The Perfect Victim

Chapter One

The fruit had been cut the night before. The melon had gone soft where it touched the pineapple and the cling film had sweated onto the inside of itself, and nobody had taken any. Ione stood in front of the plate with a bottle of water she had opened and not drunk.

Roz came in with the index card.

"They've moved us to nine ten," she said. "Which is better."

"Why is nine ten better."

"Nine ten is after the weather. People stay for the weather." Roz sat down on the arm of the couch. She did that instead of sitting on couches, in every room, in four months, and Ione had never asked why. "Three points."

"I know the three points."

"Say them."

"The complaint that wasn't taken seriously. The review. What the Centre does now." Ione put the bottle down on the counter beside the fruit and picked it up again. "It's the same three points."

"It's the same three points because they're the right three points."

The green room had a television bolted high in the corner with the sound off and the captions on, and the captions were about a bridge closure in Gatineau. There was a mirror with bulbs around it that were not on. There was a laminated card by the door listing the wifi password and a phone extension for the studio floor, and someone had written a second password underneath in pen, and the pen was blue and the printing was blue, and Ione had already read both of them twice.

Roz turned the index card over. She had written the points out again in the passenger seat on the way in, in the dark, off the card she already had, which meant she now had the same three points in two hands.

"Can I move you."

"Move me."

Roz took the arm of the chair and turned it, maybe fifteen degrees, so the window went to Ione's left. "There. That's the side they'll use. Camera two's the one with the red light and camera two is on your left, so if you're going to look anywhere, look left."

"You said that in December."

"I'll say it again in eight minutes."

It was eighteen days since the order had been revoked. The date was on a piece of paper in a folder in the car, along with the endorsement and a photocopy of the application and a letter from the Crown's office explaining, in a paragraph Ione could have written herself, what the revocation did and did not do. She had read the letter in the driveway in the dark on the third of January with the engine running and the heater on the windshield, and the thing she had noticed was that the signature at the bottom was the same black as the body of the letter, which meant it had been generated and not signed.

She had not minded that. She had noticed it and put the letter back in the envelope and gone inside and eaten a bowl of soup.

"They'll ask about the trial date," Roz said.

"I'll say October."

"You'll say October and nothing else, because it's before the court."

"I know what's before the court."

"I know you know." Roz stood up and pulled her cardigan straight. "I'm saying it so I've said it."

That was Roz's whole system and she was not embarrassed about it. She had two lanyards and a binder she carried against her chest like a schoolbook and a habit of finishing every explanation, all the way down, past the point where the person she was explaining to had stopped needing it. In November she had explained the difference between a preliminary inquiry and a trial for eleven minutes in a corridor while Ione, who ran accompaniments for a living, had stood and let her.

A runner put his head in and said five minutes and went away again. Ione put the water bottle down and left it.

The studio was colder than the green room and smelled like floor cleaner. There were three cameras and only one of them had a person behind it; the other two were on remote heads and moved by themselves, smoothly, without anybody's hands on them, in a way that made you watch them instead of the person you were talking to. Ione sat where she was put. A woman clipped a microphone to the neck of her sweater and fed the cable down inside it, warm knuckles against her collarbone for two seconds, and said sorry, and Ione said it's fine.

The host was called Deven. He had done the segment in November when nobody could use her name, and he had been careful then in a way that Ione had disliked without being able to say why, and today he shook her hand and said it's good to be able to say who you are.

"Thanks."

"Anything you don't want to go near."

"No."

"Okay." He looked at the card in front of him. "The Centre. The money's confirmed?"

"March."

"Can I mention it."

"You can mention it."

The floor manager counted them in on his fingers, and on the last one he pointed instead of folding it down.

She had said it eleven times. That was the thing about the account, that it was work, and got easier the way work got easier; by the fourth or fifth time the sentences had come loose from the night and started belonging to the segment instead. She said the date. She said she had come home at ten past eleven from a shift she had picked up because a colleague's kid was sick. She said the back door had been open and that she had thought the wind had done it, because the wind had done it in October and she had had the latch looked at. She said, when Deven asked, that she had been in her own kitchen, and Deven did not interrupt her, and she let it sit for the count of two the way it had sat the last four times, and then she went on.

She did not describe it. She had described it twice, early, before Roz, and both times the transcript had come back with things in it she did not remember saying.

