And Pete came through with a tea towel in his hand and the two of us stood there and looked at each other.
“How do you know him, sweetheart?”
And she said, in the flat way six-year-olds say things that take your legs off:
“He got me out of the car.”
What we did with that for four days.
Nothing sensible.
I want to be honest about the four days, because the version people prefer is that we sat down and gently and lovingly got to the bottom of it, and what actually happened is that I did not sleep and Pete went out to the shed at eleven at night and came back at one.
Because a six-year-old cannot say a thing like that in your front room and have it mean nothing, and the only two explanations available to me on that first night were both unbearable.
Either she was making it up — which would have meant that the child we had brought home two days earlier was in a great deal more trouble than anybody had told us.
Or she was not.
On the Thursday I asked her, as lightly as I have ever asked anything, whether she remembered anything else about the man in the photograph.
And she said: “He had a red bag. And he did the singing.”
Silas had a red rucksack from the age of nineteen. It is in the loft. It was on the back seat of that car and it came back to us in a plastic bag from the police.
The bundle in the drawer.
There is a brown envelope in the bureau in our front room.
It came in the October of 2023 after the inquest. Inside it are the coroner’s findings, the collision investigator’s report, the statements, and a covering letter from a woman at the coroner’s office whose name I could not tell you.
Pete went to the inquest. I did not. He came home and told me the two sentences I asked for, which were that it had been quick and that Silas had not been at fault.
And then the envelope went in the drawer.
For two years and two months, that envelope sat eleven feet from the sofa I cried on most evenings, and neither of us opened it, and neither of us ever said out loud that we were not opening it.
I opened it on the Friday, at about half four in the afternoon, with Immy at school and Pete at work, sitting on the floor of my own front room.
What was in it.
The collision happened at 17:40 on the nineteenth of December, 2022, on the Ferndown road about four miles outside Cardew.
Two vehicles. Silas’s, northbound. And a blue hatchback southbound, which crossed the centre line on a long right-hand bend.
In that car: a woman of thirty-one and a child of three years and six months in a seat behind her.
The woman was Kelda Cray. She died at the scene.
The child is my daughter.
There are nine witness statements in that bundle. Eight of them are about the road.
The ninth is from a man called Robert Innes, who was driving a flatbed about two hundred metres behind Silas and who stopped.
And his statement is four pages long, and there is a paragraph on page two that I have now read, I would estimate, four hundred times.
He describes a young man getting himself out of the driver’s door of the northbound car. He describes him going to the other vehicle. He describes him going in through the rear passenger door, which was buckled but not jammed, and getting a small child out of a seat, and carrying her about fifteen metres up the verge away from both cars.
And then he describes the young man sitting down on the grass.
Mr Innes reached them about ninety seconds later. He says that when he got there the young man was still talking to the child.
He does not record what was said. He was not asked.
What the police told us in 2022.
