I did not. I moved my bowl to the left and took the one nearest me and I did not look at whose place it was, because looking would have taken another second and there was not another second.
It could have been her husband. It could have been a cousin who had driven two hours.
I have had eleven months to sit with the fact that the woman who ended up with that bowl was the right one entirely by accident.
By the time anybody turned back, everything looked exactly as it had.
His mother picked up her spoon.
She took one mouthful. She said something to her husband. Then another.
Across the table he said: you haven’t touched your soup.
I said: it’s too hot.
His eyes went down to the bowl in front of me, and for about a second something crossed his face — not suspicion. Arithmetic. The same thing I had been doing four minutes earlier.Several minutes later Nerine stopped in the middle of a sentence.
She blinked. Then blinked again. Her hand went tight on the edge of the table.
She said: something’s wrong.
And I want to record the two seconds before that, because I was the only person in the room looking at the right end of the table.
She did not put her hand on the table because she felt faint.
She put it there and then she looked at her son.
Straight at him, across eleven feet, for about a second and a half, before she said a single word to anybody.
That look is the entire case. Nobody else saw it and it is not in any document and it is the only thing I know for certain that I will never be able to prove.
Her husband said: what do you mean?
She said: I feel strange.
And there were about twenty people round that table by then, because two more had come through from the front room, and every single one of them turned to her.Chairs went back. Somebody said sit down, Mum. Somebody else had a phone out.
Except me. I was watching Renwick.
And he was not looking at his mother.
He was looking straight at me, and his face had gone completely pale, and his eyes were moving over me the way you check a room you have just entered.
