My mother-in-law arrived with three suitcases and called the police to get me out of my own doorway. She handed me her potted peace lily to hold while she said it.

Pell let her get all the way to the end of it, which I have thought about since and which I think was deliberate.

Then he said, "Right. Whose property is this?"

And Audrey said, "My son's."

And Pell looked at me.

PART 2 — THE SERGEANT'S QUESTION

I said, "Mine."

Audrey laughed. Actually laughed, in front of two police officers and the Aldreds.

"She's his wife."

"I understand that, madam," Pell said. "I'm asking whose name's on the title."

"Well — both of them. Obviously."

"Is that right?" He was looking at me again.

"No. Just mine."

Bette said, "That's not true," with the phone still up.

And Mazur said, without any particular edge, "Madam, could you stop recording, please," and Bette did not, and Mazur said it again, and she did.

I said, "I can show you."

"That'd be helpful."

So I went inside — and I left that front door standing wide open, which Pell noticed and mentioned afterward, because a person with something to hide shuts a door.

I came back with the folder.

Title register, which I had printed in 2021 for an insurance thing and never filed properly. Completion statement from 2017. The solicitor's letter.

Pell read the first page for about eleven seconds.

Then he turned it round and showed it to Audrey Brace, and he did not say anything at all while she read it, which was the most devastating thing anybody did that afternoon.

Dalton arrived at ten past seven.

He had been gone two and a half hours by then with his phone in his pocket, and I know exactly where, because he told me three weeks later: the car park at the retail park on Linnet Way, with the engine off, watching people come out of the big shop with trolleys.

Eleven missed calls from his mother. Four from his sister. Two from me, both at about five twenty, both of which I regret.

He saw the police car from the end of the road. I watched him see it. He slowed right down and came up Fernwick Row at about nine miles an hour and parked three doors past his own house, which he has never done in six years.

Then he got out and did his jacket up, which is a thing he does.

His mother was on her feet by then with the suitcase upright beside her. Bette started talking before he was through the gate.