The statement took four hours.
She gave it in the same room she had sat in on the first day — the room with the table and two chairs and the window, the filter coffee that someone always brought without being asked. She gave the statement to Nair and to a senior officer named Shivraj who had come from the CCB divisional office and who had the quality of a man who had seen a great deal and had developed a systematic approach to what he saw that required him to see everything before drawing conclusions. She was grateful for this quality. She had been afraid of the opposite — of a conclusion already drawn, of the statement being received by a framework already built around her guilt.
The statement was everything she remembered. She did not edit it. She did not present it — she gave it in the order it had come, in the fragments it had come in, and she flagged the gaps where she could feel something but not yet hear it, and she flagged the certainties and the uncertainties separately. She was a person who had spent eighteen months building a system for the accurate external representation of her own inner experience, and she applied that system to the statement. Everything exact. Everything honest.
Nair did not interrupt. Shivraj asked clarifying questions at three points — specific, precise questions that she answered precisely. His questions told her he had read the notebooks overnight — she could tell from what he asked and what he didn't ask that he had the foundation of the documentation she had built.
When she finished, the room was quiet for a long time.
"The post-mortem report," Shivraj said finally. He set it on the table between them. "The cause of death is confirmed as head trauma consistent with impact on the nightstand corner. The forensic analysis of the scene is consistent with a fall — specifically, a fall in which the subject was in forward motion and the impact occurred on the right side of the head." He paused. "The scene evidence does not indicate that Layla Menon was pushed. It is consistent with a stumble. A stumble that could have been caused by her own forward movement being interrupted suddenly, or by a foot catching on the carpet edge—" He indicated a note in the report. "There is evidence of carpet edge disturbance near the foot of the nightstand. Consistent with a trip."
She looked at the report. "She moved forward," she said. "In the conversation. After I said no. She moved toward me and I moved back. I don't think I touched her."
