Henderson read each page with the same neutral attention he had given her words. He did not praise the folder. He did not dismiss it. He turned the pages, made notes of his own, and asked whether she would be willing to provide a formal written statement based on her account, and whether she would allow him to retain copies of the photographs and the documents she had shown him. Alicia said yes to both, and signed the statement where he indicated, in the same steady hand with which she had written the original account.
When the paperwork was done, Henderson closed his notebook and stood. He thanked her for her cooperation, and for the clarity of the record she had kept. He said he would speak to Mrs. Whitmore again, and that he would review both statements carefully before deciding what, if anything, required further action.
He asked one more question before he left the table, about the fine letter: had Alicia paid it, or responded to it, or been contacted about it again? She said she had not paid it, and had not responded beyond her request for the covenants, because she did not believe a fine issued without a cited rule or a process could be answered by payment. Henderson nodded, made a note of that too, and did not comment on whether she was right. His neutrality, Alicia realised, was not indifference. It was the discipline of someone who understood that his job was to gather, not to decide in the moment, and that a premature opinion could contaminate the very record he was trying to build.
Alicia walked him to the door, and for a moment they both looked out at the garden, where the pool lay still in the afternoon light and the gate stood latched. Henderson glanced at the gate stop, at the lounger, at the shallow end, taking in the geography of the account he had just heard, matching words to places. He did not go out to examine them closely. That, Alicia understood, would come later, if it came at all, through proper steps. For now, the visit had been what it needed to be: a statement taken, a record shown, copies retained, and a door left open for whatever the next step required.
At the door, he paused, as if remembering one last routine step.
"I'll check whether there's any camera footage from around that afternoon," he said.
Eleanor Vance did not answer the door at once. Alicia stood on the narrow concrete path between their houses with her hands folded in front of her, listening to the faint shuffle from inside, the sound of a kettle being set down, a chair pushed back, a voice saying, "Just a moment, dear." The morning was already warm, the kind of heat that made the air over the drive shimmer if you looked at it too long, and Alicia could smell cut grass from somewhere two gardens over.
When the door opened, Eleanor was wearing a pale blue housedress and the small gold cross she always wore, her grey hair combed back neatly, her eyes sharp behind her glasses in a way that had nothing to do with age and everything to do with forty years of watching a classroom.
"I've been expecting you," Eleanor said, "or someone. Come in out of the sun."
The house was cool and quiet, the curtains drawn halfway against the light, a clock ticking in the hall. Eleanor led her to the kitchen table, where a laptop sat open beside a mug of tea gone cold.
"I don't like to pry," Eleanor said, sitting down with a carefulness that suggested her knees were not what they had been. "But my camera looks straight at your gate. It has done for years. It was meant for my own front path, but the angle catches your side fence as well. When I heard the shouting that afternoon, I went to the window. I saw enough. And then, later, I looked at what the camera had kept."
Alicia felt her shoulders drop a fraction. She had not realized how tightly she had been holding them.
"May I see it?" she asked.
Eleanor nodded and pressed play.
The footage was not cinematic. It was flat, a little washed out by the afternoon light, the colours slightly too bright, the sound a thin buzz of insects and distant traffic. But it was clear. There was Alicia's gate, closed. There was the fence. There was the patio beyond it, and the edge of the pool glittering at the corner of the frame.
Then the gate flew open.