Chapter 8: The Statement That Could Not Be Injuncted
Roy Hess agreed without hesitation.
He said yes before Lila had finished explaining what they needed.
He said yes the way people say yes when they have been waiting a long time to be asked.
They met him at the police station at noon.
Detective Marsh had arranged a formal recorded interview.
Roy sat across from two officers and a prosecutor's liaison and told the story the same way he had told it the night before — steadily, without drama, without embellishment.
He described what he saw.
He described the man.
He described the bottle, the rags, the way the flame caught and the way he ran.
He was in the interview room for two hours.
When he came out, he looked lighter.
Not happy.
But lighter.
"Is that enough?" he asked Marsh.
"It's significant," Marsh said carefully.
"Is it enough to matter?"
Marsh looked at him.
"Yes," he said.
"It matters."
Sam gave his own statement afterward.
He sat in a small room with a recording device on the table and a glass of water he didn't touch and he told them everything.
The phone call from Clara the night of the fire.
What she said about the man who came to the kitchen.
The hospital, the next morning, the doctor who told him his son had not survived.
The years afterward — the grief, the silence, the way he had eventually come back to work because working was the only thing that kept him upright.
He told them about the scar.
How he got it pulling a colleague out of a burning building two years after Clara d!ed.
How he had never talked about it.
How a child had recognized it from a dream.
The prosecutor's liaison stopped him there.
"The boy — Eli — he remembered the scar from a dream?"
"He said he'd dreamed about it," Sam said.
"A mark on a man's arm.
He'd had the dream more than once.
He told me later he used to think it was just something his mind invented." He paused.
"Children who experience trauma very early sometimes retain fragments.
Sensory impressions.
Not memories exactly.
More like — echoes."
The liaison wrote something down.
Sam's statement took ninety minutes.
When he walked out of the room, Eli was sitting in the hallway with Lila, the two of them side by side on a bench, Eli working through something on a piece of paper with a pen he'd borrowed from the front desk.
"What are you writing?" Sam asked.
"Questions," Eli said.
"Things I want to ask you.
About her.
About before." He looked up.
"Is that all right?"
"Yes," Sam said.
"That's more than all right."
Lila's phone buzzed.
She read the screen and exhaled.
"The injunction was denied," she said.
"The court ruled that the financial records are relevant to an active criminal inquiry and cannot be withheld." She looked at Sam.
"Warde's team has forty-eight hours to comply."
Sam sat down on the bench on the other side of Eli.
The three of them sat there for a moment in the corridor of the police station, the fluorescent light humming above them.
"What happens to Warde?" Eli asked.
"If the records confirm what we think they confirm," Lila said, "he'll be charged.
Arson resulting in d*ath.
Possibly more, depending on what the records show about his involvement in the cover-up." She paused.
"He's in his seventies.
His legal team will argue his health, his age, the passage of time.
But the charge will be on record.
The truth will be on record."
"And Eleanor?" Eli asked.
"She gave her statement this morning.
Voluntarily.
Her lawyers negotiated the terms, but she didn't minimize her role.
She confirmed the fraud.
She confirmed what she knew about Warde." Lila paused.
"She asked me to give you something."
She reached into the briefcase and produced a sealed envelope.
Eli's name was written on the front in Eleanor's handwriting.
Eli looked at it for a long moment.
He didn't open it.
"Later," he said.
He put it in his jacket pocket.
Sam watched him.
"You're handling this very well," Sam said.
"Better than I am."
"I've had a strange life," Eli said simply.
"I think it prepared me for strange things." He looked at Sam.
"Can I ask you one of my questions?
Now?"
"Yes."
"What was she like in the morning?
Before work.
What did she do?"
Sam thought about it.
Really thought about it, the way he had not let himself think for a very long time.
"She made tea before anything else," he said.
"Strong tea.
She said coffee was for people who had given up on flavor." He almost smiled.
"She hummed while she waited for the kettle.
Always the same song.
I never knew what it was.
I asked her once and she said she didn't know either, that she'd heard it somewhere as a child and it just stayed."
Eli was quiet.
"I hum," he said.
"In the kitchen.
When I'm waiting for things." He looked at Sam.
"I never knew where it came from."
Sam looked at his son.
Neither of them spoke.
Down the corridor, a door opened.
A clerk called Lila's name for a signature on something.
Lila stood.
Looked back at the two of them on the bench.
She left them there.
Sam and Eli sat in the humming light, and Sam began to answer the questions on the list, one by one, and Eli wrote down the parts he wanted to keep, and the afternoon moved around them quietly, the way afternoons do when something that has been broken for a very long time has finally, carefully, begun to be repaired.
May you like
Philip Warde's financial records arrived at the prosecutor's office the following morning.
By afternoon, his solicitor had stopped returning calls.
