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.
