Two of them came. It took twenty-six minutes, which tells you exactly how that call had been graded.
Twenty-six minutes is a very long time to stand in a doorway.
Nobody said anything for most of it. That is the part nobody puts in these stories.
Audrey sat down on one of her own suitcases on my step, sideways, with her handbag on her knees, which at seventy-four is not comfortable and which I was aware of the entire time.
Bette stood by the car with her arms folded and rang somebody and talked about me in a voice pitched to carry, and the only phrase I caught clearly was "won't even let her sit down," which was not true and which I did not correct.
And I stood in that doorway holding a plant.
At about the fifteen-minute mark Geraldine Aldred came over from number eleven with two mugs of tea, which is the most Fernwick Row thing that has ever happened.
She gave one to Audrey and one to me. She did not give one to Bette, and I have never asked her whether that was deliberate.
Then she said, to nobody in particular, "It's going to go cold out here," and went back across the road and stood at her own gate, and did not go inside, and was still there when the police came.
I have known that woman nine years and we talk about bins. I did not know until that afternoon that she would stand at a gate for twenty minutes so that a neighbour was not on her own with it.
At about minute twenty Audrey said, without looking up:
"He said it was all done."
I did not answer her.
That is the only honest thing that woman said to me that day, and I had the whole of it in my hand already, and I let it go past.
By then there were about fifteen people out on Fernwick Row, because three suitcases and a shouting match on a Thursday will do that, and two of them were the Aldreds from across, who have known me since 2016.
The officers were a man of about fifty called Pell and a woman of about thirty called Mazur.
Audrey went at them before they were off the path. She was good at it. Thirty seconds of her son, her age, her things on a step, her heart.
