PART 4 — THE NIGHT
Cassian told me all of it on the Thursday, at our kitchen table, after Detective Ondrea Vasseur had sat in our front room for two hours and after he had stopped being a man who could hold a position.
He had given me the tablet that night on purpose. That is the worst thing he has ever done to me and he said so before I did.
Not to harm me. Because Ivor was coming, and because he had been managing the two of us in one apartment for eight months, and because he had run out of ways to do it.
At about ten that night the two of them had it out in our kitchen while I was asleep.
Cassian told him it was finishing. That there was a place with a bed available from the Monday, that he had already filled in the forms, and that he was telling me in the morning whatever it cost him.
Ivor took the truck at twenty-two past ten.
And he took the wallet off the counter, and the watch off the dish by the door, and the phone, and he took Cassian's wedding ring off the shelf above the sink where my husband puts it every night because of the machines at work.
That is not a theft. Cassian said that to the detective and she wrote it down.
A man who steals a truck does not take a ring that will not fit him and cannot be sold.
The pyjamas were nothing. He had changed at one in the morning because he had been up with his brother and had spilled something.
And the left hand in that lift was nothing at all.
I want to put that in, because I built about nine hours of certainty on it. Detective Vasseur asked me what else I had noticed and I told her, and she said, quite kindly, that people in the first hours of something like this see things everywhere and that it is so common they are trained on it.
He is right-handed. He pressed a button with his left hand at half past five in the morning after four hours at a hospital, and I decided my husband had been replaced.
The thing that was real was the lock log. It was the only thing that was real, and it was sitting in an app on my phone for eight months and I had never once opened it.
Whether Ivor Pellier meant to go off that road is not established and it is not going to be.
The finding was that the vehicle did not brake. There is no note, no message, and nothing in the four hours before it that anybody can read either way.
Detective Vasseur told me that in these cases the answer is usually that there is no answer, and that the family has to decide what to carry.
