly the right threads.