What Is Said Out Loud

The presiding judge spoke for forty minutes, without notes, looking at the courtroom.

Étienne had imagined a clerk reading out a document, a flat voice, paper. It was nothing like that. It was a man telling a story, in order, with dates, who stopped from time to time to say: this is disputed, or: on this point the accused gives another account, which we shall hear.

Sabrina Gaudin was thirty-five. She was a home carer, employed by a charity, fourteen people to visit, between six in the morning and sometimes nine at night, in three split rounds. She lived in a rented house in Sarnay-les-Bois with her nine-year-old daughter. On the fourteenth of November she had finished her evening round at nine forty at the home of a gentleman of eighty-nine, to whom she had given his drops and heated up some soup. He is the last person to have seen her alive with certainty.