What I did not know until a policeman stood on my path is what he had been telling other people.
There was a housewarming in the September of 2019, four months after the wedding. About thirty people, in that garden.
I had a bottle in my hand and I was doing the rounds.
Norma came across the grass, took it out of my hand — not roughly, the way you take a thing off somebody who is being slow with it — and held it against her hip.
And she said, to thirty people:
"Give me that. My son bought this house and I helped him do it. You've landed on your feet, Rowan. Come on, everybody, glasses up."
And thirty people put their glasses up.
My own brother was four feet away.
Nobody said one word.
And neither did I.
That is the thing. It was not that I was shouted down.
It was that correcting a seventy-four-year-old woman in front of thirty people at my own party, about money, four months into a marriage, was going to make me look like exactly the woman she had spent two years implying I was.
So I laughed and said something about needing the bottle back and went inside.
Six years. That is where six years started.
PART 3 — FORTY-ONE THOUSAND
Here is what Norma Delaine said on my path, in front of a police officer, with her daughter filming.
She said she had put forty-one thousand dollars into this house in 2018 and that she was not being kept out of a property she had an interest in.
I had never heard that number in my life.
Officer Beckwith wrote it down, which at the time I thought was odd and which was the single most useful thing anybody did that afternoon.
In the February of 2018, Norma Delaine transferred forty-one thousand dollars to her son.
She has the statement. She kept it because she is seventy-four and that generation keeps everything.
Ardan told her it was going into the house on Oriel Street and that it would be looked after.
It did not go into that house. It could not have. There was no transaction on that property in 2018 and there is a land registry entry that has said the same thing since 2016.
Where it went was a personal guarantee.
He had a partnership in a fit-out business that came apart in the autumn of 2017, and he had signed personally, and in the February of 2018 he was eleven days from something extremely unpleasant.
