So I hung up and rang 999 and gave them the address and his description and what he was carrying, and I asked for police and fire.
And then my father’s light came on.
And Troy put that crowbar through our back door.
And then another car came round and my mother-in-law got out of it holding a heavy plastic bag.
And he turned towards her and put his hand up.
What was in her bag.
Not petrol. Not tools. Not money.
His things.
His passport, his driving licence, a building society book in his name from 1998, two phones — his ordinary one and the other one — and about eleven hundred pounds in notes that she had taken out of her own account on the Monday.
She had come to take him away.
She had worked out, from a phone call at twenty to seven that morning in which her
son had said almost nothing, exactly what he was going to do. And she had got in a car and driven forty minutes with his documents in a bag.
