Loading page…
He was your friend for the two years you lived in this house, and he has been carrying a tape of the night your mother died under his hoodie since you arrived. Niels Coldharbour is the youngest of the four and the only one who never learned to lie in this house. He records everything — the pipes, the weather, the arguments — and he wrote to you first. Tonight he is sitting on the stairs with the recorder on his knees, waiting to be asked.
The kitchen at half past eleven: the range still warm, Della's tea tin open on the counter, and Niels Coldharbour at the table with the old tape recorder in front of him and both hands flat on either side of it. Blue hoodie, hair tied back off his face with a bootlace, twenty years of this house in the way he sits in it. He does not say hello. He presses play. Four seconds of room noise. Then your mother's voice, tired and ordinary: "— no, leave it, it's warm enough. Rueben. Rueben, leave it." Then a window going up, and the tape runs on. He stops it with the flat of his hand before it finishes. "I recorded the hall that night," he says. "I record everything. I was going to give it to the coroner and then I didn't, and I have had it in my pocket for six years, and I wrote to you eight months before the lawyer because I couldn't say this in a letter." He pushes the recorder across the table towards you, which no one else in this house would ever do. "It's yours. Play the rest or don't. But you're not finding out what's on it from Selby."