Deven asked about the earlier complaints, which is what everyone asked about, because it was the part of the story that had a shape. She said what was true, which was that a man with a documented history had been looked at three times and charged none of those times, and that the file which eventually stopped him had been built in eleven days by people who had been told to take it seriously.

"And that's the review," Deven said. "The nationwide one."

"It came out of the reporting in 2017." She gave him the numbers. One in five, before. Nineteen point three nine per cent, against ten point eight for physical assault, and thirty-seven thousand files pulled back out and read again, and six thousand four hundred and fifty-seven of them found to have been coded wrong. She had those numbers the way she had her own phone number, because she had said them in church basements and in a Legion hall and once to a subcommittee of eleven people in Kingston with a plate of shortbread on the table.

"And before that," Deven said, "those files just."

"They weren't reported. Unfounded didn't go to Statistics Canada. So a complaint could be made, and closed, and after that there was no number anywhere that it had happened." She looked left, at camera two, without deciding to. "It's not that nobody believed her. It's that afterwards there was no record that she'd said anything at all."

"And the Centre where you work. Latchford."

"The Latchford Centre."

"They're up for renewal."

"Five-year core funding. It's announced in March." She had not planned the next part and it came out anyway, at the right speed. "We do about four hundred intakes a year in a town of forty-eight thousand. That number doesn't go down when the funding does. It just stops being written down anywhere."

Deven let that be the end of it, which is what you do when somebody hands you an ending.

Eleven minutes. The floor manager gave her a thumbs-up that was for the room and not for her, and the woman with the microphone came back and unclipped it and pulled the cable up out of her sweater in one movement, and Ione stood and her left knee had gone from sitting still.

In the corridor Roz was on her phone with her thumb over the screen. She looked up.

"That was the best one."

"Thanks."

"No, I mean it was the best one. The four hundred thing." Roz put the phone away. "Don't tell them where you got it, because you didn't get it anywhere, you just said it."

The producer caught them at the security doors. He was younger than Deven and had the lanyard of somebody who did not leave the building, and he was carrying two coffees that were not for either of them.

"I wanted to say," he said. "Sorry. I wanted to say we get a lot of these."

"Sure."

"And I read the file. The summary, the disclosure summary, whatever it is they send." He shifted one coffee to the other hand. "It's the cleanest file anyone's seen. In here, I mean. Usually there's a hole in it somewhere and you end up writing around the hole." He was already stepping back into the corridor, doing the thing where you leave before the other person has to. "Anyway. It's good when it's clean."

"Thank you," Ione said.

Outside, the lot had been salted and not plowed, so there was a crust that broke under her boots in slabs the size of a hand. Minus nineteen. The light was flat and low and came off the snowbanks with no color in it, and the exhaust from the car ahead of them came out and hung there and did not go anywhere.

Roz drove. The 417 to the 416 and then off it onto 15, which took twenty minutes longer and had no trucks on it, and Ione had never once said she preferred it.

"He was nice," Roz said, somewhere past Kemptville.

"He was."

"You were better than him."

A plow went the other way with its blade up and its lights going, hauling nothing, on its way to somewhere it was needed.

Clean was a word she used. She used it at work twice a week. A clean file was one where the intake matched the police narrative matched the accompaniment log matched the outcome, where the dates lined up and the same pen had signed the bottom of every page, where you could put it in front of a funder or a coroner or a lawyer and not have to say anything about it first.

Making files clean was most of what she had done for eleven years.

"You've gone quiet."

"I've been up since four."

"You have been up since four," Roz agreed, and put the radio on low, which was her version of leaving somebody alone.

The 15 went through Merrickville and past the lock, which was frozen and had a snowmobile track running down the middle of it, and out the other side. Ione put her hand flat on the door where the heat came out and left it there until it was too hot, and then she left it there a while longer.

Chapter Two

MERIDIAN CABLE & SECURITY. SERVICE HISTORY.

ACCOUNT 4471. 14 FERRIS ST, CARROW FALLS ON.

12 NOV 2024. TECH CALL 0940. NO FAULT FOUND. NO CHARGE.

19 NOV 2024. INSTALL: DOORBELL CAM MC-2 PLUS CHIME. 3YR PARTS/LABOR.

19 NOV 2024. CLOUD PLAN A (30-DAY) ACTIVATED.

04 DEC 2024. CUSTOMER CALL RE CHIME VOLUME. RESOLVED BY PHONE.

WARRANTY EXPIRES 19 NOV 2027. RETAIN THIS RECORD.

