Chapter 12 — WHAT WAS IN THE BUCKET

The police took the bucket. It sat on our patio for two days first, on its side, and Ray photographed it on the Friday night because Ray is the kind of man who photographs things.

The lab did not need to do much. It was water. Tap water, a little washing-up liquid, and a grey microfibre cloth was found nine feet away in the grass.

The temperature of the water is the thing that mattered legally and it is the thing nobody can ever establish, because it sat in a bucket on a balcony at forty-one degrees for an unknown period.

Sarah's account, given twice, is this. She had filled it warm. She had been washing the outside of the patio glass — from the balcony, which does not make sense, and which is exactly the kind of thing that does not make sense when a person has been standing at a window for two hours watching a child they put there.

She said she was going to come down. She said she had been going to come down for an hour.

She said she looked up and saw my truck and she stopped on the balcony instead.

And when I got down on the stones and picked up my daughter, she said the sentence, and she tipped the bucket.

Sarah, to the police, on the Saturday:

Sarah: I threw it at him. I want that written down the way I said it. I threw it at him and I hit her and there is no version of this where that is an accident, because I threw it.

That is a strange kind of confession. I have thought about it a great deal. It is a woman refusing the one piece of mercy available to her.