PART 4 — WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED
Corbin Aske is alive.
He is eighty-one. He lives two states away in a town called Hensfield and he has been there since 2000.
It took Detective Ilsa Rourke eleven days to find him, which tells you exactly how hard anybody had looked in 1999.
I have met him twice.
What happened in 1998 is this, and I have it from him and from my husband and the two accounts agree in every material respect, which I did not expect.
Corbin Aske took money out of that business. Somewhere around ninety thousand dollars over four years, out of a job costing system he had designed himself, and he has never once denied it and did not deny it to me at a kitchen table in Hensfield.
My mother found it in the October of 1998.
She did not go to the police. She went to Corbin and she offered him an arrangement, which was that he sign over his forty percent and go, and that nothing would ever be said.
He refused. For three weeks he refused, because his name was on the sign and because he had built that shop with his own hands, and because he had already paid about thirty thousand of it back.
And at one in the morning on the eleventh of November 1998 my mother rang my husband at our house and asked him to come down to the unit.
Gethin got out of a bed next to a woman who was seven months pregnant and drove four miles.
What he found was Corbin Aske at a bench with his coat on and my mother with a folder, and the argument had been going for about two hours, and Corbin had put his coat on eleven times and not left.
Gethin was twenty-seven. He was a foreman on thirty-eight thousand a year at his mother-in-law’s company with a baby coming in eight weeks.
My mother put a page in front of him and told him to sign the bottom of it.
He asked whether Corbin had signed the top. My mother said yes.
Corbin Aske was sitting eleven feet away at that bench and did not say anything, because by that point he had worked out that the alternative was a criminal referral, and he had two children in college.
My husband signed a witness attestation for a signature he had not seen made.
He has never claimed he did not know. He told Detective Rourke that in an interview and he told me the same thing at a kitchen table, which is the only reason I am still in this house.
He said, “I knew. I was twenty-seven and I was frightened of her and I knew.”
That conversation was on the Thursday, four days after the funeral, at our own kitchen table, and it started at about seven in the evening and finished at about two.
I had the box on the table between us. I had not let anybody take it yet.
I asked him one question at the start and then did not speak for about forty minutes, which is the only time in twenty-nine years I have managed that.
The question was: “Did you ever try to undo it?”
He said yes. Three times.
In 2001 he wrote to Corbin Aske at the last address anybody had and it came back. In 2009, after his own father died, he told my mother he was going to tell me, and she told him to think about what that would do to me and to Nessa, and he thought about it and did not.
And in 2016, he wrote four lines on a card in a car park and stood up at an anniversary dinner in front of forty people.
I did not know that until that Thursday.
He was not going to make a speech about millwork. He had decided, at forty-five, after two drinks, that he was going to say Corbin Aske’s name out loud in a room with her accountant and two men who had worked in that shop since 1989 in it.
And my mother came round that table and took the card out of his hand and folded it under her bread plate and told him to sit down, and he sat down.
He said, “I’ve been glad she stopped me every day since and I’ve hated her for it every day since, and both of those are true, Roisin.”
Then he said the thing I have not been able to put anywhere.
He said, “I was going to tell you in 2016. That’s what the card was. I’d have got about nine words out.”
