On Easter Sunday my daughter called and asked me to come and get her, and her mother-in-law put a hand on my chest in the doorway in front of thirty guests and told me to go home. My son-in-law told me to call the police, because the Chief was standing in his back yard eating food he’d paid for. He was right about that — and it is the reason he lost everything.
Of the thirty people on that lawn, that is one. Two others gave statements when they were asked to, properly and without being difficult, which is more than nothing.
The other twenty-seven have gone on with their lives, and I pass four of them in Halverstock with some regularity, and every single one of them looks at the road.
Nobody burned anything down.
That is what I would say to any man reading this who is sitting in his truck outside a house with a card in his hand.
I wanted to. I had eleven numbers and I know exactly which four of them would have taken my call on a Sunday afternoon and asked me almost nothing, and I have thought about that version of the following two years more often than I am comfortable admitting.
In that version I get to feel like something for about a week.
And Perpetua Slade is still a woman who thinks nobody believed her in 2018.
Nell moved back in with me for fourteen months and then out again into a place of her own about a mile from here, which was the right order and which took a lot of work by people who are not me.
She is doing well. That word is doing an enormous amount of lifting and she would want me to say so.