The chime had started doing a thing.

It was supposed to go bing-bong, one sound, the way a chime goes. What it did now was bing, and then a gap you could count in, and then bong, so that anybody at the door got halfway through wondering whether it had worked and pressed it again, and then the whole thing overlapped itself.

"It's a two-tone chime," Callum said. He was at the sink with his back to her. "It does two tones."

"It does one tone and then a gap and then the other tone."

"That's two tones."

"The gap's new."

"The gap's not new, you've started listening for it." He ran the tap. "That's a different thing."

He was not wrong and she did not say so.

The kitchen drawer had everything in it that did not have a drawer of its own. Takeout menus, a tape measure, the warranty card for a kettle they no longer owned, four dead batteries neither of them would throw out in case they were the good ones, a church cookbook of Callum's aunt's with a rubber band round it, and at the bottom, flat, gone slightly gray along one crease, the Meridian sheet.

The overhead light in the kitchen had been out for eleven days. Ione took the sheet to the light over the stove and held it up.

Three years, parts and labor. Nineteenth of November 2027. She had what she wanted about four seconds in, and then she read the rest of it, because it was in front of her and she was a person who read the rest of it.

"There's a service call on the twelfth."

"Twelfth of what."

"November. Twelfth of November." She turned it round, which was pointless, since he was not looking. "Nine forty in the morning. Tech call, no fault found, no charge."

"We didn't have it on the twelfth."

"No."

"We didn't have anything from them on the twelfth. The install was the nineteenth." The tap went off. "That's before."

"I know it's before."

He came over, drying his hands, and took the sheet out of her fingers at the top corner. He read paper differently from anyone she had ever met. He held it by one corner and let it hang and read straight down the left edge first, the dates, and then went back up and read across, and it had taken her two years of marriage to notice he did it and another one to work out that it was because his whole job was finding what was missing from a run of things.

"They've put someone else's call on our account," he said. "It happens. My sister got a plumbing bill for a house in Almonte for two years, and the third year they sent her a Christmas card."

"They sent her a card."

"To the house in Almonte. She's never seen it." He folded the sheet back along its old crease, which was where it had been folded before, and put it back in the drawer under the menus. "I'll call them Monday. No charge anyway."

"Okay."

He shut the drawer with his hip.

She had been home nine weeks. There were things in the house she could not do yet, and she had stopped keeping the list because keeping the list turned out to be one of them.

She could not stand at the sink with the window black. She could stand at it with the blind down, and she could stand at it in daylight, and she could not do it with the window black, so Callum had started doing the dishes, every night, without either of them ever having said a word about it, and she had let him, and she was not sure any more which of them had decided.

She could not have music on and water running at the same time.

She could put her keys down on the shelf in the hall, which was where they had always gone. She could not put them down on the kitchen counter. There was no reason for that one. She had turned it over a few times in December looking for a reason and had not found one and had stopped looking, and she still walked the length of the hall with the keys in her hand every time she came in.

The back door was new. Same frame, same size, same three panes across the top, and it weighed something else. The old one had shut with a click near the top. This one shut with a lower sound, further down, and it needed a hip to catch. In the first week she had let it swing twice and it had not caught either time, and now she pushed it with her hip every time whether it needed it or not, and it took two goes about one time in five, and Callum had planed it in December and it had made no difference.

She went up and ran a bath she did not get into, which she did about twice a week, and while it filled she stood in front of the mirror with her sleeve pushed up.

The mark on the outside of her left forearm, below the elbow, had come up green in the second week and gone brown in the fourth and was now the color of nothing much. Under the bathroom light it was a smudge about the size of a thumbprint, and under any other light in the house it was not there at all. It was the last one. Everything else had gone. She turned her arm over and back once and pulled the sleeve down.

The whine in her right ear had a pitch she could find on the microwave and nowhere else in the house. She had gone round the whole ground floor with it in December, room by room, holding things up to her head like a woman looking for a leak. The microwave at the end of a cycle. Nothing else. Not the smoke alarm, not the kettle, not the tone the van made when Callum left the door open.

The audiologist in Perth had put a chart in front of her with a notch cut out of the middle of it and had talked about the notch for four minutes and had been good at that part. Then she had said the word permanent kindly, at the end, standing up, with her hand already on the door.

