He was not going to do it with us in the house.
He knew I was on days that week. He knew Nia was at school from ten to nine. He had the texts to prove he believed we would be out of that building by twenty past, and the prosecution accepted it, and so in the end did I.
What he intended was an empty house, a gas fire, and a claim.
The eight hundred and fifty thousand is a joint policy that pays on death and he never once tried to claim on it, and the fire would not have triggered it, and the thing he wanted was the buildings cover.
And the text — stick the heating on the second you’re in — which is the single sentence that stopped my heart in that car park, is not what I thought it was either.
He sent it at twenty-nine minutes past seven to find out where we were.
