He is not a man who planned to kill his family. He is a man who planned a fire in a row of houses and thought that was the careful version.
Nobody in Lark Hollow has ever accepted the distinction and I have stopped making it out loud.
The eleven minutes in that multi-storey, which I have had to listen to, because the call is evidence and I have heard it four times.
I know how I sound on a 999 call. I have listened to about nine thousand of them.
And I sound textbook. Location first, then the threat, then the description, then the hazard — petrol, crowbar, gas supply — and I give the house number twice and I spell the street.
There is no shake in it anywhere. Fen has told me she did not know it was me until the third sentence.
And underneath it, at about the forty-second mark, you can hear my daughter.
She says something twice. It is not clear on the recording and the transcript has it as inaudible, child’s voice.
What she said — because I remember, and because she has told me since — was: “Is Daddy going to be in trouble?”
Twice. And I did not answer her either time, because I was giving a controller the colour of a petrol can.
That is what I actually did in those eleven minutes. I ran a perfect call and I did not say one word to the child in the back seat.
I have been told by four people that this is what you are supposed to do. And it is. And she was eight, and she asked twice.
What I had already done.
And now mine.
Nia did not tell me anything new in that car park.
I had been building it since the sixth of September.
That is the date I photographed the policy schedule. I had already checked, by the fourteenth, what accidental-death provisions were on it and what they were not. I had already been through the second phone, twice, in the night, in the utility room, on the twenty-first and the twenty-eighth.
Five weeks.
I had a folder on my work email from the eleventh of September called household.
And I had told nobody. Not Fen, who sits four feet from me. Not my sister. Not the police, who I speak to for forty hours a week.
Because I wanted it complete. Because I have spent seven years listening to people ring in with half a thing and get told there is nothing that can be done with half a thing.
So on the seventh of October I got up, and made a packed lunch, and drove my husband to an airport, knowing — not suspecting, knowing — and I had already decided in the kitchen that I was going to follow him.
And my daughter was in the back seat, because she comes with me, because that is the school run.
The other half.
She had tried before.
On the Monday the sixth — the morning after she heard it — she said something in the car on the way to school.
She said: “Daddy was on his other phone again.”
And I said: “Don’t be silly, love. Daddy’s only got one phone.”
I lied to my eight-year-old about a thing I had photographed in my own utility room eight days earlier, and I did it because I did not want her anywhere near it, and I was proud of myself for it at the time.
And she took that correction and sat on what she had heard for a day and a half, and only brought it out in a car park when she thought we were about to drive back to the house.
