I am sitting looking across a slow river at water meadows dotted with patches of yellow loosestrife.

In the distance, figures move slowly across the meadows on the path that was underwater only two months ago.

A wagtail hovers over the water, then perches on one of the little docks along the river, dipping its tail.

I am with Harriet. I brought her here from the Retirement Home in her wheelchair.

Her memory is getting dim now. “Beautiful day,” she says, once or twice.

Yesterday I went to the courthouse with Dorothy and Sue. It was only the second time I had been. (Sue has been with Dorothy every day of the trial, which has been going on for four weeks).

Three people were arrested after the discovery of Chloe’s body in a burned-out car off the bypass, her boyfriend, Micha, a girl, Kasia, and her uncle Bartek.

In the afternoon, Micha sobbed in the dock. “I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it.”

“Why are you crying?”, asked the lawyer for the other defendant, Kasia.

“I am crying for Chloe and for all of us. I didn’t kill her, I didn’t kill her.”

The judge says: “We will give you a moment to compose yourself.”

Then the lawyer for the other defendant, Kasia, resumes. “I will ask you again. Would Chloe have left the back door open if she had left the house alive?”

Micha asks for the interpreter again.

The lawyer is still trying to show that Chloe never left for work that morning.

The defendants have turned on one another.

Micha now says that Kasia might have killed Chloe, calling her vindictive and vengeful. That’s because Kasia  stupidly boasted to her cell-mate and said how much she hated Chloe.

She had also written a letter purporting to be from a hit-man, describing how he had accompanied Micha, bringing barbecue lighter fluid to set the car alight and seating the dead body in the driver’s seat.

The cell-mate, a burglar, took it to the police.

Now I guess Kasia’s lawyer is trying to pin the murder charge on Micha and get Kasia off as an accessory only.

The police theory is that Micha smothered Chloe in bed, then went to work. Kasia and her uncle removed the body, drove it to a service road off the bypass and set fire to the car.

They are being tried as accomplices. The motive: to benefit from a life insurance policy and inherit the house.

It’s been tough on Dorothy. She has learned things she didn’t want to know. Like the intimate videos made by Micha with fly-on-the-wall camera hidden in an alarm clock on a bedside table.

The camera SD card was found on him when he was arrested.

I try to write objectively but I feel I am entering a kind of darkness.