I Married the Son of the Man Who Killed My Mother · Nadia Voss

Chapter 3: Four Sundays a Year

I asked him in the car, forty minutes later, on the motorway, because I have discovered I do my worst thinking in stationary rooms.

"Did my mother call you the night she died?"

Nathaniel did not take his eyes off the road.

"Yes," he said.

I looked out of the window for a while.

"Twelve hours," I said. "Rule three. It's been eight days."

"I know."

"So say it now."

"She called me at 3:34 in the morning on the nineteenth of April and I did not answer, because my phone was in a kitchen and I was asleep," he said. "There's a voicemail. Eleven seconds. She says, Nathaniel, it's Bea. I think somebody's been in the office. Call me when you're up. That's the whole of it."

His hands were perfectly steady on the wheel and his voice was not.

"I called her back at 7:10," he said. "The car had been in the water since about four."

The road went past.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because it's not evidence, it's a wound." He signalled and moved into the slow lane and I understood he was doing it so he could look at me. "Because eleven seconds of my dead friend's voice on my phone is the single most useless thing in this entire case, and the day you hear it is the day it stops being useful to you as anything except grief. I was going to give it to you. I was going to give it to you when there was something to put beside it."

I made myself breathe.

"He told me to ask," I said. "Your father. He said, ask him who she called, and he said the phone record's in the room. He wanted me to think you—"

"Yes."

"That's a strange thing for a man to do who has nothing to hide."

"No," Nathaniel said, "it's exactly what a man does who has one thing to hide. He gives you a smaller true thing and lets you find it yourself. You'll trust the next thing he hands you twice as much." He indicated again. "Ivy. He's had four years to prepare for a person like you. Do not think of him as a defendant. Think of him as a competitor with a better dataset."

* * *

The four Sundays a year turned out to be a real thing and not the most useful thing.

Gerald Wren goes to Zurich on the first Sunday of the quarter for a foundation board that has met there since 1994. The house on Hallam Road is empty for eleven hours: the housekeeper is off, the cook comes at four, and the alarm is on a domestic contract.

The next one was the fifth of October. We had six weeks.

We spent them being married.

I want to be accurate about this part, because it is where the story stops being a plan. We had rule two — no daylight in public — and it turns out that for two people who are lying to nine hundred guests, the only place either of them can stop performing is with each other. We ate dinner four nights a week in a flat with two bedrooms. He learned that I do not speak before nine in the morning. I learned that he cooks badly and with enormous confidence, and that he keeps his mother's photograph in a drawer because his father does not permit it in a frame, and that when he is thinking he goes absolutely still in a way that frightened me for the first month and then, at some point I did not notice, stopped frightening me.

On the second of October he came in at eleven at night and put a bag down and said, "The Toledo nurse."

"You went to Ohio?"

"I went to Ohio." He sat down heavily. "She wouldn't open the door. She talked to me through it for forty minutes, which I count as a success."

"And?"

"She signed something in 2021. Twenty-two thousand dollars and a clause. She said the number so I'd understand what she'd sold." He rubbed his face. "She wanted me to know one thing, and she made me stand on a doorstep in the cold until I'd written it down properly. In the last four months of the Danish arm, the site got a change of protocol by email — dose escalation, no new consent forms, no ethics submission. She kept a copy."

"She still has it?"

"She burned it in 2021." He looked up. "But she remembers who signed it. It wasn't my father."

"Who?"

"The email was signed off by the trial's independent statistical reviewer," Nathaniel said. "Which is a contracted role, and it was contracted to Rakes Biologics, and it was invoiced at four hundred thousand a quarter."

The kitchen clock ticked.

"My mother was Rakes Biologics' statistician," I said.

"Your mother left Rakes Biologics in 2018," he said quietly. "The reviewer on the Corvale trial from 2019 was not Beatrice Rakes. There's a name on those invoices, Ivy, and it isn't hers."

* * *

We went in on the fifth of October at 9:40 in the morning.

Nathaniel had a key to the house because he has always had a key to the house. The alarm code was his mother's birthday, which he said out loud with an expression I won't try to describe.

The door under the stairs took the keypad and then the two locks — his key, and then mine, the Wren-spouse key that a woman in a solicitor's office had handed me eleven days after the wedding as part of a folder of "family administrative items," with no more ceremony than a parking permit.

The stairs were narrow and the air was dry and cool and smelled of paper.

Twenty-nine years of clinical records. Grey boxes, floor to ceiling, on rails, labelled by protocol number and year. It was, and I say this as the daughter of a statistician, beautiful.

"Corvale is CV-something," Nathaniel said. "Start at the far wall."

We found the Danish arm in eleven minutes. Four boxes.

Not registry copies — originals. Site logs. Consent forms in Danish with a stamp. Adverse event reports with handwriting on them. And in the third box, a bound printout of a full dataset, 300 patients, with a coversheet dated the eleventh of March.

"That's the file I sent her," Nathaniel said. His voice had gone strange. "That's my file. That's the one I attached to that email."

"How is it in your father's basement?"

"Because it was taken out of a university department under a warrant nobody can produce," he said, "two days after she died."

I stood in a cold room and put my hand flat on a box that had been in my mother's office, and for a moment I could not do anything at all.

Then I opened the fourth box, because I am my mother's daughter, and the fourth box was not trial data.

It was correspondence.

Contracts, signed. The statistical review agreement between Wren Pharmaceutical and Rakes Biologics, October 2019, four hundred thousand a quarter. The protocol amendment, dose escalation, no ethics submission, dated the fourth of February.

And under that, a single sheet of Rakes Biologics letterhead, dated the twenty-second of March — three weeks before my mother died, eight days after Nathaniel sent her the files.

Gerald,

We have a problem and I would rather tell you than have you find it. Beatrice has been given the Danish set by someone inside your building. She will publish; she does not bluff. I would ask you to remember that whatever is done about this, she is my daughter.

V.

I read it four times.

Behind me, Nathaniel said, "Ivy."

"She knew." My voice came out of somebody else's body. "Three weeks before. She wrote to him and she called it a problem and she signed it with an initial like a business letter."

"Ivy—"

"She is my daughter," I said. "That's the sentence she chose. Not stop. Not leave her alone. She asked him to remember."

And upstairs, in a house that was supposed to be empty for eleven hours, a door closed.