第17章 Testimony

She gave evidence in the district office on the Monday, in a room with a low ceiling and a radiator that was too hot, to a man from the water authority and a man from the coastguard and a woman from the district office who had taken her statement by letter and now wanted to hear it out loud. She told it in the order it happened. The duplicated plug. The false temporary. The plate on the deck of a boat. The book in a drawer. She did not tell them about the ledger in the shed, and she did not tell them about the letter, and she did not tell them about the road, and the reason she did not tell them was not protection, and she made sure they understood that, because she said it aloud in the middle of her statement. "I'm going to leave out some of it," she said, "and I want it minuted that I've said so. There's a family record in this parish that's older than this authority and it isn't mine to hand over and it isn't evidence of anything and I have not been asked for it and I have not offered it. Everything I'm giving you is a mark, a position, a plate, a book in a drawer and a man's account of what he did in 1952. That's what a public body acts on. If you need the other thing you'll have to go and ask a woman of eighty-eight on a hill, and I'll tell you now that you won't, and that I would think less of you if you did, and that if you did, she'd probably give it to you, and that she'd think about it for the rest of her life." The coastguard man, who was about fifty and who had a badge of tan on his forehead from a hat, said: "Miss Ashgrove. The fourteenth of April. You were on a set of stones in this bay at five in the morning." "Yes." "Do you know where they are?" "I know where they are when the water's off them. I've marked the position off the mouth marker at four different tides and I've got it in my working book and I can give you the coordinates tomorrow and I have not written it into anything I gave you because it isn't a navigation obstruction and there is nothing to obstruct." "They're a potential hazard to small craft." "They're a hazard to small craft the way a reef is a hazard to small craft. My office could have them charted as a drying rock. I asked the board to minute that they exist and I have not put them on a chart and I would not put them on a chart, because the minute and the chart say different things and the chart is a thing that strangers from other counties rely on, and I will not put a parish superstition in a document that gets used to keep people off the rocks at Ardra, and I would not put a road in it either." The woman from the district office said, "That's the first sensible thing anybody's said to me about this bay in nine years." Then they asked her the question she had known was coming since the first day. "Miss Ashgrove, is there anything out there that has harmed anybody?" Nell Ashgrove looked at the low ceiling for a while. "I'm going to answer that carefully," she said, "and I'd like the reason on the record as well as the answer. I'm not hedging because I don't know. I'm hedging because I've spent eleven years being paid to distinguish between a thing I don't know and a thing I can't prove, and this bay is the only place I've ever worked where those two have come apart, and I've watched four people this month be truthful with me in ways that cost them something, and not one of them has lied to me once." She put her hands on the table, the way she had in the board room. "Here's what I know. In eighty years of a family's tide record there are ninety-one days when somebody went out onto those stones. Two of the people who went out are dead and neither of them died because of it. Sixty of the ninety-one came back and could tell you what happened to them, and eighty-one came back and would not talk about it, and eleven came back and wrote the word *same* in a hand that did not change. I have not seen anybody harmed. I have not seen anybody changed in any way I could put in a report. I have met a man who went out at nineteen and came back and has spent thirty-three years unable to be alone in a room, and I have met a woman in Ardra who speaks a dialect that is not in this county any more and who is perfectly happy, and I have met a woman of eighty-eight who went out in 1946 and came back the same, and who is the reason I know any of it, and who was not harmed, and who was also not, as far as I can tell, entirely her." The room was quiet. "So the answer to your question is no," said Nell, "and I'm going to add, without being asked, that the reason nobody has ever been harmed on those stones is that everybody in this bay who is capable of being harmed by them has been told about them since they were old enough to walk, by a grandmother, or a mother, or a harbourmaster, or a man on a slip, and the instruction has always been the same one, and I have now heard it from four people who never met each other and who all word it the same way, and the wording is: the road comes out four times a year, and you do not walk it twice, and you do not go on it alone, and you do not go in the fog with no wind." "And if somebody does all four?" "Then they come back," said Nell, "and they're the same, and nobody knows, and it gets written in a book and the book is not published." The coastguard man looked at his notes for a while and then said, "That's the first sensible ruling I've ever heard in a statement," and put his pen down, and Nell Ashgrove took her coat off the back of the chair and thought, on the way out into the rain, that she had just told a public body everything about the bay except the only thing that mattered, and that she had done it on purpose, and that the only thing that mattered was that a brass key in her coat pocket opened a lock on a store above a ferry slip where a nine-year-old girl had once been left for an hour and ten minutes, and that she still did not know who had sent the letter.