Chelo.
She sees Nia once a month.
That took until the April and it took a mediator and it was the hardest decision I have made since the seventh of October.
Because she told me to take Nia and not complicate things. She said that on a phone, at seven o’clock in the morning, when she already knew.
And she was wrong, and she was managing her son instead of ringing 999, and if I had done what she said there would have been a fire in a terrace with Wilf at number nine in it.
And she is also the only person in that family who got in a car that morning and went towards him with nothing to gain.
Both of those are true. I have had to let both of them stand, and it has taken a year, and Nia has one grandmother.
And Wilf at number nine, who I have used in this as a point and who is a man.
He is eighty-one. He has been in that house since 1979. He gave Nia a fifty-pence piece every birthday from the year she was born and he called her the little one.
And he was in on the morning of the seventh of October. He has told me so. He was in his kitchen at twenty past eight with the radio on and he heard the glass go and thought it was the bins.
And in the November, when I took him a thing to say thank you for a statement he had given, he said something at his own door that I was not ready for.
He said: “He was all right with me, your Troy. He did my gutters.”
He did. In the October of 2023, on a Saturday, up a ladder, for nothing, for two hours.
And Wilf said that to me standing in a doorway with a tin in his hands, and he was not being disloyal and he was not excusing anything. He was eighty-one and he was trying to work out how both things could have been in the same man.
I did not have an answer for him then and I do not have one now.
He moved to his daughter’s in the March. Not because of us; his knee. He wrote me a card.
And the last thing.
My father’s camera keeps thirty days.
The police took the unit on the seventh of October and they had the whole thirty days off it, which is how the Monday purchase of the can and a number of other things got nailed down, and which is why that man pleaded in the end.
And on that thirty days there is a clip from twenty to three in the morning on the twenty-sixth of September.
Troy, on our back patio, in the dark, with a torch, going along the external wall where the gas comes in. Four minutes and eleven seconds of a man measuring something with his hands.
I had seen it.
On the twenty-sixth of September, at about eight o’clock in the morning, with a cup of tea, on my phone, because the light had triggered in the night and I always check.
I watched four minutes of my husband at our gas supply in the dark and I saved the clip to the folder called household and I went to work.
Eleven days.
Eleven days between watching that and a car park at an airport, and in all of them I did not ring anybody, because a man walking round his own house with a torch is not a thing that gets a unit sent, and because I knew exactly what the person on the other end of that call would have to say to me.
I know, because I am the person on the other end of that call. Forty hours a week, for seven years.
And here is what I have had to take, and it is not about my husband at all.
I was not frightened of not being believed.
I was frightened of being believed and it still not being enough — of handing over half a thing and being told, kindly, by somebody doing my own job, that there was nothing that could be done yet.
So I waited for a complete file.
And the file was complete at about twenty past eight on the seventh of October, when a man put a crowbar through a door, with my daughter two streets away in the back of a car, where I had driven her.
My father put that camera up in 2021 so that a house could say who had come through the door.
It said it. On the twenty-sixth of September, at twenty to three in the morning, in four minutes and eleven seconds.
I was the one who did not pass it on.