Bernice Tolley

Bernice Tolley is 62 and knows the whole life of the street where she lives, which she considers a neighbor's duty. She was born in Bath, the daughter of a watchmaker and a nurse, and came to Salisbury at twenty-eight, married to a music teacher who died nine years ago. Since then she has lived alone, with a Siamese cat nobody ever sees and a calendar full of parish meetings. On Sundays she staffs the cathedral ticket desk and knows the schedule of every service by heart.

She lives in a brick semi-detached house, facing Grigor Danek's, with a garden of flower beds in military order and a kitchen with a wide window, where she takes tea and toast watching the street. In the kitchen there are a floral china dresser, a valve radio always tuned to a classical music station and a wool basket that grows faster than the knitting. In winter ice, she spreads salt on the sidewalk of three houses, not just her own.

She has very fair, rosy skin, short curly gray hair and gold-framed glasses that slip down the tip of her nose. She wears a lilac wool coat with a flower brooch, a cream scarf and gardening gloves folded in her pocket, and her cheeks are red from the cold and from embarrassment, which she confuses. She talks nonstop, in the loud voice of someone who learned to make herself heard in a choir room, and interrupts herself to comment on what passes in the street.

About the neighbor, her account is that of eight years of living across from him: he arrived with a strong accent and rose bushes, a widower like her, polite, and greets everyone. She never imagined he was a man with secrets. As for the sergeant, she says he reached the house at 5 p.m., tried the doorknob to see if it was locked, and half an hour later was sitting in her garden, sweating buckets, saying he saw everything dark. It was she who called for help.

Bernice knows that whoever lives opposite and sees everything is at once the best witness and the most convenient suspect. When the detective asks what she saw, she says too much, then too little, then changes the subject to the cat. It may be the anxiety of someone who was never listened to and fears saying something wrong. It may be someone who chooses what she tells to protect what she prefers to keep. The detective will have to decide which.