PART 5 — THE CUP
Dr. Halima Osei did four things in about eleven minutes on that Thursday morning and I have written them down because I want them in one place.
She did not answer the door.
She documented everything contemporaneously, in a record outside his network, while a man in a white coat was hitting the glass.
She took and sealed samples in front of me and photographed the labels, which is why nothing in this case was ever arguable.
And she asked me one question that nobody else had asked me in four years, which was: “Nerys, is there anywhere you can go tonight that he does not have a key to?”
She did not ask if I was frightened. She did not ask whether I was sure. She asked about a key.
The answer was no, and Bree Tancredi drove me to a place at half past one in the afternoon and sat in the car park for forty minutes until somebody came out to get me.
My mother was on a plane that night. I had not seen Gwen Sorenson in eleven months, and the first thing she said to me in a doorway in Thornwell was not anything about him. It was, “Right. Have you eaten?”
She stayed four months. She lives eleven minutes from me now.
My daughter is called Corliss. That was not a decision I made quickly and I did it with the permission of her sister, who I have met twice and who I write to at Christmas.
There is one more thing and then I am finished.
In the March, four months after he was charged, I got a letter from a registrar called Priya Nadkarni.
She is the one who looked at the floor at that dinner.
It is two pages long and it is the only apology I have received from anybody in that building. She writes that she went home that night and told her partner about it, and that her partner said somebody should say something, and that she said it was a marriage and none of her business.
She writes that she thought about it perhaps once a month for five months and did nothing, and that when the news went round Marchcroft she was not surprised for even one second, and that the not being surprised is the part she cannot get past.
I have not answered it. I have read it about eleven times.
I do not hold it against her, and I want that in here, because forty-five people were in that room and she is the only one who wrote.
I hold it against the man who was standing eleven feet away and who ran that department and who has since retired with a dinner.
I do not have the silver cup and I never saw it again after that morning. It went into an evidence bag at eleven forty on that Thursday and I assume it is still in one.
She doesn’t decide what goes into her body. I’m her husband and her doctor.
He said that in a hotel function room in a dinner jacket in front of forty-five of his own colleagues, including the man who ran his department, about a twenty-seven-week-old pregnancy and a cup with a lid on it.
He was not being careless. He had said it in every room in my life for four years, in softer words, and every single time it had gone by.
That night he said it in the hardest words he had ever used, in front of forty-five medical professionals, to see what would happen.
Nothing happened.
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