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.

And then I told her what I wanted, which was for somebody with a badge that Sutton Ostrand did not own to come to that house within the hour.

Yvonne let me finish.

Then she said no.

I want to put down what she said next in order, because it is the hinge of everything, and because at the time I nearly hung up on her.

She said: Cormac. I am not going to touch the assault. That is a county matter and it is going to be a county matter no matter who I call, and if I go anywhere near it on a Sunday afternoon I contaminate it and I lose it.

She said: take her to a hospital. Not in Halverstock. Drive the extra forty minutes. Let the ER document her and let them make the report they are obliged to make, and do not be the person who reports it, because you are her father and every defence attorney in this state will spend a year on that.

Then she asked me one question, and it was not about my daughter, and I did not understand it for about four seconds.

She said: how many times has that Chief been in that back yard?

I stood in a parking area in front of a house with white tents on the lawn and I understood what she was actually asking me.

I said: I don’t know. He was very comfortable out there.

And Yvonne said: that’s the case.

She said: Cormac, a domestic assault in Ridley County is a hard case. It is one woman’s word, it is a good lawyer, it is a jury that plays golf with his father. You will be at it for three years and you may lose.

She said: a chief of police with a standing invitation to that patio is a different kind of case entirely, and it is not hard at all, and everything you have just described to me is sitting inside it.

I said that I did not care about a chief of police.

And she said, and this is the sentence that did it: then you are going to get him convicted of hitting your daughter, and he is going to be back in that county in two years, and the same man is going to be answering the phone.

I argued with her. I want that on the record, because in every version of this that gets repeated back to me I am calm and I am not.