My mother-in-law turned up on my porch with three suitcases and called the police when I wouldn't let her in. Then the officer asked my husband one straightforward question about who owned the house — and the silence that followed was the ugliest thing I have ever stood through.

He said, "Get it in writing before anybody has time to think about it."

The luggage went back in the SUV at about ten past six. Ardan carried it.

He did not go with them. He came inside, and we were in that kitchen until about two in the morning, and almost none of it is anybody's business.

What I will put down is that he did not deny the forty-one thousand and he did not deny what he had told her.

What he said, at about half past midnight, was: "She'd never have given it to me for a debt."

And I said, "So you told her it was for a house you don't own."

And he said, "I was going to fix it."

Six years.

I told Norma myself.

Not through a solicitor and not by message. I drove to her flat on a Sunday in the November with the land registry entry, the 2016 completion statement and nine years of mortgage records in a folder, and I sat at her kitchen table and went through it with her for an hour and a half.