Martha Quill

Martha Quill is 31 and has looked after the household's two children since the boy was born, four years ago. She was born in Wigan, the daughter of a miner and a weaver, and entered domestic service at twelve, scrubbing pots in a merchant's house. She rose from kitchen to stairs, from stairs to nursery, and thinks she has arrived where she always wanted. She knows the house better than the one who pays for it, which she tells anyone who will listen and anyone who won't.

She sleeps in the nursery, a large room on the top floor with pale plank floors, two iron cots, a dollhouse with its front open and a rocking chair where she used to embroider, until the house fell out of conversation. The window looks onto the back roof and the garden, and the fire in the hearth is lit at five. It is there that she spends most of her days, an ear tuned to the stairs: she knows who goes up, who comes down and how heavy each step is.

She has a round, rosy face, small alert eyes and brown hair pinned under a white nanny's cap. She wears a gray cotton dress with a starched white apron and a bunch of keys at her waist, which jingles at each step and announces her arrival before she appears. She is curious, talkative, opinionated, full of stories about her employers, and once she begins a conversation it is not easy to interrupt her.

About the two weeks her master fell ill, her account is that of someone who moved around the house: a dry white powder settled at the bottom of a glass on his bedside table, on the 9th, like sugar that won't melt. The master tasted it, said it was bitter and drank no more. The trays for the room passed through many hands, hers, the cook's, the nurse's, whoever was in the corridor. She says four years in that house entitle her to an opinion.

Martha knows that a nanny who knows everything is a nanny who risks being remembered for it. When the detective asks what else she noticed, she opens her mouth eagerly, glances aside and lowers her voice. It may be the eagerness of a witness who was never heard. It may be someone who chooses what to tell according to what suits her to keep back. The detective will have to decide which.