Chapter 24: Simone Testifies
Simone Hart entered the long room dressed as if for a photograph, and sat down as if for a sentence.
Dominic had not seen her choose a seat at a table in his house for five weeks without his heart doing something complicated. Now she took the chair furthest from him, folded her hands over a small envelope, and looked not at Julian, not at Dominic, but at the board secretary's pen. She was fifty-three, beautiful in the disciplined way of a woman who had decided beauty would be work and had never missed a day at it. That morning the discipline showed. So did the cost.
"I asked to speak," she said. "No one has promised me anything for speaking, whatever you may hear later. Least of all Dominic."
"In fact," Dominic said, with an effort at lightness that fooled nobody, "she refused my coffee."
"You make terrible coffee," Simone said, and a startled breath went around the table that was almost laughter. Her mouth trembled, and then steadied. "I have things to say which I should have said five weeks ago. Some of them I should have said three years ago, before I ever let Julian Mercer make me an offer."
Elena, returned to the chair beside Ada at the side of the room, watched Simone's hands. The envelope under them was creased, as if it had been carried and carried again.
"Julian came to me in the spring," Simone said. "He told me Dominic would never marry me. That was not news, but he said it kindly, which is his talent. He said the vineyard would be sold one day anyway, that Dominic's pride was the only obstacle, and that when the sale came I would be left with nothing — no home, no standing, no security. He offered me a share. A defined share, from the Halvern sale, and arrangements for my future. In return he asked for very little, he said. Only the household schedules. Who would be where. When the house would be empty. When Dominic travelled, when staff changed, when deliveries came."
She swallowed.
"I gave them to him. For the gala week most of all — the timings, the service movements, who held which duties. I told myself it was harmless. Schedules are not secrets, I said. I said a great many things that spring. I have a talent for dialogue with myself in which I always win."
"Simone," Julian said gently, "you are distressed. You are rewriting a few perfectly innocent planning conversations —"
"I am not distressed," she said. "I am ashamed. It is different. Distress seeks comfort. I am not seeking comfort." She turned to him for the first time, and Julian's face, Elena thought, finally lost the protection of its own smoothness. "I never knew about the bottle. I want that said to this board, to Dominic, and to the woman who stopped him drinking. I did not know. If I had known — God forgive me for needing to say if — I would have stood in that doorway myself. What I knew about was a sale, and a sick man's signature, and I told myself the sickness part was Julian's exaggeration for business reasons."
Now she slid the envelope to the centre of the table.
"This is the copy Julian gave me, to reassure me that everything was prepared. Dr. Feld's statement. The one you have already seen today. Dominic's supposed incapacity, all written and signed — and the date on it is two days before the gala. He gave it to me before the gala, Julian. Before. You said it was insurance. I kept it because even then, God help me, some part of me knew insurance is not usually dated before the accident."
Claire stood. She had waited, Dominic saw, through Nair and Elena and now Simone, holding the last piece until the room was ready to understand what it was looking at. His daughter had her mother's patience in an argument, which is to say she had saved the unanswerable for last.
"The board should see the cellar," Claire said.
Ben dimmed the blinds. The footage, from the overlooked camera Elena's notebook timestamps had pointed him to, was grainy and silent and utterly without theatre. A corridor. A cellar door. A time stamp, running in the corner, on the night before the gala.
A man crossed the frame carrying out his errand with the unhurried ease of someone who had been told exactly when a house would be empty. On his left wrist, as he reached for the door, the camera caught it clearly: a small anchor tattoo.
"That is not a member of this household's staff," Ben said from beside the screen. "He was a temporary waiter, hired late for the gala, under a name that was not his. He was paid in cash. We traced the payment, through the catering intermediary who received it and passed it on, to an account controlled by Mr. Mercer."
The footage ran on a few seconds longer — a man, a door, a schedule kept by someone who had been promised a share — and then Claire stopped it. She did not replay it. She did not need to.
"The schedules Simone passed on told him when the cellar would be unwatched," she said. "Julian's code opened it. Julian's money hired the hands. And Julian's doctor had already written the ending, two days early." She looked down the table at the directors. "My father and I have had our own years of silence, and I will spend a long time being sorry for my part in them. But I did not learn what happened in this house from gossip. I learned it from a ledger, a notebook, a camera, and a date. So will you."
One of the directors asked, in a voice he tried to keep level, whether the recording could have come from another night. Ben shook his head. "The camera clock was checked against the lock record and the ledger," he said. "They agree. That is the night before the gala."
Julian stood up. "This is a performance. A family performance, rehearsed — Simone is emotional, Claire is a filmmaker, she knows how to cut a story —"
"Sit down, Julian," Dominic said.
"I will not be tried by my uncle's —"
"You are not being tried," Dominic said. "Not by us. That part is not ours to do."
And Simone, quietly, to the table rather than to any one person, said the last thing she had come to say.
"I took money's promise for telling a man when his own house would be empty. I will live with the name for that. But I will not sit silent while the man who used me calls it love of family."
She rose, nodded once to Elena — an apology, offered without words, in front of everyone — and sat down again, because there was still the matter of the men waiting downstairs.
Chapter 25: Julian, Arrested