Chapter 11 · Chapter 11

The clerk did not raise his voice, and that was the courtesy of it. A man who shouted a thing could be argued with. A man who read it flatly, in the tone of a man reading a list of what the house already owned, gave you nothing to push against.

He read the date first, then the hour, then the name of the one who had given it. He read that she was a servant of this house. He read that her statement had been taken in the corridor and written down in her own words, and that she had been asked twice whether she wished to change any of it, and had said no.

Then he came to the sentence.

"The last person seen," he read, "near the door of the study."

He stopped there, because that was the end of the page, and he turned it with two fingers so the room would know it was the end.

The majlis did not move. That is the sound a room makes when everyone in it has already decided not to be the first to look at the person named.