I could have refused to eat. I have refused food at that table before over less.
I could have stood up and walked out of that house and been in my car inside ninety seconds with the keys in my own bag.
I did none of those things.I swapped the bowls.
Which means I needed somebody to drink it.
There is no reading of that which is self-defence. Self-defence is the bowl on the floor.
What I did was evidence-gathering, and I used a seventy-nine-year-old woman to do it, and for eleven months I have been describing it to people as instinct.
It was not instinct. Instinct is fast and stupid. This took four minutes and it involved a plan.
And I have to go one further, because there is a thing I have said to exactly one person.
I was not certain she would only be unwell.
I did not know what was in that packet. That is the whole premise of everything I did that afternoon; it is the reason I could not simply accuse him.
Which means I put an unknown quantity of an unknown thing in front of a woman of seventy-nine, and I sat and watched her eat two mouthfuls of it, and I did not stop her.
I have been told, by somebody qualified, that in that state a person is not making that calculation.
I was making it. I remember the calculation. It was: she will be all right and he will not be able to say I imagined it.
And here is why I needed evidence instead of an exit, which is the part underneath the part.Because I no longer trusted my own head.
Six months of being told I was tired, confused, worrying too much. Six months of a man saying you’ve already asked me that in a kind voice.
It had worked. That is the whole point of it and it had worked completely.
By that Sunday I was a woman who could not be certain she had seen what she had just seen, standing eleven feet from the man who had arranged for that to be true.
So I did not need to escape.
I needed a witness who was not me, and it had to be a witness those people could not dismiss — which meant it had to be one of them.
That is the real reason it was her and not a doctor, and not a policeman, and not a friend I could have driven to in nineteen minutes.
