Chapter 119: Bellhaven Court
Theo arranged it in the March. He did not ask me. He told me it was arranged.
“Ottilie Marsh will meet you. Thursday, three o'clock. Bellhaven Court, staff room.”
“Will you be there.”
“I'll be in the car park. I'm not coming in. I've been in enough.”
Bellhaven Court is a twenty-four bed residential home on Kell Road.
A ramp, a bad hedge, and a car park with eleven spaces.
I had never seen it. In six years and in four hundred and twelve pages, I had never once seen the building.
Ottilie Marsh is fifty-three. She has worked there nineteen years.
She made tea in a staff room with a broken chair in it and did not apologise for the chair.
She had a photograph in her bag and she put it on the table before she sat down.
Nadine Okoro, forty-one, in a green tabard, in the corridor by the linen cupboard, laughing at something outside the frame.
She had a gap in her front teeth. I had not known that. There is no photograph of her in the court file.
Here is what I learned in one hour and ten minutes on a Thursday afternoon.
She rode a green Raleigh. Three-speed.
A milk crate zip-tied to the rack with four ties, two of them blue.
She kept a spare pair of work shoes in the crate, because she cycled in one pair and worked in the other.
She sang while she did the med round. She sang badly and she knew it and the residents asked her to anyway.
There was a man called Ivor Pelk. Parkinson's, room nine.
He wanted his toast cut into nine pieces.
Not eight. Nine. He counted them. Nadine cut nine, every night, for four years, and never once said anything about it.
Ivor Pelk died in 2021. Ottilie said he asked after her for about a year and then stopped asking.
She carried a laminated card in her tabard pocket.
Theo's school timetable, printed out and cut down to fit.
She could never remember which day he had swimming. She had it laminated at a shop for two dollars.
Ottilie has that card. She showed it to me and then she put it back in her bag and I did not ask.
Nadine worked nights.
Ten at night until six in the morning. Four on, three off, for eight years.
She was not on nights that Friday.
Ottilie's daughter had a thing at school that evening.
Nadine swapped onto the two-to-ten so that Ottilie could go to it.
If she had worked her own shift she would have been inside this building at half past ten at night.
She would have been in the corridor by the linen cupboard, cutting toast into nine pieces for a man in room nine.
I have not found a way to hold that fact that makes it smaller.
Her ride home was five point eight miles. She had done four point one of them.
Twenty-two minutes left. That is not a figure I got from Ottilie. That is from the reconstruction file, and I have known it since I was twenty-four.
At the end Ottilie took me down the corridor and showed me the cupboard where the old books are kept.
They keep the medication administration records for seven years.
Bound books. Numbered lines. Initials, time, date.
The book for that period was still there because nobody had got round to the destruction schedule.
She found the page in about a minute, because she has been doing this for nineteen years.
Friday. Evening round. Twenty-one forty-eight.
Initials N.O., in blue biro, in a small hand, on a printed line, with the date written beside it.
Forty-five minutes before she was killed, Nadine Okoro signed her name to a document.
I stood in a corridor and looked at that page for a long time and did not touch it.
Then Ottilie closed the book and put it back on the shelf, third from the left, and we went back down the corridor.
At the door she said one thing that I have not been able to put anywhere else in this account.
“She'd have hated all of it. The court. The money. She'd have said, that's a lot of fuss over me.”
Theo was in the car park.
Standing by his car, not in it, with his hands in his pockets and his back to the hedge.
I did not tell him what I had seen. He has seen it. He was the one who told Ottilie which cupboard.
“All right?”
“Her name was Nadine Okoro,” I said. “She cut the toast into nine pieces.”
He looked at the hedge for a while and then he nodded twice.
“Yeah,” he said. “She did.”
He did not forgive me for anything. He has never used that word and I have never asked him to.
He drove me to the bus stop on Kell Road, which was four minutes, and we did not speak for any of it.