So I hung up and rang 999 and gave them the address and his description and what he was carrying, and I asked for police and fire.
And then my father’s light came on.
And Troy put that crowbar through our back door.
And then another car came round and my mother-in-law got out of it holding a heavy plastic bag.
And he turned towards her and put his hand up.
What was in her bag.
Not petrol. Not tools. Not money.
His things.
His passport, his driving licence, a building society book in his name from 1998, two phones — his ordinary one and the other one — and about eleven hundred pounds in notes that she had taken out of her own account on the Monday.
She had come to take him away.
She had worked out, from a phone call at twenty to seven that morning in which her son had said almost nothing, exactly what he was going to do. And she had got in a car and driven forty minutes with his documents in a bag.
Her plan, as she has since told the police and the court and me, was to get him into her car and drive him to her sister’s and sit on him until he was somebody she recognised again.
It was a terrible plan. It was also the only plan that anybody in that family made that morning that was not about money.
And he put his hand up to her because he thought she had come to help him do it.
And the business, which is the second folder and which I said I would not open and which I am going to open about four inches.
It went in the October of 2024. Plant hire. It had run since 2019 and it had been in trouble since about 2022.
And I signed for it.
Not the loans — the guarantee, in the March of 2021, at our kitchen table, in about four minutes, because he said the bank needed a second name and because I had a shift at two.
I did not read it. I have read it since; it is eleven pages.
And what that document means is that the hundred and eighty-seven thousand that came out of that business in 2024 came for both of us, and that the house was in negative equity because of a signature of mine from 2021.
So when I say that my husband was a man so far down he could not wait for an answer to a text message — I know exactly how far down, and I know what the number was, and part of that number has my name on it.
That does not make a petrol can my fault and nobody has ever suggested it does, including his barrister.
It does mean that on the sixth of September, when I photographed a policy schedule and started a folder, I was already four years into a document I had not read.
I have been a person who signs things in four minutes and a person who builds a file for five weeks, and they are the same person, and the second one was trying to make up for the first.
What he was actually doing.
And here is the part that took eleven months and a trial to get straight, and that I have had to let go of in stages.
He was not going to do it with us in the house.
He knew I was on days that week. He knew Nia was at school from ten to nine. He had the texts to prove he believed we would be out of that building by twenty past, and the prosecution accepted it, and so in the end did I.
What he intended was an empty house, a gas fire, and a claim.
The eight hundred and fifty thousand is a joint policy that pays on death and he never once tried to claim on it, and the fire would not have triggered it, and the thing he wanted was the buildings cover.
And the text — stick the heating on the second you’re in — which is the single sentence that stopped my heart in that car park, is not what I thought it was either.
He sent it at twenty-nine minutes past seven to find out where we were.
He wanted a reply. He wanted just getting in now so that he knew he had a window.
I did not reply, and he did not know where we were, and at twenty past eight he put a crowbar through his own back door anyway.
That is what the court heard. A man so far down that he could not wait for an answer to a text message.
What it does not change.
He put an eight-year-old’s home in that position for money. He bought a petrol can on the Monday from a place on the Moraine road and he kept it in his mother’s garage.
And a fire in that house at half past eight on a Tuesday morning, in a terrace, is a thing that does not stay inside one set of walls. There is an eighty-one-year-old man called Wilf in number nine.
