I have watched the pier footage. It exists and I have a copy and I have been through it more than I should.
There are four seconds, after Kettleman steps up and before I shake my head, where I am looking at her.
And my face is doing nothing at all. It is completely still.
I know that face. I have used it on quarterdecks and in briefings and once on a very frightened nineteen-year-old.
It is the face I use when I have already decided how something is going to end and I am waiting for the other person to get there on their own.
My sister was six feet from a river with my bag in her hand, and I was standing there being extremely good at my job.
At her.
And because I gave her that room, a sixteen-second stretch of my sister exists on a pier camera and in an investigator’s notebook, and it is now attached to her name in a file she cannot read.
It has been fourteen months.
There is a process about the contractor and Wendell is part of it and I am a witness and that is all I am going to write about that.
Arabelle was not charged with anything in the end. She was interviewed twice. The second time she brought a solicitor who told her to answer everything, and she did, and it is the first time in her life she has ever done what somebody told her.
Her firm let her go in the December. Not for the pier. For the booking, which was in her name on their system because Wendell used her login.
She has not worked since. She is forty-four with eleven years in one job and a reference her employer will only confirm dates on.
And Wendell moved out in the January, which nobody in that family saw coming and which I did.
He had a wife who had just become the single most documented liability in his industry. There was never a version where he stayed.
She is in that house on her own now, the house she was so determined nobody should look down on.
I have not enjoyed one minute of that and I want that written down, because for about two weeks in the November I thought I was going to.
She rang me in the March. First time in fourteen months.
