He said: “He was all right with me, your Troy. He did my gutters.”
He did. In the October of 2023, on a Saturday, up a ladder, for nothing, for two hours.
And Wilf said that to me standing in a doorway with a tin in his hands, and he was not being disloyal and he was not excusing anything. He was eighty-one and he was trying to work out how both things could have been in the same man.
I did not have an answer for him then and I do not have one now.
He moved to his daughter’s in the March. Not because of us; his knee. He wrote me a card.
And the last thing.
My father’s camera keeps thirty days.
The police took the unit on the seventh of October and they had the whole thirty days off it, which is how the Monday purchase of the can and a number of other things got nailed down, and which is why that man pleaded in the end.
