My neighbour poured a bucket of red paint over my car at two in the morning because I had her SUV towed. By half past seven there were three police cars outside her house — and then an officer crouched down by my rear bumper, looked at what the paint had eaten through, and told the other one to get me away from the vehicle.

PART 5 — SEVENTEEN
I met Yohana Otieno in the November of last year.

She asked for it, through the detective, and I said yes immediately and then spent four days being frightened of it.

We met in a coffee place halfway between, which is about an hour for each of us.

She is fifty-one. She talked about her husband for about forty minutes and I mostly listened, and then she asked me one question, which was whether the car had been all right.

I did not understand at first.

She meant whether it had run well. Whether it had been looked after. Whether the person who had it had kept the oil up and fixed things when they broke.

I said yes. I said I had it serviced twice a year at a place on Alder Road and that the air conditioning had gone in the second summer and I had had it done properly.

And Yohana Otieno said, “Good. He’d have liked that.”

I have thought about that more than anything anybody has said to me in two years.

Mira is seventeen now.

She was not at that coffee place and I have never met her and I do not expect to, and her mother told me that she has known for a year that the reason there is a case is a set of initials she scratched into a bumper when she was ten and got shouted at for.

Yohana said she does not know yet what to do with that and that they are not rushing it.

I would like to say something about what Verna Dunlop did and I have written this paragraph four times.

She poured paint over a car in the middle of the night because a woman she had decided was a newcomer had her SUV towed off a strip of concrete.

That is all it was. There was no more to it than that and there is no version where she gets credit.

And it is also true that a homicide file that had not moved since 2021 is now a prosecution because of five hours of exterior red sitting on a rear bumper at two in the morning.

Both of those are true and neither one changes the other, and I have stopped trying to make them into a single sentence.

You’ve been here four years. That drive was shared before you turned up and it’ll be shared after you’ve gone.

She said that to me in a room behind a fire station in front of thirty people, holding my survey folded in half at her side, about a strip of concrete eleven feet wide.

She was telling me that the way a street works is that whatever was there before you is the truth and you are a visitor.

She was completely right and she had no idea what she was saying.

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