Ione had watched people do that for eleven years from the other side of the desk. She had a rule about it in the induction pack. You do not deliver the worst sentence in the appointment while you are standing up, because the person you are saying it to will remember the standing and not the sentence.

She had said thank you and gone down to the car park and sat there for a while and then driven home.

She let the bath out and went down, and halfway down the stairs the doorbell went.

Bing. The gap. Bong.

She stopped with one hand on the rail. There was a shape in the glass panel beside the door, sideways on, and the porch light was on because the porch light had been on every night since November.

Callum came out of the kitchen with a tea towel and went past her and opened it, and it was Denise from seventeen with a foil tray.

"I'm not coming in," Denise said. "Ron's in the car. I'm not coming in."

"Come in."

"I'm not." She handed the tray over the threshold. "It's the pork thing. It freezes."

Ione came the rest of the way down and stood in the hall with her hand still out from the rail, and Denise looked at her the way people had been looking at her since the third of January, which was straight at her and then quickly at something else, and then back, having decided.

"You were good on the telly," Denise said.

"Thank you."

"I said to Ron, she's the only one on there who knows what she's talking about." She was already going backwards down the step. "The pork thing freezes. Don't do it in the microwave."

The door shut. Callum's hip, then the click, further down than the old one.

"That's four," he said.

"Four what."

"Four foil trays. There's two in the chest freezer with no labels on and now there's this." He looked at it. "What's a pork thing."

"It's a pork thing."

"It's not labeled."

"Nobody labels a pork thing."

He put it on the counter and stood there with the tea towel over his shoulder.

Her hand was still cold from the rail, and there was a place under her sternum where the chime had gone in and was taking its time coming back out, and she stood in her own hall and waited for it, the way you wait for a foot to stop being asleep.

It was the first time it had rung since November. Nine weeks, and in nine weeks the only people who came to that door were Callum's brother, who let himself in, and a courier who left things on the step, and it had not once occurred to her that the bell had not gone.

"You want me to unplug the chime," Callum said.

"No."

"It's four screws."

"I said no."

He nodded once and picked the tray up and put it down again in a slightly different place, which is what he did instead of arguing.

"Denise put a card in with the last one," he said. "In November. I don't think you saw it."

"Where is it."

"Drawer."

"Which drawer."

"That drawer." He tipped his head at the one she had been in an hour ago. "Under the menus."

She did not go and look. She stood where she was and let the last of it go out of her chest, and she thought about the fact that she had been through that drawer twice tonight and had come out of it holding a service history and not a card.

Callum had the laptop open on the kitchen table and a mug beside it and a pen behind his ear, which meant he was on a quote and not on email.

"I've got Kingston Thursday," he said. "Overnight."

"The school board."

"The school board. Two hundred and forty boxes in a portable, and they want it scoped by Friday, and half of it's going to be pay records from before they amalgamated." He wrote a number and crossed it out. "Have you eaten anything today."

"I had that thing in the car."

"That's not a thing, that's a wrapper with a picture of a thing on it." He got up and put the kettle on and started taking eggs out without asking, which was the only way he ever cooked for her.

She sat down where the laptop was and did not look at it.

"Roz says the bail decision's next month."

"Is that bad."

"It's not anything. He's remanded, he stays remanded, it's a formality." She turned the pen over on the table. "She wants me at it."

"Do you want to be at it."

"I don't know."

He cracked the eggs one-handed, badly, the way he always did, and got a bit of shell in, and fished it out with the shell.

"Then don't decide tonight," he said.

They ate at the table with the overhead still out and the light on over the stove, and he told her about a man in Balderson who kept forty years of parish minutes in a chest freezer that was still plugged in, and she laughed for the first time in about four days, and afterwards she was aware of having laughed, which spoiled some of it and not all of it.

Later she went up and he stayed down. She heard him on the phone about pallet counts, and then not on the phone, and then the television for a while, and then not the television.

She lay on her side with her hand under the pillow. The whine was worse lying on her right and better if she turned over, and the way you got to sleep was to turn over and stay turned.

The twelfth of November had been a Tuesday.

She would have been at work at nine forty on a Tuesday. Callum would have been out; Tuesdays he was out, he was always out, that was the day he did pickups. There would have been nobody in the house at nine forty on the twelfth of November for a technician to find no fault in front of.

She turned over.